Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
What is religion? It is a puzzle. Henri Bergson wrote:
How is it that beliefs and practices that are anything but reasonable could have been, and still are, accepted by reasonable beings.
Quite! Today not everyone means the same thing by religion. Many people use the word as meaning any set of personal ideals or beliefs. Thus communism, though atheistic, is called a religion. In its early stages, religion did not have this broad meaning.
The Romans of the classical periods had already forgotten the original meaning of the word, “religion”, a word which belongs to the earliest period of the Latin language. They surmised it came from the word “bind” (ligare or religare), and literally means “what binds man to the gods,” but the word would then have to be “religation”, not “religion”, so we are looking at Latin popular etymology here rather than anything scientific. Alternatively, Robert Graves speculates that the root of the word “religion” might be the Latin expression “rem legere” meaning “to choose a thing”—the tribe’s shamans or diviners had to choose whatever thing or course of action that might obtain divine favour—meaning, be successful. One way or another, religion came to mean, “the belief in and worship of gods”.
But defining religion is a poor way to start an anthropological study, if it is to be based on field work. If no one knows how religion began, then any definition of it might cut off some important element that fell outside the definition. So anything like totemism, magic, taboo, superstition, witchcraft has to be considered as legitimate.
Religious sceptics in ancient Greece and Rome speculated about how mankind came to believe in gods. The Roman poet Lucretius explained:
Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods.
Since then there have been many attempts to understand how this strange and widespread phenomenon arose. It has to be admitted that nobody knows and it is likely that no one will ever know. To study the emergence of religion in mankind is to study the emergence of mankind. No men are currently emerging from apes, so the occurrence cannot be studied directly.
Plainly, it evolved as human consciousness evolved but unlike the evolution of species, which leave fossils, however inadequate they might be, the evolution of such human traits as language and religion have left nothing that can unequivocally be attributed to them until so late in human development that they can be of no assistance in determining origins.
All of recorded history and much of human prehistory of the last 40,000 years concerns the social, cultural and technological evolution of modern people. The species, Homo sapiens has not altered physically in any detectable way in that time. The change has been entirely in knowledge and the application of the brain.
Nineteenth century intellectuals, who categorised primitive people of today as unintelligent or incapable of having religious thoughts, were being purely racialist. Those same middle class intellectuals did not even know how the working classes of their own society lived, yet made pronouncements about the mentality of Negroes, Bushmen, Aboriginals, American Indians, Melanesians and others. They said the Veddahs of Ceylon could not speak except in grunts and signs and could not make themselves intelligible in the dark. They speak Sinhalese! Sinhalese is an Indo-European language related to English, German, Latin and Russian!
The point is that religion is a social phenomenon and requires communication. It must have grown as language grew. People so primitive that they hardly had a language can not have had a religion. The Veddahs, of course, had no religion, the nineteenth century armchair anthropologists wrongly told us. Nevertheless, the deduction that there could be no religion without language seems reasonable, though only speculative. As language progressed, so did religion and people born to certain parents had no more choice of their religion than they had of their language.
Religion is like language also in giving local cultures an identity. The extinction of a language is the extinction of a people—ask a Welshman! People feel the same about their religion. Whatever is apparently revered in a religion is at core a symbol of the people themself. The god, totem or fetish of a clan is the clan, in a sense that is real to the members of it but is unexpressed. The individual identifies with the clan and the clan lives on after the individual dies, so the individual accepts that they have part that is immortal—their soul. So, warriors might say that they might die in battle but their souls will be spiritually with the surviving soldiers. Whence the idea of guardian angels.
Many errors were made by the early sociologists of religion because they thought they could see all levels of human development in the reports of primitive tribes from all over the world, brought in by explorers, merchants and travellers. All of this “data” was anecdotal and, although some remarkable books were written from it, they amount only to speculations.
When it was accepted that primitive tribes could communicate by language perfectly well, it was decided that they perceived things differently from advanced people. They decided that primitive people saw the supernatural in everything. In some ways, that is perhaps true, but they did not see the supernatural in everything all the time, any more than a Catholic sees the blood of Christ in every glass of wine. Many common objects had a supernatural set of properties but they manifested when they were supposed to—on ritual or magical occasions, not while they were going about their everyday business. The experts wanted to go from tribes that had no religion at all, they were so primitive, to tribes so superstitious that their whole existence was conditioned by ghouls and spirits.
