How human society became Religious Society

 

In the below Blog I have tried to capture the essence of what created the religion as we see it today. Everyone have their own belief system and it is not one's right to disregard others belief unless it is harm to human society. This is an Unopinionated blog which I have created after days of research and all the points presented here are not my own but are available in various public domains. I tried to understand how religion as concept came into existence and how it became what it is today. I have not included the discussions of Gods, science and various mythology/History. Religion's contribution to society and how individually they evolved from scratch to present. We will talk about religions particularly some other day. For now lets dive into our topic.

Before gods had names and temples rose up, humans were small hunter-gatherer bands, males and females that shared the first need, survival. Those people lived tens of thousands of years back. They roamed vast, open landscapes to the rhythm of migration for animals and depended on plants for food, shelter, and safety. Life was communal- not just physically but spiritually. The oldest known burials, like the ones discovered at Qafzeh Cave in Israel, around 100,000 years ago, might suggest that even the earliest Homo sapiens had some inkling of the sacred: bodies were buried in red ochre and other symbolic objects, presumably as part of a ritual or respect for the dead. 

Qafzeh cave Burial
https://journals.openedition.org/paleo/4848

Many natural phenomena were beginning to be endowed with ever greater significance as human culture developed, chiefly following the cognitive resolution (70,000 years ago). The ones found in Lascaux, France (17,000 BCE) depict animals and hunting scenes upon the walls of caves that, probably for ritualistic, mnemonic, or magical purposes rather than mere ornamentation, served as sites for the display of early symbolic thought-the capacity to impute meanings to objects, sounds, or stories that extend beyond their immediate practical utility. Cultures began emerging around shared memory, myth, and custom. 

Lascaux Painting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux

As farming and settling began to take root, humans' relation with nature started to change and their spiritual connection deepened. The forest, the river, the mountain, all being unpredictable and powerful. Without science to explain natural phenomena, nature was viewed as possessing agency. Rain could be a blessing or a punishment; a disease could be the work of a spiteful spirit. Such beliefs led to the formulation of animism, probably the oldest spiritual concept in the world.

Animism does not equate with religion in a modern, organized sense. Rather, it is an understanding of the world wherein all living things and sometimes inanimate objects like plants, animals, rivers, rocks, and the very wind itself are thought to be imbued with spirit. It is relational and holistic. Early in the 19th century, anthropologist E.B. Tylor maintained that animism represented religion in its more uncomplicated form giving human inclination of attributing life and intent to things. Modern cognitive scientists such as Justin Barrett have confirmed that humans are evolutionarily hardwired to see agency where it does not exist (for instance, attributing human features to clouds or ghostly testimonies from the wind). This cognitive bias thus made the animistic worldview intuitive and widely accepted.

Read Primitive Culture by EB Tyler at
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.42334

Mark Nodea – Rainbow Serpent
(one of the original paintings from Aboriginal Australia)

All around the ancient world, one can see animism making itself understood through different cultures. For instance, "Dreaming" in Aboriginal Australia means how ancestral spirits created the land, and most groups even nowadays work under a worldview where the land is thought as being alive with the spiritual presence. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a Yoruba religion that connects with rivers, and trees, storms, and ancestors worships Orishas as spirits. An Indigenous person in North America, for example, Lakota thought that Nature's elements were parts of Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, and then ceremonies offered for the identification of all life.

Amaterasu,
one of the central kami in the Shinto faith

Evidence of animism is clearly visible among contemporary religions. In Shinto, the indigenous spirituality of Japan, kami or spirits reside within rivers, mountains, trees, and in some cases, even objects. Shrines are erected in honor of these entities, many of which being local and directly correlating to that specific location. This shamanic lineage across Central Asia, and Siberia still engages in the invocation of the spirits of animals and nature through trance and ceremony. That is not "primitive"; rather, they are alive and complex belief systems based upon a worldview that sees harmony with nature rather than dominion over it as their premise.

