RELIGION (IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE)

Investigations in cultural anthropology and the comparative study of religion have led scholars to advance numerous and varied theories to account for the origins and universality of religious phenomena in human societies. This article presents a brief review of the main trends in the development of these theories and a consideration of some of the principal religious ideas and practices found in primitive societies.

Theoretical Interpretations

Mid-20th-century investigations of religion in pre-literate or barely literate societies reveal a renewed emphasis on the nature and meaning, rather than on the origin and social function, of religion. Interpretative studies of religious symbolism, myth and mythology, ritual, sacraments, and sacrifice, made by reputable anthropologists, have appeared with increasing frequency. This shift in emphasis can be explained partly in terms of the sociology of knowledge and partly as reflecting a growing realization of the inadequacy of theoretical frameworks once considered as established.

Evolutionist Hypothesis. Many early students of primitive religion were savants belonging to the 19th-century European middle class, from whose perspective the socioeconomic history of mankind appeared to be a triumphal march toward ever-greater material prosperity and rational enlightenment. It was natural for them to regard Charles darwin and T. H. Huxley as their major prophets and to view the history of thought as an evolutionary process of emancipation from magical and religious categories, through those of increasing philosophical refinement, to unchallenged scientific ra tionalism.

Tylor. Sir Edward Tylor, for example, in Primitive Culture (2 v. London 1871) held that religion began with universal belief in ghosts and spirits (animism) and that by degrees men arrived at the notion of one universal Spirit animating all things. Tylor's scheme left no room for revelation but only for progressive generalization as human society embraced ever-wider social aggregates.

Frazer. Sir James George Frazer, in the manner although not with the matter of his positivist predecessor Auguste comte, claimed in The Golden Bough (2 v. London 1890) that mankind had passed through three broad intellectual stages: magic, religion, and science. According to Frazer the earliest men thought that by magical procedures, imitating natural processes or utilizing the "law of sympathy," they could compel events to comply with their desires. It was when such procedures did not work that they invented religion. They conceived religion not as the manipulation of impersonal supernatural powers immanent in phenomena but as the supplication of supernatural persons. Spell became prayer, and the kill became the sacrifice. Religion explained more cogently than magic why its practices sometimes failed to bring about the desired results. Since deities and spirits were persons, they possessed the attributes of persons; they had likes and dislikes toward mortals, they could give or withhold favors at will. Ethically, Frazer argued, religion was on a higher level than magic, since the success or failure of a prayer might hinge on the moral state of the petitioner. Nevertheless, religion also failed men, since their attempts to persuade the divine beings to give them benefits were frequently uncertain in their outcome. Finally, the vanguard of mankind, having learned all too slowly from past errors, had discovered the scientific method, which gave understanding of the real causes of events, by which the events could be controlled. Religion for Frazer, like the state for Marx, was to wither away in the sun of this scientific enlightenment. This was a doctrine that scientists of Frazer's time found flattering.

Freud and Durkheim. In the early 20th century scientific humanists such as Sigmund freud and Émile durkheim continued to speculate about the origin and evolution of religion. Freud's etiological myth is well known. He derived religion (and even culture) from the dominance of the father in a postulated primordial horde and from remorse (commemorated in sacramental rituals of many types) when the father was murdered, out of sexual jealousy, by the young males. This was the origin of the Oedipus complex and of all subsequent religious development. Durkheim found in totemism of the Australian aboriginal variety "the earliest form" of religion. The animal eaten by the totemic group was in his view the master symbol of that group itself. Through its consumption each member of the group partook of its unifying power, and all became "members of one another" instead of a mere assemblage of separate individuals. For Durkheim totemism was a stage of social evolution through which all more advanced societies had passed. Successive religious refinements, such as animism, polytheism, and monotheism, were but modalities of the totemic principle: all man's gods are but man-created symbols of society itself.

All these theories, and others too numerous to mention, had one common feature: they treated religion as an illusion that originated in "the childhood of the race" and passed through successive stages until men had either outgrown it completely or so tinged it with philosophical and ethical elements as to make it a "religion of humanity" divested of its supernatural "errors."

