Chapter 2. Before Scripture: Prehistoric, Shamanic and Archaic Religion

The religions studied in this book come with texts, but religion is far older than writing. For tens of thousands of years before the Rigveda or the Gathas, people buried their dead, painted caves, carved figurines and raised monuments of stone. This chapter sets out what the library’s sources say that evidence shows, where they disagree, and which theories of the origin of religion they bring to it. Two of its themes reappear in the Indo-Iranian inheritance: sacrifice as an exchange between hunter and prey, and the power of the dead (see ch. 6).

The problem of mute evidence

Mircea Eliade, whose History of Religious Ideas the library holds in Romanian translation, argues that the burden of proof lies with those who deny religion to early humans. If palaeanthropes were “complete humans”, he writes, they had beliefs and rites, because “the experience of the sacred constitutes an element in the structure of consciousness”. He traces the opposite view to the age of evolutionism, “when the analogies with the primates were being discovered”. He is just as clear about what the evidence cannot show: “beliefs and ideas are not fossilisable.” The documents are “numerous, but ‘opaque’ and little varied”: bones, skulls, stone tools, red ochre, grave goods. Before the Aurignacian (c. 30,000 BCE), the tools “reveal nothing beyond their utilitarian value” [Eliade, Istoria credințelor și ideilor religioase, #44122, ch. I §2].

To illustrate the gap, Eliade cites C. Reichel-Dolmatoff’s account of a Kogi burial in Colombia in 1966. The shaman called the grave “the village of Death”, “the ceremonial house of Death” and “the uterus”, raised the body nine times to return it to the foetal state, and laid it with its head to the east. An archaeologist of the future, Eliade notes, would find only a skeleton, some stones and shells, and the symbolism would be “just as inaccessible” as that of a Palaeolithic grave [#44122, ch. I §3]. The anthropologist Adam Kuper, quoted by the folklorist Juliette Wood, makes the same point about social forms: “There are no fossils of social organization” [Wood, “The concept of the Goddess”, in Billington and Green (eds), The Concept of the Goddess, #50933, ch. 1].

Burials, ochre and bones

Eliade dates certain burials from the Mousterian (c. 70,000–50,000 BCE). He reads the strewing of red ochre, “a ritual substitute for blood, hence a ‘symbol’ of life”, as evidence of belief in survival after death. The practice, he says, is found from Zhoukoudian to Tierra del Fuego. He cites the child at Teshik-Tash framed by a pair of wild-goat horns, the flint tools and ochre at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, and graves oriented to the east, which he links to the hope of a “re-birth” [#44122, ch. I §3]. He also records doubts: André Leroi-Gourhan found the evidence for personal grave goods “very debatable”, and the reading of a Neanderthal skull at Monte Circeo as ritual cannibalism “was not unanimously accepted” [#44122, ch. I §3].

The cave-bear skulls of Drachenloch and other Alpine caves were for decades read as offerings to a Supreme Being or a Master of Animals, notably by Wilhelm Schmidt and W. Koppers. F. Ed. Koby argued that many such “deposits” were produced by chance and by the bears themselves, and Leroi-Gourhan agreed. Eliade finds the critique “convincing” but notes that the same arrangement recurs in niches more than a metre above the floor. He reports Johannes Maringer’s conclusion that sacrifice is not attested in the Lower Palaeolithic, is ambiguous in the Middle, and appears “with more or less certainty” only in the late Palaeolithic [#44122, ch. I §4]. Eliade himself holds that among hunters killing the animal “is equivalent to a sacrifice in which hunter and victim are interchangeable”. He also points to the belief that an animal can be reborn from its bones, which survives as late as Thor’s goats and Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones [#44122, ch. I §1, §4].

Painted caves and the shaman

The parietal art is limited to Spain, France and southern Italy, apart from one painted cave in the Urals. Its content, Eliade quotes Leroi-Gourhan, shows an “extraordinary unity” from c. 30,000 to 9,000 BCE. Because the paintings lie far from the entrances, often in uninhabitable depths such as the six-metre shaft at Lascaux, scholars agree in treating the caves as sanctuaries [#44122, ch. I §5]. Interpretations differ. The “Great Sorcerer” of Trois-Frères was made famous by the Abbé Breuil’s drawing, but Eliade notes that recent photographs do not show all the elements Breuil drew. The Lascaux shaft scene of a man lying before a wounded bison was read by Horst Kirchner as a shamanic séance, with the bird on a pole as the shaman’s helping spirit. Leroi-Gourhan, by contrast, saw only a bird “symbolically equivalent” to its neighbours on the panel [#44122, ch. I §5–6].

Eliade concedes that he cannot judge Kirchner’s thesis, yet holds that “the existence of a certain type of ‘shamanism’ in the Palaeolithic seems certain”. His reason is that ecstatic experience, “as an original phenomenon, is constitutive of the human condition” [#44122, ch. I §5]. His monograph defines the phenomenon in its “least hazardous” form: “shamanism = technique of ecstasy” [Eliade, Șamanismul și tehnicile arhaice ale extazului, #48975]. The reference shelf records the later reaction. Ronald Hutton argued that Eliade ignored “varieties of native practitioner”, oversimplified Siberian cosmology and was “intent on generalizations”. Wendy Doniger, defending him, still placed his work “within a body of assumptions that we no longer accept” [Wikipedia: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy].

The female figurines and the Mother Goddess debate

The so-called “Venus” figurines, a name Eliade calls “rather improper”, range from south-western France to Lake Baikal. He gives most weight to the excavated house contexts at Gagarino, Mezin and Mal’ta, where female figures came only from the half of the dwelling reserved for women. He concludes that “it is impossible to specify the religious function of these figurines”, although they probably represented “feminine sacrality”. [#44122, ch. I §6]. For the Neolithic he reports James Mellaart’s findings at Çatal Hüyük. The principal deity there is a goddess “presented under three aspects: young woman, mother giving birth to a child (or a bull), and old woman”, and one shrine of about 6200 BCE held “four human skulls placed under bull heads fixed in the wall” [#44122, ch. II].