What is true is that some primitive societies accept the supernatural as natural. But most primitive people live their lives in a down to earth and practical way. If a stone has a supernatural aspect, it only manifests when it is used in a certain way, so they are not fearful of using a stone for some practical purpose. When the stone is painted or carved or placed in a tree, it might become a fetish, but the act of the person or people endow it with its supernatural properties.
The experts were apt to ignore the practical routine of native people in favour of their peculiar (to the observer) religious practices, which they were then depicted as being obsessed by. Most primitive people are no different to us in that they have to make a living. Yet the nineteenth century observers of them, who were mainly missionaries particularly concerned with religion, were not bothered about their everyday lives, but about the state of their immortal souls, which they considered on the verge of everlasting incineration because of their traditional religious rituals. In those cases where the natives even had simple practical religious practices, and no spectacular or bloody rituals, the missionaries reported that they were devoid of any idea of God.
Thus, Sir Samuel Baker declared in 1867 that the Northern Nilotes of the Nile basin lived in a “puny” world, devoid of any form of worship or idolatry, or even superstition. Their minds were “stagnant". Only four years later Tyler refuted this racism, but equal nonsense was being reported by Western observers into the twentieth century.
The Victorian experts also were racist in failing to understand that simple people can be just as metaphorical in expression as sophisticated people. If a native says a man is a leopard, why do we think he is simple to hold such a belief when we all know men cannot be leopards? Yet we can say our boss is a monster, the meter maid is a bitch, our enemy is a rat. We have a series of misfortunes and conclude we’ve had a spell of bad luck. Primitive people say they’ve been bewitched. The primitive explanation has more content, though both explain nothing much in fact. We label witchcraft as supernatural but for primitive people it is a perfectly normal explanation of bad luck.
More often the misunderstanding was that of the scholar not the native. These scholars often did not bother to get the nuances of the words they were interpreting. Every linguist knows that words rarely have exactly corresponding words in a different language and translation is a compromise or approximation. Students used to be urged to read a foreign work “in the original” so that the translator’s assumptions were not forced on to them, but instead they could consider alternatives and satisfy themselves. Often biblical scholars today are not satisfied with the popular translations of biblical Greek or Hebrew and offer their own translation to bring out a nuance. But no one could expect average Christian punters to understand anything so unrevealed.
The scholar would decide that a native meant “soul” by a certain word and take it for granted that the native concept matched the scholar’s. Could a Polynesian understand an Eskimo explaining the Arctic landscape? Could an American or European? Eskimos are supposed to have a large number of words for snow all with different meanings. Whether this is true or not, it illustrates the problem. Could a Christian make an Eskimo understand that the crucified man was the lamb of God?
We are sophisticated people who have had long experience of reason and rationality based on the scientific method, yet primitive are no less rational in applying their premises. it is the premises that are wrong, not their logic.
Some simple tribes have a sense of amazement or awe at certain things that happen, either naturally or ritually. Westerners often feel just the same, whether in church or before an astonishing natural vista. Observation of nature and the human deductions made from them reveal to people something of their own character and destiny. This is understood as a revelation of the divine.
St Augustine wrote:
What is now called the Christian religion has existed among the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh; from which time, religion, which existed already, began to be called Christian.
So there is no qualitative difference between revealed religion and natural religion. Revealed religions are simply natural religions fossilised in the pages of a book.
Max Müller deduced that human beings always had an intuition for the divine or an “idea of the Infinite” from observing nature. Müller thought that emerging people would have tried to touch the moon, as a child might, and gathered from their inability to do so, the concept of the Infinite from which they conceived intangible things that became gods. Breathe was also intangible and became the basis of someone’s spirit or soul.
This natural feeling of wonder is doubtless the source of religious awe and, if true precludes the need to propose a primitive revelation or a religious instinct, but little can be concluded from it because many tribes feel awe at natural events but do not worship them or try to placate them. On the other hand, Polynesians apparently are quite matter of fact about hurricanes that they often experience and are undoubtedly awesome. This illustrates another fault of the armchair students of the primitive. They compile vast collections of data to illustrate some speculation they have, but say nothing about all the instances that could be collected that refute it.
Müller showed however that examination of the meaning of the names of gods can reveal something of their origin. Thus Apollo loved Daphne who fled and became a laurel tree. Daphne is the dawn, in Greek, and Apollo is a sun god. The name of the laurel tree is also dawn so the myth is that the dawn fled from the rising sun and transformed into the bush called by the same name. In a Jewish version of this myth, Joseph is the sun and Aseneth is the dawn. Aseneth repents before the rising sun and becomes a city of refuge, probably a pun on the name Aseneth.
