Returning to the History of Religions has convinced me of the inadequacy of existing theories of religion — from Aristotle to Hegel and Durkheim — that is to say, both those that start from individual subjectivity and those that focus on social function. It is not possible to remain at that level of generality, nor to ground these historical productions in the psychological structures of the species, nor to rest content with sociological functionalism (Durkheim) or the representation of a people's truth (Hegel), given their tight linkage to material conditions (hunter-gatherers, farmers, city-states, empires).
The task here, once again, is to substitute multiple external causalities for the lived interiority, with special emphasis on the political and military dimensions that assert themselves at least from the first city-states onward. Here, as elsewhere, after-the-fact selection — often through violence — is decisive, even if it remains obscured by the supposed autonomy of ideology (belief). Religion is only one example of the dialectic between ideology and material causalities that are ultimately determining. These causalities may be material, but they are neither mechanical nor immediate; they leave a degree of autonomy to ideology, which is indeed a decisive actor in the dialectic while remaining subordinate to it in retrospect. We have a three-way interplay among forms of social organization, politico-military selection, and ideological progress — moving from tribal or pagan animism to the polytheism of city-states with their tutelary deity (totem), and on toward the monotheistic tendencies (never complete) of empires that must integrate diverse populations and break free from clanism, thus universalizing themselves. Comparisons between these different configurations will help clarify the functions of religions and their history.
Aristotle
There could hardly have been a genuine theory of religion when all philosophers believed in the existence of the gods (even Democritus and Epicurus, who merely neutralize them). Yet in Aristotle one finds the sketch of a theory of religion that he is said to have set out (according to Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development) in his lost work The Protrepticus, which still had a religious character (he still believed in premonitory dreams) but which can then be found scattered, as if in passing, throughout later works (Metaphysics, Politics, Rhetoric, Ethics).
For all his commentators, Aristotle's religion seems limited to his conception of God as first cause, unmoved mover, and self-thinking thought (though this does not stop him from assimilating the stars to gods). This "philosopher's god" is, however, quite un-religious, fairly remote from both civic religions and mystical feeling. In the Metaphysics, he traces the same origin for both philosophy and religion: they are born of wonder and the need to find answers to what one cannot understand — to give explanations of what is unknown or feared and exceeds us. The first religious need would thus proceed from a cognitive imperative (like philosophy for Hegel: "If the power of unification disappears from human life and oppositions lose their living relation, their interactions, and attain their independence, then philosophy becomes a need" — Hegel, The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy, p. 110).
Yet this cognitive stake (which recedes as science advances and obscurantism retreats) does not account for the political importance of religion — which Aristotle nonetheless acknowledges — nor for the inner experience of the sacred or devotion, which he ascribes to the fear and reverence that seize us before the divine, before what is superior to humankind ("the starry sky above me") — purely individual reasons, yet supposedly universal. But if the feeling is individual, the sacred is social. This psychological experience that shakes our entire being is thus supposed to be universal: an emotion of the soul detached from any particular theology, like contemplation — but this is not enough to make a religion, nor anything more than simple superstition. By remaining at the level of feeling, one also misses the important function of religions as guarantors of truth and social order, and ultimately as foundations of morality.
This anthropology of religion is highly inadequate, above all in its failure to account for the content of religions — which Hegel wanted to do, making religions the representation of a people's spirit. He held that "it is absurd to believe that priests invented a religion for the people through trickery and self-interest. It is equally flat and foolish to see religion as a capricious invention, an illusion." The problem is that this leads him to believe that even the most absurd religions and myths arise from an inner essence of peoples, by a kind of immanence and spontaneous generation that imposes itself in symbolic or coded form — whether through immediate certainty (conviction), oceanic feeling (participation), or abstract intellection (cognition). We shall try to show, on the contrary, that the determinations of religions are external, and that peoples adopt the religion of their prince.
When Heidegger attempted, in his Phenomenology of Religious Life, to reduce religious experience to the apocalyptic temporality of the early Christians — which is very reductive and idealistic — at least what he took for an existential tendency testifies, in conversion to a new religion, to the initial shock of tragic upheavals seeing one's world disappear: a shock that dissolves completely after institutionalization.
Religious Subjectivity
One can certainly identify a religious subjectivity, but it is barely distinguishable from culture itself, providing a general explanatory framework that gives meaning to all aspects of life, along with a whole system of duties and prohibitions. This is why many cannot imagine living without religion, which would seem to them like living without culture or morality — Gandhi even claimed that a life without religion is a life without a rudder. What is clear, in any case, is that religions belong to a particular culture (membership), justifying social organization. The remarkable thing is that this cultural heteronomy — imposed by common language — is completely internalized by individuals (prohibition, guilt, debt, sacrifice), but this internalization is deceptive, inverting the real causes.
To account for the subjective adherence to myths and religions, one must combine several sources: cultural transmission, community belonging, crowd enthusiasm, the presence of the Other of language (the imaginary friend or demon), the receptacle of prayer, the supreme judge as guarantor of ultimate justice, the dreamed paradise or hell, as well as the works of charity that bind us — solidarity in action. The institutionalized religion that seems to embody a merely external divine nonetheless leaves deep marks on subjectivities.
