Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One Book 1: A Thermodynamic Genealogy of Primitive Religions 1.1. Chapter 1: Initiation into the Study of the Origins of Primitive Religions ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 by Lawrence C. Chin. Last update: Jan. 31, 2007

Basic principles of the evolution of consciousness. In respect to the distance to Truth, human consciousness may be considered to consist in two axes: one, the time-independent (synchronic), according to which the human consciousness has already had an immediate intuition of Truth, i.e., the most fundamental laws of nature, the first and second law of thermodynamics; the other, time-dependent (diachronic), according to which the human consciousness, progressively with time, penetrates the illusory surface layer of reality to get at the underlying structure of reality which is the Truth - or truer than the illusions on the surface. That is to say, in time consciousness learns to stratify reality. That moment, in the history of consciousness, of penetration or "break-through" into the structure is what will be shown here to be the transition from a functional to a structural perspective of reality - of which an illustrative instance, Lavoisier's chemical revolution (later).

The condition of possibility of consciousness' progressive penetration through the layers of reality is the differentiation of consciousness, which is therefore the temporal dimension of consciousness. From the most basic level of functional perspective, its differentiation pushes consciousness to gradually break through to the structural level of reality.

According to the first axis: the laws of thermodynamics have always already been intuited by the human mind, both among the "primitive" and modern, among the laypersons and the educated alike - the only differences being the categories in which the intuition is formulated: scientific or mythic, structural or functional. The sudden comprehension of the thermodynamic laws may in fact be considered the mark, the moment of the awakening of consciousness (Wachsein): thus the beginning of burial (the care for the dead) among the archaic Homo sapiens is testimony for their awakening to the truth of Conservation (in this case, of the soul - a necessary entity in the functional perspective: see below), i.e. the first law of thermodynamics.

The intuition of the second law of thermodynamics was manifested among the early peoples in their sense of the cosmos as constantly degenerating, or of the order of society as incessantly decaying, and hence in their ritual practices to periodically restore the cosmos to its original, "pristine" state, or in the communion rites to restore social order to its original purity: the two principal themes of human religiousness, as we will see.

The memory of the first law of thermodynamics was responsible for the content of human spiritual experiences. The crucial distinction to understand here is that between the functional and the structural perspective. Function means the effect and often the emergent property of a combination of some certain elemental "stuff" interacting among themselves. As emergent property, function then is the more in "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." To use the human brain as an example, consciousness (the instantaneous willful perception in the framework of memories of the past) is the function or product of, or dependent on, all the brain cells composing the brain, though it is no where to be found in the brain. Consciousness is generated amongst the communicational relations, by means of neurotransmitters, between individual brain cells, and so an emergent property of the mass of brain cells. That by which the whole brain is more than the sum of its constituent brain cells is the consciousness added to it, and the physical basis of consciousness is not simply the brain cells but also their relatedness.

Structure refers to that which underlies or "bears" the function. So in the above example the brain cells in their particular positions interacting in particular ways to produce the function of "consciousness" would be the structure for that function.

The human experience of reality can thus be understood as operative either on the surface level of function or on the deeper level of structure. The functional perspective is that which takes the function or in other words the epiphenomena (life, consciousness, the conventional four "elements") at face value and as independent - for granted, so to speak - and in which the human consciousness of pre-scientific age operates; it is also our ordinary, everyday way of experiencing the world, the mode of consciousness of the lay persons. It is the fundamental, basic modus operandi of human consciousness, its immediate, given "state", so much so that today, in the age of science, only the "educated" or the scientists are able to transcend it occasionally, to elevate their perception into the higher level, structural perspective in their perception of reality. This structural perspective, on the other hand, is one which no longer takes the function or the epiphenomena at face value but as dependent upon the structures underlying the epiphenomena (which are now correctly seen as functions) and producing them as effects. As such it represents an advancement in consciousness from the functional mode, that is, a consciousness gaining in maturity. Hence the achievement of the structural perspective is a function of the maturity of consciousness in proportion to time passed, and consciousness universally grows from the functional to the structural perspective - whether in East (China) or West. This much should be common sense: the beginning immaturity of consciousness (i.e. its taking the effects on the surface as independent entities rather than as effects, functions, or sign posts hinting at the presence of a deeper reality) is conditioned by the limitation - individuation - of our conscious existence: our macroscopic size which hides from us the microscopic constituents (the atomic structures and so on) for the macroscopic reality immediately compatible with and hence accessible to us; and our microscopic size which hides from us the macroscopic reality of which the microscopic reality immediately accessible to us - the Earth and the Solar System - is merely the tip of the iceberg: it hides from us the Milky Way behind the Solar System, the largeness of the Universe behind the Milky Way, and perhaps a Meta-Universe behind the observable Universe. As consciousness grows, however, it gradually becomes aware of its limitation, of the localness and relativeness of its environment - it sheds its provincial (functional) perspective and acquires knowledge of that which is hidden behind - the hidden Truth.

Now that we have spelled out the basic pattern for the evolution -- growth -- of human consciousness, we can attempt a short genealogy of human spirituality.

The conservation of the soul, animism, and the origin of the belief in gods. It appears that the first and most immature expression of human spirituality (primitive religiousness) is based on an animistic view of nature -- that the whole of reality is animated by spirits or dis-embodied souls -- which produces all variations of what we call primitive religions, shamanism, totemism, etc. At the beginning of all major civilizations -- be it the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Mesopotamian, the Mesoamerican, the Germanic -- we find this primitive religiousness as the substratum from which they evolved. All later forms of human thought and symbolic systems -- religions and philosophies -- grew out of animistic consciousness. Here, as a first step to understanding primitive religiousness, we will try to expose how the human experience of the thermodynamic structure of the cosmos produces the basic elements of primitive religiousness: life of the soul after death, the need for the restoration of order, etc.

The essence of primitive religiousness is the mediation between the world of the living and the world of the dead (spirits). Hence its basis is the conviction in the immortality of the soul (and therefore belief in the afterlife), without which the world of the dead would make no sense. This is the synchronic or "ideal" core of religious experience.

"Soul", this concept, is derived from the experience of consciousness, the awareness of the external world and of itself and its body. Among the first humans, and even among the laymen of contemporary time, this consciousness is experienced and understood functionally, due to lack of (scientific) education. Consciousness at the premature level of development was operative on the basic stratum of the functional perspective. In other words, this consciousness, which is in reality an epiphenomenon, an effect, an emergent property of the structures underneath (the brain), is not taken as such, but at face value, for granted, i.e. as existing independently, especially of one's body (like shadow is seen as an independent entity rather than dependent, cast by another, actual independent object). This independence of one's sense of self (one's consciousness) is simply an immediate datum of experience, so natural does "Cartesian dualism" (so to speak) seem to us. It requires advancement of knowledge (e.g. in neurophysiology) to convince oneself of the illusory nature of this piece of immediate experience. Here we have the first of the two essential constituents of the animistic consciousness: an illusion consisting in taking a function (an effect) not as such but as independently existing.

