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

by Robert N. Bellah

  Rather than a single mass descending in one body, the linguistic and other evidence from the earliest texts suggests that there were numerous, perhaps relatively small, groups that filtered into India, fighting with each other as much as with the preexisting inhabitants, and gradually acculturating to what they found. In this scenario classical Indic culture can be seen as an amalgam of the culture of the Aryan migrants and that of the indigenous inhabitants. Although this story is convincing, we cannot really know in any particular case what is Aryan and what is indigenous, because we have only Sanskrit texts, even though we can be pretty sure that what we have is some kind of Some early scholars spent a great deal of time trying to separate out the two strands (or more than two, given that India was probably quite diverse at the time the Aryans arrived, nor were the Aryans necessarily homogeneous themselves), later scholars have tended to feel that we must just attend to what we have and not worry too much about what came from where. In any case the texts that we have are in various forms of older or later Sanskrit, or, in the case of early Buddhism, in Pali, a Middle IndoAryan dialect related to Sanskrit. Although there are words derived from Dravidian and other non-Indo-European languages, the texts in the axial period are all Indo-Aryan in one form or another.

  It would be well to mention briefly the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization, which was at its zenith from roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE. I had initially wanted to discuss this Bronze Age civilization together with comparable cases in Chapter 5, which included ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Shang China, but evidence of the sort that would allow me to reconstruct the religion was missing. The Harappan civilization was in many respects remarable, covering a large territory, having a large population (perhaps a million or more) and some significant technological achievements. Much had seemed to hinge on the Harappan script, the decipherment of which was long awaited. Recently serious scholars have suggested that the Harappan signs were not writing at all and would never be deciphered.10 Asko Parpola, a longtime researcher on the Harappan script, finds such a dismissal unconvincing, although he admits that no attempt to decipher the script so far has been successful.” More discouraging for my purposes, however, is his admission that, given the scantiness of the surviving texts and the likelihood that, like Mycenaean B, even if deciphered, they would contain only references to merchandise, their usefulness to understanding Harappan culture would be minimal. But even though there is not and probably will never be enough data to describe the Harappan religious system-though some inferences can be made from figurines and incised tablets-the continuity of site occupation, even at a reduced level of complexity, was sufficient to make it very likely that cultural features descended from Harappan culture were ultimately integrated into the emerging Vedic culture, even if we cannot know exactly what those elements were.12

  In getting my footing in this new field, it was good to discover or rediscover that, as in the case of Greece with Louis Gernet and Jean-Pierre Vernant, there were good Durkheimian predecessors. (In China too there was the distinguished work of Marcel Granet, Durkheim’s student, but I felt he had most to say about developments in the Han, and so later than the period with which my chapter dealt.) Of course I was long familiar with Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’s Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, and remembered the importance of Indic material in it, but it was only in rereading it that I discovered that Mauss had been a student not only of Durkheim, but of the great French Sanskritist, Sylvain Levi, whose book, La Doctrine du Sacrifice Bans les Brahmanas, was a fundamental source for his entire argument.13 Also, in reading Paul Mus, who had been only a name to me before, I learned from the translator’s preface to Mus’s great book Barabudur that, not only was Mus a student of Mauss, but in lecturing at the College de France, Mus always carried two books, one of which was Levi’s Doctrine du Sacrifice.14 And then it occurred to me that my old friend, Louis Dumont, from whom I had learned about India but also about many other things, was surely a student of Mauss, a fact confirmed by a quick look at Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus.is So, though my way was no less difficult, I felt, as a profoundly Durkheimian sociologist myself, at least in good company.

