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

by Robert N. Bellah

  156. Ursula Goodenough and Terrence W. Deacon, “The Sacred Emergence of Nature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 865. When I got hold of this very large book with contributions from many distinguished thinkers, I hoped that it would help me with my project. I was almost completely disappointed. By viewing science and religion primarily as theories and not as practices, they ended up comparing apples and oranges, interesting as examples of how educated people think today but not helpful in understanding the different ways in which science and religion work.

  157. Goodenough and Deacon, “Sacred Emergence,” 867.

  158. Terrence Deacon and Tyrone Cashman, “The Role of Symbolic Capacity in the Origin of Religion,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 3 (2009): 490-517. Here Deacon and Cashman move toward the explanation of religion as a practice in a way that the earlier article and most of the others in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science do not.

  159. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 138-140.

  160. Deacon and Cashman, “Role of Symbolic Capacity,” 9.

  161. Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 19-71.

  162. Deacon and Cashman, “Role of Symbolic Capacity,” 10.

  163. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 28-45.

  164. Deacon and Cashman, “Role of Symbolic Capacity,” 13.

  165. Huizinga discusses personification in Homo Ludens in the chapter titled “The Elements of Mythopoiesis,” where he writes of myth: “As soon as the effect of a metaphor consists in describing things or events in terms of life and movement, we are on the road to personification … Personification arises as soon as we feel the need to communicate our perceptions to others. Conceptions are thus born as acts of the imagination. Are we justified in calling this innate habit of mind, the tendency to create an imaginary world of living beings, a playing of the mind, a mental game?” (136).

  166. Buber, I and Thou, 85.

  167. Ibid., 59.

  168. Ibid., 57, 144-146.

  169. Ibid., 172,

  170. Ibid., 173. Buber is willing to include not just trees, but “this huge sphere that reaches from the stones to the stars.”

  171. Ibid., 150.

  172. Ibid., 124.

  173. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, rev. ed., trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995 [1670]), 285.

  174. Ibid., 127. Passage numberings in two editions are Blaise Pascal, Pensees, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), 423 (hereafter cited as Lafuma), and Blaise Pascal, Pensees et Opuscules, ed. Leon Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1920), 277 (hereafter cited as Brunschvicg).

  175. Ibid., 56. Lafuma 185, Brunschvicg 265.

  176. Ibid., 28-29. Lafuma 110, Brunschvicg 282. This passage as a whole is particularly helpful for Pascal’s view of the heart.

  177. Ibid., 57. Lafuma 190, Brunschvicg 543.

  178. Ibid., 60. Lafuma 199, Brunschvicg 72.

  179. Ibid., 66. Lafuma 200, Brunschvicg 347.

  180. Plato, Laws, 2.653, in The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas Pangle (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 32-33, with help from A. E. Taylor’s translation in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 1250-51. We will see in Chapter 3 that Plato was right about rhythm and harmony: only humans can “keep together in time.”

  181. Plato, Laws, 7.796, in Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 18-19.

  182. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 143.

  183. Plato, Statesman, 268d. I have drawn on J. B. Skemp’s translation in Hamilton and Cairns, Complete Dialogues, 1033, and C. J. Rowe’s translation in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 310.

  184. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 149-150, citing Aristotle, Poetics, 1447B.

  185. Plato, Symposium 223d, trans. Michael Joyce, in Hamilton and Cairns, Collected Dialogues, 547.

  186. Smith, Natural Reflections, 140-146.

  187. Ibid., 33.

  188. Ibid., 27.

  189. Ibid., 135.

  190. Ibid., 132.

  191. Ibid., 89-94.

  192. Ibid., 31-32.

  3. Tribal Religion

  1. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Donald has developed his argument further in A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001).

  2. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 149.

  3. John H. Crook, “The Experiential Context of Intellect,” in Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, ed. Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 359-360.

  4. The last chapter of Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York: Knopf, 1991), is entitled “Democracy Means Paying Attention.”

  5. Our knowledge of Homo habilis, the first of our genus, who flourished between 2.3 million years ago and the emergence of H. erectus 1.8 million years ago, is too fragmentary to hazard a guess about their capacities.

  6. Johanna Nichols, “The Origin and Dispersal of Languages: Linguistic Evidence,” in The Origin and Diversification of Language, ed. Nina G. Jablonski and Leslie C. Aiello (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1998), 127-170.

  7. Jared M. Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper Trade, 1992).

  8. Derek E. Wildman, Lawrence I. Grossman, and Morris Goodman, “Functional DNA in Humans and Chimpanzees Shows They Are More Similar to Each Other than Either Is to Other Apes,” in Probing Human Origins, ed. Morris Goodman and Anne Simon Moffat (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2002), 2.