But immaturity notwithstanding, consciousness had also already intuited the most fundamental laws of nature, the first and second law of thermodynamics. The second essential constituent is the awareness of the first law, the law of Conservation of energy-matter and momentum. The fact of Conservation (that the total amount of "everything" never changes) is universally intuited by all humanity -- something like the hallmark of the Awakening (Wachsein) of consciousness -- although for most of the history most of the people do not have or understand the concepts in which Conservation is expressed scientifically (structurally and quantitatively): matter, energy, the interchangeability between the two, and momentum. The intuition of Conservation is responsible for all spiritual expressions of humanity: a typical formula of spiritual expression is that a single universal "substance" or life-force runs through all things in the cosmos, animate or inanimate -- this consubstantiality expresses Conservation as it reflects the understanding that there is never really any distinction or construction or dissolution but only re-shuffling and re-consolidating of the same underlying material here and now in this form and then and there in that form; all things, when they die, never really die, but only return to their source (like waves disappearing into the ocean whence it came: reshuffling of the same material). Today we know that even during extreme nuclear reactions when (part of) matter disappears, it has never really disappeared; it has merely "relapsed" into energy. Since Conservation is to be applied to all things, and since in the functional perspective consciousness (and all functions) are understood shallowly at face value, as a thing, the conclusion, or the experience, becomes inevitable that consciousness must be conserved, never destroyed, upon the death of body merely returning to the "primal source" from whence it came. Without knowledge of neurobiology, one must ask oneself "Where will I go upon death (of my body)?" Insofar as "I" is experienced as a thing, not as an effect, "I" cannot possibly simply disperse with nothing left. For nothing is ever destroyed or created but only transformed: we all know this first law of thermodynamics intuitively. Only when one has penetrated the illusion, looked at oneself objectively as a mere biological organism (a biological machine), and understood the "I" to be a mere effect floating on a mass of nerve cells communicating through neurotransmitters ("we are our neurotransmitters", as contemporary neurologists say, understanding that consciousness, our sense of "I", is just the emergent property produced by all the information-passings among the neurotransmitters between nerve cells), can one admit to oneself that upon death, the "effect" (consciousness) indeed disperses, that it is the material that produced consciousness -- the atoms that made up the brain -- that are conserved and never destroyed. That is, unlike modern scientists with their structural perspective who apply the first law only to the structures beneath the function and therefore deny the immortality of consciousness/soul, the primitive humans, because they operate in functional perspective, applied the first law directly to the function -- in this case consciousness -- and ignored the structures -- the brain-mass -- and thus arrived at the conviction in the immortality of the soul.

Thus there is a definite connection between myth and science. Myth expresses scientific truth in an intuitive form, in functional terms so that while it expresses the "same" truth (Conservation) as does science, its expressions tend to conflict with those of science which expresses this truth in structural terms.

Furthermore, the most primitive functional perspective objectifies every function around as independent and thus into a "thing", so that the "thingness" permeates all primitive myths: toothache, wind, emotional state -- everything is objectified into a thing and animated like oneself so that gods and ghosts are made from them. (See below.)

It is because tribal humans take functions as objectively real that they would use hallucinogens and believe that the hallucinations thereby produced actually do mean that their "soul" (i.e. consciousness, life-force) is traveling far away and meeting ancestors and gods. Recall, for example, the Incas' veneration of cocaine (which they called "The Plant") and their belief that it was the gift from gods because it allowed the shamans to meet the gods. Today, as we understand that these "visions" are just mental effects produced by the physical structures of the brain that are temporarily altered by hallucinogens, we no longer assign sacred values to these substances.

Realizing that the belief in the immortality of the soul -- and hence in the afterlife -- reflects the first budding of the comprehension of the first law of thermodynamics -- a functional interpretation of this most fundamental law of nature -- allows us to pin-point amidst the archaeological record the moment in time when the Homo genus first acquired the ability to comprehend and "represent" (functionally) the laws of nature. One simply has to look at when the hominids started burying the dead and furnishing it with daily artifacts and paraphernalia for use in the afterlife -- for such customs indicate that the practitioners were convinced of the immortality of the soul and hence the afterlife, and were therefore aware of the first law. The hypothesis is that, at some point in the evolution of the Hominid, probably during the time of enormous encephalization, this encephalization must have caused the computational ability of the brain to pass a certain critical level so that suddenly the Hominid consciousness was able to intuit the most fundamental laws of nature, which the animals apparently did not and could not. This moment of Awakening (Wachsein) rests within our species, it seems, Homo sapiens sapiens. Our cousins did not appear to be "awakened" to the laws of nature. While in our species this "awakening" was responsible for much of our "symbolic" behavior -- such as the rituals concerning the dead -- our cousin the Neanderthals did not seem to burden themselves with the elaborate set of symbolic rituals surrounding death which the Awakening would have engendered, even if they had picked up some of Cro-Magnon man's symbolic practices under pressure from competition (e.g. the use of red ochre). C.f. Ian Tattersal, "Once We Were Not Alone" in Scientific American, Jan. 2000: "Further, despite misleading early accounts of bizarre Neanderthal 'bear cults' and other rituals, no substantial evidence has been found for symbolic behaviors among these hominids, or for the production of symbolic objects -- certainly not before contact had been made with modern humans. Even the occasional Neanderthal practice of burying the dead may have been simply a way of discouraging hyena incursions into their living spaces, or have a similar mundane explanation, for Neanderthal rituals lack the 'grave goods' that would attest to ritual and belief in an afterlife [hence the budding, functional understanding of the laws of nature]." (p. 61)¹

Now that we have traced the origin of the belief in the afterlife and the world of the dead, let us continue to derive the rest of the components of the animistic mythic consciousness from this beginning. We can do this through imagining a scene, where various tribal men² waiting on their father or some authority who is about to die. Let us consider that in Indo-European languages the word for "soul" always derives from the word for "breath", "wind", "air" etc.: psuche, "breath"; anima and spiritus meaning "breath" and "wind"; ghost and Geist "breath"; atman and prana "breath". In classical Chinese as well qi (氣) meaning "air" was thought to be the life principle running through and animating the body and mind, and even the whole cosmos. So are Hebrew ruah and nefesh, Egyptian ka, Iroquoian orenda, Polynesian mana, all meaning "air" or "breath" (c.f. Ellison Banks Findly, "Breath and Breathing", Encycl. of Rel., vol. 2, p. 302). Consider also the Algonquian manitou. The primitive humans made this identification between their self-awareness (soul) and breath probably because all life breathes and so they saw the essence of being alive -- and thus being sentient -- in breathing. Through breathing one gets animated by anima. (Hence John 6: 63: to pneuma estin to zwiopoioun, h sarx ouk wfelei ouden, "It is the 'wind' that maketh live; the flesh profiteth nothing.") "Soul" thus came from a compactification of consciousness-breath-metabolism, i.e. (sentient) "life force" in general. The instances of "soul" as "breath" or "air" multiply indefinitely.³ When the father dies, his lungs collapse, and the last breath gushes out his mouth. ("His ghost departed him.") It is easy for the tribal men, already convinced of the immortality of the soul, to take the last breath as the soul (the consciousness) exiting the body. Then they witness its dispersion or rather blending into the air, the wind, the heaven, or the entire atmosphere around. Insofar as the "father" has been infused into the surrounding atmospheric nature, he is now animating nature instead, and every sign in it -- rain, storm, thunder -- is his expression, his approval or disapproval of men's conducts, just like when he was alive. Natural phenomena are signs of father's animation of nature just as body movements formerly were signs of his animation of his body when he was alive. He has become a god. This is the origin of "anthropomorphism", ascribing human passions to gods and human shape to their representation. The ancestral spirit thus governs the cosmos throughout and, because of his tremendous power to influence everything, must be placated and propitiated, insofar as tribal people have not yet become conscious of universal ethical principles and so expect the ancestor to behave only capriciously according to how happy he is, rather than treating the humans below predictably according to these universal ethical principles. This is the "core psychology" of propitiation, before its incorporation into the overall propitiatory-restorative rituals as attempts to curb the entropy-increase of the cosmos. Now the more authorities pass into nature after death, the more numerous these ancestral ghosts deemed deities. The cosmos is now full of gods. Together with and reinforced by the tendency to objectify which we noted earlier as the essential modus operandi of the functional perspective, gods now appear in every phenomenon: god of wind, of thunder, of rain, of sun, of clouds, etc., so long as the spirits of the deceased ancestors can penetrate every aspect of nature and animate it. Now air (together with water) has this special status in that it easily reminds of the first law of thermodynamics because of its quality: a formless substratum-matrix from which definite forms emerge (wind, tornado or waves) but into which they then disappear back (destruction and creation are mere illusion; the net amount never changes.) In this way it is easy to conceive all the spirits (in the form of air) coming together into a single whole and animating nature as a single whole, so that ancestral spirits have the tendency to coalesce into a Generic Ancestor (consult the example of Di 帝 among the Shang in China)⁴ which often becomes identified simply with the atmosphere in general, the "cosmic pneuma", acquiring divine significance. This is one way to see the latency of monotheism within polytheism.

