Prehistory and Sentiment
Paulo J S Bittencourt
In a very rich and thought-provoking approach to the field of Cognitive Archeology, (The Prehistory of the Mind: A search for the origins of Art, Religion and Science), Steven Mithen hypothesizes that the origins of art and religion are associated with a frenzy of cultural activity, corresponding to the beginnings of the final phase of our architectural history of the mind. This phenomenon would date back to the big bang of human culture, during the transition from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic ages. In fact, the complexity of this transition leads us to confirm the existence of “a series of cultural sparks that occurred at different times and in different parts of the world, between sixty and thirty thousand years ago.” Mithen conceives totemism – that is, the belief that animals, plants or objects would constitute symbols or ancestors, by kinship or mystical affinity, of a human collective – as a consequence of the cognitive fluidity of the modern mind between the so-called social and naturalistic intelligences, which, in the archaic mind, operated separately. The quintessential manifestation of this harmonious integrity would be anthropomorphic thinking.
The ivory figurine, from Hohlenstein-Stadel in southeastern Germany, shows a lion’s head and a human body. Images like this permeate, Mithen warns us, the art of almost all hunter-gatherer societies, and even those who make their living from agriculture, commerce and industry. Unfortunately, we can only conjecture about the “inner” meanings of these images. It is impossible to reconstruct the religious ideologies of early Upper Paleolithic societies, as we have no access to the lost mythological world of the prehistoric mind. We therefore always run the risk of attributing meanings to images that are temporally and spatially distant in relation to the conditions that inspired it. In fact, as the Frenchman André Leroi-Gourham emphatically argued, the “religious” balance “(…) remains until now very poor and it is difficult to understand how, having such materials at their disposal, certain authors were able to consider bone deposits as proof of religious practices. The impression that constantly emerges from essays on prehistoric religion is that of a forced use of documents that have nothing positive to say about the particular point of religion.”
We have to be content, therefore, with interpreting the “external” meaning of the material culture produced by groups of hunter-gatherers, cautious in interpretive reconstructions through an above all prudent and cautious attitude. In any case, it is possible to gauge the fundamental mechanisms of the mind’s operations in the religious phenomenon from primordial manifestations of belief. Archaeological evidence from the early Upper Paleolithic, such as art and graves, provides evidence of a set of the most common properties of religions: the idea of survival of some non-physical component after death and its continuance as a being with beliefs and desires; the assumption that certain people in a society are more likely to receive direct inspirations or messages from supernatural spheres, such as gods or spirits; the execution of certain rituals in a precise way as a way of causing changes in the natural world. The existence of non-physical entities brings with it transgressions of biological and physical intuitive knowledge. They may have bodies, but they often do not go through the normal life cycles (birth, growth, reproduction, death and deterioration). They can also violate intuitive physics by being able to pass through solid objects or simply be invisible. They tend to harbor, however, some fundamentally intuitive aspects. Without a doubt, the one that most stands out as basic to all religions, already mentioned in relation to totemism, is the belief in the intentionality of these spiritual entities, as occurs with normal human beings. In this sense, they can be cunning or disingenuous, suffer from jealousy and rivalry. The ambiguity of violations and conformities in relation to intuitive knowledge as a defining element of supernatural entities would characterize, according to Pascal Boyle, the peculiar nature of religious phenomena.
In short, religions would be fables; They may not be true, but, Nancy Huston reminds us, they are effective. The followers adhere to them, and behave accordingly. It is impossible to say, in a certain sense, that God does not exist. All we can really say is “that it exists nowhere else outside of human heads. But existing at this point, in so many human heads, is a huge existence!” There would then be “two types of truth: the objective, whose results can be compared with the real (sciences, techniques, everyday life) and the subjective, which we access only through inner experience (myths, religions, literature)”.
How can we neglect, without further ado, a route of access to knowledge of one of the inner experiences that has permeated, to such a large extent, all time and space in human history?
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Professor Paulo Bittencourt is a brilliant teacher of Ancient and Medieval History at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul UFFS [Erechim Campus], Brazil. He contributes articles regularly, and is a columnist of a periodical too. He has several books to his credit. He is an ardent student of Vedanta.