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The Study of Archaic Religion

Within comparative religion studies the category "archaic religion" was launched in 1964 by the sociologist Robert Bellah (see below. He proposed a clear definition of "archaic" specifying a type of symbol system dominant in a specific type of society in a specific time period which followed Previously "archaic" was often used in several vague senses as ancient, primitive, pagan The archaic stage of the religious life, dating from about 8,000 BCE to 1,000 BCE, is found worldwide. Comparative religion studies most often say that it follows the primitive stage and precedes the historical stage of the great world religions. It peaked after 3,000 BCE in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as India, China and Japan, but the aracic pattern flourished later among the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, and native American peoples. Disputes remain as to the essential nature of archaic religion so rather than siding with any one interpretation, the following summarizes six slightly different perspectives from which to view the many facets of this bedrock religious pattern.

Robert Bellah's Sociological Perspective

Archaic religious life differs in striking ways from the primitive. In primitive settings one finds no towns or cities, no writing, literacy or teachers, no specialized craft-differentiation. The economy depends upon hunting and gathering with little domestication of animals. There are no gods in the religious symbol system, only spirits and totemic ancestors. Their religious action has no sacrifice, only dances for fertility, or the”walkabout” to visit ancestral totem's ”stopping places,” and to reconnect or fuse. It is a one class society. There is little leverage for social change. An archaic world is more far more differentiated. It has settled living in villages, towns and cities. It has writing, agriculture, craft-specialization, gods, priests, sacrifices and two classes in society—patrician kings and priests on the one hand, plebeian commoners on the other. The symbol system still lacks the idea of two worlds—this world and the other. Gods are almost within reach in caves, clouds, mountains, wilderness and temples. In a primitive setting, the world is a “one possibility thing,” but in the archaic tensions between classes occasioned social change. Also, priests, by using augury, divination and omen-reading to make moral decisions, exercised leverage for social reform. The archaic created large scale warfare and geographically extensive empires. It is also available on line through J stor.

Owen Barfield's Psychological Perspective

Barfield emphasizes that the archaic age was above all defined by people living in a psychological sense of “original participation” Barfield defined original participation as “the sense that there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from me, ...something of like nature with me...psychic and voluntary.”. Hence, consciousness and matter always dwelt together in any phenomenal object; they co-mingled or “participated.” The physical form of a mountain was not just a physical thing; It was the appearance of the mountain god who dwelt in it or lurked around it; it was the god's body or image--his/her appearance. Similarly, the sun, moon, earth, rocks, rivers and the rice growing in lakes and rivers were manifestations of divine beings with feelings and will. Furthermore, through “invisible silver threads,” as it were, gods could emit powers into fetish objects, thereby charging special sticks, stones or weeds with the power to heal or curse. And they also beamed ino you, too, personality traits, moods and illnesses. If you felt quick, it was Mercury; if melancholy, Saturn; if combative, Mars; if expansive, Jupiter; if loving, Venus. To them the seven spheres of heaven were draped around them like a cloak. Pre-perspectival art expressed this sense of envelopment and permeability. The impermeable individual, the modern sense of an islanded, walled-off ego, arose for most only during the Renaissance in the late stages of the evaporation of original participation. Art styles and subjects changed after 1400 and became humanistically centered. Language changed, too. All archaic word-meanings had this primordial participation built into them. So hearing the word “tree” called to mind a spirit-appearance. That was what the signifier signified. The Sioux word for the cottonwood tree (wagachun) called to mind that one of the standing peoples who liked tobacco smoke and gave courage when used as the center pole for the sun dance. Likewise, they “minted” all the phenomena of their world from the controlling agreement that matter and consciousness participated everywhere. Before modernity, words carried a sense of participation. We today use unparticipated words to construct items in our world. We figurate “its,” not “thous.” We cannot feel that a tree is a god-spirit; but given the inherent connotations of their words, they could not help feeling it.

Henri Frankfort's Philosophical Perspective

This Dutch archaeologist (b. 1897), anthropologist and cultural historian specializing in ancient Egypt, stresses the limitations of archaic thinking. They lived before the dawn of philosophical thinking. They had great powers of imagination and thought a lot but within the box of a mythopoeic mode of thought (myth-making). They exhibit five habits of thought that we have largely dropped. First, concepts were substantialized—were imagined as physically existing. “Life,” for example, was felt to be a glob, like putty, adhering to a person somewhere inside, like oatmeal sticking to your ribs. Similarly with luck, eloquence, courage or a sense of justice. By ritually eating corn bread each morning, the pharaohs of Egypt were thought to imbibe justice, since corn bread was an appearance of the goddess of justice, Ma'at. Second, they made any association between two things into a possible causal explanation. Every resemblance of appearance, color or sound—every contact in space or time, establishes a connection. If a pregnant woman saw snake's heads raised up in a Pueblo Kiva ceremony, this might cause the fetus to raise its head and be born the wrong way. Sticking a pin in a voodoo doll might actually pierce the person resembling the doll. Sympathetic and contagious magic were thus part of archaic associationist thinking. A common form of causal association was “predicate confusion.” Here any two things sharing the same predicate were associated and therefore might be seen as the same thing or even the whole class of things. A black cat, the black plague and a black knight might all be bringers of death, expressions of the god of death. Or all red heads might have a fiery temper. Third, they did not insist on one logical explanation for something as has been fashionable since the time of Greek philosophy. They accepted many emotionally satisfying explanations of how the sun got up in the sky and juxtaposed them side by side in their texts. Fourth, Frankfort, like Lucien Levy-Bruhl, asserts that they were indifferent to “secondary causation,” that is, non-spirit explanations. They explained things straight away by reference to spirits. Fifth, they experienced emotional, qualitative time and space, not space or time in general. Mythopoeic thought does not abstract out a general concept of space as uniform measurement units, or of time as uniform duration. Localities have emotional color—alien, friendly, sacred. Different times and different qualities of light during the day, have different spirits in them. They do not ever speak of a succession of qualitatively indifferent moments of time, or homogeneous, even space.