The process can of course be conceived in reverse: that through breathing, the sign of aliveness, the air -- the ancestral spirit -- as the universal life principle, enters the person to constitute itself as the particular soul of such person. This reminds of the first law of thermodynamics nonetheless -- through the idea of the universal substratum manifesting itself in the multitude of particular forms. So follows from here the phenomenon that tribal people frequently name grandchildren after grandparents, regarding the former as reincarnation of the latter: the same substratum (of the Generic Ancestral Spirit) re-manifesting itself.⁵

If the whole nature is thus animated by the ancestral spirits, a particular part of nature, the animal species, can be seen to be singled out for particular attention because they are the most "animated" part of nature. The animistic view of nature can then become totemic. On this, later.

The ancestor spirits, insofar as they are co-extensive with the cosmos and constitute its very structure, are immortal, forever conserved according to the law of conservation (they -- and as the cosmos itself -- can never be destroyed as nothing can be). When transformed into (re-thought of as) gods, they correspond to the natural phenomena that they supposedly respectively control or embody. The Germans, the Romans, and the Greeks of the pre-Hellenistic age seem to have been on this stage, with the Germanic pantheon of Wodens, Tiwes, etc. and the Olympians of the Greeks. The ancestors can remain un-transformed, in which case we have the pure ancestral cult. Or some transformed and some not, which is the case of the bronze age China, where however the ancestors seem to have outweighed the gods of natural phenomena in popular consideration. The mixed scenario seems also to characterize the Syriac interaction sphere where the post-exodus Israelites settled. The ancestral spirits can then be consolidated into the Generic Ancestor, the precursor of the monotheistic god, through coalescing of the diverse spirits. This is the case, also, among the Chinese of the bronze age, i.e. the Di of the Shang, and is probably also the case with Abraham's theophany (later). The polytheistic gods can also be consolidated in the same ways, and we have then the theogony or summodeism typical in the Near East and Egypt. The Generic Ancestor and the monotheistic god, again, are forever conserved, and can be de-personalized through differentiation to become the field of pure conservedness of all beings behind their genesis and dissolution on the surface and be devoid of characteristics derived from interpersonal relationships. This is the Presocratic pantheism.

Now shamanism or deity-cult would become an experienced necessity: the belief in the immortality of the soul led to the belief in the afterlife, which led to the belief in the world of the dead or spirits, comprising principally of the spirits (the roaming souls) of the deceased ancestors and/or the spirits of various sorts of deities (from natural phenomena to abstract qualities), and perhaps finally a universal spirit that is the unification of all the disparate spirits; then attendant upon this belief in the world of the spirits would be the experienced necessity of mediation between the world of the living and the world of the dead, between the visible and the invisible, between the impotent actors of flesh and the almighty dead ancestors and gods who, as the animating principle or the very structure of the cosmos governing all natural phenomena, were literally determinant of the worldly fortune of the former, favorably if they are well-propitiated, and un-favorably if not. This act of mediation is the essential content of primitive religiousness, and the actor of mediation the "sacerdotal" (e.g. the shaman, the priest, etc.).

The universal belief and stories among the primitives about the "life of the dead" and the wandering of its soul should now become rather common sense. Consider some typical examples from around the world.

(1) The Huron: The Huron believed in two types of souls: "... life souls (onnhekwi), which animated the body and made each part of it function. These souls were as large and had the same shape as the body, or organ, with which they were associated. They accounted for actions such as breathing, heartbeat, and bodily motion. Each of these manifestations of the body soul had its own name"; and "the intellectual soul (andionra), which was associated with self-awareness, knowledge, memory, and the powers of reasoning. These were the qualities especially esteemed in civil chiefs." (Bruce Trigger, The Huron, 2nd ed., p. 106 - 7) Apparently the Huron analyzed the breath-soul into its conscious and metabolic components. Then:

(2) The Finns (from Juha Pentikäinen, "The Ancient Religion of the Finns"):

It is because of beliefs such as these that the thermodynamically awakened humans had been burying their dead with artifacts for use in the afterlife, and in the case of the nobles even with live human servants and animals for service in the afterlife. This is not "(human) sacrifice" in the proper sense of restaurant (below).

