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

by Robert N. Bellah

  It is, inter alia, a painfully honest confrontation of the difficulties of renunciation, showing that real human goods must, ultimately, be abandoned in the ascetic search for ultimate felicity; and it is the most subtle and successful attempt in Pali literature to infuse ascetic values into an ordinary, productive and reproductive society. This society is only glimpsed at the end of the story, inevitably, since sustained narrative description would falter on the contradictions and paradoxes [inherent in such a society]: just as the fabled Rama-rajya, the utopia that follows Rama’s victory over Ravana and his consecration as king, occupies only nine verses at the end of Book 6 of the Ramayana.269

  Collins points out that the Buddhist absolute commitment to nonviolence, without either the relativism of the Mahabadrata or the allowance of violence toward nonhumans in the Ramayana, although well expressed in the Vessantara jataka, is not quite as simple a contrast with the Hindu epics as it might seem. He argues that in practice in Buddhist societies Dhamma has two modes: “Mode 1, grounded in the principle of reciprocity, which requires and legitimates violence, when it repays bad with bad in the form of punishment for crime and in self-defense; and Mode 2, where values, including that of nonviolence, are absolute.“270 The power of the Vessantara jataka is its recognition of the presence of both modes and their costs. That Buddhists have always seen it as a joyous story and not a tragedy has much to do with the fact that it points beyond itself: “Often known simply as Mahajataka, the `Great Birth Story,’ it tells of events in the penultimate human birth in the sequence which was to become Gotama Buddha, when he brought to perfection the virtue of giving; thereafter he was reborn as a god in the Tusita heaven, before his last and final birth as Siddhartha Gotama.“271 It is to the Buddha and to his nirvana that the story points.

  It is worth thinking about the fact that the three epics we have been discussing raise the question of violence and its evils, of the good king and the good society, in ways far more explicit than do the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Aeneid. In part this is because the Greek epics arose at a time when the warrior societies they describe were recent (and Virgil’s Latin epic takes the Greek epics as a model too closely to break the mold), but the parallel Indian warrior societies were but a distant memory when our versions of the epics were composed. In the Indic epics it is the capacity of narrative to take insights from systematic thought and show their complexities and inner contradictions unflinchingly that is most impressive. Without their narrative depth, we would have a truncated view of how the tradition would play itself out in subsequent history.

  Pascal in one of his fragments says something that applies to this book: “The last thing one discovers when writing a work is what one should put first.”’ After having written Chapters 1 through 9, and in the course of completely rewriting Chapter 2, “Religion and Evolution,” I discovered the importance of play among mammals and the extraordinary way in which play in animals provided the background for the development of play, ritual, and culture among humans.2 So play, though discovered last, did get in quite early in this book, but then is largely ignored through the whole trek from tribal to axial religions. Play was there all the time, just below the surface, though I didn’t point it out. Because, having been at work for thirteen years, I can’t imagine rewriting the whole book to give adequate attention to play, I will here in the Conclusion try briefly to make up for that deficiency by discussing the importance of play and those things that endanger play in human life.

  Schiller

  I will begin by alluding to an important classical discussion of play that I overlooked in Chapter 2, namely Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.3 Schiller picks up on a brief analogy in Kant, who remarked that art is to handicraft as play is to but he develops his conception of play far beyond anything in Kant. Schiller already guessed at the nature of animal play, which Gordon Burghardt has so brilliantly analyzed in his remarkable book The Genesis of Animal Play-namely, that play is a realm of freedom relative to the pressures of the struggle for existence: it can occur only in what Burghardt calls a “relaxed field.“5 As Schiller puts it:

  Certainly nature has given even to the creatures without reason more than the bare necessities of life, and cast a gleam of freedom over the darkness of animal existence. When the lion is not gnawed by hunger and no beast is challenging him to battle, his idle energy creates for itself an object; he fills the echoing desert with his high-spirited roaring, and his exuberant power enjoys itself in purposeless display … The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is the mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.

  Schiller contrasts “the sanction of need, or physical seriousness” with the “sanction of superfluity, or physical play,” but suggests that human play, though also beginning in physical play, can move to the level of aesthetic play in which the full spiritual and cultural capacities of humans can be given free reign.’ Schiller was a poet of major stature and a philosophical amateur, so some of his reasoning is not easy to follow. What he seems to be arguing is that human life is riven by a series of dichotomies that play overcomes: matter and form, sense and intellect, actuality and necessity, and so forth. He opposes the reduction of play to “a mere game” when he writes, “But why call it a mere game, when we consider that in every condition of humanity it is precisely play, and play alone, that makes man complete and displays at once his twofold nature.” He culminates this line of reflection with a remarkable assertion: “For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing.” 7

  One other point, among the many interesting things that Schiller says, has to do with play and time:

  The sense impulse requires variation, requires time to have a content; the form impulse requires the extinction of time, and no variation. Therefore the impulse in which both are combined (allow me to call it provisionally the play impulse), this play impulse would aim at the extinction of time in time and the reconciliation of becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity.’