Mythopoeic thought also lacked five distinctions that are built into modern thought. First, they had not reached the stage of effectively differentiating between appearance and reality. Dream experiences were not taken to be less real than waking experiences. To be effective was to be real. Second, mythopoeic thought lacks a distinction between a symbol and what it stood for. They did not conceive of symbols as signifying yet being separate from objects. They did not consider that the connecting relationship was only established in their minds and was separate from the objects. Thus, a person's name was an essential part of him, not just a symbolic, mental connection having nothing to do, really, with the person. A lock of hair is pregnant with the whole significance of the person. Third , there was no distinction between a real act and a ritual one. Ritual bowls with the names of hostile kings on them were solemnly smashed with the object that enemies should die. Egyptians felt that real harm was done by the destruction of their names. They also sought to destroy detrimental dreams, plans, thoughts, rumors, as we would say, “ritually.” Ritual acts like anointing the bricks used for a building were a part of construction on the same footing as other work, and there were rituals, addressed to gods, for firing the bricks and mixing in the straw. Fourth, it lacks the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge. Ancient man did not have alongside his sense perceptions another set of conceptions about what was really happening which he regarded as more true than his sense perceptions. Fifth, they lacked a distinction between specific events and general laws that were impersonal, mechanical, necessary. Instead of the natural law conception of nature, they had “the dramatic conception of nature.” For them, the succession of seasons and the movement of heavenly bodies were conceived as the signs of a life and will. The change from day to night was caused by a will. An event such as a storm was always the result of a willed action of some god or demon, possibly part of a fight between the two. Through rituals, humans would try to help divine forces.

Frankfort concludes, “Mythopoeic thought knows only life, The world is not inanimate or empty, but redundant with life—every thunderclap, shadow, cloud, or unknown clearing in the wood has individuality and confronts man as a 'Thou.' It is not that he 'peoples' inanimate things with spirits; he simply does not know the inanimate. All is experienced as life confronting life.”

Brede Kristensn's Phenomenological Perspective

Kristensen (1875–1950), a Norwegian expatriate to Holland and lifelong student of the ancient Near East, says that the key to grasp early archaic religious life is to see that what they really worshiped was the the Infinite Self-Renewing Life of the Earth. This was the sort of permanent, underlying kind of life that could die and come back to life again like the brown grass and barren trees annually did. They saw this power springing from the Great Mother Goddess deep in the Earth. More than early primitive animism or later sky-god polytheism, the Great Mother, says Kristensen, dominated archaic religion. The famous Venus of Willendorf statuette of a pregnant woman, dating from 22,000 BCE, is probably the Great Mother Goddess. Goddess worship expressed itself principally in extreme, sacred respect for the many lesser, finite bearers of the earth's Life. Water, for example, could revive the life of drooping plants so it must carry an unusual measure of earth's Life. The water god may acually have been seen as a god by virtue of participating in the more fundamental life of the earth. So also many other gods. One could read the whole of Frankfort's book on Ancient Egyptian Religion in the light of this supposition and it would make great sense out of many puzzling matters. At any event, later on Holy water came into religious use. Blood, too, seemed to have more of Life than most things. Blood, shed, led to death. Blood retained in pregnancy led to new life. Bull's blood was sprinkled on the earth to increase its fertility. Again, horns died, were shed, and then grew gloriously back; hair and finger nails also continued to grow on the body even after death so they too must be special, finite, visible bearers of the Goddess's Life. Cave temples all around the Mediterranean had “the gate of horn” at their entrance. When Samson lost his long hair he lost his strength, an Old Testament echo of archaic sensibility and so also perhaps the Shofar ram's horn. Snakes could shed their skin and new skin reappeared. And they lived underground close to the Great Mother and were often depicted coiled around her arms. The moon also could fade and grow back. Mountains, too, had extraordinary life in them. They had grown from the primeval hilllocks, first above of the ocean's surface, to tower over the landscape. Egyptian pottery plates had little hillocks in the middle. Some vegetation like date palms were impressively loaded with life-giving food. Palm branches were sacred even at the time of Jesus when he entered Jerusalem on what later became Palm Sunday Evergreen trees especially possessed a potent dose of Life for they never completely lose their greenery. They are highly sacred in Japanese Shinto today. The body grows cold at death so warmth, fire, and the sun, too, must bear great life. So Germanic and Nordic peoples lit candles on evergreen trees at the winter solstice to induce the disappearing sun to return, a vestigial custom not unknown, even in suburbia today. Sacrifice, says Kristensen, was not a crass process of giving to get something back. Out of befitting respect, only Infinite Life could be offered to Infinite Life. Therefore finite life had first to be converted into Infinite Life before it could be offered. It must be killed and transformed. But only a priest who had himself undergone transformative suffering and emerged reborn as divine could take life, trans substantiate it, and offer it. Something like this probably went on in the underground initiations of Greek Elusinian mystery religions near Athens. Initiates of the Earth Mother Demeter and her daughter Persephone, died and rose again, now possessing some of Her Infinite Life. Plato himself was said to be an initiate. Christianity eventually prevailed as the mystery religion of the Mediterranean world with its historically real dying and rising God. And the Roman Catholic mass, in which the wafer and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ for eternal life, continues to give hope and meaning to millions. Archaic man, says Kristensen was neither a little philosopher trying to explain things to himself, nor a greedy egoist out for gain, but rather an innocent existentialist who worshiped that upon which he felt his life depended.