Ritual as ergonic and the implication of "guilt". Let us now initiate ourselves into the cognitive/phenomenological perspective that underlies ritual performance. Take the example of sacrifice. Why did ancient people chop off someone's head as "offer" to the atmosphere? In the simplest conception of the psychological state behind this one can say that humans of the tribal time experienced their impotence before the divine Nature upon whose whim their survival depended, and this sense of impotence and dependency resulted in the feeling of guilt, that they had to constantly thank Nature (the animals, the spirits of ancestors and gods, etc.) for granting them the continuation of their precarious existence. This resulted in the act of propitiation, and so sacrificial offerings to the gods, ancestral spirits, the animal spirits, etc. But let's look at it from the animistic perspective together with the budding understanding of thermodynamics. Insofar as the ancestor spirit was the atmosphere which nourished all life, all animals, all plants, in fact manifested itself as all these on which human survival depended, the products in hunting or in agriculture were then experienced as bounty offered up by him for his descendants' sake. But our taking from him had "weakened" him. Our use of him (our "eating him", literally) risked exhausting him; so when feasting on him we returned part of him (e.g. burning part of the game) back to the atmosphere in order to regenerate him so that he might remain "plenty" and re-manifest himself in more bounty for our next round of use (the communion vs. expiatory, or exergonic vs. endergonic, sacrifice, respectively: later.)⁶ In fact, because of the second law of thermodynamics, the cosmos was continually weakened of its own accord (like today's belief about the eventual "heat death" of the universe). The weakened ancestor meant a weakened structure of the cosmos that would then have difficulty in sustaining the natural cycle of seasons and of the production and nourishment of plants and animal life. Here the second law of thermodynamics came into the primitive consciousness: our constitution as localized open dissipative structure (the material meaning of our life) meant that without eating (energy-input) our order would collapse back into equilibrium (i.e. we would be dead). So was the ancestor anima, who thus also had to eat. Otherwise, it (cosmos) would run down and collapse into equilibrium and natural disasters (drought, excessive rain, flood, extinction of species) would ensue. Just as low entropy was the differentiated state of order (e.g. like a box with all black marbles squarely on one side and all white marbles squarely on the other) whereas high entropy was the undifferentiated state of disorder (the box with marbles randomly mixed together on both sides; Figure below), so equilibrium of the cosmos meant that its differentiated order (sky in separation from earth, lake from mountain, river from land) reached equilibrium and disappeared: natural catastrophes as signifying maximal entropy (e.g. the non-distinction between river and land during flooding). "Sacrifice is the nourishment for the gods," so is it often said.⁷ Offerings to the ancestor spirit (sacrifices or otherwise) were ways to feed him in order to restore him to his former vigor, thus maintaining the smooth working of the natural rhythm and stabilizing all natural orders away from equilibrium. This is the "ergonic" meaning of ritual: that it is performed to do work, i.e. to change (in this case, renew) the state of nature. Thus the ancient Chinese popular saying in justifying the annual sacrificial marriage of the river god with a select virgin by sinking her in him, "if we don't perform the marriage for Uncle River, then it will flood and drown all people."⁸ The ancestor was capable of offering bounty only when he was "well-fed". We thus see our thesis emerging that whereas the belief in gods results from the primitive understanding of conservation, the belief in the necessity of rituals (including sacrifice) results from the primitive understanding of entropy (second law).

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low entropy      high entropy

The idea which frequently occurred among the ancients was that the ancestors had to be fed to be kept strong in order to take care of their worldly descendants. Herbert Plutschow writes in "Archaic Chinese Sacrificial Practices in the Light of Generative Anthropology", especially in reference to the (early Bronze) Chinese: "The blood of the sacrifice was supposed to end drought, flooding, and other natural calamities believed to originate from dissatisfied ancestors, or, to obtain from them the climactic conditions necessary for agriculture and human survival." "Also, these ancestors were thanked for good weather and harvests and for victory in battle, all in 'thanksgiving' sacrifice. Conversely, the humans therefore blamed them for droughts, bad harvests, enemy invasions, or, for the curses they inflict upon the members of the elite. The role the Chinese attributed to their ancestors follows universal patterns. When social ills began to proliferate and clan relationships to crumble, when ritual was neglected and taboo broken, the ancestors were allegedly displeased with the living and caused natural disasters, nightmares, social disharmony and other ills." "Therefore, in order for the combined king/ancestor to have sufficient power to maintain the state order, they had to be fed properly with nutritional sacrifice, the most potent food being, of course, raw or cooked meat. According to the Tso-chuan, ancestors, especially royal ancestors, had to be fed to keep them strong, like their living descendants. By this acquired strength, they could respond effectively to the demands and needs of the state." "[B]ehind an underfed human was an equally underfed deity and meagerness was taken as a sign or presage of a drought." Citing Plutschow is especially instructive since he follows René Girard's psychological explanation of sacrifice as the killing of scapegoat by which the primitives resolved their "mimetic desire" and maintained social order. It is difficult to see how a scholar might come to see so much of a supposedly violent human nature in sacrifice when a literal understanding of its meaning clearly points to its being a "metaphor of eating/ metabolism" and therefore to a (primitive, functional) thermodynamic understanding of the necessity of food-intake in maintaining the order of a dissipative structure stabilized away from equilibrium. But: "If underfed, writes Girard about other archaic cultures, the god would waste away, or else, he will descend among men and lay claim to his nourishment with unexampled cruelty and ferocity" (ibid.): this "retribution" by Nature or the Ancestral Ghost can be interpreted in terms of the second law, as the equilibrium-process due to lack of energy-input as manifested in natural calamities (much more on this, later); but it can also be understood differently as a natural process of restoration of equilibrium that is in terms of the first law and is like reciprocity and "karma".

This is related to the feeling of guilt. Since the law of Conservation guarantees the eventual restoration of the net amount, then the taking from Nature-Ancestor by men will in some future time be balanced by the taking from men by Nature-Ancestor: so men feel anxiety or fear -- for "retribution" by Nature -- and this is guilt. Sacrifice then pre-empts retribution by voluntary restoration on men's part: it lessens fear or anxiety by substituting restoration controlled by men (at a set, convenient time and in a fixed form of the sacrificial food) for natural restoration which is unpredictable in timing and may assume any form (such as the taking of a random person's life). Such fear of course only makes sense in the functional perspective, for natural restoration is a necessity only on the structural level of the subatomic particles. For example, quantum physics offers instances reminding of the "retribution by nature" which is experienced as necessary in the primitive mind: because of quantum fluctuation (due to the uncertainty principle) subatomic particles are permitted to burst into existence out of nothing (creation ex nihilo) as long as their counter-parts (anti-particle) also burst out of nothing simply to annihilate them; this annihilation is something like the "retribution by Nature". Or again the alpha particle is locked inside the nucleus of an atom and normally cannot escape without extra energy; but due to the uncertainty principle (i.e. the uncertainty in the energy of the particle expressed as DE) it could suddenly have the extra energy from nowhere and escape the nucleus -- as long as it "gives back" this energy it borrowed from uncertainty after a time Dt, or the uncertainty in time. (This is the other uncertainty pair in addition to the original Heisenberg pair of location and momentum. "For a short in enough time... both a particle and its immediate surroundings -- or indeed the whole universe -- may be uncertain about how much energy the particle has." John Gribbin, In Search of the Big Bang, p. 235)⁹ It is all the same: Nature gives out "something more" for free but it will restore the net amount later because of the law of Conservation. Ultimately, there is no free-lunch. The primitive mind can be seen to apply the same law and "return the favor" -- by receiving from the Ancestor, men have incurred for themselves a debt (Schuld, guilt: c.f. Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals) which they must pay back -- except on the functional level and not on the structural level of the atoms. Natural restoration means that, if the debt be not paid, the ancestor would proceed to regenerate himself of his own accord by "descending among men and laying claim to his nourishment with unexampled cruelty and ferocity".("Thanksgiving" as pre-emptive.)¹⁰

(In terms of the intuition of the second law, the "retribution by Nature" can be pictured as the eventual levelling of any differences, like water or air always dispersing out in its container evenly, allowing no localized concentration [inhomogeneity]. That is, the Conservation of the first law is not by the primitives distinguished from the equilibrium of the second.)

