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

by Robert N. Bellah

  Even if the early Zhou proclamation of the idea of the Mandate of Heaven was only a first step, it had implications for the understanding of the relation of ruler and people as well as ruler and Heaven significantly different from anything we know about the Shang. In the “Jun Shi” Zhou Gong is supposed to have said: “If our sons and grandsons cannot be respectful above and below [toward Heaven and the people], and destroy the glory that our ancestors have brought to our house-if they do not remember that Heaven’s Mandate is not easy to keep, and that Heaven is not to be relied upon, they will overturn the Mandate.” 141 What respecting the people entails can be discerned from a number of chapters in the Shu. For example, in the “Zi Cai” King Wu admonishes one of his sons to “attend even to the helpless and solitary, attend even to pregnant women … from of old the kings have done so.“144 If I may paraphrase Bernhard Karlgren’s rather awkward translation of this chapter, the son is told to set an example for the people, to care about and encourage them, to avoid capital punishment, and, indeed, as far as possible to avoid punishments altogether.141 We may doubt how far such injunctions were carried out, or how the kings actually attended to pregnant women, but it is the ideal that is of interest here.

  The poems in the Shi are no easier to date than the so-called authentic chapters of the Shu, but many of them give a vivid picture of how rulers ought to act as well as how they in fact do act. For example:

  But not all rulers were judged so worthy. Another song warns:

  Or the judgment may go beyond warning:

  In early China, people were more valuable than land, so that oppressed peasants could, as it were, “vote with their feet.” Though they may have sought a “happy land,” the most they were likely to find was a somewhat more benevolent lord.

  If the Shi gives us a remarkably frank picture of Zhou political life (at moments, as in the “Big Rat” poem, rivaling David Malo’s picture of early Hawai’i), it also is our best source for pre-Confucian piety. One of the “Zhou Hymns,” generally believed to be the oldest texts in the collection, gives an idea of the centrality of Heaven in Zhou belief:

  The phrase “I, a little child” indicates that it is the king speaking; the king sometimes even refers to himself as an orphan. Such usages are probably related to the phrase “I, the one man,” which the Zhou as well as the Shang continued to use.

  What is significant in this hymn is the idea that the king is the humble servant of Heaven. No Shang inscription implies any such relation of the Shang king to Di. Indeed Di almost completely drops out of late Shang inscriptions, which are addressed almost exclusively to ancestors (though under Wu Ding ancestors were sometimes viewed as intercessors with Di). References to ancestors are not missing in the Shi, but they are rare, particularly in comparison to the many references to Heaven. That ancestors were still viewed as potentially influencing their descendants is indicated by the opening verse of a Minor Ode:

  Another Ode describes an ancestral sacrifice in great detail, and observes:

  Oracle bones are very different sorts of texts from the hymns, odes and airs of the Shi, so we are, in a sense, comparing apples and oranges. For all we know there were Shang hymns to Di that have not survived. But from the existing evidence, it does appear that Zhou piety from fairly early on, though it continued to observe ancestor worship, developed significantly new preoccupations with Heaven and the human-divine interaction. We have, for example, in an Ode in the Book of Songs, an accusation of Heaven that reminds us of the Egyptian accusation of the god:

  But here, too, Heaven has its defenders:

  What we have here is at least incipient theological argument. When Confucius said he was “a transmitter, not a creator” (Analects 7/1), he surely had a point, because he was indeed trying to conserve and interpret the traditions of the “three dynasties” (Xia, Shang and Zhou), but particularly that of Zhou:

  The Master said, Zhou could survey the two preceding dynasties. How great a wealth of culture! And we follow upon Zhou.‘544

  As I have noted, in no other case does the axial follow the archaic with such continuity.iss

  I have referred to the despotic founders of early states, who came to power through blood and terror as they almost always did, as upstarts of the kind that tribal society usually managed to repress. As opposed to Girard’s theory, it would seem that the first killing among culturally organized humans was not the killing of a scapegoat, but the killing of an upstart who genuinely threatened to revive the despotism of the old primate alpha male. We have argued that hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is not the abandonment of domi nance, but a new form of it, the dominance of all against each. Effective dominance, however, brings on not only submission but resentment, and a desire to resist dominance. That is why upstarts wishing to re-create despotism can be found in every society. We do not need to go to sociobiology for an understanding of the ubiquity of upstarts: modern philosophy has had more than a little to say about this human proclivity. Hobbes spoke of the “desire to be foremost,” Hegel of the fundamental human dialectic of “master and slave,” Nietzsche of the “will to power.”