  Schiller here seems to be saying that taking place in “time out of time,” which Levi-Strauss, as we noted in Chapter 1, saw as characteristic of music and myth, is perhaps primordially characteristic of play.’ The “extinction of time in time” would seem to be what happens in a relaxed field, in a form of life not subject to the struggle for existence, and play, as the first such form, reaches far back in biological time.

  I think Schiller helps us move from the description of animal play in Chapter 2 to the description of tribal ritual in Chapter 3. In all three tribal examples we see how ritual takes place in a relaxed field, and that it takes considerable effort to create such a field. Among the Kalapalo, a major ritual requires weeks, if not months, of preparation. Some of this involves rehearsal and the construction of the ritual paraphernalia that will be used during the performance, but there is also an intensification of economic effort to provide the surplus food that will be given out to the participants and attendees at a major ritual. Having to forage in the midst of a ritual would surely break the spell. Indeed, it would seem that the capacity for a significant degree of food storage would be a prerequisite for rituals involving more than one’s immediate group, if they are to be held at all. We can see similar preparations among the Australian Aborigines and the Navajo. One can imagine that in pre-state times one would want to hold a ritual at a time and place relatively safe from outside aggressors as well. So human ritual requires work to prepare a relaxed field; animal play requires that the players be fed and safe, but no special or extended preparation is necessary. That human play and work are not only opposites but in various ways interdependent is an insight we will need to consider further below.

  The descriptions of tribal rituals themselves usually exhibit features that we could characterize as play: such ritual is very much embodied as in singing, d
ancing, feasting, and general hilarity, but there is also a powerful element of pretend play that can have serious meanings. We can cite a relevant description of Kalapalo ritual:

  Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with them although it is not directly addressed to them … Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focused mental images of the powerful being are created in the minds of the performers by means of the performance … There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power. In public ritual, this is power of community.10

  We can also turn to Ellen Basso’s description of the sense of moral equality that the ritual generates, which we already saw as foreshadowed in the egalitarian rules of animal play: “Economically, it means that everyone is obligated to participate, but everyone receives regardless of contribution. Ifutisu, the most basic value of Kalapalo life (subsuming the notions of generosity, modesty, flexibility, and equanimity in facing social difficulties, and respect for others) is extended beyond the domain of family to all people in the community.“11

  But although animal play takes place in a society organized in a more or less harsh dominance hierarchy, hunter-gatherer and some horticultural societies, such as those described in Chapter 3, are relatively egalitarian. One must wonder if the egalitarianism that is endemic in play and ritual has somehow been generalized outside the ritual context in such societies. Perhaps hunter-gatherer egalitarianism can be explained entirely on economic grounds as some have tried to do, but a cultural push from the domain of play and ritual might also be involved. I have argued in Chapter 4 that the continual reassertion of equality in the ritual context probably helped such societies cope with the ever-present threat of the domineering upstart.

  Play, Ritual, and the Early State

  What happens when, with the spread of agriculture, village settlements, and increase of population, dominance hierarchies reappear, at first modestly and then-in the early state-with a vengeance? We noted a ritual bifurcation: some rituals are reserved for the dominant elite and take place out of sight or at a distance from the rest of the population, although communal rituals of various sorts continue among the non-elite population. In the Tikopia-an example of a “traditional” Polynesian chiefdom where the chief had little coercive power and was still seen as the head of an extended lineage that included the whole group, but was treated with a reverence unknown to hunter-gatherers-the beginnings of something we can call worship appeared. It is the chief and only the chief who offers sacrifices, in this case of food and drink, to powerful beings who can now be called gods, as requests for their protection and assistance are central elements in the ritual that only chiefs can perform. However, after observing these sacred rituals from a distance, the words of which are secret and spoken so softly that the commoners cannot hear them, there is a general festival involving singing, dancing, and feasting that reminds us of the communal rituals of tribal societies.

  Even in Hawaii, which was an early state or very close to becoming one at the time of Western discovery, there was an annual alternation of rituals. During the period of the year belonging to Ku, the war god, rituals took place in walled temples where the general populace could not enter. There the priests undertook sacrifices, most significantly human sacrifices, to magnify the power and prestige of the paramount chiefs on the verge of becoming kings. But for the rest of the year, the Makahiki season, especially beginning with the New Year rituals, a very different kind of ritual prevailed. Significantly, in this period the gates of the temples of Ku were closed. As we saw in Chapter 4, no one worked during the four days and nights that follow the hi’uwai rite. People of all classes devote themselves to feasting, mockery, obscene and satirical singing, and, above all, to dancing., Laughter overcomes kapu [tabu], and sexual advances during the dancing cannot be refused. Valeri writes that “these marvelously coordinated dances” realize “a perfect fellowship” that reconstitutes society itself. All of this takes place in an atmosphere of “hierarchical For a while at least, the old egalitarianism reappeared.