Functionalist Hypothesis. Scientific cultural evolutionism—which was inconsistent with the Marxist view that "force is the midwife of progress"—received a sharp setback in the West as a result of World War I and its consequences. It recovered somewhat in the materialistic evangelism of Leslie White and his school of American neoevolutionists. But the millions of dead and the mutual barbarities wrought by "civilized" men in the war made progress appear less inevitable than the earlier Darwinians had supposed.

Practical Interest in Cultural Anthropology. It became apparent that change was not always "progressive" but might lead to anarchy and anomie. Those Western nations especially that governed large impoverished colonial populations became concerned to maintain their stability rather than encourage radical changes that might have a violent outcome. Great Britain, in particular, developed the notion of "indirect rule" in its overseas territories, whereby a share of political and judicial authority was delegated to indigenous leaders, to chiefs, headmen, and religious functionaries. In order to rule through these authorities it became necessary to understand to some extent the structure of the social systems in which they operated. Consequently some encouragement was given to anthropological research.

Interdependence of Religion and Society. Anthropologists came to see their task as "exhibiting the systematic interconnections" in the social relationships and social institutions found in the tribal societies at any given time. Emphasis was laid on the "social function" of a given institution in contributing to the "cohesion" of the total system. Students of primitive religion sharing this bias, such as Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, saw religion, especially in its ritual aspect, as what has been described as "a sort of all-purpose social glue," for cementing together fractured social relationships or for binding together different types of institutions. In the Trobriand Islands of the western Pacific Malinowski endeavored to show how magical ritual served to coordinate and regulate cooperative human behavior in a variety of hazardous and uncertain social and economic undertakings, such as open-sea fishing, agriculture, and overseas trading expeditions. Radcliffe-Brown argued that ritual expresses in its symbolism certain values, upon the acceptance of which the proper functioning of society depends.

Functionalist analyses stressed the close interdependence of society and religion, the latter being regarded as a kind of servomechanism to the former. The question asked was always: what is the "function" of a given religious belief, or ritual performance, or myth in the maintenance of "social solidarity"? In such an intellectual climate it was not considered "meaningful" to inquire about the meaning but only about the function of such phenomena. Differences between religions, as expressed in doctrine, symbolism, and liturgical forms, were reduced to the single functional requirement that "religion makes for social cohesion (or social solidarity)."

"Meaning" Versus "Function." Anthropologists have begun to concede a greater degree of autonomy, and even validity, to religious systems. This has been due partly to the study of religion in pluralistic and changing societies, in which its function in maintaining social solidarity is by no means so obvious as in isolated traditional communities. The proliferation of new sects, the rise of millenarian movements, the persistence of religious forms in groups undergoing rapid changes in social structure—all these have underlined the need for a new approach based on a consideration of what is meant by religious beliefs and symbols. The work of such philosophers and sociologists as A. N. whitehead, Ernst cas sirer, Suzanne Langer, and P. A. Sorokin in the field of symbolism, and the anthropological field studies of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, and Clifford Geertz have been crucial in restoring to its former prominence the notion that "ritual is a language for saying things which are felt to be true and important but which are not susceptible of statement in scientific terms" [J. Beattie, Other Cultures (London 1964) 239].

Religion in Multifunctional Communities

The preoccupation of earlier scholars with functional aspects of religion may well be attributable to certain features of social organization in small-scale communities living close to the margin of bare subsistence and possessed of only limited technological equipment. The major types of human purposive activities that are broadly classified as religious, political, legal, economic, etc., in preliterate societies are hardly specialized as separate associational structures (each with its appropriate sets of beliefs, aims, concepts, techniques, and procedures) but remain, as it were, embedded in the total community.