The Christian is keen to diminish any hypotheses put forward about the development of religion, mainly because it is a threat to the idea of revelation. The truth is that their criticisms have some validity precisely because the development of religion in mankind is no longer open to direct study. Speculation, when facts are not available, is legitimate. What has to be recognised however, is that such speculations have an insecure basis and no one, whether religious or atheistical should be surprised if something emerges that weighs against an idea.
Philosophers spend their whole time speculating and rarely bother to check their speculations against reality, yet philosophy is still an attractive university course. Even scientists like Einstein are fond of “thought experiments”. Speculation can be useful, especially if it provides some criterion for progress. The ninteenth century anthropologists did useful work, and work which is still useful although it cannot be used uncritically.
What is wrong then in considering what the earliest people must have felt at night? Naturally, we cannot know, but we can be fairly sure that diurnal animals would be scared when it got dark. Apes were prey for big cats, hyenas, bears, wolves, dogs, and so on. Many of these predators were nocturnal. When consciousness began to glimmer they must have wondered at their feeling of terror at night. Would they have immediately recognised their odd feeling as an instinctive fear of predation by big cats?
We do not know, but it assumes knowledge and powers of reasoning that had not yet developed. They would simply have feared the night itself. The instinctve fear was not conscious, but consciousness made fear and night become real and eventually made an association between them. Later they will have realised that the danger of night was the danger of big cats, but who was to know what other dangers there were too?
Now this is all conjecture but there are many sophisticated people who fear the dark or the night and think there are monsters lurking on the doorstep or round the corner. It seems a sensible fear based on instinct and rendering people cautious and alert in difficult circumstances. Yet the sensible instinct in the conscious mind is a monster lurking behind the door. These monsters could easily become devils.
Critics, Christian and non-Christian, say such speculations are quite unhistoric and of no value. They seem to forget that we are speculating thus precisely because the period we are considering is not written down in books or painted on walls. These were prehistoric events of a psychological and sociological nature that were not written down for our future edification. There is no evidence for these ideas, or any other. There is no evidence for God, but that does not stop billions of Christians from genuflecting before him every sunday.
The best we can do is speculate, propose hypotheses and see whether they have any consequences that can be tested. Usually thay have not because any consequences are equally long past and lost. Yet the approach is scientific. It is simply that we have not the data to accept or reject this idea or that. We can assume that simple people, however primitive, tried to account for what was slowly entering their consciousness. We might be able to get some clues by careful field studies on simple people today, but it has to be remembered that these simple people are fully conscious and rational, even though their premises are perhaps not correct from our scientific viewpoint. So, even anthropological field studies have to be seen as studies of advanced people relative to the emergent humans who first came aware of their night fears.
Religion must have accompanied the growth of human consciousness, so it can never be studied in the field. We can be sure it evolved somehow from the earliest inchoate thoughts that emerging humans had. The nineteenth century anthropologists seemed to imagine a fully formed man, a little hairy perhaps, but with an empty brain. All the armchair anthropologist had to do was to imagine what the simple, untaught, factless man would do in certain circumstances. It is an interesting exercise but not of much practical value.
We do not know at what stage consciousness evolved. Are chimpanzees coonscious? They can recognize themselves in a mirror. Surely such self awareness implies consciousness. If so, our ape-like ancestors were probably conscious before they even crossed the species gap into humanity.
Whenever it occurred, an animal, behaving perfectly naturally for an aniimal—that is by instinct—began to have glimmerings of consciousness, self-consciousness, emotions, its environment. What surprised these animals in some way would perhaps have forced its way into their consciousness first. Certainly they must early on have been puzzled by emotional feelings like sexual attraction and fear.
All of this speculation is at the individual level. An individual might be surprised by its shadow, or by its fear of the dark. Individuals might have personified their fears and emotions. But it is only when they began to communicate effectively to each other that the basis of religion arose. Religion is necessarily communal, social.
Herbert Spencer assumed primitive people were rational but limited by their lack of knowledge. From observing the sun and moon, the clouds and stars coming and going, they get an early idea of duality—in presence and absence. A person’s reflexion in water and shadow were similarly present sometimes and absent others. Dreams seemed real to simple people and Spencer surmises that they deduced the self in the dream was the shade.
The shadow was identified with the soul and once a personal soul was conceived, the concept was passed on to other things, animate and inanimate. The early people realised that sometimes dead people appeared in their dreams, so their shadows must live on though they themselves are dead, at least for as long as amyone remembered them enough to dream about them. Thus other people’s shadows became ghosts. Ghosts preceded fetishes and were more widespread.
