How Old is Religion?
Is this a question worth asking?
“I think metaphysics is a recent invention in the history of religion, and pre-philosophical religions, lacking metaphysics, could be considered hyper-superstitious forms of atheism, where God really lived on a mountain and had a physical body, but he would burn your face off if you tried to look at him.”
I think this may or may not be true, depending on what he means by “recent”. I think this is really what people ought to mean when they say “How Old is Religion”. Superstition has obviously existed forever. Even some behaviors of animals could be regarded as superstitious, like Cats getting scared by cucumbers. But when did people actually become capable of recognizing an abstract existence of certain objects? And when did this become a feature of religion?
DeepLeft’s notion of superstitious atheism seems crazy at first, but it does seem to resonate with some forms of animism among very primitive peoples — namely, the Piraha of South America. They are a very strange group, they don’t have vocabulary for numbers past three. I would strongly recommend
’s article on ancient atheism for a more apt description, but here’s an excerpt from it:“Turning towards religion, the Pirahã again seem to disobey the general rules of anthropology and do not have a Creator deity. They do believe in spirits and supernatural phenomena, but oddly they only believe in these because they directly experience them.”
In the article, SAH quotes passages from Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, and the accounts of the Piraha are quite bizarre.
“Don’t you see him over there?” he asked impatiently. “Xigagaí, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, is standing on the beach yelling at us, telling us he will kill us if we go to the jungle.”
“Where?” I asked. “I don’t see him.”
“Right there!” Kóhoi snapped, looking intently toward the middle of the apparently empty beach.
“In the jungle behind the beach?”
“No! There on the beach. Look!” he replied with exasperation.
In the jungle with the Pirahãs I regularly failed to see wildlife they saw. My inexperienced eyes just weren’t able to see as theirs did.
But this was different. Even I could tell that there was nothing on that white, sandy beach no more than one hundred yards away. And yet as certain as I was about this, the Pirahãs were equally certain that there was something there. Maybe there had been something there that I just missed seeing, but they insisted that what they were seeing, Xigagaí, was still there.
It seems as if the Piraha believe in their gods as actual beings that live among them, like any other animal, that they can see and hear on the regular. Everett at the time was a missionary, and after teaching the Pirahas about Jesus the following happened:
“The morning after one evening’s “show” an older Pirahã man, Kaaxaóoi, came to work with me on the language. As we were working, he startled me by suddenly saying, “The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him.”
“Why not?” I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration.
“Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them.”
Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus’s penis was—a good three feet.
I didn’t know what to say to this. I had no idea whether a Pirahã male had pretended to be Jesus and pretended to have a long penis, faking it in some way, or what else could be behind this report. Clearly Kaaxaóoi wasn’t making this up. He was reporting it as a fact that he was concerned about. Later, when I questioned two other men from his village, they confirmed his story.”
The Pirahas are exceptional in many ways, so maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised about this, but I still am. It is highly befitting for a people without a number system — arguably the most simple form of metaphysical language — to also have a religious system almost akin to a catalogue of cryptids… And what is with these gods? Creatures that live above the clouds and will kill you for coming down? Perhaps the Pirahas are just naturally all gifted shamans. We are shaman believers here at Sectionalism Archive Substack, don’t worry! But the Shamans of Nepal and the Steppe are a little more sophisticated than this. For the record, some other animistic groups display similar beliefs to the Pirahas, but in a far less extreme manner.
I wrote a whole post — my longest, and one day I’ll make it longer — on the metaphysics of Eurasian pagan religions reflected in myth, so I am unwavering on the belief that the belief system DL is describing is not present by the dawn of civilization… But… Why? And did such a religion as the Pirahas dominate the world at some point? Or was it always a minority belief?
Well, think about it this way. At some point, human beings were presumably all quite dumb compared to today. In fact, there are now two studies suggesting that hunter-gatherers were, in general, stupider and more schizophrenic than moderns. Modern hunter-gatherers and peoples of recent hunter-gatherer origin tend to be not very smart. I think the smartest are the Inuit, who have average IQs of 91. I think Uralic peoples who lived primitive lifestyles tend to have quite high IQs, but it’s also kind of selling Uralians short to call them primitive. They just live in a shitty climate, they’re not that primitive otherwise.