Offerings as "feeding the Ancestor" involved more complicated details of the primitive understanding of thermodynamics and furthermore the issue of the "primordial guilt" or "original sin" at which we can only hint here. The "primordial guilt" has to do with the imperfection of our existence, specifically our constitution as localized open dissipative structure (the material meaning of our life). The very desire and need to eat (or consume in general) signifies to us that we have a debt to pay for our order (our body), to pay to the second law, that is to say, having order (constitution as dissipative structure) against the overall necessary entropy-increase means a primordial debt: the need to create even greater disorder in the environment than the originally linear entropy-increase would have created, in order to even out the order that we are: this original sin of ours which is the necessary tendency to increase disorder in the environment (later, evil done). This primordial debt as the indebtedness necessary for the formation of any order at all furthermore hangs together with the human frustration with finitude (temporo-spatial delimitation). However only during the constitution of salvational traditions did the problem of primordial indebtedness ("original sin") become fully delineated in human consciousness. Before then, the primitive men were only dimly and implicitly aware of the "primordial debt" which they attempted to "pay" back confusedly and in the same manner in which they paid the secondary, derivative indebtedness: over and over again with sacrifice, i.e. with feeding -- a task doomed to failure, as to be explained later on ("Heidegger's Concept of Guilt...").

Ritual as periodic restoration Ritual religiousness as a metaphor of feeding -- and sacrificial religiousness is the most pronounced expression of this -- is the underlying meaning of the "myth of the eternal return" which Mircea Eliade has spoken of. We may first use the example of sacrifice as the most illustrative instance in which rituals appear in their order-restorative function. In Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (vol. 1, p. 330) Eliade remarks with respect to "la fonction du sacrifice chez les Indo-Iraniens. Dans la perspective qui leur était propre, les auteurs des Brahmanas partageaient une conception similaire [to that of Zarathustra]: le monde était périodiquement restauré, i.e. 'recrée', par la puissance illimitée du sacrifice." "In the perspective which is proper to them, the authors of the Brahmanas shared a similar conception [to that of Zarathustra]: the world was periodically restored, i.e. recreated, by the unlimited power of sacrifice." The kosmos ("order") is, like an organism, an order, a system stabilized far away from equilibrium, and as such it has to have energy pumped periodically in to maintain its internal order-equilibrium ("internal" vs. "external" or environmental equilibrium later on) -- otherwise it will disintegrate as a matter of the second law, just as an organism will if it does not periodically eat. Sacrifice, at this late tribal, proto-state period, became an affair of feeding the cosmos -- over and over again. Sacrifice, with its original meaning as "food", thus is restaurant, restoration-operation. The primitives, who were always at the mercy of natural catastrophes (storm, flood, earth-quakes), had expectedly experienced these as disorders of the cosmos, as its continuous disintegration, entropy-increase, which was the natural course of things given the second law, and which interrupted its ability to "give". Hence the need to restore it. The "Golden Age" is the period when the cosmos is still full of energy and minimally entropic, like a person having just eaten and feeling strong. But then the order of the cosmos is running out, just as a person gets hungry and so weaker as time passes. That entropy always increases with time passed is the "arrow of time." Ritual, as restaurant of the present degenerative state back to the former Golden Age, is the means by which primitive humans fight against the arrow of time. Once again, they are applying thermodynamics at the wrong level.

Ritual is order-restorative both among the hunter-gatherers and among the agriculturalists, though it could have different flavour among the ones than among the others. "Les cultures agricoles élaborent ce qu'on peut appeler une religion cosmique, puisque l'activité religieuse est concentrée autour du mystère central: la rénovation périodique du monde... L'Univers est conçu comme un organisme qui doit être renouvelé périodiquement; en d'autres termes, chaque année." (Ibid., p. 53: "The agricultural cultures have elaborated what one can call 'a cosmic religion', since religious activity is centered around the central mystery: the periodic renovation of the world... The Universe is conceived as an organism that must be periodically renovated; in other words, each year.") That is, it has to "eat" -- take in energy -- periodically. But sacrifice is not necessarily the only way for such restoration; re-enactment of the creation myth does the same. This is in fact more frequent among the hunter-gatherers and the pre-intensive agriculturalists (e.g. the Polynesians), but appears among developed civilizations as well. "Puisque le monde doit être renouvelé périodiquement, la cosmogonie sera rituellement réitérée à l'occasion de chaque Nouvel An. Ce scénario est attesté dans le Proche-Orient et chez les Indo-Iraniens [the origin of the Mesopotamian New Year Festival, c.f. below]. Mais on le trouve également dans les sociétés des cultivateurs primitifs, qui prolongent en quelque sorte les conceptions religieuses du néolithique. L'idée fondamentale -- rénovation du Monde par la répétition de la cosmogonie -- est certes plus ancienne, pré-agricole. On la retrouve, avec les inévitables variations, chez les Australiens et chez de nombreuses tribus de l'Amérique du Nord. [E.g. the calendrical festivals, such as Seed Planting, Corn Sprouting, Green Corn, and Harvest of the Five Nations Iroquois (slash-and-burn 'early' agriculturalists) which were originally derived from the southeastern U.S. (not the original customs of the Huron), and which had more to do with the restoration of the cosmos after its entropic exhaustion in 'giving birth' to vegetative nutrients than with agricultural metaphorism. (Bruce Trigger, ibid., p. 114)] Chez les paléocultivateurs et les agriculteurs le scénario mythico-rituel du Nouvel An comporte le retour des morts, et des cérémonies analogues survivent en Grèce classique, chez les anciens Germains, au Japon, etc." ("Since the world must be periodically renovated, cosmogony will be ritually reiterated during the occasion of each New Year. This scenario is attested in the Near East and among the Indo-Iranians. But one finds it equally among the societies of primitive cultivators, who continued in some way the religious conceptions of the Neolithic. The fundamental idea -- the renovation of the world by a repetition of cosmogony -- is certainly more ancient, pre-agricultural. One finds it, with inevitable variations, among the Australians and among numerous tribes in North America. Among the paleocultivators and the agriculturalists the mythico-ritual of the New Year includes the return of the dead, and analogous ceremonies survive in classical Greece, among the ancient Germans, in Japan, etc."; p. 53 - 4.) The "return of the dead" is the recycling of the souls -- like the reincarnation of the ancestor spirits in the new generations -- so that the restoration of the cosmos after its entropic exhaustion means the restoration of everything in it, including the individual living beings: just as, because of entropy-increase, although none of the many things in one's bedroom may have disappeared, they do in time get into ever messier arrangement and a room thus needs periodic cleaning and re-arrangement of things therein so as to be kept orderly, brand-new; so now although the souls remain the same because of conservation, during the restoration of the cosmos they are once again put in good (orderly) arrangement away from equilibrium.

The origin of this cyclicity of time (restoration - entropic exhaustion -- restoration again) among the agriculturalists and hunting-gathering societies -- annually based or otherwise -- has been traced by Chris Knight (Blood Relations) to the primordial lunar-based cyclicity or periodicity governing the first human ritual, the sex-strike. We are here not only looking away from the usual explanation of the restoration ritual in terms of analogy with the vegetation cycle but also supplementing such materialist explanation (which is correct, but insufficient) as that of Knight's with the primitive awareness of thermodynamics therein (maintenance of an open dissipative structure) as the primary determinant, i.e. as the cognitive pre-condition. Thus is cast in the new light: "the Ice-Age hunting community's ritually structured schedule of work" -- procuring energy to pump into the social organism -- "and rest" -- restoration, enjoyment, and the beginning of entropic rolling-down-the-hill (A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History, Ch. 6. 2. "The Origin of the Sexual Division of Labor").