Mircea Eliade's Religious Perspective

Eliade (1907–1986), perhaps the foremost scholar of the archaic, stresses its superiority over our historic and profane period. He uses a good bit of specialized terminology. For him, archaic man is homo religious par excellence for he lives in the cyclical myth of “the eternal return, ” oriented to getting back to in illo tempore, (that time) the fabulous, fresh time of the beginning when the cosmos was full of being, power and life, when totemic ancestors, spirits and gods lived with men. Likr Frankfot, Eliade thinks archaic man found things taht seem permanent to be impressive and sacred. He worshiped what seemed changeless. When archaic humanity seeks to reconnect with the permanent he reconndects with the time of the beginning. Todo this he betakes himself to some sacred center that Eliade calls an axis mundi. This is a power spot where enduring Being breaks into this level of the world and makes an axis uniting the underworld, the surface world, and the upper world. The center is not only a place of irruption, but also of passage, communication and orientation that lays out a group's world. The “symbolism of the center,” for Eliade, is the key to understanding the archaic. It involves the functions of piercing, passage, petitioning and positioning. Archaic humanity therefore always arranges its encampments, homes, towns, and temples so that each has a center, an axis mundi, to facilitate periodic returning to in illo tempore. Here archaic man engages in “the repetition of the archetypes.” In myths, a divine example for any action is given, that is, an archetype. Hence, all aspects of life are connected to some episode in mythic time. Eliade claims that archaic people are only “once fallen.” because, whenever the wear and tear of daily life debilitates them, they realize their eccentric state and reconnect themselves. Historic people, by contrast, are twice fallen. When they spin off center they neither realize it nor reconnect. Archaic man is thus the only truly religious man. He has a sacred existential stance of being present to reality because all parts of his life are connected to the cosmos-generating myths. Thus, they have something to respect at all times and places. Modern man has a profane existential stance of being present to reality because most things in his life have no connection to the genesis of the world. For Eliade, the profane is defined by this “coexistence of contradictory essences”—wherein some parts of life are sacred, but most are not. This hodge-podge results in a life that is profane, meaningless, bored, humdrum, routine, and cynical. Color it Grey. So sacred and profane are not properties of objects, but two different ways of being present to reality. Eliade mixes up primitive and archaic religion and highly praises both. While largely ignoring archaic limitations, he provides a sharp and searching critique of techno-modernity.

Ken Wilber's Evolutionary Deep Structure (Integral) Perspective

Wilber is interested in the archaic as an example of one stage of the evolutionary curve of consciousness as a whole. For Wilber the archaic stage has been followed by the mental-egoic fundamentalist stage, the formal rational stage, the awareness, subtle, causal, and the enlightenment stages, each inscribing its own world view. For him, history, and all these cultural developmental stages, closely match an individual person's developmental stages from infancy on. Ontogeny recapitulates the essence of phylogeny. Baby and history grow similarly in terms of deep structures of consciousness To distinguish maturation stages, Wilber focuses in on each stage's cognitive style, emotional climate, motivational factors, sense of self and sense of time. The archaic cognitive style is mostly pre-logical operations as Frankfort points out, but it has an extended time sense, making possible farming and all the features of settled living. Its sense of self is verbal membership, Persons felt their identity to be members of a mythic group whose origin from a common divine ancestor was narrated in a shared world-forming myth. It was thus word-based in narrative, not primarily blood-based in clan/kinship bonds. On this basis, myth united tribal and ethnic groups into large kingdoms. Motivationally, the late archaic world was into heroism, the strongman warlord installing satellite sultans in a feudal system. In many ways it was an exploitive “con.” It was a matter of idealizing will power to override the body's need for immediate pleasure in a quest for autonomy beyond shame, doubt and guilt. It was a matter of self protection and control of one's turf, seeking power and safety within a membership world as the “king of kings.” Its oppression and constant warfare wore out its welcome. By 800 BCE, religions of law and strict personal conscience arose to replace the archaic. and in an accelerating process of the evolution of consciousness were two hundred years later followed by the rise of numerous mysical paths to Self Realization.

References

Ancient Religion and the Evolution of Consciousness

Religion: The Ancient, or “Archaic,” Pattern - A Symposium of Six Perspectives on the Archaic Religious Period

The archaic stage of the religious life, dating from about 8,000 BCE to 1,000 BCE, is found worldwide. It supersedes the previous primitive stage and precedes the historical stage of the great world religions. It peaked after 3,000 BCE in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as India, China and Japan, but continued to flourish later among the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, and native American peoples. Since disputes continue about the nature, value and meaning of archaic religion, the following summarizes six different angles from which to view the many facets of this bedrock religious pattern.

==Robert Bellah's Sociological Perspective== Bellah defines religion as “a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence“ Religious evolution he defines as “a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization which endows the organism, social system, or whatever the unit in question may be, with greater capacity to adapt to its environment so that it is...more autonomous relative to its environment than were its less complex ancestors.” Elsewhere he characterizes evolutionary advance as “an increase in the ability to learn to learn.”

For Bellah, evolution includes notions of change, direction of change, and stages of change, but not necessarily moral progress or perfection. In line with the social science tradition, he leaves aside the more interior questions whether man, consciousness, or the structures of the human psyche evolve.

For Bellah, archaic religious life, as seen in its outwardly visible forms, differs strikingly from the primitive. In primitive settings one finds no towns or cities, no writing, literacy or teachers, no specialized craft-differentiation roles. The economy depends upon hunting and gathering with little domestication of animals.