  But though upstarts are found in all societies, successful upstarts appear only in complex societies. Two aspects of complex society help to make this possible. An increasing agricultural surplus allows larger groups to formgroups beyond the face-to-face bands of hunter-gatherers-and the age-old techniques of dealing with upstarts are harder to apply in such large societies. But the opening wedge for the successful upstart is most often militarization. Large, prosperous societies are almost always in danger from the havenots at their fringe, or from other prosperous groups who would like to become even more prosperous. In a situation of endemic warfare, the successful warrior emanates a sense of mana or charisma, and can use it to establish a following. Thus in Polynesia, the toa (warrior) could challenge the ariki (priest/chief). “Heroic ages” in many parts of the world have seen the rise of such warrior chiefs. The brave warrior alone could not challenge the old egalitarian consensus. As Hobbes pointed out, the strongest man can be overcome by a coalition of others, even by someone weak when the strong man is asleep. It is when the outstanding warrior can mobilize a band of followers that he can challenge the old egalitarianism and, as a successful upstart, free the disposition to dominate from the controls previously placed on it. The warrior band, however, can turn out to be a self-defeating project if all it does is stimulate the creation of other warrior bands leading to an ever escalating increase in violence (a real possibility-the “nightmare of history” of which James Joyce spoke).156

  Chiefdoms are notoriously ephemeral, but early states are also quite fragile. It is only when a successful warrior can fashion a new form of authority, of legitimate hierarchy, that he can break the cycle of violence and hope for lasting rule, perhaps one to be inherited by his offspring. But this involves a new relation between gods and humans, a new way of organizing society, one that finds a significant place for the disposition to nurture as well as the disposition to dominate. This is the task that archaic religions and societies have to complete if they are to be even briefly successful. In doing so they elaborate a vast hierarchical conception of the cosmos in which the divine, the natural, and the human are integrated.

  Even societies in which the old hunter-gatherer egalitarianism was maintained by an informal system of increasingly severe sanctions against incipient upstarts, required a pattern of myth and ritual that would provide meaning and solidarity “above the fray,” so to speak, of everyday life. That was the role of the Dreaming in Australia and the other tribal groups we considered had similar practices and conceptions. We then found that in societies where agriculture was increasingly important and population was growing, ranked lineages could provide, as we said, “a superordinate reference point capable of moderating and mediating the tensions of daily life.” The Kalapalo and the Tikopia had such ranked lineages, even though they were basically egalitarian.

  There are clear continuities be
tween tribal and archaic religions: in the moments of collective effervescence in the great festivals of archaic society, the solidarity of the social whole was reaffirmed. But most of the time in archaic societies hierarchy, not collective solidarity, provided the organizing principle. As Lewis Mumford writes:

  At this point, human effort moves from the limited horizontal plane of the village and the family to the vertical plane of a whole society. The new community formed a hierarchic structure, a social pyramid, which from base to pinnacle included many families, many villages, many occupations, often many regional habitats, and not least, many gods. This political structure was the basic invention of the new age: without it, neither its monuments nor its cities could have been built, nor, one must add, would their premature destruction have so persistently taken place.157

  Archaic societies were much larger than preceding societies had ever been. If they were to maintain any stability at all they had to find forms of solidarity that were based on more than tribal festivity on the one hand or warrior force on the other. The solution that every archaic society of which we have adequate knowledge found was a new conception of kingship and divinity that moved beyond old ideas of ranked lineages and powerful beings. In Hawaii as in the societies we have examined in this chapter, kings acted like gods and gods acted like kings. The cosmos, as Jacobsen said, was seen as a state, and the state as an essential element in the cosmos.15’

  But perhaps we need to move back a step. Once upon a time there was no state and no cosmos seen as a state. How did we get from a society, even a ranked society, in which chiefs and people were still linked by strong kinship ties, to a society in which a genuine secondary formation, a state, no longer linked to the common people by kinship, could appear? It would seem that that shift from tribal to archaic society only became possible when one man focused so much attention on himself that he could claim that he and he alone was not only capable of rule, but capable of maintaining society’s relationship to the gods-or, before long-to “the god.” When the Shang king spoke of himself as “I, the one man,” he expressed a profound truth about archaic kingship. The new secondary formation, the state, was to express his will alone, and it was he alone who stood before the god(s), maintaining the right ritual relationship to the divine. It is as though the king, himself divine or semidivine, was the necessary fulcrum to move society to a new level of social organization. Or, to change the metaphor, it is as though the archaic king unleashed an explosion of atomic energy, capable of moving what had for millennia not been willing to move. But, once achieved, the archaic state had quickly to weave a web of institutions and structures of power, but also of rituals and conceptions of the cosmos, which would make it seem both natural and inevitable.