So, Spencer thought religion began with a belief that the shadow survived the death of the body. The ghosts of prominent ancestors and chiefs were specially honoured and became gods, the chief remaining a chief or ruler even in the world of shades. Food and drink offered to dead people eventually transfigured into sacrifices to the gods. The root of religion is ancestor worship.
Sir E .B Tylor in Primitive Culture, 1877, proposed the idea of Animism. Tylor thought, the belief in definite spiritual persons, souls and gods, must have been preceded by a vaguer and more nebulous belief. Nature generally must have been supposed by primitive man to have an animating spirit. This vague general animation was in the course of time gathered into separate and definite personalities: the gods and goddesses of sky and sun and moon, of fire and water, the spirits of the trees, the fountains, the animals, and so on.
Yet Tylor’s Animism was not the first stage. A vaguer and earlier stage was man’s awe in presence of the mighty and mysterious movements surrounding him in nature. He did not at first personify these forces, and did not even think of a general animation of nature, or world-soul. Primitive religion is belief in spirits.
Sir J G Frazer, an influential student of religion, thinks that magic preceded religion, which was derived from magic, or the failure of magic. But magic probably developed alongside religion when practitioners tried to coerce the powers of nature. For long they believed, and some people still believe, that magic worked, but those who eventually admitted it failed came to see the vegetation and the storm as willful, because of personal powers behind them and chose in stead to try to placate them through worship. A French authority, Solomon Reinach, thinks that the use of taboo was a stage earlier than magic.
These ideas seem reasonable but are not particularly well founded in anthropological studies where primitive tribes do not seem to associate dreams and spirits. Nor is their any even remotely universal attitude toward death among primitive people, yet if these theories were valid, much unity would be expected. Spenser and Tyler did not examine the differences between primitive people but simply took what evidence they needed for their ideas. Their ideas are not, for that reason wrong, but lack corroboration. Frazer’s work makes fascinating reading still as a vast catalogue of religious lore but magic is an unlikely source of religion in general, although Frazer did satisfactorily prove that magicians or priests are rulers in primitive tribes uncommonly often.
Where should we look for culturally early fragments of human social evolution? People with better weapons and organisation pushed less knowledgeable peoples aside and seized their lands. They were marginalised, so we have to seek them in the margins, in isolated islands, dense forests and in otherwise difficult terrain.
They are the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the Botocudos of Brazil, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Andamanese Islanders, the Aetas of the Philippine Islands, the Samoans of the Malay Peninsula, the Tasmanians, and the Bushmen of South Africa. These are admitted to be the least sophisticated human peoples. What we have been slow to accept is that they are not simple-minded, backwards or mentally retarded. Their own lives and organisation is often well suited to their lifestyle and they often have an astonishingly comfortable and carefree life with sufficient food and little or no social conflict. They are not “noble savages” because we are a lot more savage than they are, but they do indeed have a certain nobility and sensitivity to their environment.
Essentially they are no different from us. We know that pre-historic hunter-gatherers killed animals in wasteful ways and even in recent times, the Maoris have driven the New Zealand Moa extinct. But most such peoples seem to have recognised, presumably through experiences like this, that there is no sense in it. We have not yet properly reached that stage. We know what we are doing, but have no will to change it.
In Tierra del Fuego, the lowly Yahgans were studied in 1882 and 1883 by two French scientists before modern ideas could reach them. These scholars declared:
We have never detected the least allusion to any kind of cult or religious idea.
They quote a missionary who had earlier spent twenty years amongst the Yahgans:
They have neither hope nor fear beyond the grave. For them there is neither God, nor good, nor evil, nor spirits to fear apart from the phantoms which may injure them in this world. Death is the end of existence, and they have no idea of a spiritual life or of the composition of man from a body and a soul.
Whether these men were mistaken or whether the missionary activity had some effect is for anthropologists to decide, because the Yahgans certainly believed in spirits and a God at a later date. If the French anthropologists are to be believed, there is no presumption that human cultures have to have gods and spirits, and this can be concluded even if they had such beliefs but only feebly held. Yet, the Christian likes to assume a primitive revelation. Why then did the revelation not contain a warning that worship should be kept free from bloodshed, human sacrifices and all the monstrosities of religion.