There are no gods in the primitive religious symbol system, only spirits and totemic ancestors. And primitive ritual action lacks the practice of sacrifice. Featured rituals are dances for fertility, or the”walk about” to visit the ancestral totem's ”stopping places” to reconnect with them. It is a one class society in which there is little or no leverage for social change. “Church” and society are co-extensive. In a primitive setting, the world is a “one possibility thing.”

An archaic world is far more differentiated and can change. It has settled living in villages, towns and cities. It had writing, agriculture, craft-specialization, gods, priests, sacrifice rituals and two classes in society—the noble, patrician kings and priests on the one hand, plebeian commoners on the other.

Undoubtedly, the two greatest innovations of the archaic stage were gods and sacrifice ritual. Priests were organized in great temples, but no local congregations formed around them. The whole society was more or less the religious organization and kings were seen as divine by birth. This new symbol system, however, still lacks the idea of two worlds—this world and the other. The gods were right here in this, the only world. They were potentially within reach in caves, clouds, mountains, wilderness, temples, sun, sky and earth. The archaic also lacked the idea of an inalienable, individual soul charged with choosing a path to personal salvation. This degree of individualization appears only later.

In archaic settings, however, tensions between classes could occasion social change. And priests, by using augury, divination and omen-reading to make novel moral decisions also exercised leverage for social reform. The archaic, alas, also created geographically extensive empires and large scale warfare.

Bellah's methodological focus is on the outwardly visible symbol and ritual systems, not on the inner, invisible factors of human life which are yet observable or inferable. In line with the positive-knowledge methodological tradition inherited from sociology's founding grandfather, Auguste Comte, Bellah writes as a social scientist and thus hews to the objective side of the street, without wandering to the subjective. He thus avoids most “psycho-logistical.” theorizing to explain evolutionary changes.

Bellah's great originality in this 1964 article lay in reintroducing the concept of evolution to the scholarly study of religion. Evolutionary approaches had in effect been banned and absent since 1900.because 19th century evolutionary studies began to seem too closely associated with racism, colonialism and European culture as the apex of the whole evolutionary process. Evolutionary models had become guilty by association.

Besides the whole concept of evolution had been ringingly anti-religious in its applications. Throughout the 19^th century concepts of evolution had been used to pound nail after nail into the coffin of religion in an effort to rid modern society of it. The first nail was Auguste Comte's “three stages of thought” theory in 1845. According to this, primitive man had only religious thought. Classical man in Greece and Rome, however, had evolved to philosophical thought. But this was still speculative, inconclusive and futile. Modern man had finally evolved to full scientific thought and “positive” knowledge, hence, the name “Positivism,” for his system of thought. Comte even created a new sunny, humanistic annual calendar of religious holidays to replace the old--with himself as its leader!

Framed this way, Comte's “Positivism” continued Deism's long 18^th century assault on the Christian story of healing miracles, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ and bodily ascension into heaven. But it did more. Now the struggle was not just between the free-thinking, skeptical village atheist and the orthodox clergyman, but between the socially beneficial light of reason, positive scientific knowledge and progress versus the darkness of superstitious error. It was effective intelligence versus ineffective primitive stupidity. Evolutionary thought thus cast religion as the retarded remnant of tribal savagery, doomed to soon disappear from civilization, or so most intellectuals thought.

Darwin's 1858 evolutionary theory of the descent of species and survival of the fittest was a second and more powerful nail in the coffin of religion because it appeared to answer the question, “How did we get here?” We got here by natural selection. Science replaced the Judeo-Christian myth as the official truth-provider of civilization. When gene theory was linked to Darwinism in the 1950s, the nails of determinism, mechanism, random meaningless chance mutations, purposelessness, and materialism were also hammered home. And if, in all things that exist, only matter is real and has the first and last word, then (now that we're here) what makes the most sense to do if not competitively pursue materialistic values and comfortable amenities to ease our lot in the world? Doing this we may not become all that happy, but what to do? The whole materialist ethos was clearly antithetical to the religious outlook and values in both tenor and substance. Many found this modern air hard to breathe.

Bellah's contribution was that, in the face of this triumphant, if bleak, scientific materialism, he relinked evolution to positive things like the increase of autonomy, freedom, cooperation and the possibility of further benevolent social change despite constraining factors in existence. And he outlined the stages of religious evolution to include historic, early modern, and modern symbol systems, and explored their social potential, though not the mystical systems of Asia and the West.

Backed by functionalism, Bellah saw religion as a positive and necessary force in all societies. Religion, in functionalism's general action theory (Talcott Parsons), plays the key role of providing the coordinating over all framework, or “sacred canopy” of meaning, needed so that society can succeed in its goal-attainment (politics), in its adjustment to nature (economics), and in its socialization of children (education) and thus transmit its heritage and survive. Religious evolution, in Bellah's refurbished sense, could thus hope to make religion still better able to fulfill its vital social functions. (References: Robert Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” in Lessa and Vogt, Reader in Comparative Religion. 2nd ed. and in Bellah, American Sociological Review, Vol 29, No 3 (June 1964), pp 358-374), and on line at jstor.org/stable/2091480) and Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Harper and Row, 1985.

==Henri Frankfort's Philosophical Perspective== This Dutch archaeologist (b. 1897), anthropologist and cultural historian specializing in ancient Egypt, like Comte, also stresses the limitations of archaic thinking, but he studies it sympathetically and in depth and is not ideologically prone to denigrate it. Classically, archaic man lived before the dawn of western philosophical thinking about 600 BCE. They did much thinking of an imaginative and concrete representational sort but within the bounds of what Freud called “the primary process” and Frankfort called the mythopoeic mode of thought (“mythopoeic” = myth-making). Frankfort thus ventures more into the invisible, subjective side of human life and works primarily by observation and logical deduction in line with the methodological tradition which says that “The proper study of man is by inference,” He studies Egyptian hieroglyphics and infer things about their mind, logic, psyche, and consciousness stage.