I think it’s kind of a meme at this point, but a lot of people with an IQ below 90 have a hard time with things even someone of average intelligence would consider pretty easy. “But I did eat breakfast”, trouble with recursion, low sympathy etc etc. I’m not really sure if the “Breakfast Question” is real or not, but I’m pretty certain that the statements made on that greentext about mapping are since it all relates to real world things like being able to do simple math, being able to read, being able to use a map. In a society of a few thousand people with an average IQ of 85, there would be plenty of people smarter than modern averages from Europe and East Asia. The odds go up when you consider assortative mating and natural selection happening every generation. But in a band society — the small groups of families, often <50 strong, that dominated the Paleolithic — the odds are lower. If there are 50 people in your band, IQ follows a normal distribution, and your average is 85, there are likely to be ~8 members of the tribe with an IQ above 100. There is likely be to be only one member with an IQ at or above 115, and it is unlikely anyone will have an IQ above 130. If your tribe has an average IQ of 70, which isn’t off the table, it is unlikely anyone will have an IQ above 115. Aboriginal Australians have average IQs in the 60s, and are a pretty well-preserved example of a very primitive population. Native Americans tend to have IQs in the 70s if I remember correctly, although it is possible that they experienced brain drain. African countries have average IQs in the 60s but I think it is likely that in western conditions full-blooded Africans would have IQs averaging in the mid-high 70s (and yes, Black Americans live in “Western Conditions”).
It is probably pretty reasonable to assume that Paleolithic peoples were not more intelligent than modern Inuits, because we’ve been selecting for intelligence all this time and we’ve gotten better at it since the advent of farming, and the cousins of Inuits who did develop civilization seem really quite smart. At the same time, I have trouble believing that in modern conditions they would grow up to have IQs below 60. I mean, they were very good at what they did. They might score below a 60 on an IQ test, but only because their intelligence was allocated very differently from moderns. On top of all this, there are other factors which encourage a more Piraha-like religious model over a metaphysical religion. In low-intelligence, violent, perhaps a bit schizophrenic societies, people are going to be more paranoid and superstitious on average, thinking they saw things they didn’t, and furthermore there is a strong incentive for a fear-based religion where spirits are things very much in this world that will come to fuck your shit up if you do bad behavior. Why the Piraha kept this system, I don’t know, but they did. Meanwhile the Aztecs and Inca had religious systems not really that different from stuff you see in Eurasia — well, except for the absolutely bizarre blood cult of the Aztecs. Other than that it was arguably even somewhat profound.
Even if a wise man did come around once every few generations, and even if he found himself in the right place at the right time, how long would these religious reforms last? Who would carry on his legacy? In a larger group there would be midwits who could do it decently well, but in a group of 50? Unlikely.
Even in less intelligent peoples, the numbers game usually allows some sort of metaphysical religion to arise. By the Mesolithic and Neolithic, bands were coagulating together into larger social structures which we typically call “tribes”, and then after that “chiefdoms”. Instead of 50 people, there were thousands of people within one social unit. Even if your group has an IQ of 85, if you have 3,000 people then you are expected to have sixty 115+ and six 130+ IQ people, again ignoring the impact of natural selection on every generation and assortative mating (which is fair in the relatively non-stratified Mesolithic). Yeah, sixty isn’t great, and 115 isn’t a super stringent lower bound, but it’s enough people who are reasonably intelligent enough to develop some sort of metaphysical system if they find themselves in a religious position. And people did find themselves in these positions. Shamans, Medicine Men, and even “Big Men” seeking to legitimize their rule and the tribal way of life with the establishment of the concept of cosmic order or “rightness”. Nature is just barely beginning to peak out of the womb of custom. It isn’t necessarily profound, but it’s something. By the time the Neolithic comes around, thousands of people are living in single settlements alone, and these settlements are likely in alliances or trade networks with other settlements, allowing for the transfer of ideas and stories. Also, IQ rises significantly in the Neolithic. Well, probably not everywhere, but in a lot of places. By this point, there were undoubtedly hundreds of people with enough aptitude to mull over metaphysical belief systems, and a fair amount of people naturally talented enough to serve as bards and poets who could make a metaphysical system accessible exoterically. Because people with this skill tend to also exceed in other areas, their ideas presumably spread across their social spheres.