  9. Ibid., 1.

  10. Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 121. Tattersall does allow himself one line of speculation: In quadrupedal monkeys, the newborn emerges from the birth canal facing the mother, who can assist in the final emergence. “In humans, on the other hand, the baby has to twist to face away from the mother, who therefore cannot provide such assistance for fear of breaking the baby’s back. Neither can the mother attend by herself, as monkeys can, to clearing mucus from the baby’s nose and mouth to allow it to breathe or to unwinding the umbilical cord from around the baby’s neck. All these attentions are frequently necessary, which is why midwifery is virtually universal in human societies. It has been suggested that the involvement of females other than the mother in the birth process goes right back to the origins of bipedalism; and if so, this implies a level of cooperation and coordination among early hominid females that goes far beyond that involved in the occasional infant care by `aunts’ seen in other primates” (121-122).

  11. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 130.

  12. Ibid., 62-66.

  13. Ibid., 77.

  14. Ibid., 78.

  15. It is beyond my competence to resolve this issue. The idea of a language module has originated among followers of Noam Chomsky and is described at length in Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994). Merlin Donald argues, convincingly to me, that there is no such thing as a language module. See A Mind So Rare, esp. 36-39.

  16. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 279-285.

  17. Tattersall, Becoming Human, 128.

  18. See the diagram in Colin Renfrew, “The Origins of World Linguistic Diversity: An Archaeological Perspective,” in Jablonski and Aiello, Origin and Diversification, 178.

  19. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 263-265.

  20. My twin granddaughters were playing quietly when one of them said rather loudly, “mama.” My daughter responded and was told “not you!” It was the other granddaughte
r who, in their play, was at the moment the mama.

  21. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 264.

  22. Tattersall, Becoming Human, 138.

  23. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 179.

  24. Tattersall, Becoming Human, 139.

  25. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 264.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid., 205.

  28. Ibid., 266.

  29. Linguists have discovered that in all cultures parents speak to infants in something they call “motherese,” a kind of simplified, highly repetitive, singsong, partly nonsense, kind of language, one that communicates feeling rather than information. Each language has its own version of motherese, to be sure, but the basic characteristics seem to be quite universal. Because motherese is made up largely of singsong nonsense syllables, it is easy to imagine that it had a prelinguistic mimetic precursor. On motherese, see Pinker, The Language Instinct, 39-40.

  30. See William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

  31. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 182.

  32. Leslie C. Aiello, “The Foundations of Human Language,” in Jablonski and Aiello, Origin and Diversification, 23.

  33. Dunbar, Grooming, 78.

  34. Though we tend to think of language in terms of abstract meanings, heavily influenced as we are by our constant exposure to written language, it is well to remember that speech is gestural, bodily enacted, and involves subtle muscular training, just as other forms of gesture do.

  35. Dunbar, Grooming, 140.

  36. Steven Brown, “The `Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” in Nils L. Wallin, Bjorn Merker, and Steven Brown, The Origins of Music (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 275.

  37. Ibid., 277.

  38. Dunbar, Grooming, 146.

  39. See Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Donald makes a telling point: “It is surely no coincidence that only one subspecies of the entire hominid line has survived; most other species of mammals have at least several co-existing subspecies, each occupying a special niche. But not humans. Apparently only one hominid can occupy the human niche for any substantial length of time.” Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 209.

  40. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 197-198.

  41. Since the publication of Donald’s Origins of the Modern Mind in 1991, which is summarized here, the work of scholars like de Waal and Tomasello, as discussed in Chapter 2, has shown a considerable degree of shared consciousness among the great apes.

  42. Ibid., 198.

  43. Ibid., 200.

  44. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 36-39.

  45. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 283, citing Jerome Bruner, Possible Worlds, Actual Minds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

  46. Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).

  47. Ibid., 402-403.

  48. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 282.

  49. Ibid., 283, citing George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

  50. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 283-284.

  51. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 215.

  52. Ibid., 214.

  53. Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth andMeaning (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 17. Italics in the original.

  54. It is worth remembering that in his later writings Durkheim identified “society” not with its existing reality but with the ideals that gave it coherence and purpose.

  55. James McClenon, in Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), argues on neo-Darwinist grounds that shamanistic healing is the “origin” of religion. Though interesting, his argument seems much too simple to me.

  56. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jamestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 63. Italics in the original.

  57. Morris Berman, Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 83.

  58. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24. Keith Hart in his preface to this posthumously published book invokes Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and holds that Rappaport’s book is “comparable in scope to his great predecessor’s work” (xiv), a judgment with which I agree.