Even more sophisticated peoples needed no God or gods. The human race cannot have begun with a revelation and degenerated from it. As a purely instinctive animal, it began without religion, then believed in spirits of the dead and sometimes a great spirit, then in polytheism, and then in monotheism. Perhaps, the final stage is a return to no religion.
Brazilian Indians were reported to have no gods and no religious practices except a firm belief in the body’s invisible double. This is closely connected with dreams, but their name for it is “shadow”.
Concerning the Tasmanian Aboriginals, driven to extinction, the first bishop of Tasmania, a missionary of long experience, said:
No trace can be found of any religious usage, or even sentiment, among them; unless indeed we may call by that name the dread of a malignant and destructive spirit which seems to have been their predominant, if not their only, feeling on the subject.
Though they had no gods and no kind of worship, they had a religion of belief in magic and malignant and destructive spirits of the dead who were never mentioned. They were convinced that man had a double which survived the body, and their name for it was “shadow”. Beyond this they had only a feeling of awe for the sun and the moon, which however they did not worship.
The Bushmen of South Africa are often quoted as believing in a supreme spirit, ’Kung, who created all things, but ’Kung was not a god, and they were said not to clearly believe in a spirit which survives the body:
Everything connected with their religion—that is, their dread of something outside of and more powerful than themselves—was vague and uncertain. They could give no explanations whatever about it, and they did not all hold the same opinions on the subject. Some of them spoke indeed of a powerful being termed ’Kung or Cagu, but when questioned about him, their replies showed that they held him to be a man like themselves, though possessing charms of great power. Many are supposed to have had a vague belief in immortality… but probably very few of them ever gave a thought to such matter.
They vaguely believe in the survival of some part of the person, for which they have no definite name. This vagueness was probably the anthropologist’s rather than the Bushman’s. Even if it was genuine, it reveals nothing about the beliefs of the Bushmen. Ask any ordinary Catholic about Catholic doctrine and it is doubtful that any two would be sure of it or would agree.
Bushmen certainly have rich legends about ancestors, one of whom, ’Kung, is well on the way to becoming a god, though apparently he was not worshipped.
These peoples are surviving fossils of culture in the early Stone Age, the Europeans of tens of thousands of years ago. Better equipped and organised cultures have driven them into the islands, deserts and forests. They show us the variety of religion in development but suggest no trace of primitive revelation or of a religious instinct. There is no trace of Animism or Pre-Animism, and magic seems amongst them to develop equally with, not to precede, their rudimentary religion.
Originally emergent humans can have had no belief in a god. Mostly these primitive peoples have not evolved the idea of god, though arguably there have proto-gods. When people with developed religions contact them, they view the “god” they describe as a strong man akin to some prominent ancestor of theirs, about whom they tell stories, as the British did about King Arthur or Robin Hood. They respect this superhuman but apparently do not worship him.
Some of these peoples do not have any religion at all in the sense that we understand it. If religion is the belief in and worship of gods, then few of these primitive peoples have a religion, unless the meaning of the word is extended to include a belief in spirits. It proves it is a mistake to assume a definition of what religion is a priori. The first religious idea, not preceded by any sort of speculation about the animation of nature or awe of the powers of nature, is a belief in what we today call soul or spirit. Primitive religion seems to make its first appearance as a belief that a part of man survives the death and decay of the body.
Myth is the earliest science. It gives an account of phenomena by invoking gods to explain them. Realization must have come to the archaic genius as a gestalt happening—a revelation—or so it seemed. He was thrilled and excited by it, and so too were others to whom the sage explained it. It was this thrill and excitement that stimulated the urge to express it in play, and, having a purpose, stimulated other devotional arts like poetry and music too. Plato was clear:
Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.Cited by J Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1949
The civilized state—law, order, craft, trade, art, poetry, knowledge and, ultimately science—grows out of myth. All begin in primitive ritual, imitative magic to mimic the great processional movements of existence—a sort of childish playing at being Nature which metamorphoses by superstition into necessary acts without which the world would stop. Archaic man “plays the vital order of Nature in a sacred play, in and through which he actualises anew or ‘recreates’ the events” thus maintaining cosmic order. Among the natural phenomena to be explained are also the social ones the archaic people are forming—their rituals, rites, sacrifices and ceremonies. They are explained as necessary to keep the world working. From this ritual play comes the earliest culture, law and government, and religion.
The primitive game began as a make belief reality, passed into being a synthetic reality then became a mystical reality. By then, it has become, for those participating, many generations down the line, the cause of what it began as representing. A gambler who settles on the same set of numbers gets trapped by his habit. He fears that if he does not bet them, they will come up that very week, so he must gamble every week—or lose out!