It’s hard to judge just how original the Great Spirit of Amerindian religion is, but considering how widespread it was I don’t doubt that it had some existence before the White man arrived. It’s also possible that the Great Spirit was initially more Pantheistic than Panentheistic, and with Christian influence became Panentheistic. The Australian Aboriginals also have some nuances to their religion, but I’m not sure how much of this is a creation of Anthropologists making a mountain out of a mole-hill. I’m also not sure how much it can be characterized as a metaphysical system. Frankly I don’t know much about Aboriginal religion, and if anyone is more edumacated on it plz tell me. Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Aztecs, and Chinese all had complex terminology for metaphysics, and one of the most profound religious compilations that still exists today — the Vedas — started being composed by illiterate cattle-herders shortly after or during their migration into the Subcontinent. A priest among the close cousins of these “Rigvedic” people began composing the Gathas probably a few centuries later, starting the Avesta around the time the later Vedic hymns were being composed. So, I think by this point in history there’s no doubt that complicated religions exist, which is not surprising. It’s very hard even to compare primitive peoples today to peoples of the mesolithic, because most of them have had a lot of sustained contact with other peoples, and furthermore in the past few centuries have come to see like social units who live a similar lifestyle as sharing some sort of identity with themselves.
It’s not that I think human beings were ever “Atheists”, or even “Materialists” exactly. It’s just that at some point it’s hard to say at all if they even think to place themselves on this dichotomy. It could be considered a more authentic way of thinking, which is why a lot of Monistic philosophers and sages try to go back to this state, or believe in the secret wisdom of certain animals. Perhaps it is not that the Piraha hallucinate a god on the beach, and it is just that they do not consider there to be a distinction between an imagined god on the beach and a tangible being on the beach which we rely on sensory perception for. Or, perhaps, there really is a god on the beach, although I’m not sure how I feel about him coming down to randomly kill people, or shag the women with a giant fake penis. But there are clearly other more secular examples of them not engaging in metaphysics. They don’t have terms for colors, they only have a few terms for quantity, and their language does not a complete system for recursion. The Piraha have a very difficult time trying to learn very basic arithmetic and counting. Everett spent eight months trying to teach them to count to ten, to no avail. I’m wondering if, in a society of a small handful of families where the families combined average an IQ very low for modern standards, this broad inability to distinguish qualities from instances and use recursive thinking would be more common. It seems like at least at some point in human history it is likely, but even very primitive peoples often have enough competence in these areas to be considered aware of metaphysics.
So, all of that being said, I think it is possible that at a certain point in human prehistory, humans began making a leap from “superstition” to “religion”, either where humans became good enough abstract thinkers to distinguish between qualities and instances, or where human social units became large enough that there was a sizeable minority of people with this ability and with a more general wittiness that allowed them to develop metaphysics. But, this does not necessarily mean peoples a certain distance back were “Materialists” or “Atheists” so much as they were just naive of the distinction. Perhaps you can argue that the Piraha are just good Kantians rejecting Transcendental Realism, and not Materialists at all… But by the Bronze Age it is hard to argue that many learned men were still in this superstitious mode even in societies that had not yet reached the stage of civilization.
Enjoy this video of an Inuit father making tools while his young daughter watches. They even do the classic “Eskimo Kiss”
the part about the limited number system is something i haven’t seen in a while . I remember authors going through all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to avoid calling them retarded -like in Alex’s adventures in numberland
I'm following Jean Gebser's model of magical, mythical, and mental consciousness, where metaphysics (quantitative or logical analysis of God) really only takes place in the third stage. When I read about the ancient Hebrews saying that God was a burning bush, or a pillar of fire, or the Muslim conception that God has physical hands, or even the Christian/Vedic idea that God takes on a body, this is very different from the Pythagorean concept of God as "source of the limit and unlimited."