  Early Vedic India

  Because the texts as we have them are hymns used in rituals, we will start with a description of the ritual system and only gradually, using hints in the texts, some archaeology, and a great deal of inference, try to describe the kind of society in which these rituals were performed. Actually inference is there even with respect to the rituals, because the hymns used in a ritual don’t describe the ritual as a whole or the varieties of rituals in which they were used. The RV hymns for the most part appear to have been used in sacrificial rituals directed toward a number of gods and asking for a variety of gifts, largely this-worldly, such as wealth in cattle, the birth of children, particularly sons, long life, and victory in battle. Stephanie Jamison and Michael Witzel have succinctly expressed the meaning of these rituals:

  Perhaps the most obvious motivating idea of Vedic religion is the Roman principle of “do ut des,” “I give so that you will give,” or in Vedic terms “give me, I give you,” dehi me dadhami to-that is: reciprocity. The ritual oblations and the hymns that accompany them are not offered to the gods out of sheer celebratory exuberance. Rather, these verbal and alimentary gifts are one token in an endless cycle of exchanges-thanks for previous divine gifts, but also a trigger for such gifts and favors in the future. Most Rgvedic hymns contain explicit prayers for the goods of this world and for aid in particular situations, along with generalized praise of the gods’ generosity.18

  This relatively simple and straightforward pattern might remind us of Homer, and, as in Homer, sacrifices were devoted to a number of gods. The Vedic gods, however, have few cognates with Greek gods and are lacking any sense of overarching organization.‘9 Although Indra is a powerful and central god, at times declared king of the gods, his capacity to control the other gods seems even less than Zeus’s, and further, a number of other gods are described with his same attributes and powers. Here is a short hymn to Indra, RV 3.45, to give a sense of what the simpler hymns are like:

  1. Come hither, Indra, with your bay horses that give us joy, with hair like the peacock’s! May none hold you back, as trappers a bird! Go past them, as past a desert land!

  2. Devourer of Vrtra, splitter of Vala, burster of strongholds, driver of the waters, mounter of the chariot at the neighing of his two bay horses-Indra is the shatterer of even the steadfast.

  3. As the deep oceans, you increase your strength, as do cows. As cows with a good cowherd to their fodder, as irrigation ditches to a pool, they have gone.

  4. Bring unto us offspring, wealth, as the share to one who makes a promise! As a man with a crook a tree bearing ripe fruit, shake down sufficient wealth, Indra!

  5. You are self-sufficient, Indra, your own ruler, commanding, the more glorious by your own achievements: as such, growing in strength, 0 much-lauded one, do be our best listener!20

  From this hymn it is clear that Indra is a powerful warrior god. Verse 2 alludes to mythical events that need not detain us but illustrate his conquering strength. He is also, however, associated with pastoral and agricultural activities and is thus an appropriate recipient of prayers for material well-being. The hymn just quoted might seem to be simple, but unraveling all the allusions and all the meanings of Indra’s various attributes would require a great deal of exegesis. Poetically the poems are highly condensed and allusive, assuming knowledge of the myths without spelling them out. They are works of great poetic art, and the bards who composed them competed to produce the finest hymns. But as Witzel has said, trying to discern the myths, let alone the history, of the early Indo-Aryans from these hymns alone would be like trying to discern the history and religion of early Israel if we had only the Psalms as our source.21

  Nonetheless, by mining the text of the RV carefully, Witzel has reconstructed at least a rough picture of what was happening when these texts were composed. The text t
ells us of some thirty tribes or peoples (we will have to consider later what we can make of their social organization) under a number of rulers (rdjan, later translated as “kings” but here better as “chieftains”), whose lineages, as far as we can reconstruct them, cover five or six generations. As a result of the incessant fighting of the Aryan peoples not only with the dasa (the indigenous, or better, culturally non-Aryan peoples) but if anything even more with each other, a group of Five Peoples centered on the Puru gained hegemony, only to lose it to one of its late-arriving subgroups, the Bharata.