Among the early games must have been that of pretending to be the animals hunted. Ancient rock paintings show it, so it certainly happened, and suggests why many gods in many cultures are animals or half animals—humans with animal bodies or heads. Those simple, naïve, archaic people, who played at being the herds moving seasonally, become enslaved by the thought that they must do it for fear that the herds will go elsewhere if they do not keep up the ritual. In hunter-gatherer societies, the herds of animals would not appear in their seasonal migrations, or the even more important roots and berries collected would be blighted if the drama is not enacted. In primitive agricultural societies, the crops would rot, wither or not ripen.
At the great seasonal festivals, the community celebrates the grand happenings in the life of nature by staging sacred performances, which represent the change of seasons, the rising and setting of the constellations, the growth and ripening of crops, birth, life and death kin man and beast.J Huizinga
It is easy to appreciate that the archaic person playing the animal convinced themselves they were it—their drama had recreated the actual. The play has then ceased to be simply play and has become religious—the man imagines he has the spirit of the animal within him. With this delusion, drama or make belief becomes holy. What was a game has become a ritual—has become religion.
The Greeks had a sacred rite they called a “dromenon”—something acted. From it comes the word “drama” for the play itself. It was a cosmic act, the events leading to a vital natural occurrence. The drama was understood as a perfect recreation of the events anticipated, showing how they should be! Such acts had to be done precisely or they were worse than useless, inducing calamities. Religion is a game, but modern believers have forgotten!
Religion is play-acting consecrated to a god or gods. The gods are also part of the play, and so too is the act of consecration. Make belief is at the base of all religions. Clues to this are the way make belief, or pretending, in sport, poetry, song and the theatre are prescribed in ways similar to the make belief of religion, and the law, for that matter. They all occur in special places and at special times, have similar names and are repeated as needed. A sacred place is a church or a temple, but also a stadium, arena or tennis court, not to mention a law court. Originally they were all a grove or a field, marked off for the sacred purpose.
Primitive people know their religious game is not entirely real. They know they are play-acting when they wear fearsome masks to make themselves into evil spirits and go about scaring the women and children. The women act scared, though they know the mask only hides a man. Yet they still believe the real purpose of it all and so pretend to be duped. they act as if it were real because, for them, in a sense, it is, though they know they are playing roles. Only modern believers are completely duped by their Christian rituals. Intelligent people today can see ritual and religion for what it is—a show, a drama, a representation, a performance—but at the time it was thought of as reproducing a reality, and necessary for it. Some people still think it, being unable to see the ritual as merely a performance with extremely primitive origins.
The ritual, the sacred game, has to be formalised and repeated in its sacred or consecrated playground, the special place in which it is played. The inheritance of a sacred space for magic, mystery and sacrament from primitive imitative play is rationalized later as the need to isolate the communion or the initiate from evil influences. Consecrating the play area makes it holy and confers God’s protection, a bit of primitive magic—part of the game! It is so infantile as to be embarrasing. In respect of time, the occasion of the holy drama was a feast, a holy day, eventually a holiday, when the participants rejoiced that the continuity of existence had been guaranteed for another season.
When societies got far too big for everyone to act in the play, provision was made for spectators or a congregation who could join in to a degree by acting as the chorus or simply by their enthusiasm, the whole being accompanied by joy, merriment and feasting in celebration of a job accomplished to everyone’s advantage. From it, the community had a secure and wholesome feeling of order and well being to carry into the next season that the play has to be enacted.
All are games played according to prearranged rules. Indeed, in an important sense they serve to demonstrate that they have preserved the rules—they have fossilized them. Preserving the rules is their main function, for by doing it, they preserve the order of the universe. The rules stand for, indeed are, cosmic perfection.
No skepticism is possible where the rules of a game are concerned for the principle underlying them is an unshakeable truth.Paul Valéry
Agreed rules are binding and cannot be gainsaid. The one who does so is the spoilsport and he is despised and ostracised. Early societies and cultures formed around those who agree to certain rules. The spoilsport is the apostate, the heretic, sometimes the rejected prophet who might cut loose and start a new game with his own rules. In other games, he is the outlaw, the seditionist and the iconoclast. The cheat is not as disrespected as the spoilsport because he nominally sticks to the rules. Since he knows he is cheating and so has an advantage over the others, he becomes the priest.
The origin of any sacred act can only lie in the credulity of all, and the spurious maintaining of it in the interests of a special group can only be the final phase of a long line of development.