In its stage of psychological mental development, archaic mankind, says Frankfort, exhibits five habits of thought that we have largely dropped. First, concepts were substantialized—that is, they were imagined as physically existing things. “Life,” for example, was felt to be a glob, like putty, adhering to a person somewhere inside, like oatmeal sticking to your ribs. Similarly with luck, eloquence, courage or a sense of justice. Since corn bread was an appearance of the goddess of justice, Ma'at,. by ritually eating corn bread each morning, pharaohs were thought to imbibe justice and decide wisely.

Second, they made any association between two things into a possible causal explanation. Every resemblance of appearance, color or sound—every contact in space or time, establishes a connection. If a pregnant woman saw snake's heads raised up in a Pueblo Kiva ceremony, this might cause the fetus to raise its head and be born the wrong way. Sticking a pin in a voodoo doll might actually pierce the person resembling the doll. Sympathetic and contagious magic were thus part of archaic associational thinking. A common form of causal association was “predicate confusion.” Here any two things sharing the same predicate were associated and therefore might be seen as the same thing or even the whole class of things. A black cat, the black plague and a black knight might all be bringers of death, expressions of the god of death. Or all red heads might have a fiery temper.

Third, they juxtaposed explanations. “They did not insist on one logical explanation for something as has been fashionable since the time of Greek philosophy.” They accepted many emotionally satisfying explanations of how the sun got up in the sky and juxtaposed them side by side in their texts.

Fourth, Frankfort, like Lucien Levy-Bruhl, asserts that they were largely indifferent to “secondary causation,” that is, non-spirit explanations. They explained things straight away by reference to spirits.

Fifth, they experienced emotionally qualitative time and space, not space or time in general. Mythopoeic thought does not abstract out a general concept of space as uniform measurement units, or of time as uniform duration. Instead, localities have emotional color—alien, friendly, sacred. Different times and different qualities of light during the day, have different spirits in them. They do not ever speak of a succession of qualitatively indifferent moments of time, or homogeneous, even space.

Mythopoeic thought also lacked five distinctions that are built into modern thought. First, they had not reached the stage of effectively differentiating between appearance and reality. Dream experiences were not taken to be less real than waking experiences. For them, to be effective was to be real.

Second, mythopoeic thought lacks a distinction between a symbol and what it stood for. They did not conceive of symbols as signifying yet being separate from objects. They did not consider that the connecting relationship was only established in their minds and was separate from the objects. Thus, a person's name was an essential part of him, not just a symbolic, mental connection having nothing to do, really, with the person. A lock of hair is pregnant with the whole significance of the person. They operated by the principle, noted by Frazer and others, of pars pro toto, that is, a part can stand for the whole.

Third, there was no distinction between a real act and a ritual one. “Ritual bowls with the names of hostile kings on them were solemnly smashed with the object that enemies should die. Egyptians felt that real harm was done by the destruction of their names.” They also sought to destroy detrimental dreams, plans, thoughts, and rumors, as we would say, “ritually.” Ritual acts like anointing the bricks used for a building were a part of construction on the same footing as other work, and there were rituals, addressed to gods, for firing the bricks and mixing in the straw.

Fourth, it lacks the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge. Ancient man did not have alongside his sense perceptions another set of conceptions about what was really happening which he regarded as more true than his sense perceptions.

Fifth, they as yet lacked a distinction between specific events and general laws that were impersonal, mechanical, necessary. Instead of the natural law conception of nature, they had “the dramatic conception of nature.” For them, the succession of seasons and the movement of heavenly bodies were conceived as the signs of a life and will. The change from day to night was caused by a will. An event such as a storm was always the result of a willed action of some god or demon, possibly part of a fight between the two. Through rituals, humans could join in these battles, trying to help the divine forces.

Frankfort concludes, “Mythopoeic thought knows only life, The world is not inanimate or empty, but redundant with life—every thunderclap, shadow, cloud, or unknown clearing in the wood has individuality and confronts man as a 'Thou.' It is not that he 'peoples' inanimate things with spirits; he simply does not know the inanimate. All is experienced as life confronting life.”

(References: Henri Frankfort, ed. Before Philosophy, and Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion.)

==Brede Kristensn's Religious Perspective== Kristensen (1875-1950), a Norwegian expatriate to Holland and lifelong student of the ancient Near East, says that the key to grasp early archaic religious life is to see that what they really worshiped was “the Infinite Self-Renewing Life of the Earth.” He deals with the inner, invisible subjective aspects of life, too, but more in terms of feelings and emotional dependence than in terms of their thinking and logic,

Archaic man sought connection with the sort of life that could die and come back to life again as, indeed, the brown grass and barren trees obviously did each year. Archaic peoples saw this power as springing from the Great Mother Goddess deep within the earth. More than early primitive animism or later sky-god polytheism, the Great Mother, says Kristensen, dominated the hey day of archaic religion. The famous Venus of Willendorf statuette of a pregnant woman, dating from 22,000 BCE, was likely an early representation of the Great Earth Mother Goddess.

Goddess worship expressed itself principally in extreme, sacred respect for the many lesser, finite bearers of the earth's Life. Waiter was one of these. It could revive the life of drooping plants so it must carry an unusual measure of earth's Life. Holy water came into use. Blood, too, seemed to have more of life than most things. Blood, shed, led to death. Blood retained in pregnancy led to new life. Bull's blood was thus sprinkled on the earth to increase its fertility. Like produces like.