  Even in RV times, the “Aryans” were no longer simply the immigrants from afar or their descendants. Chiefs with dasa names were to be found among the Aryans, and many loanwords from Dravidian, Munda, and perhaps even Tibeto-Burman appear in the RV, so that “Aryan” had become a cultural, not a racial, term, referring to those who took part in the sacrifices and festivals, that is, who participated in the common culture. Further, these self-styled Aryans no longer remembered or celebrated any foreign area from which they might have come. They placed the center of the world as somewhere in northern India, and it is there that, in their own eyes, they originated. We are in a heterogeneous world genetically and culturally even though “Aryan” never lost its elite connotation.22

  What we find amid the welter of tribes, subtribes, and lineages is a centralizing tendency that will only grow stronger at the end of the Rgvedic period. As Witzel puts it, “The Rgveda thus represents, above all, the history of two royal lineages (Puru and Bharata) toward the middle of the Rigvedic The result of protracted conflict was “the ultimate victory of the Bharatas over the other tribes and their settlement on the Sarasvati [River], which became the heartland of South Asia well into the Vedic period. It is here that RV 3.51.11 places the centre of the world, with subdued enemies in all directions.“24 Witzel attributes the earliest collection of the RV hymns to the centralizing tendencies of the Puru and the Bharata, no mean feat, given that the hymns were the “sole property of a few clans of poets and priests who were not willing to part with their ancestral and (more or less) secret knowledge.“25 But willingly or unwillingly, part with them they did, and even the language of the hymns as we have them reflects that of the Purus and Bharatas and not that of some of the lineages from which they originated.26

  The centralizing tendencies of the Purus and the Bharatas, the precursors of even stronger centralizing tendencies to come, should not lead us to imagine that they created an early state. Though they were moving in that direction, decentralizing tendencies, leading to frequent changes of leadership, were still strong. We are in the world of chiefs and paramount chiefs, not of kings and states. Witzel describes the world of the early Rgvedic period from which the centralizing tendencies began as one of “small, tribal, pastoral societies of the Eastern Panjab without or with only an incipient caste system, a pre-Hindu religion, a cold winter with no real monsoon, without cities, and with an economy based on cattle herding.“27 He describes the society of this early period, located in the far northwest and the Panjab, as consisting of “chieftains (rajan) [who] lord over fellow rajanya/ksqtriya (nobility) and the viii (the people), with the addition of the aborigines and servants/slaves (dasa. Dasyu. purusa).“28 Elsewhere he describes the early Rgvedic ritual system as consisting mainly of “a simple morning and evening fire ritual, some seasonal festivals, and the major New Year/spring Soma ritual.“29 These rituals required priests, but not necessarily a priestly class. As in ancient Greece, chiefs and heads of lineages could function as priests, though, as also in ancient Greece, there were poets’/priests’ lineages, but, as yet, not a priestly class or caste.

  All of this makes sense if, as George Erdosy has argued, mainly on the basis of archaeological evidence, “the reappearance of stable political structures following the collapse of Harappan urbanism, along with an eastward shift in the focus of economic and political power and the spread of a new family of (Indo-Aryan) dialects, required almost a millennium. The emergence of what may be termed simple chiefdoms, datable to c. BCE 1000, was the culmination of this process.“30 What is remarkable is that even in the four or five centuries after 1000 BCE that saw significant political and cultural change, the material culture remained remarkably simple. There were still no settlement centers large enough to be called cities, no palaces or temples, only wattle and daub houses, and there was a “general absence of luxury goods and a striking poverty of artistic expression.“31 Yet it is just in this period that, as we will see, paramount chiefdoms, even incipiently an early state, emerged together with radical social and cultural transformations.