So writes Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), apparently citing A E Jensen. It might be that the “special group” believed their own stories, after all, they were all they had to believe, but it is certain that particular invididuals invented them and inculcated them into the others. And this happened at the outset. There is no obvious reason why a bunch of animals should all spontaneously start to imitate Nature. One of them must start the games and be joined by others who become leaders when yet more join.
Archaic people played games that were either mimickry or contests. So one primitive game form was the contest, in Greek, the “agon”, which is shown on ancient Greek pottery, the flute players shown accompanying it indicating it is not just a fight. Nature was seen as dualistic and different forces were in contention, so simple mimickry was accompanied by sacred competition, though sometimes the competition is only mimicked too. At other times, it is serious, and might often have been to the death once the playing was accepted as having an essential purpose.
In primitive tribalism, the tribe was often divided into two halves (phratriai) in which inbreeding was not allowed. Each member had to select a sexual partner from the other half of the tribe. The two halves were strongly bound by tribal ties, but were rivals within the tribe. The dualism reflected their cosmic dualistic ideas about Nature. The totem of one might be a high flying bird, and that of the other a lowly tortoise. The Chinese called one “yang” and the other “yin”. “Yang” was sun, warmth and summer. “Yin” was moon, cold and winter. The tribal dualism was an imitation of Nature, of night and day, and summer and winter, as examples. At some stage the play required the youths and maids to separate and then come together again at some great festival of maturity called marriage. This mating ritual eventually was fossilized almost universally because it had reproductive advantages that strengthened tribal vigour. Less vigourous tribes were overcome and enslaved or obliged to adopt the same practices, until it was universal.
At these meetings, members of the phratriai contended in a series of individual contests. They had a ritual purpose and so the game element had already become representational being critical to the smooth running of the world, and the prosperity of the group. Each victory was ensured future success for the group. It saved the group in a small way for another season. It was good! A defeat left them uncertain. It was bad, though good for their rivals.
It did not matter that some contests depended only on luck not on skill or strength. Luck was sacred too! The idea of holiness for most people is a guarantee of happiness, of good fortune or good luck. Fate is the future, and might be good or bad. Religions conditions it to be good, believers think.
The contests were held and the honours bestowed on the winners. Honour is the prize of virtue, said Aristotle. It proves to a man his value, and to his peers. Virtue, honour, nobility and glory came from the contest, the agon, a game. Homer wrote in the bible of the ancient Greeks “always be the best and excel over others”. That was the noble aim. Nobility was founded on virtue, originally manly qualities and then good qualities. Honours went to the best, until some became wealthy enough to keep the honours anyway, giving rise to the noble class. The idea that nobles should be virtuous always remained, nevertheless. Though many were wicked and all were selective about what being virtuous required, many took their duty to be virtuous seriosuly.
The Hellenic games were always religious, and the agon was always sacred. Contests need not be of the physical type. Quizzes, singing, and eating and drinking contests were popular. Alexander the Great celebrated the death of Kalanos with a festival that involved heavy drinking contests in which 35 contenders died during the competition, and six more, including the winner died later. Alexander was himself a big drinker, and, since he died young and not in battle, might have died in a similar fashion.
The Roman games were also sacred. The people’s right to the Roman games was a holy right. They had to be conducted with precise ceremony, and were usually either annual seasonal events, or one-off occasions in honour of a pledge made to a god. These characteristics show they were sacred events.
During the growth of civilization, the agonistic function attains its most beautiful form, as well as its most conspicuous, in the archaic phase. As a civilization becomes more complex, more variegated, and more overladen, and as the technique of production and social life itself beome more finely organised, the old cultural soil is gradually smothered under a rank layer of ideas, systems of thought and knowledge, doctrines, rules and regulations, moralities and conventions which have all lost touch with play. Civilization… has grown more serious. It assigns only a secondary place to playing. The heroic period is over, and the agonistic phase too a thing of the past.J Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1949
A law suit is a type of contest, and also began as play. In Greece, it was an agon, a contest with fixed rules, decided by an umpire. Trial by ordeal was judging a case by a test. That is what the agonistic origins of law were—a contest. The word “ordeal” simply means a divine judgement. Any judgement made by a god was just, to the primitive way of thinking. To determine justice therefore was a divine act requiring all the ritual procedure os any other sacred event. It was performed in a sacred space called a court.