Multiplex Character of Social Relations. Social relationships in such communities tend to be multiplex, i.e., each serves a plurality of interests at the same time. Thus an elder may be at once head of a lineage (in the kinship system), headman of a village (in the politicojural system), overseer of the village's productive and distributive activities (in the economic system), and priest of the ancestral cult (in the religious system). These aspects of life overlap, interpenetrate, and concern the same persons. Thus all types of activities are saturated, as it were, with religious and moral implications, at any rate more fully than in modern societies characterized by a complex division of labor, in which social relationships, increasingly associational in type, tend to serve single interests. Objective comparative study of religious systems indicates that a major note of religious belief and practice is the achievement of what might be called subliminal unity. This type of unity is quite distinct from the reconciliation of interests, rational and utilitarian, that may be brought about by legal, political, or economic institutions. It relates rather to the establishment, through prayer, liturgical action, sacrifice, communion rites, and the use of symbolism, of a state of rapport or corporate solidarity between Deity or Spirit (whether singular or conceived of as a unanimous group) and a congregationin-worship, on the one hand, and between the individual members of that congregation, on the other. When the congregation is identical with the kin group, the local community, the polity, and the economic unit, the function of its religious institutions may easily be mistaken for "the promotion or maintenance of social solidarity." Yet it is not the fact of unity but the nature, or quality, or dimension of unity that is in question. At what level of being or experience do the participants in ritual seek to be bound together? What is the meaning, rather than the function, of their joint worship? There are many dimensions of "solidarity," and it is this crucial multiplicity that Durkheim and his followers did not adequately comprehend, or else tried to reduce to the single mysterious essence "the social sui generis."

Varieties of Religious Ideas and Behavior. In multifunctional communities the quintessentially religious tends to be tinctured with evaluations, imagery, sentiments, rules, customs, life styles, etc., derived from experience in economic, political, domestic, legal, and other types of situations—in each instance colored by a particular natural, social, and ecological environment. The great catalytic sentence "Render, therefore, to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's" (Mk 12.17) is not heard so as to be understood in such communities. God, or the gods, are translated into Caesarean terms and take on the attributes of power figures in political, domestic, economic, and legal situations where the utilitarian interests of the group and its component individuals tend to be paramount. Nevertheless, as even such an agnostic humanist as Paul Radin has often pointed out, it is possible to discern in very many "primitive" religions traces of mystical and philosophical thought that appear to be unalloyed by Caesarean considerations, as in cases of prayers and myths of a monotheistic cast set in polytheistic religious contexts.

In societies with a low degree of technological development and division of labor, with multiplex social relationships, with total personal involvement in almost every relationship, and in which kinship is an irreducible principle of social organization, it is perhaps not surprising to find close interdependencies between the system of religious beliefs and practices and other cultural systems. It should also occasion little astonishment that the powers of nature and of human and animal disease should figure predominantly in religion. With poor technological control over the environment and inadequate knowledge of empirical causation, everyday existence is surrounded by unpredictable and menacing hazards that cannot be effectively dealt with or curbed. Such perils appear to be autonomous entities and are conceived of as arbitrary and capricious personalities. The tendency to personify natural powers may well be connected with the personal character of multiplex social relations, whereas the tendency to spiritualize almost every force that can affect human beings may be linked with man's inability to bring practical resources to bear against them. Spiritual personalities may be coped with by entreaty, sacrifices, and the symbolic activities of ritual, where forces known to be impersonal and uncontrollable would evoke only despair and helplessness.

Cults of the Dead. There are manifold varieties of what Tylor called animism (to which he assigned a pivotal position in his treatment of the origin of religion; his "minimal definition" of religion was indeed "a belief in spiritual beings"). These varieties may be reduced to two main categories: beliefs about the spirits of the dead and beliefs about nature spirits (including those of disease). Cults of the dead take many forms but, again, may be broadly regarded as falling under two heads: ghost placation and ancestor veneration. In the former the spirits of the dead are regarded as inimical ghosts who bring illness or other misfortune on the living. Such spirits are not thought of as genealogically interlinked with the living but as the supernatural residues of powerful, rich, or important individuals. What is left after death is not usually the humane aspect of personality but the individual's accumulated grudges against the living. The aim of ritual in this case is to detach the living victim from his dead persecutor by propitiation or exorcism.

In many societies in Africa, China, and elsewhere, however, the cults of ancestor worship are addressed to the congregation's known and named forebears whose links of kinship to the living and to each other are not only remembered but are of structural importance to the living in their daily interactions. Such cults are found especially in societies that attach a high value to unilineal descent as a vertebral principle of social organization. They assign beneficent as well as punitive characteristics to the dead; indeed, when the dead punish it is to remind their living kin to "live well" and morally together. The aim of many rites performed on behalf of ancestral "shades" is to "cause the ancestors to be remembered," as the Ndembu of Zambia phrase it. The importance of commemoration may be structural and jural as well as exemplifying piety. For in such societies lineage ancestors several generations back may constitute indices of the distinct lineage subdivisions of which the community is composed. The segmentation of society into its jural and economic subgroups may thus be validated and sustained by regular performances of ancestral ritual.

