Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The First Human Faiths
A. Why is it important to study the early Religions?
B. “Prehistoric and tribal religion, the backdrop of all later religion, is a
vast and complex phenomenon. But it possesses certain basic themes
which, in modified forms, appear centrally in later religion as well.”
C. Two ways to learn about early religion: Anthropology & Archeology
and the study of the remnants of those who still practice the early
religions.
D. What is the beginning of religion?
E. Animism
2. Gods, Spirits and the World
A. “[Early] religion is concerned with soul or spirit.”
B. The beginning of magic.
C. Cosmic religion.
D. Oral traditions
E. Mythology: “Myths are ways of thinking in pictures rather than
abstract concepts.”
F. The “Great Spirit” is really the Great Mystery.
3. Initiation Rites of Men and Women
A. Importance of initiations: “They serve the end of social cohesion by
inducting adults into the tribe after proper training and a potent shared
experience, and they often serve the end of individual fulfillment as
well by giving status and perhaps secrets of value in the soul’s journey
after death.”
B. Men
C. Women
4. Shamans
A. “Shaman is used as a generic term by scholars for those who offer
themselves as mystical intermediaries between the physical and the
nonphysical world for specific purposes, such as healing.”
B. “Shamanism”
C. The “call”
D. Training
E. Shamanic medicine and healing: “Medicine people are permitted to
attend indigenous patients in some hospitals, and in the United States,
the national Institute of Mental Health has paid Navajo medicine men
to teach young Indians the elaborate ceremonies that have often been
more effective in curing the mental health problems of Navajos than
has Western psychiatry” (LR, p. 34.)
5. Archaic Hunters and Gatherers
A. A sacred activity: “A hunter does not set out simply to forestall
his tribe’s hunger. He launches on a sequence of meditative acts, all of
which–whether preparatory prayer and purification, pursuit of the
quarry, or the sacramental manner by which the animal is slain and
subsequently treated–are sacred”
B. The importance of gathering activities.
C. The importance of women: “The important role of women as
gatherers is reflected in the high status accorded them in hunter
gatherer societies where there appears to be an egalitarian bent
exhibited by a great degree of complementarity in the roles of men and
women” (MPMF, p. 41.)
6. Archaic Farmers
A. The mythology of the “fall.”
B. A new understanding of the relationship between life and death.
“Agriculture seems to have brought out a new and darker sense of the
interconnection of death and life.”
7. The Negative Side of Early Religion
A. Sacrifice: “Religious headhunting, human sacrifice, and largescale
animal sacrifice are not genuinely primitive but are usually associated
with agricultural societies and are a part of the mentality to which it
gave rise” (MPMF, p. 45.)
B. Abandonment of the elderly and disabled.
C. Rigid social constraints
D. Shame based society
E. Ideals of “Noble Savage” versus reality