The Concept of Panchtatva in Hinduism

In terms of evolution, what one now calls Hinduism has prevailed in India for thousands of years. Although, later Hinduism obtained formal texts like the Vedas and schools of philosophy, many aspects of early Hindu practices-especially rural or folk traditions are profoundly animistic. Sacred groves, river goddesses, tree shrines, etc., all speak for animal veneration (the cow, monkey, and snake). Even present-day celebrations of Hinduism, such as Nag Panchami, where snakes are ritually worshipped, or paying homage to the river Ganga as a living goddess, serve to prove the animistic roots of Indian spirituality.

 These traditions-whether in Amazon, Pacific Islands, African savannah, or Himalayan valleys-have one thing in common: not a doctrine but a relationship to land, animals, weather, one another and everything. The question was what does it mean? And the first answer was animism: that means we are not alone.

As societies transitioned from a nomadic existence based on hunting and gathering to one of settled agriculture, the people began to understand the world around them in ever deeper symbolic and psychological dimensions. Life was precarious in these early stages, dependent upon the fickleness of weather, on animals that refused to cooperate, on diseases that ruined human and animal lives, and on the specter of death, none of which could be altered by human activity. The early humans, caught in this uncertainty, developed a worldview based on animism: spirits in everything: animals, rivers, mountains, trees, and the wind. This was not really a religion in our sense. It was rather a psychological construct for survivalism, wherein nature was seen as alive, meaningful, and responsive to human endeavors.

These animistic beliefs were the first expressions of collective human meaning. They created meaning for events such as droughts, illness, or good harvests, but most importantly, they enacted communal practices: rituals, seasonal festivals, and funerals. Over generations, these practices became the very foundation of culture: shared systems of behavior, identity, and social order. From the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime to the animistic celebrations of early Siberian, African, and Native American peoples, these systems exemplified how the human mind attempted to weave spiritual significance straight into the fabric of everyday existence. As fixity and stratificational tendencies in community life intensified, new levels of culture grew. In the course of its stratification, political organization emerged chiefs, elders, shamans, kings setting forth the desire to formalize. This is where culture started shifting into religion.

Things started changing with the introduction of Abrahamic religions in the world. The three Abrahamic religions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-were the primary forces molding society before culture, as we know it today, came into being. Starting out as separate beliefs based on the idea of a single, all-powerful God, these religions were the first to transcend tribal practices, thereby becoming formal institutions. In the case of Judaism, the early Israelites practiced animism and polytheism like their neighbors, but later these beliefs evolved into monotheism with a central code of law, namely, the Torah. This legal system became the lifeblood of Jewish society, transforming the formerly tribal culture into an organized religious system governing both spirituality and practical living.

Original photo of oldest available Torah

 

The trajectory of Christianity was similar to that of Judaism but with a radical departure in the concept of salvation as faith in Jesus Christ. Jews practicing old Jewish customs became Christians within this covenant. But Christianity began an emergence as a different religion with the formal establishment of Christian theology and with the emphasis laid by Paul on faith and grace over ritual law. Within no time, this religion became European faith, intermingling not just with the spiritual but also social, political, and cultural environment, especially with its adoption within the Roman Empire. Roman King Constantine accepted Christianity as religion into his kingdom. That was from where the church had  started embracing institutionalized power, hierarchically structured. Also it was the first time when religion was institutionalized into political structure of the society.

Roman King Constantine conversion to Christianity

Just as it was with Christianity and Judaism till then, the seventh century saw the emergence of a religion set forth by Prophet Muhammad, with Islam being its name. In contrast to all preceding cultures, which philosophically regarded religion as one of the many things that constitute a larger culture, Islam instituted in a theocratic paradigm; it has a general paradigm wherein religious principles (of what is provided in the Qur'an and Hadith) would bind not only matters of the spirit but also join laws for society, governance, social relations to all human life. The rise of Islam as a formalized religion spread very far and wide so much so that the entire culture and even artistic practices (from art to architecture) came much later than the establishing influence of the religion. Thus, the scope of the concept of religion in Islam was even more important in determining a person's belief. This ensured a different form of religious culture that made history in shaping the future of the Middle East, North Africa, and the various countries in the world.