The idea of rituals as cyclically restorative is distinctively developed by Eliade in his Le sacré et le profane (Ch. II. "Le temps sacré et les mythes"; next chapter). Our (thermodynamic) interpretation differs from his in that whereas Eliade sees the Golden Age, the "mythic" time of plenitude (la plénitude primordiale), in the metaphysical manner as synchronically (and so always) co-present with the "real" (empirical) time which degenerates, so that ritual as restorative from degeneration becomes for him the "reintegration of the sacred time of origin", allowing us to become the "contemporaries of gods" ("Reintégrer le Temps sacré de l'origine, c'est devenir le 'contemporain des dieux', donc vivre en leur présence" for the moment of the ritual, that is; ibid., p. 79); we see the plenitude as diachronically, i.e. actually located at the beginning of time and rituals as physically allowing us to return to it in order to get ready for the next round of degeneration.

Elements in primitive (intraworld) religiosity that prefigure (extraworldly) salvation later on. Approaching the constitution of salvational consciousness is the use of sacrifice to purify the soul, which is experienced as incessantly degenerating as a matter of entropy-increase and as thus in need of periodic restoration. For example, Eliade (Histoire, p. 329) describes the soul-restoration rituals serving as the milieu for Zoroastrianism: "Suivant une interprétation récent, l'officiant acquiert, par le truchement du rite (yasna [i.e. sacrifice]), la condition de maga, c'est-à-dire qu'il jouit d'une expérience extatique [shamanistic ecstasy: soul leaving body] qui procure l'illumination (cisti). Durant cette illumination, le prêtre-sacrificateur parvient à séparer son essence spirituelle (menok) de sa nature corporelle (getik); autrement dit, il récupère la condition de pureté et d'innocence qui précédait le 'mélange' des deux essences [i.e. reincarnation; compare this with the Orphics]. Or, ce 'mélange' eut lieu à la suite de l'attaque d'Ahriman. Par conséquent, le sacrificateur contribue à la restauration de la situation primordiale..." The continued existence of the soul after death -- the foundation of shamanism or primitive religiosity in general -- naturally gives rise to the idea of karma (below) and reincarnation; but here the experience is already leaving the shamanistic and moving toward salvational consciousness since the prolonged contact of the breath-soul-consciousness, experienced as the ordered system or "local concentration", with earthly matter causes the former to be more and more dispersed among (i.e. to reach equilibrium with) the latter which -- as material -- is experienced as the dissoluted, equilibrium state: for now the order is temporarily re-stabilized (restored) away from equilibrium through energy-intake (the sacrificial food); here sacrifice's meaning as restaurant acquires the expiatory undertone: restoration from maximum entropic condition as washing away the stains of dispersion-disorder-equilibrium. But one wants to be saved from such entropic process and here the "entrapment" of the soul in the body is already experienced as an evil event (by Ahriman, the evil counterpart to Ahuramazda, the good, supreme god). Once periodic restoration gets stretched linearly into restoration once-and-for-all, then salvation-proper. (This salvation-approaching purification first starts disengaging itself from the cultic milieu in the Hellenic world among the mystery religions, and eventually completes itself in Plato's Phaedo, as will be seen later.)

Ritual as communicative Ritual as restorative must not be confused with ritual as communicative, e.g. divination, which looks often the same as the former on the surface. The purpose of the Innui rite of sweating, for example, is for divinatory purpose: the purification of the soul -- ridding it of material disorders that impede it -- in order to communicate with the "Master of animals" (le maitre des animaux; c.f. later). In general divination is: (1) inquiring the ancestor, such as before embarking on an adventurous enterprise, about whether the "energetic" (entropic) state of the cosmos will be favorable to (ensure the success of) the enterprise; (2) about the amount and details of the upcoming sacrifice in order to produce therewith the most favorable energetic state; (3) about the outcome of a certain crisis or illness as determined by the future energetic state of the cosmos; in other words, divination is directly or indirectly enquiry about the future energetic (entropic) state of the ancestor-cosmos whose optimal state it is the purpose of sacrifice to ensure. Much on this later.

The interchangeability between animals on the one hand and humans and ancestral spirits on the other is frequently observed in shamanism as well as in totemism. This is because both are based on animism. (Recall the Latin anima meaning "wind", then "soul", "spirit", and finally "animals"). Within shamanism however this feature seems most to do with divination. Since the ancestral spirits do not converse with living humans in the ordinary manner of human communication through speech (the atmosphere does not respond when a human asks it questions), a special manner of communication is sought for. Shamans all over (from the late neolithic and early bronze China through Siberia to Khoisan in Africa) tended to use animals as vehicles of communication between the world of the spirits and the world of the living, riding on them during ecstasy to "see" the ancestral spirits in the other world. They did so because of the divine nature within animals, which in totemism was literally considered to be the ancestors themselves. And to do the "riding" they either sacrificed animals before rituals in order to release the spirits in animals for riding (remember that the anima of animals is the ancestral spirit itself "breathed into", so to speak, the animals to animate them) or they dressed as animals or both.

Due to their incomprehension of religions modern scholars have the habit of subsuming ergonic rituals within the communicative rituals. A famous example is how Hubert and Mauss in consideration of the relationship between sacer and sacrificare tried to reduce the ergonic rituals of the Latins to communicative rituals. As Émile Benveniste summarizes: "[Le mémoire: Essai sur la nature et les fonctions du sacrifice, in M. Mauss, Oeuvres, t. I, 1968, p. 193 - 307] montre que le sacrifice est agencé pour que le profane communique avec le divin par l'intermédiaire du prêtre et au moyen des rites. Pour rendre la bête 'sacré', il faut la retrancher du monde des vivants, il faut qu'elle franchisse ce seuil qui sépare les deux univers; c'est le but de la mise à mort. De là la valeur, pour nous si profonde, du terme sacerdos, qui repose sur *sakro-dhōt-s, composé à l'aide de la racine *dhē- 'faire, poser', d'où 'rendre effectif, accomplir' (c.f. facio)." ("Sacré", Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, II, p. 188) Benveniste is here concerned with the question of why sacerdos ("making sacred": sacrifice) always somehow involved killing. But the function of sacrifice as the freeing of the anima for communication is secondary to the primary function of the freeing of the anima for restoration, of which we will later learn the three aspects: primordial sacrifice of the ancestor, communion and expiatory sacrifice. (This communication between the sacred and the profane is part of Hubert and Mauss' overall interpretation of sacrificial rituals as a "means of the complex interaction of sacralizing and desacralizing a victim, and correspondingly desacralizing and sacralizing a sacrificer", which we do not adopt. For a short summary, c.f. Bruce Chilton, The Challenge of Understanding Sacrifice from an Anthropological Perspective.)