Again, horns died, and were shed, but then grew gloriously back. Hair and finger nails also continued to grow on the body even after death so they, too, must be special, finite, visible bearers of the Goddess's Life. Cave temples all around the Mediterranean had “the gate of horn” at their entrance. In an Old Testament echo of archaic sensibility, when Samson lost his long hair he lost his strength. And so also perhaps the Shofar ram's horn may be an echo of Archaic times. Snakes could shed their skin and new skin reappeared. And they lived underground close to the Great Mother and were often depicted coiled around her arms. The moon also could fade and grow back. All finite bearers of Life.

Mountains, too, had extraordinary life in them. They had grown from the primeval hilllocks, first above of the ocean's surface, to tower over the landscape. Egyptian pottery plates had little hillocks in the middle.

And of course, some vegetation like date palms were impressively loaded with life-giving food. Palm branches were sacred even at the time of Jesus when he entered Jerusalem on what later became Palm Sunday Evergreen trees especially possessed a potent dose of Life for they never completely lose their greenery. They are still highly sacred in Japanese Shinto today with its archaic overtones,

The body grows cold at death so warmth, fire, and the sun, too, must bear extraordinary life. So Germanic and Nordic peoples lit candles on evergreen trees at the winter solstice to induce the disappearing sun to return, a vestigial custom not unknown, even in suburbia today, on December 25^th.

Sacrifice, says Kristensen, was not a crass process of giving to get something back. Out of befitting respect, only Infinite Life could be offered to Infinite Life. Therefore finite bearers of life life had first to be converted into Infinite Life before they could be offered. They must be killed and transformed. But only a priest who had himself undergone transformative suffering and emerged reborn as divine could take life, trans substantiate it, and offer it. Something like this probably went on in the underground initiations of Greek Elusinian mystery religions near Athens. Initiates of the Earth Mother Demeter and her daughter Persephone, symbolically died and rose again, thence forth possessing some of Her Infinite Life. Plato himself was said to be an initiate of this mystery religion.

Christianity eventually prevailed as the mystery religion of the Mediterranean world, touting its historically real dying and rising God. And the Roman Catholic mass, in which the wafer and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ for eternal life, continues to give hope and meaning to millions.

Archaic man, Kristensen concludes, was neither a little philosopher trying to explain things to himself, nor a pragmatic rationalist, nor a greedy egoist out for gain, but rather an innocent existentialist who worshiped that upon which he desperately felt his life depended. Perhaps we may expand upon Kristensen a bit and say that archaic man's urge to reconnect with Infinite Self-Renewing Life was born of a natural reaction to an intensifying sense of separate self hood with its attendant awareness of vulnerability, lack and death. With the evolution of his bigger brain, a human being was no longer a dreamy animal, snuggly comfortable in the arms of nature, unaware of a distant future. He was no longer content to be instinctive, biologically driven, sensory, the smartest animal who could say, “I survive.” But neither had he become a snug something else. He was in a transitional state of awakening to his existential situation, living half way between the slumbering animal and the fully awake divine, so to speak. It was as if evolving mankind had stepped on to a flimsy bridge over a deep canyon with his animal past behind him on one end of the bridge and something unknown ahead on the other.

In this budding awareness he felt freer; could sense new possibilities and he sought new powers, but also felt a vague dread about choosing wrongly and missing the mark.. So deep inside, a faint background trembling arose--a subtle shiver of existential anxiety. Was it out of this strange brew of increasing self consciousness, sense of separation, isolation, lack, dread, freedom, choice, death and transcending possibility that the archaic religious pattern arose in which humanity attempted to influence things by sacrifice, magic, and pyramid provisions for an afterlife basically the same as this one? (Reference: Brede Kristensen, The Meaning of Religion, translated by John B. Carman, 1960.)

==Mircea Eliade's Phenomenological Perspective== Eliade (1907-1986), perhaps the most prolific scholar of the archaic, stresses its superiority over our historic and profane period. To elucidate the archaic, he deploys a considerable arsenal of technical religious terminology. For him, archaic man is homo religious, par excellence, for he lives in the cyclical myth of “the eternal return, ” oriented to getting back to in illo tempore, (that time) the fabulous, fresh time of the beginning when the cosmos was full of being, power and life, when totemic ancestors, spirits and gods lived with men.

When archaic humanity seeks to reconnect with the time of the beginning, he first betakes himself to some sacred center called an axis mundi. This is a power spot where enduring Being breaks into this level of the world and makes an axis uniting the underworld, the surface world, and the upper world. The center is not only a place of irruption, but also of passage, communication and orientation that geographically lays out the arrangement of a group's everyday world. The “symbolism of the center,” for Eliade, is the key to understanding the archaic. It involves the action of the sacred to pierce into the world, providing passage to the higher and spatially orienting all things in the surface world

Accordingly, archaic humanity therefore always arranges its encampments, homes, towns, and temples so that each has a center, an axis mundi, to facilitate periodic returning to in illo tempore. At the center archaic man engages in “the repetition of the archetypes,” repairing himself and his relationships to others and the gods. In myths, a divine example for any action is given, that is, an archetype. Hence, all aspects of life are connected to some episode in mythic time.

Eliade claims that archaic people are only “once fallen.” because, whenever the wear and tear of daily life debilitates them, they realize they are off center and reconnect themselves. Historic people, by contrast, are twice fallen. When they spin off center they neither realize it nor seek to reconnect. Archaic man is thus the only truly religious man. He has a sacred, existential stance of being present to reality because all parts of his life are connected to some aspect of the cosmos-generating myth. Thus, they have something to respect at all times and places. They live in sacred time and sacred space.

