II.

Primitive Religions

The varieties of feeling and behaviour known as primitive religion constitute a type of consciousness that Western civilization has lost.

A.

Internal and External World

The main feature of primitive religious consciousness, as studied among peoples such as the Polynesians or Africans, is the absence of any sharp boundary between the spiritual and the natural world, and thus between the human mind or ego and the surrounding world. The French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called this absence of boundary participation mystique (“mystical participation”), denoting a sense of fusion between the human organism and its environment. This feeling may be described as corresponding on its own level with the modern intellectual grasp of humanity's interrelationship with nature in the science of ecology. A similar absence of boundary prevails also between the worlds of waking experience and dream, and between the individual will and the spontaneous emotions and drives of the psyche. As a result the whole external world is charged with powers that may be called mental or spiritual. Material objects, as stable and comprehensible features of the external world, do not exist, for everything seems to behave as whimsically as the events in dreams. Uncontrolled as the contents of experience may be in this state of mind, they would appear to be so lively, mysterious, and fascinating, as well as terrifying, that the whole of nature is suffused with an atmosphere of the awesome and uncanny. The German religious historian Rudolf Otto referred to such an atmosphere as the “numinous”.

B.

Numinous Atmosphere

Basically, the numinous atmosphere is attached to the entire natural world and every object within it. A good example may be seen in Shinto, a present-day “primitive” religion practised in the sophisticated civilization of Japan. The Japanese term shinto (Japanese shin, “spirit”) means “the way of the gods” or “the way of spirit”. In the view of Shinto, every rock, tree, animal, and stream has its own shin or kami (Japanese, “god” or “goddess”). It is, however, misleading to call the kami a god in any Western sense of the word; similarly, the term shin means “spirit” only in an extremely vague sense, for it is used often simply as an exclamation similar to “Wonderful!” Shinto has no system of doctrine, no creed, and no formulated religious ideas; it is fundamentally concerned with expressing wonder, respect, and awe for everything that exists. This concern involves treating everything as if it were a person, not always in the sense that it is inhabited by some humanlike ghost or spirit, but in the sense of having a mysterious and independent life of its own that may not be taken for granted.

Obviously some things such as the sun, the moon, the ocean, and certain mountains and places of peculiar strangeness or beauty seem more highly charged with the numinous atmosphere than others. As the intensity of the numinous at particular spots differs, so the qualities or aspects of the atmosphere itself differ. Anthropologists commonly use the Polynesian words mana and taboo to typify the positive and negative aspects of the numinous. When it appears as mana, it is potent and useful, but when as taboo, it is fearsome and forbidden.

In primitive religions not only external things and places but also human beings are, on occasion, felt to be charged with the numinous in a peculiar way. The type of person gifted with special access to the mana or power-aspect of the world in such religions is the shaman or medicine man or woman. This role is significantly different from that of the priest or minister of such a religion as Christianity, for the power of the shaman is not traditional but personal in origin. It is his or her own peculiar discovery, brought forth in solitude from commerce with dreams.

The numinous is more than the sensation of awe and mystery in the presence of an uncanny world. The absence of a clear boundary between the human mind and its environment, in a world in which both inner and outer events seem merely to happen, brings ecstasies as well as fears. Among the Navajo, for example, this enthralling aspect of the numinous is called hozon, a term referring to a sensation of intense beauty and peace that may be evoked by rituals of chanting, dancing, and sand painting. Such rituals of sympathetic magic, whether for evoking hozon, rain, or fertile crops, have their origin in the same sense of fusion between the human and the natural world and between the events of the mind and the events of the outside world.

C.

Ritual

Ritual plays a major part in primitive cultures, although it is not recognizable to them as in any way different from so-called practical activity. It is rather an attempt to influence or harmonize oneself with the course of nature by dramatized or symbolic enactment of such fundamental events as the daily rising and setting of the sun, the alternation of the seasons, the changing phases of the moon, and the annual planting and harvesting of crops. Moreover, ritual is the acting out of the great mythical themes that, in these cultures, take the place of religious doctrines. Ritual, as found in primitive religions, might therefore be described as an art form expressing and celebrating humanity's meaningful participation in the affairs of the universe and the gods.

In cultures wherein this type of feeling about the world prevails, no department of life is specifically recognizable as religion. Everything is permeated by religion; indeed, religion is so involved with everyday life that it is impossible to distinguish the sacred from the secular. Only greater and lesser degrees of the sacred exist. Religion as a specific activity does not exist, and members of such cultures would have the greatest difficulty in talking about their religion. They would have no way of distinguishing the rituals for successful hunting from what Western culture would call the pure technique of hunting. Symbolic forms on spears, boats, and household utensils are not for them supernumary decorations but functional parts of the object, evoking mana for their effective use.

D.

Myth

Similarly, such cultures have no religious doctrine or abstract concepts about the nature of the numinous and its difference from everything else. Spirit is a feeling rather than an idea; the language most appropriate to it consists not of concepts but of images. Thus, instead of religious doctrine there is myth, or an unsystematic complex of stories handed down from generation to generation because such tales are felt in some undefined way to represent the meaning of the world. According to the earliest anthropological interpretations of myth, such as that of the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer, the mythical gods and heroes personify the heavenly bodies, the elements, and the so-called spirits of the crops and herds, and myths are naive explanations of the ways of nature. A later interpretation is that of the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, who suggested that myths are based on dreams and fantasies giving concrete expression to unconscious psychological processes. According to Jung, the psychological unconscious, like the human body, has more or less the same structure among all peoples; this uniformity accounts for the astonishing resemblances between mythological themes in unconnected cultures throughout the world. He felt further that these unconscious processes shape people's mental and spiritual growth and that for this reason mythological imagery and its enactment in ritual is a kind of wisdom for the direction of life. Thus, when a tribal dance is believed to assist the rising of the sun, the enactment of the rite gives the members of the tribe a sense of meaning, that is, of playing a significant part in the life of the entire universe.

A somewhat similar explanation of myth was offered in his studies of Indian and Indonesian culture by the Sri Lankan scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, who felt that the great mythical themes are parables of a timeless philosophy, an intuitive knowledge of human nature and destiny that has always been available to those who truly wish to plumb the depths of the human mind. The American philosopher Susanne K. Langer holds that myth affords the earliest example of general ideas and therefore of metaphysical thinking. According to Langer, language is better fitted to express new ideas by metaphorical than by literal means. The assumption that solar and fertility myths are rudimentary attempts to explain natural forces, as science explains them, must probably be abandoned. Just as the myth-making cultures do not distinguish between spirit and nature, or religion and life, neither do they discriminate symbolic truth or fantasy from literal truth or fact. It is not a matter of confusing myth with fact, for the idea of the literal fact has not yet arisen.