Ritual as representational Loosely, the initiation rituals, by which the biological fact of growth (e.g. "adulthood") is integrated into the social fact (e.g. "belonging to the men's house"), belong here. Another example would be habituation to the new season through a ritual drama. In other words, any rituals performed as a theatrical representation of a fact in order to integrate it into the social realm. Cosmogonic rituals (such as those performed by the Australian aborigines in Dreaming, or even the Mesopotamian New Year festival and the Israelite equivalent at which Yahweh was enthroned), however, do not belong here, since their purpose is "ergonic" (the regeneration of the cosmic order).

-- We have thus explicitated the synchronic core of primitive religiousness. In addition to the memory of thermodynamics and the functional perspective, a third feature, the compactness (the undifferentiated state) of consciousness which is a function of the functional perspective, must be kept in mind in its consideration. The magical practices among the primitives, as for example analyzed by Freud as operating according to either metaphor or metonymy and unified in their commonality as "omnipotence of thought" (c.f. Totem and Taboo, Chapt. 3), are effects of an undifferentiated consciousness operating on the functional level and its consequent conception of order in terms of macrocosmo-microcosmic concentricism. Freud thus refers to the essence of magics as "mistaking an ideal connection for a real one",¹¹ or in other words the confusion or identity between representation and what is represented. The observation that an undifferentiation between the processes of mind and processes of nature is operative in magical practices of tribal people is certainly correct, but the nature of it must be more complex than simple confusion of the mind. It is here that the most usual, common sense explanation of the primitive mentality as manifestation of the immaturity of consciousness (psychological ego-centrism should we call it) belongs. E.g. "There is an universal tendency among [immature] mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious." (Hume, Natural History of Religion; section III)¹² Psychological explanations of this type, which frequently compare the mind of the primitive peoples with the mind of contemporary children, are not exactly "wrong", but simply miss the point, the reason why these primitives come to see so much of consciousness or personality in such natural phenomena as thunder, storm, river, sea, and moreover animal species: the conservation of consciousness or personality. (We will see later the true form of the parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny in the issue of religion.)

In the study of religions it is often said that the three principal constituents of religiousness are rituals, rules (e.g. taboo), and representations (myths and the artistic representations of gods): the three Rs in the French circle (rites, règles, et récits/ représentations). We'll deal with taboo later. The mental plane (the symbolic form) correlative with such method or praxis is the myth. Insofar as the components of the cosmos at this stage are: the cosmos, gods/ ancestral ghosts, human beings, and society (as tribe; adopting from Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age), the tentative structural components of myth should be:

• cosmogony (stories about the generation of the cosmos);
• theogony (... of gods);
• anthropogony (... of humans);
• historiogenesis (... of the human collective);

plus some others:

• origins of things, phenomena, and animals;
• tales of heroes;
• origins of human conditions (e.g. how man lost immortality);

Those dealing with the origin or generation of something are usually classed as etiological or explicative, and those with human conditions, ontological. Note that in our analysis the primitive, intraworld religiosity has three main components: ergonic (techniques that aim at the accomplishment or production of some concrete results, e.g. sacrifice or the ritual theatrical repetition of the cosmogonic drama), representational (rites that aim to represent an accomplished state of affairs: e.g. rites of passage), and communicative. These are not to be confused with the three components of religiosity of rites, rules, and representations-myths but rather cut across them all: rites can be either ergonic or representational, rules are purely ergonic (e.g. taboo as negatively ergonic: the avoidance of accomplishing a certain unwanted state of affairs), and representation (myths and "idols", etc.) is, well, representational.

Once the synchronic core of the mythic consciousness of Homo sapiens sapiens is thus exposed, we shall never consider such lines as: "The ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife"; or "The ancient Chinese engaged in ancestor cult". Which people don't? The superficial multiplicity of cult patterns in the ancient world and contemporary anthropological field shares the same foundation in the conviction of the necessary continuation of the soul after death, and no peoples on the primitive level of existence would fail to possess such conviction because it unfolds from the very structure of immature consciousness, cutting across humanity as the universal constant.

The loss of the "ergonic" meaning of religions in the contemporary religious studies. We wish to have shown that what may seem like a mysterious, inexplicable and irrational "symbolic" behavior of the early Homo sapiens sapiens can be easily understood as straight-forward common sense behavior -- without the need of resorting to some illusion-generating social pressure favored nowadays by the sociological trend in the study of religions -- if it is understood that, like us, they were applying the most obvious laws of nature but, unlike us, only on the functional level and not on the structural. Primitive religiousness is the method of maintenance of the order of existence proper to the early time; it is not yet salvational, for maintenance is periodic. Primitive religions are "intraworldly" (diesseitig), to use Weber's words. In the following essays on primitive, or rather pre-salvational, intraworld religions, when we consider rituals we will especially be focusing on the ergonic ones, as it is precisely this ergonic ("engineering") aspect of religiosity which the modern academic studies of religions have forgotten after their derailment into the "sociology of religion". The last person who still understood religions to a good extent was the masterful Max Weber, who even in his "Religionssoziologie" still hadn't completely replaced the ergonicity of primitive religiosity with the symbolic and (purely) sociological turn:

"Furthermore, religiously or magically motivated action is relatively rational action, especially in its earliest forms. Though it is not necessarily action in accordance with [our modern] means-end rationality, it follows rules of experience." Thus Weber points out the character of primitive ergonic rites as "pre-modern engineering" (to maintain their daily existence in "this world"): "Rubbing will elicit sparks from pieces of wood, and in like fashion the mimetic actions of a 'magician' will evoke rain from the heavens. The sparks which the twirling of the wooden sticks produces are as much a 'magical' effect as the rain evoked by the manipulations of the rainmaker." In a way, then, modern engineering is modern ergonic ritual. "Thus, religious or magical action or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive [means-and-end] action, particularly since the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic. Only we, judging from the standpoint of our modem views of nature, can distinguish objectively in such behavior those attributions of causality which are 'correct' from those which are 'incorrect,' and then designate the incorrect attributions of causality as irrational, and the corresponding acts as 'magic.'" As said, when the modern scholars of religion can no longer understand religions (see the "correctness" of the means-end rationality in them) but want to save those irrational and incorrect means-and-end actions from their irrationality or incorrectness, they turn these into 'symbolic', which is always correct (because it is self-referential). Let us elaborate on Weber's admonishment a little.

