Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Because I wanted to emphasize narrative, and to situate it in the particular Aboriginal ontology of place, I have not mentioned many parallels between the Kalapalo and the Aborigines. Concern for sickness and healing would be one example. There are curers in Australia, sometimes called “clever men” or “men of high degree,” who specialize in curing rituals.139 There are also witchcraft beliefs, means for discerning who is exercising witchcraft, and retaliation, either by violence or by countersorcery. Even wordless, or perhaps bet ter, meaningless music is to be found among the Aborigines, though not as pervasively as among the Kalapalo. Stanner writes, “Many of the songs have no meaning … but they are not sung less lovingly,””’ and Munn indicates that Walbiri song words often take “special forms” or are “foreign terms” that are very hard to translate.141 It is quite possible that the Kalapalo, who live among peoples whose languages they do not understand, have also borrowed foreign songs that are to them “wordless.” Another possibility is that ritual language, particularly in songs, has become so archaic as to be unintelligible to contemporaries. In the great traditions, there are specialists to interpret archaic liturgical language; among the nonliterate the meanings may simply be forgotten. The most significant omission in my description of Aboriginal religion is initiation ritual, which is at least as important as among the Kalapalo, although among the Walbiri, and in most but not all of Australia, it is boys and not girls who undergo initiation.

  On the other hand, the discussion of the Aborigines suggests some reappraisal of the Kalapalo. Basso more than once suggests that powerful beings are located in particular places, and the Kalapalo attachment to place is strong. The political necessity of moving the village has not lessened the attachment of the Kalapalo to their former location and its significant sites. And among the Kalapalo, as among the Aborigines, temporal distance is shallow to nonexistent. Powerful beings and Dawn People become here and now in the rituals and may be thought of more as Abiding Events than as “creators” who lived “in the beginning.”

  Indeed, “ubiety” may turn out to be much more widespread as a religious premise than the Aboriginal example alone would suggest. Even where, in archaic societies, in contrast to the beings with whom the Kalapalo and the Aborigines identify, gods and goddesses who are worshipped and who receive prayers and sacrifices indubitably do exist, they are still profoundly local. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the ancient Mediterranean world, for example, generally the gods are first of all city gods, close to their people, and continuously active among them. The idea of “the Goddess,” of which we have heard so much of late (as well of course as any idea of “the God”), was only incipient among archaic peoples. There were mainly particular goddesses and gods, though it was possible to see in a foreign god or goddess the equivalent of a familiar one. The New Age reappropriation of Aboriginal religion has, in the name of retrieving the past, come up with significant novelties. Although land in the sense of place was central in Aboriginal thinking, and Mother-cults, as we have seen, were not unknown, as Swain puts it, “Up until the early 1980s, we have no evidence of Aboriginal people referring to `Mother Once eco-feminists had embraced Aboriginal spirituality, and in a situation where many Aborigines had lost all contact with their hereditary place, it was not strange to find Aborigines themselves embracing a term that made emotional sense but had no genuine connection with their tradition. Ubiety suggests the absence of categories not only of time but of space (such as a generalized idea of Earth, much less Mother Earth) that we take for granted, so that the idea of ubiety is difficult for us to grasp, yet it may be central to the way of life of tribal and archaic peoples.

  Another feature shared by the Kalapalo and the Aborigines that may have much wider significance is, as I said of the Kalapalo, the lack of Malinowski’s idea of myth as a “charter,” that is, a set of explicit rules to be followed. It might seem that the Law or Ancestral Law of the Aborigines is just such a charter, but that would be to understand it too quickly in terms with which we are familiar. Students of Aboriginal culture have assured us that there is no overall mythical “system” that integrates all the disparate stories. Nor is there a “moral code” accepted by all Aborigines. There are stories and there are examples of how to act and not to act, but they vary from group to group and their level of abstraction is minimal. This is what I was trying to suggest when I said that Abiding Events are close to the rhythmed events of daily life. Stanner makes the point and also suggests some of the reasons why:

  Many myths, one cannot say all, had a homiletic effect; perhaps the Aborigines drew a moral lesson from them; but to all appearances a strong, explicit religious ethic was absent, probably for the same reason that a religious creed was absent. Three vital preconditions were missing-a tradition of intellectual detachment; a class of interpreters who had the prerogative or duty to codify principle; and a challenge that would have forced morals and beliefs to find

  I don’t like arguments from absence, but because we will see all three preconditions Stanner mentions gradually emerge in archaic civilizations, and be cause we take these presuppositions so much for granted that we can hardly imagine their absence, in this case Stanner’s point is valuable. The Kalapalo and the Aborigines know the difference between right and wrong as well as we do, but they lack any generalized idea of good and evil, and so both groups lack any notion of rewards and punishments in the afterlife, an idea that itself is vague enough for them in any case.

  Although I have made most of the points that I think are essential to the understanding of what I am calling, more than a little uneasily, tribal religion, I want to add one more example, in part to show another part of the world that shares the basic pattern, in part for more personal reasons: the Navajo of the American Southwest. If the Kalapalo are on the Southeastern periphery of archaic civilization in South America, the Navajo are on the Northwestern periphery of archaic civilization in North America. To be more personal, Clyde Kluckhohn, one of the great experts on the Navajo, was one of my undergraduate teachers, and my undergraduate tutor and thesis advisor, David Aberle, was also a Navajo specialist. Under Aberle’s direction I wrote my undergraduate thesis, Apache Kinship Systems.144 The Navajo are simply the largest of the Southern Athabascan speaking tribes of the Southwest, all the rest of whom are called some kind of Apache, so it is natural to include the Navajo in the Apache label. In the course of my thesis research, as well as in several anthropology classes, I studied the Navajo closely. Because my academic career began with the Navajo, it seems fitting that in this, my last major work, I should return to them, for their intrinsic interest and as piety toward my teachers.

  The Navajo

  The Navajo, like the Australian Aborigines, are a much-studied people and justly so. They are the largest Native American tribe in the contiguous United States (according to the 2000 Census, some 300,000 people) with by far the largest reservation, spanning parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Although a good percentage of Navajo people still speak the language, many children are losing it, so the future of the language is not assured, even though it is being increasingly used in written publications, both periodicals and books. Although they have absorbed an enormous amount from other Indian tribes, especially the Pueblos, but also Plains Indians, and from the Spanish, the Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans, their indigenous traditions, including religious traditions, survive with considerable vigor. They justly call themselves the Navajo Nation.141

  Of particular interest from the point of view of the concerns of this book is the fact that the Navajo subsume many of the themes of Native North American religion. They compose, together with the several Apache tribes, the Southern Athabascan linguistic group, related at no distant time to the Northern Athabascans, who at the time of contact inhabited large areas in Alaska and northwest Canada, and also to several Athabascan-speaking groups on the northern Pacific Coast of California. It appears that the Southern Athabascans left the Subarctic area of the MacKenzie Basin in Canada sometim
e about 1000 CE and moved south either through the high plains or the Plateau and Great Basin areas or both, arriving in the Southwest around 1500, not long before the Spanish. At that time they began to diverge into the several Apache tribes and the Navajo. They were certainly hunters and gatherers, though they may have picked up some rudimentary horticulture on the high plains, and their religion was probably a version of the generic shamanism so common in hunter-gatherer North America, traces of which are still evident among the Apache and, only slightly less obviously, among the Navajo as well. But the Navajo (and to a lesser extent some of the Apache groups) underwent a long period of acculturation to the Pueblo cultures that had already occupied the land into which they were moving. In the course of this acculturation the Navajo picked up significant elements of Pueblo religion, which, in turn, was the Northwestern-most version of a religion centered on horticulture, and corn in particular, whose focus was in Mesoamerica. The Pueblos are in my terms still tribal peoples, yet, partly because of the influence of the archaic civilizations to their south, they show incipient archaic features. To the extent that the Navajo have become “Puebloized” they form a bridge to the treatment of archaic religion in the following chapters.