The early forms of animism, wherein religious beliefs were intermingled with the cultural practices and social order of the society, This has now given way to a clear separation between religion and culture via the Abrahamic faiths. For these traditions, religion served as the foundation, establishing moral codes, laws, and systems of governance before the cultural identity of the societies emerged. The emergence of these monotheistic religions marked a change from a culture-driven belief system into religion-driven societies, where doctrines of faith dominated the construction of personal identity and the societal framework.

Christianity and Islam moved in different contexts of state systems to offer new spiritual teachings and entire concepts of social organization supported by the growing empires. Their spread was more than simply a theological event, it was a cultural change. Unlike earlier belief systems integrated into daily life as part of local customs, the Abrahamic faiths introduced a more centralized, codified, and exclusive model of belief. This model, with its strong backing from institutions, had far-reaching consequences: it relentlessly pushed many older, largely decentralized cultures, intertwined with spirituality but devoid of institutional norms towards either transformation or extinction.

Through this, the spiritual and cultural landscape of vast regions got redrawn. In Europe, Christianity advanced and systematically erased Celtic, Norse, and Slavic traditions. In 632 AD Islam emerged as the monotheistic faith against a backdrop of diverse animistic, tribal, and Zoroastrian beliefs in the Middle East and North Africa. The Egyptian cultures flourished independently elaborated pantheon with temple-based rituals and were advanced in astronomical and spiritual systems. But they were erased with the advancement of Islam. Mayans-were left in tatters by colonialism conquest, or religious imposition and remain scattered in fragments. These were not "religions" in the modern sense; they were ways of life with interconnected spiritual, ecological, social, and political systems. Their removal meant not just the loss of belief but also the death of the whole society.

The Persians were once into Zoroastrianism, which had a pretty great influence on later ones, especially in the above beliefs regarding heaven, hell, and final judgment. It was culture, belonging to the endorsed states, and it was centered on light, truth, and purity of ritual." Later it was systematically sidelined following the Islamic conquest in Persia within the seventh century CE. Though small communities still keep it alive (like the Parsis of India), it never recovered its previous cultural or geographical dimensions. Just like through the astonishment of their own mathematical, astronomical, and ritualistic sophistication, the Mayans were totally devastated by the European conquest and the diseases to which they were converted to the European faith. Their ceremonial centers were pulled down, their scriptures burned and denied, and their cosmological view supplanted with the Christian one.

At least some ancient systems succeeded in institutionalizing themselves sufficiently to endure the pressure of what we now know as organized religions. Hinduism for example, never been a single religion-the term is simply a convenient socio-political moniker for a wide spectrum of localized rites, deities, and philosophies. It slowly began moving into institutional shape through the solidifying texts, primarily the Vedas, Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, in response to the Islamic and later British colonial pressures. Similarly, Buddhism, Jainism, and Shinto had to pull themselves up by the codification of their beliefs and organizational structures so that they could still subsist amid competing religions or modern secular states.

Especially with the rise of European imperialism from the fifteenth century onward, the need to control, categorize, or convert other people's religions has helped shape Western thinking about religion. It is only during this period and in this mode that different belief systems began to be classified into various religions. The whole idea of defining boundaries of religion came into being, especially in the minds of Westerners seeing it as contrasting with infinite other domains of life, such as culture, kinship, work, state-customs, and land-laws problems not imagined by them in a monolithic way. By contrast, this Western classification has, even further, served to create the modern idea of religion as something that has distinct boundaries, a scripture, and a clergy, something ancient cultures never set out to achieve.

Many organized and monotheistic religions, such as Christianity and Islam, challenged many other animistic cultural-spiritual systems, forcing them to extinction or reformation. Where once Akhenaton worship was practiced there is now largely forgotten; on the other hand, those that survived were often reverted into institutional forms that lay outside traditional notions of culture. And that is how all the culture transformed into becoming a religion itself.