Modern man, by contrast, has a profane existential stance of being present to reality because most things in his life have no connection to the genesis of the world. For Eliade, the profane is defined by this “coexistence of contradictory essences”—wherein some parts of life are sacred, but most are not. Modern man has no sacred way to brush his teeth and no chant for the occasion, but may say grace at meals. This hodge-podge results in a life that is profane, fragmented,, meaningless, bored, humdrum, routine, and cynical. Color it Grey. So sacred and profane are not properties of objects, but two different ways of being present to reality

Eliade has been accused of mixing up primitive and archaic religion, while excessively praising both. Although he largely ignores archaic limitations, he nevertheless provides a sharp and searching critique of life in techno-modernity. (References: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, and Cosmos and History.)

==Owen Barfield's Psychological Perspective== Barfield, a seminal British thinker, emphasizes that the archaic age was, above all, defined by people living in a psychological sense of “original participation.” Barfield defined original participation as “the sense that, on the other side of some appearance or phenomenon from me is something of like nature with me, psychic, emotional and volitional.”

Thus, for the archaic stage of cognitive development, consciousness and matter were seen as dwelling together in any object. They co-mingled or “participated.” They were not really two. The physical form of a mountain was not just a material thing, It was the appearance of the mountain god who dwelt in the mountain or lurked around it The mountain was experienced as the body or image of the god's spirit. This was contained in the very meaning of the word, “mountain.” Thus, for human thinking it could mean nothing else. Similarly with the sun, moon, earth, rocks, rivers, lakes and the rice growing in them. They were all manifestations of divine beings with feelings and will—and with powers.

Barfield's felt that the concept of “original participation” was broad enough to include humans responsive religious engagements with ancestors, nature spirits, totemic animals, unusual objects with “mana” in them (like twins), the earth mother, and all the sky gods without having to decide which came first in the evolution of religious involvement. All these could be seen as particular responses based on original participation, the very soil of Max Weber's “garden of magic.” Barfield also felt his concept of “figuration” (the sensory/verbal/intellectual/social and cultural construction of “reality”) was broad enough to include, or accord well with, all generally accepted theories of perception.

Through “invisible silver threads,” says Barfield, some of these spirits or gods could emit powers into fetish objects, thereby charging special sticks, stones or weeds with the power to heal or curse. And planets also beamed down personality traits, moods and illness into people. They “rayed down” influences, often conceived as “vapors.” . If you were quick, it was Mercury; if melancholy, Saturn; if combative, Mars; if expansive, Jupiter; if passionate, Venus (or cupid). Long into the Christian Middle Ages, Europeans still felt the seven planetary spheres of heaven were draped around them like a cloak.

Therefore archaic humanity linguistically “minted” (named and constructed ) all the phenomena of its world from the controlling social agreement that matter and consciousness participated.. Before modernity, the very words that humans used to think about anything generally carried a sense of participation. Fifteen percent of Chinese after 800 BCE might debate the schools of philosophy, but 85% of the rural peasantry remained animists until well into the 20^th century. All early archaic word-meanings had this primordial sense of participation built right into them. So hearing the word “tree” inevitably called to mind a spirit-appearance. That was simply what the signifier signified when the child first learned to talk. It was stamped into the person's brain neurology. The Sioux word for the cottonwood tree (wagachun), for example, called to mind that one of the standing peoples who liked tobacco smoke and gave courage to warriors when used as the center pole for the sun dance.

We today, however, generally use unparticipated words to construct items in our world. So we figurate (inwardly construct) “its,” not “thous.” We cannot feel that a tree is a god-spirit; but given the connotations of their words, they could not help feeling it. With the insistent onset of non participated modernity, language has changed steadily from participated to unparticipated.

As the sense of original participation evaporated after 1400 CE, art styles, as well as the subjects of art, changed and became humanistically centered on the individual. Pre-perspectival paintings reflected the archaic positioning of human life under the cloak with its feeling that persons were permeated by celestial influences. But, says Barfield, the growing individualistic urge to show how a street looked to an unparticipated, separate ego required the invention of perspective in painting--a watershed development in art history that Barfield sees as another one of the major changes in history that are basically “the moving shadows of the evolution of consciousness.”

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the father of modern philosophy, can be seen as a barometer whose thought registered this sea-change in art and in the meaning of words with which we think and linguistically construct our reality. With his method of doubting everything that could be doubted, he came to claim that only two sorts of things exist--things that have measurable extension (res extensa) and things involving thought (res cogitans). This culminated in his famous saying “Cogito ergo sum .” I think, therefore I am.” Thus he decisively pulled mind and consciousness out of nature and matter, and separated the two and his spreading influence deeply colored the modern mind.

Gone from Descartes' hand bill listing the characters in the play of existence were the archaic spirits, gods, and archetypes, as well as the mystical Absolute of Plotinus (and of many neo-Platonist scholastics of his day). Although Descartes somehow managed to exempt God and heaven from the all- consuming crucible of doubt, his philosophy led fairly directly to mechanism and materialism. Left standing in the “reign of quantity” were only man and matter and man's status was problematic; he, too, might be nothing but matter. Humans became like passengers on the ocean liner of time and space peering down at a black ocean of nature, alone in a meaningless world, sailing toward the age of reason, soon to be followed by the ages of anxiety, mechanism, materialism and a Darwinian dog-eat-dog capitalistic economic theory.

The modern sense of being an isolated, walled-off ego, foreshadowed in Athenian Greece, arose for a significant number of people only during the 15^th century Renaissance, which represented a decisive transitional stage in a long process of the evaporation of the sense of original participation dating back to 800 BCE.