  In archaic society traditional social structures and social practices were grounded in the divinely instituted cosmic order, and there was little tension between religious demand and social conformity. Indeed, social conformity was at every point reinforced with religious sanction (taboo). Nevertheless the very notion of powerful kings and well-characterized gods acting toward men with a certain freedom introduced an element of openness that was less apparent at the tribal level.159 Once kings claim to be protectors of the common people questions can be raised when the common people suffer, and the basis of political legitimacy is open to argument. Once gods have replaced powerful beings as the focus of ritual and myth, dramatic symbolic reformulations are at least conceivable. “In all polytheism there is a latent monotheism, which can be activated at any time,” Eric Voegelin goes so far as to say, “if the pressure of a historical situation meets with a sensitive and active mind..“160

  In the section on ancient Mesopotamia, we argued that archaic societies, even when they had writing, probably did not undergo a “literacy revolution.” Rather, orality remained the dominant mode of communication during archaic times and long after. Still, we need to consider whether the existence of writing did not allow at least the beginnings of more reflective and systematic thought than could have been carried on by oral tradition alone. Although riddles, aphorisms, and maxims are standard features of oral tradition, the more developed arguments that we find in the so-called wisdom literature of the ancient Near East, or in some of the writings that survive from Western Zhou, did perhaps depend, at least in part, on writing. Narrative is central to oral tradition, but written narratives could be ordered and revised to give them a weight they might not have had in oral recitation. Hymns could become the vehicles of mythospeculation. Whatever aids to reflective thought that the technology of writing supplied were limited to the scribal class. Early literacy has been called craft literacy, because it was a specialized craft that only a few could master. Those few, however, may have been essential for the self-understanding of archaic society and for what was to come.

  Voegelin was reminding us that even in massively conformist archaic society, where, as Jacobsen puts it for Mesopotamia, the “prime virtue” was obedience,”’ there were “sensitive and active” minds-prophets, priests, scribeswho, even within the confines of the cosmos as a state, could think new thoughts. The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes.16’ As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening up of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies.

  INTRODUCTION

  Ritual in tribal societies involves the participation of all or most of the members of the group-in classic Durkheimian fashion, if the ritual goes well, it leaves the group filled with energy and solidarity.’ Some are more active than others, but many are involved, and even when, as in the case of the Navajo, the ritual centers around someone who is being cured, the whole network of people with whom that person is involved participates in and benefits from the ritual. In stark contrast, ritual in archaic societies focuses above all on one person, the divine or quasi-divine king, and only a few people, priests or members of the royal lineage, participate. The rest of society acts sometimes as audience, but sometimes knows of the great rituals only by hearsay, because their presence would profane the high mysteries. Whereas tribal societies consist of small face-to-face groups, or of a few adjacent ones, archaic societies were territorially extensive and could include millions of people. It would seem that maintaining the coherence of such large and extensive societies required that the attention and energy that tribal ritual focused on the whole society now be concentrated on the ruler, elevated beyond normal human status, in relation to beings who were now not only powerful, but required worship. The elevation of rulers into a status unknown in tribal societies went hand in hand with the elevation of gods into a status higher in authority than the powerful beings they were gradually replacing. Of course, most people in archaic societies continued to live in small face-to-face groups and to have a ritual life of their own, only loosely articulated with
the great royal rituals at the imperial center, and resembling in many ways the ritual life of tribal societies.

  Both tribal and archaic religions are “cosmological,” in that supernature, nature, and society were all fused in a single cosmos. The early state greatly extended the understanding of the cosmos in time and space, but, as Thorkild Jacobsen argued, the cosmos was still viewed as a state-the homology between sociopolitical reality and religious reality was unbroken.2 As we have seen, the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined dominance and nurturance produced a new sense of divine power combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice-even human sacrifice-as a concrete expression of radical status difference.

  If the balance of tribal egalitarianism had never been easy to maintain and began to give rise to modest status differences long before the emergence of the state, the state itself and its religio-political symbolization gave rise to new forms of instability. Intermediate periods, as we have seen, raised serious questions about the cosmological order: Where is the king? Where is the god? Why are we hungry? Why are we being killed by attackers and no one is defending us? Once political unity had been reasserted, these questions could be smoothed over, but the cracks remained, and new insights appeared, such as the idea that rule is conditional on divine favor and may be withdrawn from wicked rulers, or that individuals might appeal directly to the gods without the mediation of the ruling cult. Such insights would be clearly expressed in the axial age, but in archaic society they remained only cracks in a continuing cosmological unity.’