Not all societies with strong lineage-organization have ancestral cults, however, while others lacking lineages of any depth venerate their immediate forebears. Examples of the former may be found in the Nuer and Dinka tribes of the Sudan; of the latter, among the Thai-Lao of Thailand. Thus it is by no means inevitable that lineage-based societies should possess ancestral cults, although there is a marked tendency for this to be the case.

The High God. Cults of the dead may coexist with beliefs in a creator spirit, or High God, as in many parts of Africa, e.g., among the Lunda and Luba of the Congo; Ila, Bemba, and Tonga of Zambia; Fon, Nupe, and Ashanti of West Africa; Zulu and Basuto of South Africa. Not infrequently the term for the High God is of wide provenience, cutting across tribal boundaries, e.g., Nzambi and Kalung'a in West Central Africa, Mulungu in East Africa, and Leza in East Central Africa. Sometimes, as among the Interlacustrine Bantu, the ancestors are regarded as intermediaries between their living kin and the High God. Although the Supreme Being is often regarded as "otiose," as having refrained from intervening in the cosmos after having created it, it is sometimes held, as among the Nupe, that He gave men a set of automatically efficacious rituals to set right breaches and disturbances of the moral, social, and natural orders. Even in societies without cults of the dead, including many with crude and presumably very ancient cultures, such as those of the Bushmen of southwest Africa and some Australian aboriginal tribes, research by Wilhelm schmidt, Wilhelm Koppers, and others of the Vienna school has demonstrated fairly conclusively that beliefs in High Gods, if not positive monotheism, are well established.

Polytheism. Polytheism tends to flourish in societies relatively well endowed technologically and especially where the natural habitat is diversified. Each god is associated with a province of nature and may also become the representative of a cluster of ideas and sentiments relating to certain culturally defined aspects of social and psychical life. Or the gods may be connected with man's attempts to control his physical environment. As Raymond Firth has written, "The departmental gods of the Maori are invoked each in his own sphere—the god of the sea for fishing and ocean voyaging, the god of the forests for bird-snaring and canoe-building, the god of agriculture for successful planting and harvests" [Human Types (London 1941) 177]. Often the gods are arrayed in a hierarchy, forming a pantheon. Such a hierarchy may closely replicate in its structure the political structure of the state, as in the case of the Fon of Dahomey, described by M. J. Herskovits and Paul Mercier.

Cults of the dead, ancestral veneration, and polytheistic hierarchies can be shown to be closely interconnected with kinship, political, and economic structures. High Gods, however, whether they are found in association with these religious phenomena or alone, are less easily related to their sociocultural context. Rather they provide protophilosophical explanations of the origins of the cosmos and of mankind. Where there are myths about them such myths attempt to answer the following kinds of question: Why are we here? Where do we come from? For what purpose? Why do we act in this way? Why do we die? Very frequently no formal worship is paid to the High God, no prayers are offered to Him. He remains, as it were, a latent Deus absconditus in a religious system largely conceived and symbolically expressed in a set of analogies with human social and economic orders. Primitive monotheism or the concept of an otiose High God (Deus otiosus ) in the background of a system of active lesser deities or ancestral shades or both represents a qualitatively distinct stratum of religious belief. The passive High God foreshadows the active High God of the Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition.

Syncretism and Revelation in the Ancient East. These two strands of religious development, the gods of embodied society and the God of faith, remain distinct but interwoven in many religious systems. Their significant separation may best be traced by examination of the religions of ancient mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Syria, the Iranian plateau, and egypt, the seed beds of the ancient civilizations and, indeed, as modern scholarship is coming to realize, of many complex West and East African societies. It was in these areas that the higher living religions first appeared in nuce. In the ancient state systems of Egypt and Mesopotamia the later neolithic emphases on female fertility and, later still, bull symbolism, which probably appeared first in an animistic context, have clearly developed into the worship of mother goddesses and their spouses—universal gods of the sky and fertility in taurine guise.