Advocates of a prehistoric Goddess religion read the same material as the record of a lost order. Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor state that “at least forty shrines have been found in Çatal Hüyük, all of the Goddess”. In the catalogue’s summary, their book describes a Goddess religion “systematically suppressed by the rise of patriarchal culture” [Sjöö and Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, #51023, “Women’s Culture and Religion in Neolithic Times”]. Juliette Wood sets out the critical case. Marija Gimbutas’s theories are “central” to the literal Goddess position, she writes, and that position reproduces the evolutionary models of Tylor and Frazer: “in her universality and persistence, the Goddess resembles Frazer’s Dying God, resuscitated once again and cross-dressed.” The difference, Wood argues, is that change becomes “de-evolutionary”, with the past as “a lost paradise” and the future as “a possible utopia”. She separates this literal claim from metaphorical uses of the Goddess, to which critics have “no objection” [Wood, #50933, ch. 1].

Göbekli Tepe and the first monuments

Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey has altered the debate over whether religion followed or preceded farming. Yuval Noah Harari writes that its structures “are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by hunter-gatherers”. He infers that “the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it” [Harari, Sapiens, #62741, ch. 5 “History’s Biggest Fraud”]. David Graeber and David Wengrow call the enclosures “massive”. They deny that the site is an anomaly, citing “a great deal of evidence for monumental construction” among earlier hunter-gatherers. They also report that archaeologists “remain sceptical” of astronomical readings, since the buildings “may once have been roofed” and were often altered [Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, #87533, ch. 3].

The reference shelf reflects more recent fieldwork. It reports domestic structures, “extensive cereal processing” and cisterns. This “contrasts with a previous interpretation of the site as a sanctuary used by nomads”. It concludes that “no definitive purpose has been determined” for the megaliths, popularly called the “world’s first temple[s]” [Wikipedia: Göbekli Tepe]. Alternative authors in the library go further. J. Douglas Kenyon presents the site as “challenging conventional history in an unprecedented way” [Kenyon, Ghosts of Atlantis, #63645]. Andrew Collins and Gregory Little place it in an account of Denisovan “hybrid humans” and compare it with “Mound Builder beliefs” [Collins and Little, Denisovan Origins, #70740].

Megaliths and the cult of the dead

Eliade’s chapter on the megaliths of Atlantic Europe distinguishes menhir, cromlech and dolmen. He describes the dolmens as “funerary monuments”, some containing up to a hundred dead “of several generations of the same gens“. While the farmers’ houses were “modest and ephemeral”, the “dwellings of the dead were built in stone”. He reads this through an Indonesian myth, taken from Frazer, in which the first humans chose the banana over the stone and so received short lives. In death, he argues, the ancestors were “mystically associated with the blocks of stone” and became “powerful and indestructible like the rocks”. This cult differs from Mesopotamian, Hittite, Hebrew and Greek views, in which the dead were “poor unhappy and powerless shades” [#44122, ch. V §34]. He also records a Neolithic cult of skulls, for example at Tell Ramad in Syria, where skull caps were found with the forehead painted red and the face over-modelled [#44122, ch. II].

Theories of the origin of religion

The prehistoric record has been read through every theory reviewed in chapter 1. Tylor traced religion to dreams of the dead. Müller traced it to awe before nature. Frazer placed magic before religion. Durkheim found the source of religion in society itself, symbolised by the clan’s totem [Wikipedia: Theories about religion; Wikipedia: Sociology of religion]. Schmidt and Koppers read the bear skulls as proof that Palaeolithic hunters believed in a Supreme Being [#44122, ch. I §4]. Durkheim objected that both animism and naturism build the divine from sensations of natural phenomena [Durkheim, Formele elementare ale vieții religioase, #83739]. Eliade’s own position is that Homo faber was also “ludens, sapiens and religiosus“. Silence about Palaeolithic belief, he warns, would encourage the error that early minds did nothing but conserve technology [#44122, ch. I §2]. Alan Barnard’s survey of current anthropology adds newer proposals, among them Barbara King’s “recent theory of the origin of religion” [Barnard, Social Anthropology and Human Origins, #32713, ch. 6].

Key points

• Eliade argues that early humans were “religiosus” but that “beliefs and ideas are not fossilisable”. His Kogi example shows how much ritual meaning a grave can lose.
• Ochre and oriented burials are read as belief in survival. Grave goods, cannibalism and bear-skull “altars” are disputed, and Maringer finds sacrifice clearly attested only in the late Palaeolithic.
• The painted caves are generally treated as sanctuaries. The shamanic reading (Kirchner, Eliade) stands against Leroi-Gourhan’s structural reading and Hutton’s later critique of Eliade.
• The female figurines and Çatal Hüyük underpin the Mother Goddess thesis (Gimbutas, Sjöö and Mor). Wood argues it revives Frazer’s evolutionism as a story of loss.
• Göbekli Tepe (c. 9500 BCE) is presented by Harari as a temple built before farming. Graeber and Wengrow deny it is an anomaly, and the reference shelf reports evidence of settlement and an undetermined purpose.
• Eliade reads the megaliths as a cult of powerful ancestors embodied in imperishable stone, unlike the powerless shades of the Near East and Greece.
• Origin theories (animism, naturism, magic, totemism, a Supreme Being, the sacred as a structure of consciousness) all claim the prehistoric record, and none is settled by it.