It's possible that in the Dravidian pre-Indo-European Upanishadic tradition, there was this kind of metaphysics, but we don't have any direct evidence of it in writing. You could try to infer that in 2000 BC they were able consider divine forces as being consubstantial with certain abstractions like "death itself" or "life itself."
It's possible that metaphysics did arise at the dawn of civilization, 10k BC, or even earlier. Maybe Neanderthals had metaphysics. It's impossible to prove that they didn't. But I think when you read certain sections of the Tanakh or the Theogony, Iliad, and Odyssey, it is clear that divinity is not limited to metaphysical conceptions, but that the divine was "supernatural." That is, naturalistic, but more so.
Like Thor is described as picking up mountains and throwing them at giants. This isn't metaphysics, this is just storytelling to make kids impressed around the fire.
There could be multiple layers of religion, where the priests at the top have some metaphysics, but they don't bother disseminating it to the illiterate masses. There's a case to be made that metaphysics and writing develop in mutually dependent way.
For most people today, science plays the role of the Gods. Scientists are a council of shamans, and they can get together and do anything. They could turn you into a pig, or kill you, or make you live forever. How do you know? You're not a scientist. The scientists look in their big books and they use this magic thing called numbers to predict the future and make magic.
If you look at the accounts of anthropologists in 19th century Russia, they believed that an Orthodox priest could bless a jar of pickles with a dead rat in it and make the "bad spirit" go away, so the pickles would be safe to eat. They understood that dead rats would make you sick, but they also thought, "well, he's a priest, so he could make it safe to eat." Their conception of God was literally "big priest in the sky." It wasn't much more complicated than that.
I would argue, psychologically, the magical conception of divinity is the default perception of 99% of humans throughout every stage of history. And maybe metaphysics precedes writing, and Neanderthals had it. To the extent that people are now literate, metaphysics is much more accessible, although I'm not sure that's a good thing. Even if metaphysics is true and helpful, a distorted or "half-truth" version might drive people crazy.
There are so many half-Nietzscheans who have never read him, but they have picked up on a few filtered-down points, and are now convinced that "morality isn't real, so I can smoke weed if I want to." This isn't really the fault of the person, but the fault of a society which doesn't police morality or metaphysics in a strict way. People cannot possible help but misinterpret and mess things up.
The point about intelligence is interesting. Spatial intelligence is probably decreasing over time, which is also something we have a hard time getting AI to do. Engineers are high in spatial intelligence. If everyone was slightly more spatially intelligent, the cost of basic mechanic goods, like cars, would be much cheaper, because everyone would have basic mechanical skills. I wonder if this would result in any break-through advancements at the highest level. It's hard to even know what these functions are at the highest level.
I can sort of understand verbal intelligence as "retain symbol, manipulate symbol." Mathematical intelligence is also technically a symbolic manipulation, but devoid of any qualitative texture. Language has these very hardcore instinctual pre-sets, to the point where certain brain injuries affect vocabulary, while others affect grammar. Math seems to be accessing the same infrastructure but without the aid of the pre-set instincts. So babies can talk much more quickly than they can do math. If there is a non-verbal child who can do math, they are probably severely autistic (male brained?).
But what even is spatial intelligence? It's not symbolic, but some kind of mapping. Being in a space. It does seem to me that people with high verbal intelligence ascribe mystical or emotional significance to words, like they cry when they read a nice poem. It then seems that people with high spatial intelligence would have a greater emotional sensitivity to spaces and forms, like something that is beautiful. Are we losing our sensitivity to the material world?
A counter-argument would be that when you take hunter-gatherers and put them in a city they do not become elite architects or fashion designers something.
The best film on aboriginal religion is Ten Canoes. Free on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AMmHrFdyBw