  Even in strongly hierarchical societies, rituals of reversal-which involve the violation of ordinary rules, such as rules involving gender identity, for example, but also rules of deference to superiors-can be found all over the world. Generally these have been interpreted as “letting off steam” and so ultimately reinforcing the status quo, yet to some degree they may allow the expression of real feelings even if under carefully controlled conditions. In these rituals the play element is particularly obvious.

  In modern totalitarian societies, where the most sacred rituals occur in the Central Committee or the Party Congress, great public rituals, sometimes involving hundreds of thousands of people and broadcast to all parts of the realm, reaffirm the solidarity of all with the now quite remote leadership. And democratic societies, where leadership is supposed to be “transparent,” though it is seldom entirely so, regularly hold great public rituals, such as the inauguration of a newly elected president. But however much public participation in ritual survives in class-divided state societies, the central myths and ideologies reinforce the legitimacy of the dominant ruling group, though, from the axial age on, not without challenge.

  We have noted that although the official ideology usually emphasizes the crushing dominance of the ruler, as in the case of the Behistun inscriptions of the great Persian Achaemenid king, Darius I, it also usually contains some expression of nurturance. Yet even here the frequent reference to the ruler as father or shepherd of the people, though more benign than the symbolism of ruthless power, does emphasize that the rulers are adults and the ruled are children. In archaic societies and in varying degrees even in axial societies, the ruler is related to the divine in a way different from that of ordinary people, so that religious or ideological sanction of the existing regime reinforces the existing power structure.

  But there is another feature of class-divided state societies that involves play: in most monarchical early states, and for many such states throughout historic time, it is hard work to become a king-there are brothers, cousins, powerful provincial governors who also have their eyes on the throne. And once attained, kingship often requires hard work to maintain. Yet the elite classes in such societies, what we might call the aristocrats, the extended families of relatives or close allies of monarchs, enjoy a uniquely exalted state. In Hawaii, as we saw, they were considered quasi-divine. Needless to say, they had little work to do in the ordinary sense of the word, as they were waited on hand and foot by social inferiors. What characterizes them is that they play. They hunt and engage in military exercises that can have serious consequences when put to use in war but are often playful competitions in the meantime. They learn to dance and sing with sophisticated elegance. They sometimes write poetry or engage bards to do so, so that they listen to epic lays or exchange lyric poems with their lovers. We find such aristocracies not only in ancient Greece, where many of us are most familiar with them in the Homeric poems, but also in ancient China, Japan, India, Africa, and

  One more feature of play that has developed, particularly among aristocrats, is the appearance of competition, of agon, to use the Greek word, which may be present in tribal play and ritual but is not prominent there. Rousseau thought that even in simple societies, like those I have called tribal, some element of competition was already present but was not But in aristocratic societies, competitive sporting events, perhaps deriving from military training, became common, and involved racing, wrestling, and many other “sports”-sports that survive to this day. It may be that competitive games involving team play have the same origin. We find such developments among aristocratic classes in many societies, clearly in Polynesia, for example, but again the case that comes first to min
d for those familiar with Western history is Greece. Here agonistic sports and games were highly developed, and often in connection with ritual-one thinks of the games organized by Achilles for the funeral of Patroclus in the Iliad-but the most ob vious example, because it lives on in rather different form among us, is the Olympic Games, only one of several Panhellenic athletic events. What is striking here, and so different from our own Olympic Games, is that they took place in the context of a great festival, dedicated to Zeus, of which the games were only a part.

  What I want to point out about the emergence of agonistic, competitive play is that, though still taking place in a relaxed field-during the games a truce was called between all warring Greek cities so that athletes could gather without fear, and, significantly, losers were defeated but not killedthe competitions do bring an element of the struggle for existence into the play situation itself. The standard maxim has always been “It’s not who wins or loses but how you play the game,” and clearly that has had more than a negligible influence, but the Greeks were very concerned to win. Though it was noble to compete, it was godlike to win. Perhaps no society until modern America ever emphasized winning more. But when winning becomes obsessive, play can become negative, something like an addiction, and, as Rousseau supposed, may bring inequality to the fore in a basically egalitarian arena.15

  Renouncers and the Legitimation Crisis of the Early State

  But here play takes on still another meaning: while some work, others play.l6 It is not that those who work have no play, but that for them play is constricted in time and quality because of the heavy burdens they carry just to make a living. Here play may be egalitarian among the players, but it is not equally shared in the whole society. Ideologists have often promised that modernity would democratize “leisure,” a word closely related to play, but today even the “leisured classes” don’t have much leisure and for the rest a couple of hours of television a day is mainly what is on offer.