We have already mentioned the reason why the moderns can no longer understand religions (especially their ergonic aspects): that the "perspective" has so changed since primitive times and yet modern people are not aware that there have been different "perspectives"; "religion" corresponds to the earlier, or earliest, perspective of human consciousness, "philosophy" the next, and positivism and science, the latest -- which is why we revive here approximately Auguste Comte's theologic-metaphysic-positivist succession for the evolution of consciousness. (Even when "religions" have survived the whole-sale change in perspective, as said, they do so by upgrading their interior -- their experiential content -- to the new perspective so that they are no longer exactly what they are before: thus Catholicism is "philosophized" Christianity and Protestantism "positivist" Christianity, and both are not the same as the "original" Christian religion, as we shall see.) The symbolic and sociological approaches to the study of religion which today reign in our "departments of religious studies" arise from the projection of modern concerns onto the earlier stages of humanity in order to reinforce the dominant social and economic structures, just as the nineteenth century scholars' evolutionary schema had the covert aim of reinforcing Western imperialism at the time (as the contemporary scholars have criticized them) -- but unfortunately, the imperialist, evolutionary approach just happens to understand the primitive religious mentality better, condemnable the politics behind it may be. A prime example of the sociological-symbolic approach is Robert Bellah's definition of religion as "a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence" (Beyond Belief, p. 21). This definition is not just shallow for intraworld religions and irrelevant for salvational movements (despite his rather perceptive characterization of the latter) but misses altogether the ergonic aspect of intraworld religions. Bellah's definition is based on his variant of the sociological explication of religion as "the most general mechanism for integrating meaning and motivation in action systems" ("The Sociology of Religion" in ibid., p. 12) which is itself based on a cybernetic model and coming close to Clifford Geertz's ("A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic", cited, ibid.), Hervieu-Léger's (later), and also Peter Berger's (in The Sacred Canopy). (Note in addition the similarity between Geertz's conception of religion and Durkheim's and, lately, Christ Knight's.) We see this sort of sociological definition of religion as very unfortunate in the case of intraworld religions of tribal peoples (and it is to be completely rejected in the case of salvational movements). This sociological approach gets popular because the primordial human religious experience has been so forgotten and the perspective in which it is rooted so disintegrated that the explication of religion as some sort of worldview system moulding social behavior is the only imaginable approach left. The primordial human religious experience and that perspective in which it is rooted can only be explicated through a phenomenologico-cognitive approach (such as ours) which is no longer popular. The foremost important first step in the study of religion is then the reconstruction of the lost cognitive perspective -- that of "animism" in the proper sense: the atmosphere as endowed with consciousness ("soul") of ancestors and the divine, as "sacred" -- but in modern, especially scientific, language, by which we can again see, from our modern perspective, how people of the past can in good faith "see" spiritual beings, i.e. reasonably interpret the atmospheric and environmental phenomena as the "signs" thereof, and the needs to relate to these. Only thusly can religious phenomena again be allowed to show themselves (our "phenomenological approach"). The modern scholars of religion consistently fail to understand that people in the past practice religions and perform rituals because they believe these are true, i.e. because they believe they work (the ergonic sense). When these practices no longer appear true ("working") in the modern perspective, instead of reconstructing the earlier perspective in which they may appear true (e.g. a functional understanding of thermodynamics by a compact consciousness), the modern scholars try to save these by resorting to symbolic and sociological functions that these may have.

The fault of the other, socio-evolutionist approach among many contemporary anthropologists is equally pernicious in this respect. They might want to study religion by "model[ing] a systematic process in which hominids were driven to expend increasing time and energy on things that did not exist -- 'deceptions' entertained by groups of individuals" (Camilla Power, "Beauty Magic", in The Evolution of Culture, 1999, p.96) -- and by the "non-existent things" and deceptions she means the gods and ghosts the belief in which prompted, e.g. the typical Kalahari, to "subject themselves to considerable stress [through days at time] in entering altered states of consciousness -- having spent many years in developing the skills required. Around this activity they weave elaborate ideologies of experiencing death, changing into animals and roaming in that form across the desert to visit friends and relatives" (p. 95). The underlying assumption is equally that gods and ghosts do not exist (from the contemporary perspective), that tribal humans live in the same perspective as we urbanized moderns, so that they must be "deceiving" themselves, i.e. forcing themselves to see what they don't see. What if, once the perspective changes, you do see the movements of the atmosphere as "ghosts" and "spirits"? The (erroneous) objectification of consciousness-life as a thing (the two confused together already as the unified "soul") and the (mis-)identification of this consciousness-life with the perceived principle of life (breath), together with the (correct) understanding of thermodynamics (continuation of the self after death): these (as we have described above) clearly allow the primitives to reasonably assume a consubstantiality of the self-soul with the atmosphere and that the soul-breath (anima) can leave the body, blend into the atmosphere ("Cosmic Pneuma"), enter into animals to "animate" them (hence they are called "animae"), or otherwise visit the deceased who subsist as souls within the atmospheric "substratum" of all: all the themes of animism. Unaware of the possibility of a perspective in which gods and spirits can exist as immediate sense-data, the anthropologist, wishing to save their subjects from stupidity and irrationality, thus only considers how the religious comportment may arise to consolidate the unity of human society and so aide human survival or -- since religious behaviour clearly does not directly help survival and is evolutionarily burdensome -- to further the reproductive success of its participants (sexual selection). Rather, although it probably did arise in evolutionary context, human religiosity soon went on its own path -- it subsists not because it helps in natural or sexual selection but simply because humans have enough material resources at hands to allow them to waste some of it on religious activities in which they engage themselves simply because they believe in their truthfulness, conditioned by their thermodynamic understanding and all the other factors. In another evolutionist example, Steven Mithen has referred to religious beliefs as a "mental spandrel -- a by-product of other cognitive features which are of adaptive value but which contribute nothing in themselves, and do not incur costs of sufficient magnitude to cause a loss of reproductive fitness." ("Symbolism and the Supernatural", Dunbar et al ed., ibid., p. 157) We certainly agree that religious system has the by-product of social solidarity, which contributes to its bearers' adaptability and reproductivity, and therefore the survivability of religion itself; but this kind of "materialist" approach, from the sociological of Durkheim through that of Bellah and Berger to the contemporary socio-evolutionary way, completely ignores religious experience -- because these "researchers" simply cannot understand it, cannot see how anyone can in good faith possibly experience gods and spiritual beings -- and therefore destroys our understanding of religion instead of contributing to it. They, born from the age of the "de-animization" of the cosmos (the foundation of what Weber refers to as the Entzauberung der Welt), can only see molecules and atomic elements in the air and the environment around, never "spirits", and so try to dismiss away the primitive beliefs in "spirits" as illusions generated by social or evolutionary pressure.

Footnotes:

12. See also August Comte, in connection with the first stage of his "evolution of human consciousness", the theological, whose characteristic trait is: "Ce besoin primitif [le recherche de l'origine de toutes choses] se trouve naturellement satisfait, autant que l'exige une telle situation, et même, en effet, autant qu' il puisse jamais l'être, par notre tendance initiale à transporter partout le type humain, en assimilant tous les phénomènes quelconques à ceux que nous produisons nous-mêmes, et qui, à ce titre, commencent par nous sembler assez connus, d' après l'intuition immédiate qui les accompagne." (Discours sur l'esprit positif) Also, Joseph Campbell, a more recent pronouncement: "We have noted that in the world of the infant the solicitude of the parents conduces to a belief that the universe is oriented to the child's own interest and ready to respond to every thought and desire. This flattering circumstance not only reinforces the primary indissociation between inside and out, but even adds to it a further habit of command, linked to an experience of immediate effect. The resultant impression of an omnipotence of thought -- the power of thought, desire, a mere nod or shriek, to bring the world to heel -- Freud identified as the psychological base of magic, and the researches of Piaget and his school support this view... And as we know, this infantile notion (or something much like it) of a world governed rather by moral than by physical laws... is an illusion that dominates men's thought in most parts of the world -- or even most men's thoughts in all parts of the world -- to the very present. We are dealing here with a spontaneous assumption, antecedent to all teaching, which has given rise to, and now supports, certain religious and magical beliefs..." Primitive Mythology: The Masks of God, p. 80-1.