It has been a historical accident that early European scholars of foreign or primitive cultures used the term “religion” to describe a phenomenon of which they only had a rudimentary understanding. They concluded that other cultures must have institutions similar to those of Christianity or Judaism within their respective cultures. These deeply ingrained and premature assertions and beliefs are the origin of many such discrepancies.
A difficulty in examining religions from a historical viewpoint is the common notion of the so-called “primitive religion” as the oldest and most elementary form of human religious sentiment and practice. However, it is unsafe to assume that non-Western cultural forms lacking technological development represent the earliest steps in humanity’s journey toward spiritual ideas. The more we learn about different cultural criteria, the more challenges arise in fitting them into a simple evolutionary scheme or clear system of criteria. “Primitive religions” referred to the diversity of feelings and behaviors that represent a type of consciousness that Western civilization has lost.
The primary characteristic of primitive religious consciousness, as studied in Amazonian, Indo-American, Polynesian, and African peoples, is the absence of any defined boundary between the spiritual and natural worlds and, therefore, between the human mind or ego and the surrounding world. The French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called this lack of boundaries “mystical participation,” indicating a sense of fusion between the human organism and its environment.
This feeling can be described as corresponding in its field to the modern intellectual understanding of the interrelation between humanity and nature in the science of ecology. A similar absence of boundaries also prevails between the worlds of conscious experience and dreams, or between individual will and the spontaneous emotions and impulses of the psyche. As a result, the external world as a whole is imbued with powers that can be called mental or spiritual. Material objects, as stable and understandable features of the external world, do not exist, as all things seem to behave as capriciously as events in dreams. When uncontrolled, when the contents of experience are in this mood, they will appear as vivid, mysterious, and fascinating, as well as terrifying, so that all nature will be bathed in an impressive and mysterious atmosphere. The German religious historian Rudolf Otto referred to such an atmosphere as “numinous.”
In a broader sense, the numinous atmosphere is tied to the natural world as a whole and to each object within it. A good example can be seen in Shintoism, a “primitive” religion still practiced in the sophisticated civilization of Japan. The term Shintoism (in Japanese, shin, “spirit”) means “the way of the gods” or “the way of the spirit.” According to Shintoism, each rock, animal, or stream has its own shin or kami (in Japanese, “god” or “goddess”). However, it is a mistake to call kami “god” in any of the senses the word has in the West; similarly, the term shin means “spirit” only in a vague sense, as it is frequently used as a simple exclamation, similar to “marvelous!”
Shintoism has no system of doctrine, creed, or formulated religious ideas; it focuses on expressing admiration, respect, and awe for everything that exists. This concern implies treating everything as if it were a person, not always in the sense that it is inhabited by some ghost or spirit with a human form but in the sense of having a mysterious, autonomous life of its own that should not be taken for granted.
It is obvious that some entities, like the sun, the moon, the ocean, and certain mountains and places of peculiar strength and beauty, seem more imbued with the numinous atmosphere than others. As the intensity of the numinous is different in each particular place, so are the aspects or qualities of the atmosphere. Anthropologists often use the Polynesian words mana and taboo to typify the positive and negative aspects of the numinous. When it appears as “mana,” it is potent and practical; but if it appears as “taboo,” it is terrifying and forbidden.
In primitive religions, not only external things and places but also human beings can sometimes be peculiarly charged with the numinous. The type of person granted special access to mana, or the earthly aspect of power in these religions, is the “shaman” or “sorcerer.” This role is very different from that of a priest or pastor in a religion like Christianity, as the shaman’s power does not come from tradition but rather from personal experience. It is their own unique discovery made alone through relationships with dreams.
The numinous is more than a sense of awe and mystery in the presence of a strange world. The absence of a clear boundary between the human mind and its surroundings, in a world where both external and internal events seem to occur, provokes ecstasy and fears. Among the Navajo, for example, this captivating aspect of the numinous is called hozón, a term referring to a sense of intense beauty and peace that can be evoked with rituals of chanting, dancing, and sand painting. These rituals of compassionate magic, whether to evoke hozón, rain, or good harvests, originate from the same sense of fusion between the human and natural worlds and between the events of the mind and the external world.
Ritual plays an important role in primitive cultures, even if it is not recognizable in any sense as different from the so-called practical activity. Rather, it is an attempt to influence or harmonize oneself with the cycle of nature by dramatizing or symbolically representing fundamental events like the sunrise and sunset, the alternation of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the annual planting and harvest. Additionally, the ritual involves the external interpretation of the great mythical themes that in these cultures take the place of religious doctrines. Therefore, ritual, as it appears in primitive religions, can be described as a form of art that expresses and celebrates humanity’s meaningful participation in the affairs of the universe and the gods.
In cultures where this kind of feeling about the world prevails, no sphere of life is concretely recognizable as religion. Religion is so embedded in daily life that it is impossible to distinguish the sacred from the profane. Only greater or lesser degrees of sacredness appear. Religion does not exist as a specific activity, and members of these cultures would find it enormously difficult to refer to their religion. They could not distinguish the rituals preceding a good hunt from what Western culture would call pure hunting technique. Symbolic forms of spears, boats, and household utensils do not constitute superfluous adornments but are functional parts of the object, evoking mana for practical use.