  Compared to the Kalapalo or even the Australian Aborigines, we have a much fuller sense of Navajo history and are not confined to the single frame of the “ethnographic present” as is so often the case with tribal peoples. I want to argue that the Navajo, like the Kalapalo and the Aborigines, give us some sense of what human culture was like many thousands of years ago, in particular the focus on ritual and myth. But no tribal people provides us with a fossilized specimen of early human culture; all are the product of often drastic historical change. The very fact that the Kalapalo are Carib speakers and thus far distant from the main body of Carib speakers to the north, tells us that they must have undergone an eventful history, even though we cannot reconstruct it. For the Australian Aborigines we have somewhat more than two centuries of mainly catastrophic history that gives us only a little sense of the kinds of changes that were certainly taking place before the Europeans and the Indonesians arrived on their shores. For the Navajo, however, we have not only the linguistic linkage with Subarctic peoples in the fairly remote past, but five or six centuries of history in the Southwest, the earlier part of which can only be deciphered from spotty archaeological and historical records, to be sure. Even though some of this history was catastrophic, particularly the incarceration of over 9,000 Navajo by the United States Army in what can only be called a concentration camp at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, from 1864 to 1868, the Navajo have been able to shape their own fate to a degree rare among tribal peoples. This is due not only to their remarkable resourcefulness but also to the fact that their home territory was among the least appealing in North America to white settlers.146

  The most fundamental impact of a “foreign” culture on the Navajo was not from any kind of European, but from the Pueblos, beginning with the earliest contact around 1500. This was evident in the increasing importance of horticulture under Pueblo influence among these hunter-gatherers, and of the many material (for example, pottery) and ideal (for example, mythology) cultural elements that came with it. What was occurring through the normal process of contact was intensified by particular historical events. The great coordinated Pueblo rebellion against the Spanish of 1680, which drove the Spanish-missionaries, soldiers, and settlers alike-out of New Mexico for twelve years, was followed by a Spanish reconquest of all the Pueblos except for the Hopi, as a result of which many Pueblo people took refuge with the Navajo, hoping for an eventual return to their native towns. When it became clear that further resistance was hopeless, some of these people did return to their home villages, while others intermarried with the Navajo. During the eighteenth century, drought drove some Hopi to take refuge with the Navajo, with a similar result. During this period matrilineal clans, widespread among the Western Pueblos and some of the Eastern Pueblos, became established among the Navajo, some with linkages to Jemez and perhaps Hopi clans. For a century after the Pueblo rebellion there grew up in northern New Mexico and Arizona a modestly prosperous and populous horticultural society that appeared to blend Navajo and Pueblo traits. Not the least of these was the building of pueblo-type stone buildings, “pueblitos,” in proximity to hogans, the traditional Navajo house type. The ethnohistorian and archaeologist David Brugge suggests, however, that in the mid-eighteenth century the Navajo underwent a revitalization movement147 in which they rejected some features of Pueblo culture, notably painted pottery, and reorganized their ritual system so that, while still incorporating Pueblo elements, it has a distinctively non-Pueblo cast, with a new central ritual, Blessingway, which we will discuss more later.148