The three goddesses, Diké—Justice, Tyché—Fortune, and Nemesis—Vengeance often appear together and look similar, Diké and Tyché even having scales in their hand. The latter two look like the same goddess at root. They are a reminder that law began as a game, an agon, a contest between two people aggrieved decided by fortune—the judgement of a god.
Contests could be physical, chance or verbal. Boasting and slanging matches were old forms of verbal dualling which became more sophisticated, when invectiveness gave way to winning debating points. Even today, our courts do not pretend to try to discover the truth. The point of litigation is to win not to expose the truth. Suppression of evidence has often been used, usually by the prosecution in criminal cases, to ensure an otherwise dubious victory.
In war, victory also shows a cause is favoured by the gods. It is a just cause, and so the war must have been just. Rogue politicians like Bush and Blair argue the same case still, from their modern hypocritical Christianity. Time was, brief and intermittent though it admittedly was, when some Christian princes—the Merovingians did, for example—actually turn to single combat to settle disagreements. “It was better for one to fall than a whole army.” Indeed, the pretence of it remained a ritual of chivalry for hundreds more years but it no longer stopped battles. Can anyone imagine Bush or Blair agreeing to fight Saddam Hussain in single mortal combat? We would have fewer wars if it were obligatory for all war-mongering leaders to start the hostilities personally by single combat with the opposing leader.
Things have come to such a pass that the system of international law is no longer acknowledged, or observed, as the very basis of culture and civilized living. As soon as one member or more of a community of states virtually denies the binding character of international law and… proclaims the interest and power of its own group—be it nation, party, class, church or whatsoever else—as the sole norm of political behaviour, not only does the last vestige of the immemorial play-spirit vanish, but with it, any claim to civilization at all. Society then sinks down to the level of the barbaric, and original violence replaces ancient duties.J Huizinga, Homo Ludens
While the warriors in ancient times had power, the sages and smiths had magical power. Knowledge out of the ordinary was cosmic knowledge, and therefore sacred. It revealed the divine order or rtam (Sanskrit, Persian, arta) which religious play acting kept as it should be. Competitions in this knowledge also found a part of the dualistic contests on the occasion of the sacred dramas. Catechisms are a simple form of them. In 589, at Toledo, the Visigoths converted from Arianism to Catholicism. The occasion was celebrated as a knowledge contest between the highest clerics on each side on the subject of theology.
Natural processes were seen as struggles of opposites. Heraclitus said strife was the father of all things. Empedocles saw attraction amd discord as conflicting elements. Anaximander also saw discord in that “things must necessarily perish in that same principle from which they arise, for they have to render expiation to one another and atone for the wrong they did according to the ordinance of time”. Time is Zurvan, in the Persian religion, apparently the father of the two contending spirits of Zoroastrianism.
The Persian religion was dualistic. It saw the world as a battleground between two equal gods, one good and one wicked. All human beings could do was to choose between them—personally—and so minutely influence the cosmic battle. Much of the Greek philosophical views were inspired by this, the world’s first super-religion, taken into Greece by the invading forces of Cyrus the Great around 550 BC. This same Cyrus was the original messiah of Judaism, being called God’s anointed in the Jewish scriptures.
Poetry and singing contests were also a part of the sacred festivals of primitive people. Both conflict and love imply rivalry, and such strife is the core of poetry and literature. And poetic language is arcane. It purposely sets riddles for the hearer thus overlapping with the knowledge contests. In Christendom, they revived in the cours d’amours of Languedoc at the time when its dominant religion was Catharism. The “Love Court” was a contest between troubadours conducted like a law court. The defence of honour in love was the poets’ nominal purpose, and a whole set of given poetic forms served it.
Myths were also presented in poetic form from ancient times, to be easier to remember, for they were meant to be recited or acted out. They were explanations of holy things, names, origins, meant seriously at first for they had become accepted as sacred by all but the cognoscenti, but gradually they lost meaning as factual knowledge progressed. They could not just be dropped but eventually had to be read allegorically to preserve any sacred meaning in them. The Christian holy books are the same.
Old myths become shackles that cannot be broken free from because people consider them as sacred. The skeptical Greek philosophers often could not voice their true opinions about religion for fear of the mob. It got Socrates! The elected demagogues that rule us today want to bring back this madness. They want to make it illegal to say, “The bible is not only not God’s truth, it is mainly not even true!” Such men are throwbacks to primitive times and they will take the whole of society with them, if we let them. Believers can keep their ancient myths and psalms, if they wish, but no sensible society will let them force them on to everyone else. They should keep them for the liturgical purposes they were intended for, not an absolute truth that they plainly are not.