Raymond Buckland, in his work “Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft” (1986), commented as follows:
“Nature was overwhelming to them; they felt respect and fear for it, for example, for lightning, gusts of wind, and violent water currents, attributing a spirit to each one, and therefore turning them into a god or a goddess. That is what is known as animism. One god controlled the wind; another controlled the sky; another controlled the waters. But the most important god was… the god of hunting. As for the animals they hunted, almost all had horns, so they painted the hunting god with horns. At that time, magic blended with the first hesitant steps of religion. The first form of magic was probably called sympathetic magic. It associated similar things with similar effects. For example, if a bison representation was made and then attacked and killed, the same would happen when a real one was hunted, leading to the conclusion that all bison hunts would end in its death. The magical-religious ritual was born when one of the cavemen put a hide over his shoulders and a mask to represent the hunting god and lead the attack. Paintings from that time still exist, in some caves, representing such rituals, in addition to clay bison and bears. It is interesting to see how this form of sympathetic magic has endured until relatively modern times. For example, in the USA, the Penobscot Indians (settled less than a hundred years ago in the bay of the same name, which is now Maine) wore deer masks and horns when performing rituals. Another example is the buffalo dance of the Mandan Indians, who lived on the banks of the Missouri River.”
In “primitive societies,” these cultures also lacked religious doctrines or abstract concepts about the nature of the numinous and its distinction from everything else. Spirit is a feeling rather than an idea; its most appropriate language does not consist of concepts but images. Thus, instead of religious doctrine, there is myth, or an unsystematic set of stories passed down from generation to generation, as these stories represent the meaning of the world indefinitely.
According to the earliest anthropological interpretations of myth, such as that of Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer, mythical gods and heroes personify celestial bodies, elements, and spirits of harvests and flocks, and myths are naive explanations of nature. A later interpretation is provided by Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who suggested that myths are based on dreams and fantasies that give concrete expression to unconscious psychological processes. Therefore, believing that a tribal dance helps the sunrise, the rite’s representation offers tribe members meaning—the role of playing a significant part in the universe’s progress.
A similar explanation of myth was provided by the Sinhalese researcher Ananda Coomaraswamy in his studies on Indian and Indonesian culture; he believed that the great mythical themes were parables of a timeless philosophy, an intuitive knowledge of human destiny and nature that has always been accessible to those who truly wish to delve into the depths of the human mind. American philosopher Susanne K. Langer argues that myth provides the first example of general ideas and, therefore, metaphysical thought. According to Langer, language is better equipped to express new ideas through metaphorical than literal means. It may be necessary to abandon the assumption that solar and fertility myths are rudimentary attempts to explain natural forces, as science does. Just as cultures with myths do not distinguish between spirit and nature, or religion and life, they also do not discriminate symbolic truth or fantasy from literal truth or reality. It is not about confusing myth with reality, but rather that the concept of literal reality has yet to arise.
Religions arise in cultures where components have developed a strong sense of differentiation between the human mind and the natural environment, subjective consciousness and objective reality, and therefore between spirit and matter. This sense of differentiation is linked to the development of stable agricultural civilizations, where the division of labor requires individuals to play different roles in the community. In hunter cultures, each individual masters all the arts necessary for survival, but in agricultural societies, much greater cooperation is required between individuals with different skills and roles. Such cooperation, in turn, demands more precise forms of communication between people and therefore convention, or common agreement, regarding communication symbols, especially as they pertain to language and its function.
A language is more effective the broader its vocabulary. A large number of words indicates a high degree of awareness in distinguishing things and different events. Each word is a distinctive sign of a type of experience, and the basis of classification lies in discriminating one thing from another. The need to play different roles in the community also distinguishes individuals and requires them to identify with their duties to avoid confusion. Many names, such as blacksmith, baker, tailor, carpenter, and tinker, initially indicated roles performed in society. The Latin word “persona” originated from the term that gave symbolic value to the masks worn by actors in Greco-Roman theater, each mask identifying the roles played by the actors. People developed an awareness of their uniqueness and separation from others, based in part on the acceptance of particular roles within society.
The separation of individuals by role and the growing perception of distance from the world through language developed through convention, which is both divisive and cohesive. However, conventions are complex and are learned with some difficulty. That’s why societal agreements must be respected, as with children who must be disciplined to learn a language and manage the rules of games, protocol, or morals. The community’s very life depends on observing communication conventions. Religion’s instrumentality also involves ensuring the complete system of conventions, or the rules of thought, language, conduct, and role.
The relationships between a social convention system and a belief system about the universe require further explanation. Social convention includes resources such as grammars, vocabularies, numbers, and signs, without which a person may perceive the world but cannot think about it. American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that the structure of language, that is, the tool of reflection for a person, determines that individual’s view of nature’s structure. Therefore, it is understandable that both Semitic and Indo-Aryan religious traditions conceive of the universe as if it had been created by the word of God. If the world is explained, controlled, and described by thought, it is natural to assume it was created by thought and that the natural laws that reflection reveals are the word or law of God, underlying the world as a primordial pattern.