  During this period ecological changes continued apace. The Spanish had brought with them livestock not native to the New World, and through them the Navajo acquired sheep and horses. As sheep pastoralism became more important than horticulture in the Navajo economy (hunting and gathering had never ceased to be significant sources of food), the concentrated settlements that had supported the pueblitos became less important: pastoralism allowed the return to a more dispersed and seminomadic pattern, in some ways closer to the old hunter-gatherer pattern than to the Pueblo horticultural pattern. The acquisition of horses greatly increased the mobility of the Navajo compared to any previous period. We must remember that Northern New Mexico is on edge of the high plains and that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries a great cultural efflorescence was occurring there brought on by the acquisition of horses, later of guns, and the presence of vast herds of buffalo, far easier to exploit than they had previously been. Both the Navajo and the Eastern pueblos were vulnerable to raiding from Plains Indian groups, notably the Comanche, and were at a considerable disadvantage as the French in the eighteenth century made guns available to plains tribes, whereas the Spanish managed to keep guns largely out of the hands of Indian groups under their jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the Navajo, along with other Apachean groups, although never rivaling the plains tribes in warfare, became efficient raiders, capturing livestock and occasionally slaves from Pueblo and Spanish settlements, and retaliating with large war parties when they suffered losses. After the successful invasion by the United States Army in 1846 during the Mexican-American War, Navajo raiding was systematically curtailed, to the point where the Navajo were more often the victims than the aggressors, ending only with their incarceration of 1864, already mentioned, and the return to Navajo country in 1868.149 Navajo sheep herding, the heart of the Navajo economy, expanded greatly until the 1930s, when the United States government required the limiting of Navajo herds on the grounds that their size was causing erosion in a vulnerable environment. Subsequently the Navajo have become more and more dependent on wage labor, although sheep herding remains the focus of the traditional culture.

  Given this eventful history during the last several centuries, what can we say about Navajo religion? Until the late nineteenth century, when the first records of Navajo myths and ceremonies were made, we are confined largely to conjecture. Even with increasing documentation during the twentieth century, the very size of the record and the variations arising from time and place of documentation, as well as who the Navajo informants were and who made the records, leaves room for many conflicting interpretations.150 I will have to depend on those students of Navajo religion who seem most reliable and deal with alternative interpretations when appropriate.

  Several writers have attempted to reconstruct the hunter-gatherer religion of the early Apacheans by looking for comparative material among the Northern Athabascans and the groups through whose territory the Southern Athabascans must have passed before reaching the Southwest.151 Luckert posits the idea of a “prehuman flux” as a kind of baseline for hunter beliefs, not only in North America, but perhaps everywhere. By this term he points to a “time” when all things were interchangeable: not only powerful beings, humans, and animals, but insects, pl
ants, and features of the natural environment such as mountains, were all “alive,” and could take the form of one another. Eventually some of the powerful beings shaped the earth and separated the “peoples” (including animals, plants, mountains, and so on) into their present forms. However the primordial flux is not really in the past, but can be returned to through ritual and the trance states that accompany ritual.152 Luckert argues that the sweat house, so widespread among North American hunters and still in use among the Navajo, had a particular function-its ritual use transformed human hunters into predatory animals, that is, particularly efficient hunters. In this view, the ritual sweat bath marks a transformation that allows humans to engage in the hunt, protecting them from the possibility of illness from contact with dangerous animals (that is, spiritually, not just physically dangerous). The ritual sweat bath is repeated after the hunt to transform the hunters, who have now become dangerous themselves, back into ordinary Navajo.151 A whole mythology accompanies these hunter rituals, a mythology that tells of protective beings who aid hunters and help them reach the game that other beings are withholding from them, as well as trickster beings (Raven, Crow, Coyote) who sometimes aid and sometimes hinder human intentions.

  Accompanying these hunter beliefs is the equally widespread idea and practice of shamanism. To put it in simplest terms, a shaman is an individual who either seeks or is sought by a powerful being for a direct experience through which some of the being’s power becomes available to the shaman, usually for the purpose of curing. Ruth Benedict has shown that the idea of an individual relation to a “guardian spirit” is widespread in North America and more general than shamanism as usually understood, in that not only curing powers, but many other powers such as hunting success, may be conferred by the Being with which the individual is in contact.154 The “vision quest,” in which the person undergoes austerities in some remote spot, often a mountaintop, in an effort to find such a guardian spirit, is one aspect of this complex, though in other instances the spirit takes the initiative in “calling” the individual.