  What is striking, however, is that most of the RV was composed before 1000 BCE, and so comes out of tribal societies only beginning to develop chiefdoms, at least if Erdosy is right. But the Rgveda is the most sacred text of Vedic religion and, in principle, in historic Hinduism up to the present. It has been a premise of this book that “nothing is ever lost,” but India exhibits that premise to a startling degree. It is true that the Homeric epics come out of, or at least depict, a society not much more complex than late secondmillennium India and played a significant role in education throughout the history of classical civilization. Homer might even be called to some degree a “sacred text,” but the Homeric epics never had the authority attributed to the Rgveda. There are parts of Genesis that are probably in their original form handed down from tribal or chiefly times, but they are not the core of the Torah. As we will see, the ideas present in the RV will become enormously elaborated in the first half of the first millennium BCE and will draw copious commentary right to the present, but an intact collection of tribal verse as the core of a religious tradition is uniquely Indic. It raises questions about the whole idea of religious evolution, with which we will have to grapple below.

  We don’t know enough about the ritual system in Rgvedic times to describe it in any detail, but there is evidence in the hymns to give us some idea of it. We have already described Indra, one of the most frequently mentioned gods in the RV. Though Indra and most of the gods are invisible, two of the most important, and both are important in early Iranian religion as well, are visible: Agni (fire, as anyone familiar with Latin ignis will note) and Soma (the Avestan cognate is Haoma, in both cases referring to a mind-altering drink about the identity of which there is ongoing debate). Ordinary fire and the soma drink participate in the major gods who bear their names and are present, and in the case of fire, indispensable, at the sacrificial ground. Maurer points out that the three most frequently mentioned gods in the RV are Indra, Agni, and Soma, but Agni is the most important:

  Every sacrifice [yajna], from the simplest domestic rite to the most elaborate and complex, centered around the fire, the Vedic religion hav ing been a fire-cult, as was its sister religion, Zoroastrianism, though the two were developed along very different lines. No sacrifice in either was possible without of Agni’s principal roles is to serve as messenger between men and gods, in which capacity he either conveys the essence of the sacrificial meal to the gods or brings the gods themselves to the sacrificial feast, where they sit down together on the sacred grass that has been spread out for them … Indra, on the one hand, is the mighty warrior god, the unrelenting vanquisher not only of demons, but also of all the enemies of the Indo-Aryans and hence their staunchest protector; Agni, on the other hand, is the arch-priest, intermediary between men and gods, the great and omniscient sage, and, as the focal point of all sacrifices and provider of warmth and light in the home, closest companion to man among the gods.32

  Soma, the third most frequently mentioned god in the RV is the deification of the soma plant, the source of soma as a drink that played an important part in the rituals. The pressing of the stalks of the soma plant so as to release the juice, the mixing of the juice with milk, the offering of some of the soma to the gods and the drinking of the rest by the human participants, were all important aspects of the soma ritual. Maurer points out, “The hymns addressed to Soma are couched in m
etaphors and similes of highly imaginative character, and probably no flights of fancy have ever soared higher than those of the poets of the ninth book of the Rgveda [the ninth book consists solely of hymns devoted to Soma].“33 The language of certain of the hymns to Soma has led some students of early India to believe that they describe drug-induced mystical experiences (RV 10.136, for example), perhaps the forerunner of later Indic mysticism.34 In any case, soma was believed to have strong medicinal qualities and to be the drink of immortality for both gods and men. Indra was believed to be exceptionally fond of it.35

  Although the poetry of the hymns that were recited in the rituals was complex and sophisticated, the rituals themselves were, at least in the Rgvedic period, relatively simple. There were no fixed ritual sites, no temples, but each ritual was conducted anew at a chosen spot, perhaps reflecting the frequent movement of a pastoral people. This feature, once established, continued to characterize Vedic ritual in all later times, long after pastoralism had been abandoned. The hymns are attributed by scholars to poets or bards who were not necessarily priests, and who competed for the excellence of their poems against other poets, often mentioning the reward they expected from the affluent sponsors of the ritual. They were referred to as Rsis-seers who “heard” (sruti) the texts, though they were also said to have “seen” them, rather than composing them, and who were considered semidivine. This, however, was after the canon of the Rgveda was closed and the ancient poets had been replaced by Brahmins who were the preservers and interpreters of the old texts.36