Syncretist Cults. In Egypt the male solar deity, as the heavenly father of the pharaoh, took precedence over the mother goddess as life giver. This stood, as E. O. James has memorably demonstrated, in marked contrast to the religious beliefs of Mesopotamia, where the mother goddesses were regarded as the actual source of life. In the course of time, as the ancient agricultural civilization spread from southwestern Asia to Egypt, western Europe, and India, the Goddess, the Magna Mater, tended to become an increasingly syncretistic deity, incorporating many local goddesses of maternity and fertility. For example, Isis, the "goddess of many names," became the most popular of Egyptian deities in the Hellenistic period and was identified with the allied foreign goddesses, Silene and Io, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Pelagia (see isis and osiris). In the Roman Empire her worship spread everywhere until she lost her original Egyptian character. Other composite deities of that period in the Near East included a virile Young God, regarded as both the son and husband of the Goddess, who united in a single figure the properties of what were once local gods, such as Baal, Adonis, Tammuz, Hadad, Aleyan, and El. He combined the attributes of a storm god, a weather god, a bestower of fecundity, a vegetation deity, a sky god, and a sun god. These syncretistic cults of Goddess and Young God, paired or separate, were associated with much ritual license, goaded by such sensory stimuli as frenzied dancing, wild music, and sexual symbolism, in the hope of obtaining communion with the source of life and vitality in a condition of ecstatic abandonment and mystical communion. On account of their disorderly character such rites were frequently condemned officially in the Greco-Roman world, although they had such deeply entrenched popular support that during the Roman imperial period the cult of the Goddess, in a rather more decorous and restrained form, compelled state recognition.

Relation to Mundane Order. It has been noted that, in societies with multiplex social relationships, there is a high degree of consistency between mode of subsistence, social and political structure, and religious system. Indeed, one can go a long way in the analysis of a religious system if one accepts Radin's hypothesis that religion is "one of the most important and distinctive means for maintaining life-values." "As these vary," he asserts, "so will the religious unit vary." Among the most prominent "life-values" Radin places the desire for success, for happiness, and for long life. Religion, since it is concerned with maintaining these and the secular institutions that also promote them, is not a thing apart from mundane life nor is it essentially a philosophical inquiry into the nature of being and becoming. "It only emphasizes and preserves those values accepted by the majority of a group at a given time" [Primitive Religion: Its Nature and Origin (New York 1937) 5].

There is evident support for this position in the vast literature on primitive and prehistoric societies, with their rites to ensure the fertility of crops, animals, and men and to maintain the institutions of secular society. The cults of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, too, exemplify Radin's hypothesis. James, in his discussion of the Tammuz cultus in Syria, explicitly relates its main features to ecological factors. "Behind the cultures," he writes, "lay the emotional needs of everyday life, created by the environmental conditions, in which rain was the principal necessity in the absence of an effective system of inundation and irrigation as in the Nile Valley. Without an adequate rainfall the land could not give her increase, and the social and religious structure of Mesopotamia and Syria was very largely determined by the need of rain and fertility" [The Ancient Gods (London 1960) 306].

Uniqueness of Judaism. But the external differences between primitive and ancient religions, largely determined by ecological and political conditions, resolve into substantial identity when these religions are compared with judaism. This strongly monotheistic religion stands out in marked contrast to the polytheism and syncretic monolatries of all the other Semitic-and Hamiticspeaking peoples of the ancient East. James has characterized succinctly the contribution made by the Hebrew prophets: "They insisted on a standard of conduct that would satisfy the demands of an ethically righteous God who had shown man what is good, and what is required of him: to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with his God …. The transcendent majesty of Godinspired awe, loyalty and obedience, which introduced a new standard of the good life …. Moral goodness wasa quality that had to be won in conflict with evil, whether evil be interpreted theologically in terms of sin, biologically as an inheritance from man's forebears, human or animal, or sociologically as a result of the demoralization of society and its institutions, beliefs and customs" (ibid. 275). This was not a religion that would change radically with alterations in the economic and social structures with which it would be associated. It was destined to preserve its basic principles and ethical and legal precepts throughout innumerable historical vicissitudes and in a variety of economic and social milieus. It is no mere reflection or expression of the way men organize themselves in the pursuit of "human life-values" but rather the voice of God Himself, speaking to and through His prophets. It is what C. H. Dodd has described as "the entry into history of a reality beyond history" [History and the Gospel (London 1938) 181].

See Also: religion; religion, sociology of.

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