  59. Bruce Richman, “How Music Fixed `Nonsense’ into Significant Formulas: On Rhythm, Repetition, and Meaning,” in Wallin, Merker, and Brown, The Origins ofMusic, 304.

  60. This is the central thesis of Morris Berman’s Wandering God. Berman believes that “religion” begins only with agriculture and is therefore quite recent in human evolution. Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, in The Evolution of Human Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), argue for very small early human groups that are “naturally” individualistic.

  61. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982 [1970]), 99.

  62. Ibid., xi-xii, quoting Fredrik Barth, Nomads of South Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseb Confederacy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), 21.

  63. In War before Civilization, Keeley argues that most of the few examples of societies without war are, in fact, “defeated refugees,” too traumatized and exhausted to think of mounting offensive action.

  64. Alan Barnard has made an interesting contrast between the Bushman and the Australian models of hunter-gatherer societies, concluding that the former are more likely to be closer to early Homo sapiens society for two reasons: (1) Australian models are unique to Australia, and (2) Australian models are too elaborate to be the basis of early culture. See his “Modern Hunter-Gatherers and Early Symbolic Culture,” in The Evolution of Culture, ed. Robin Dunbar et al. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 50-68. I have already dealt with the issue of cultural elaboration. David H. Turner, in Life before Genesis: A Conclusion (Toronto: Peter Lang, 1985), has argued for tendencies toward the Australian type in North America, and for the Australian type as a logical possibility everywhere.

  65. Ellen B. Basso, The Kalapalo Indians of Central Brazil (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973); and Basso, A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

  66. Basso, Kalapalo, 1-3. During the period of Basso’s second visit (1978-1980) the Kalapalo still held on to their traditional culture. The protection provided by the park “made possible their continued survival in the face of increasingly disastrous demographic, social, and economic pressures which on several occasions have threatened the integrity of the reserve,” making them, though “with fearful tenuousness,” virtually unique among native peoples of Latin America. Basso, Musical View, xi-xii.

  67. Ibid., 5.

  68. Basso, Musical View, 65. It is worth noting that in her first book Basso refers to itseke (powerful beings) only as “monsters,” having been more impressed by the dangers associated with them than anything else. Basso, Kalapalo, 21-23. The fieldwork for Musical View concentrated on mythology and ritual and led her to a much deeper understanding of powerful beings.

  69. Basso, Musical View, 69.

  70. Ibid., 68.

  71. Basso indicates that the powerful beings can be localized: “Certain landmarks-trees, areas of a river, regions of a particularly deep forest, and so forth-are supposed to be the homes pf particular monsters [itseke]. While passing by these places, one is expected to be silent in order not to attract the creatures” (Kalapalo, 116). In Musical View, as we will see, Basso says the powerful beings live in a “sky village.”

  72. Basso, Musical View, 243.

  73. Ibid., 253. Italics in the original.<
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  74. We will see something like this in other tribal and archaic societies.

  75. Basso, Musical View, 256-257.

  76. Jan Vansina notes that in oral cultures chronology is inevitably shallow: “Beyond a certain time depth chronology can no longer be kept. Accounts fuse and are thrown back into the period of origin-typically under a cultural hero-or are forgotten. The shortest such time depth I know of is that of the Aka of Lobaye (Central African Republic), where it does not exceed one generation of adults. Historical consciousness works on only two registers: time of origin and recent times. Because the limit one reaches in time reckoning moves with the passage of generations, I have called the gap a floating gap.” Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 24. Later he notes how a historical memory could be swept into a creation myth after some length of time: “a major personage in Lugbara [Congo/Uganda] creation is a British District Officer from the turn of the century” (177).

  77. Basso, Musical View, 254, quoting Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 374.

  78. Basso, Musical View, 37-39.

  79. Ibid., 170.

  80. Basso, Kalapalo, 113-119; Basso, Musical View, 71, 106-107.

  81. On witchcraft see Basso, Kalapalo, 124-131.

  82. Basso, Musical View, 91-140.

  83. Ibid., 308-309.

  84. Ibid., 310-311.

  85. Ibid., 11ff.

  86. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 27.

  87. Ibid., 37.

  88. Victor Turner has usefully emphasized the relation between ritual and dramatic performance, and the boundary between them is indeed fuzzy. See particularly part 2 of his On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985).

  89. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites ofPassage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 [1908]).

  90. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 107.

  91. My main sources, M. J. Meggitt and Nancy D. Munn, call this group the Walbiri, and so I will follow their usage, though more recent publications use a slightly different orthography and call the same group the Warlpiri.