Then, with the 16^th century Reformation, non participated individualism finally took center stage in history. The Reformation taught salvation by personal, individual faith alone, not by participating in the sacraments of Mother Church. It also taught “the priesthood of all believers.” One was to be the priest for oneself and also for others, tasked with monitoring all faith-relationships with God to keep them warm and alive. Furthermore, one had to read the Bible for oneself to decide what it taught about God, religion, church organization, sacraments, faith, grace, sin and final salvation. All was up to you.

In the wake of all this, the modern three-part personality structure of the modern psyche took form. It was composed now for the first time of id, ego and superego (a.k.a. the internal voices of child, adult and parent). Prior to the spread of the Reformation in Elizabethan England, the parental superego, the voice of Mother Church, had shaped, ruled, and generously forgiven the wayward child-id. And, through the sacraments of confession and penance, the Roman Catholic Church also functioned as the sensible adult voice. The Medieval personality structure was basically two-fold—parent and child.

But with the Reformation in England, that Mother Church was effectively gone No longer was it easy to routinely erase guilt, do penance, obtain forgiveness and assure salvation. The individual ego was now responsible for doing its own moral calculations. This fledgling ego had not only to fend between the impulsive demands of the animalistic id versus the repressive demands of society, it had to contrive to get ahead socially. No wonder hundreds of “how to” self-help booklets were published in Elizabethan England after 1550. They taught rules of living, organizing life in its smallest detail--books of courtesy, civil conversation, being gallant, being a courtier, dictionaries of compliments, letter writing, rhetoric,.books on being a capable servant of the state, the complete gentleman, and an accomplished, versatile personality!

Barfield not only maps changes from archaic original participation to modern non participation, but also points to a possible “final participation.” A first step towards it is to use thinking, not just to construct a world, but to step back and reflectively think on the very process of world construction itself. To do this is to move from Alpha thinking to Beta thinking, from type “A” thinking to type “B”. This is an increase in corporate, critical self consciousness that, says Barfield, could allow humanity to become “directionally creative” with regard to its own future evolution, to take control of the steering wheel, as it were. It is to become co-creator with whatever in evolution has fashioned us thus far.

For Barfield final participation shades toward participation with the mystical Absolute. Whenever we find evidence of a sense of final participation in a culture, it is the absolute One, which we really are, that takes all forms and participates all things, not a plurality of gods who participate only selected things that pertain to them, like “the plebes of gods” in Rome necessary to grow corn—seia, gestia, nodotus etc, etc. The difference is easy to tell. The symbol system of final participation features the All, not swarming myriads of separate nature gods and demons. Either might be better than the angst of non-participation, which if an error, may prove to be ultimately inadequate as a basis for civilization. Barfield's methodological approach thus deals with a wider range of stages of consciousness than Bellah and is compatible with Frankfort and Kristensen. (References: Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances. 1957), History in English Words, 1925)

==Ken Wilber's Perspective== Ken Wilber (1949- ) is a major modern thinker interested in the archaic as an example of one stage in the total evolutionary curve of consciousness. It is one stage in a total spectrum of human potential. For Wilber the archaic stage has been followed by the mental-egoic fundamentalist stage, the formal rational stage of more critical and self-reflective thinking, the Centauric awareness stage, followed by the subtle, causal, and enlightenment stages of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. each inscribing its own world view. He thus draws much more heavily on Asian religious history than our other thinkers to chart a full evolution.

For him, history, and all these cultural developmental stages, closely match an individual person's developmental stages from infancy onward. Frankfort touches on this comprehensive claim but Wilber explicitly lays it out. . “Ontogeny recapitulates the essence of phylogeny.” Baby and history grow almost identically in terms of developmental deep structures of consciousness. He marshals evidence from a wide variety of child psychologists, thinkers, and mystics to show that they support basically one and the same evolutionary spectrum of Consciousness. Thus, he like the Catholic biologist Teilhard of Chardin, goes beyond Bellah in arguing for progress, perilous as that always is, and to affirming the possibility of perfection or an “Omega” point for the evolution of consciousness.

To distinguish maturation stages, Wilber focuses in on each stage's cognitive style, emotional climate, motivational factors, sense of self, and sense of time using the language of Areti and a host of other developmental psychologists from Piaget to the most modern.

The archaic cognitive style, he agrees, is mostly pre-logical operations as Frankfort points out, and it has an extended time sense, making possible farming and all the features of settled living.

Its sense of self is verbal membership, Persons felt their identity to be as members immersed in a mythic group whose origin from a common divine ancestor was narrated in a shared world-forming myth. It was thus word-based in narrative, (hence “verbal” membership) not primarily blood-and-soil-based in kinship/tribal/clan bonds. On this basis, myth united tribal and ethnic groups into large kingdoms. Ideas had come half-loose from bodily moorings. With historic religions, ideas became the basis for universal membership patterns wherein ideas came completely loose from ethnic moorings.

Motivationally, the late archaic world was into heroism, the strongman warlord installing satellite sultans in feudal systems. It was an age of the “lowest common dominator,” of military force. The personality to be prized was a matter of idealizing will power to override the body's need for immediate pleasure in a quest for autonomy beyond shame, doubt and guilt like Homeric heroes. It was a matter of self protection and control of one's turf, seeking power and safety within a membership world as the “king of kings.” Its oppression and constant warfare eventually wore out its welcome. By 800 BCE, the great “historic” religions of law, conversion, morality, and puritan personal conscience began to arise to replace the archaic pattern. Christianity and Buddhism may have arisen as mysticism but they spread as universalistic and missionary religions of mental egoic stage of consciousness.

(References: Ken Wilber, The Atman Project, Up From Eden. and Integral Spirituality.