If one initially believes out of ignorance — and the terror before thunder and the questions raised by death and spirits is understandable — one believes what one is told because these beliefs are transmitted by parents and community, sustained notably by mothers who daily attest to their reality by scrupulously following the rules. More concretely, there is a subjective experience of prayer that serves as proof for most people. This imaginary companion who speaks to us can be precious or burdensome, can cultivate hope or guilt; but believing is always believing in Santa Claus, hoping that our wishes will be fulfilled, that Good will be rewarded and Evil defeated, that everything has a meaning (everything is language). Faced with powerlessness before the unpredictable, the religious attitude — prayer, sacrifices — logically becomes the only available strategy for appeasing powers perceived as angry and dangerous.
Beyond individual feeling, there is above all the sense of a community that makes us more fraternal with our co-religionists, with whom we can trade and who can offer us support — other religions inevitably appear more hostile. The formation of cohesive communities is at the root of sects and circles of the faithful alike, in a desire to live true and whole relationships; but from the first large cities onward (to say nothing of empires), the community must expand in a more impersonal way to include strangers, beyond the family clan.
Ultimately, the three theological virtues of Christianity neatly summarize the three dimensions of religion: faith (the symbolic), affirming one's belonging (credo quia absurdum); hope (the imaginary) for some magic that will save them; and charity (the real), which is not limited to Christianity — temples having been redistributive from the beginning, ensuring social reproduction. It must be repeated that the hope of being saved in an afterlife can equally be the fear of divine judgment and punishment; but the fact remains that religions mobilize subjectivities and can unleash fabulous energy (the building of pyramids or cathedrals), which proves vital for war. One might even conclude that as long as religions exist, it will be impossible to extinguish conflict — and religions remain broadly dominant, still poisoning our lives.
A Chronology of Religious Transformations
To understand the genealogy of religious structures, one must start with the tribal cultures of hunter-gatherers and the narrative language that maps out a common world beyond the immediate environment and what is visible. This common world is, however, fragmented into a multitude of languages and cultures. In Papua New Guinea alone, more than 800 languages were spoken. Languages form totalities — differentiated from other languages but including within these totalities an entire distinctive culture of myths and rites, organizing oppositions and classifications, communication between groups, the definition of identities, and the regulation of exchanges (of alliance, goods, and signs).
This apparent arbitrariness of the sign must, however, be strongly tempered by the fact that there are very few genuine inventions. Myths are always modified retellings of earlier myths, most often inverting one of their themes in order to justify opposition to, or even hostility toward, neighboring societies or to an older, discredited ideology. Maurice Godelier showed that societies form and divide along lines of shared beliefs, ensuring group unity and its common law and prohibitions. If this identity function privileges ideological causes — themselves overdetermined as we have seen — this does not prevent material causes from subsequently selecting beliefs compatible with survival imperatives.
These hunter-gatherer societies can be called originary societies, for they are oriented toward the past: toward founding ancestors, toward an original state that must always be restored since it is always being transgressed, through sacrifices. Sacrifices are indeed a form of gift/counter-gift with the spirits or natural powers one claims to command (this is the role of magic and sorcery) through incantations, fetishes, and offerings. There are no natural causes for disease or death — these are systematically attributed to evil spirits casting spells or disturbing the natural order. There are only good or evil wills.
It was only after the volcanic winter following the catastrophic eruption of Mount Toba, around 70,000 years ago, when populations from the Iranian plateau spread across the earth, that one witnesses the cultural explosion that led to the decorated caves — interpreted as a "religion of presence" (or rather of contact with another world, by appearing to merge one's hand into the rock face by coating it in pigment, leaving a "negative hand"). The hunter-gatherer tribes of that era were quite similar to the last "first peoples" studied by ethnology; but rather than religion, one should speak of a mythic era with a proliferation of myths related to those of neighboring societies (Lévi-Strauss mapped them for North America). We already find the identity function of myths attached to a tribe (totem) and their normative character in the group's practices and alliances.
The next stage — a transitional moment only recently identified — confirms what Jacques Cauvin had emphasized, to general incomprehension: a religious revolution preceding and enabling the Neolithization, rather than the reverse — the schema more familiar to us. The cause is nonetheless not internal, not purely symbolic, not the unfolding of an earlier potentiality, but again results from an external shock. This is what the discovery of the temples of Göbekli Tepe and its surroundings (9,600 BCE) suggests: it can be interpreted as a reaction to a cosmic catastrophe (comet/asteroid) around 10,800 BCE that would have caused an abrupt cooling lasting 1,200 years (the Younger Dryas), with mass extinctions of megafauna (mammoths, giant ground sloths, etc.). The depiction of a falling star points in this direction — contested by some, despite fairly convincing traces — though the cooling itself is not contested. Remaining within speculation, one imagines that this devastating episode may have generated new beliefs and rites bringing hunter-gatherers from an entire region together, drawing them to congregate regularly for great ceremonies of feasting and drinking barley beer. A similar reaction can be observed at the same period in Mexico, with large ritual gatherings organizing feasts and mammoth hunts — but producing no monumental constructions. These territorialized customs nonetheless precede and promote sedentarization, initially around these sacred sites. This would ensure their evolutionary advantage, after the fact and obliquely. The existence of a whole complex of temples near Göbekli Tepe testifies to a first small-scale semi-sedentarization (as at Jericho), thousands of years before permanent sedentarization (Çatal Höyük, one of the oldest true cities, is dated to 7,000 BCE).
We thus find ourselves, after this spiritual upheaval, at the tipping point between nomads and settled peoples (as between myth and religion) — a very gradual transition. Religions begin when one exits animism and simple magic, clan beliefs tied to territory and the cult of founding ancestors. Yet in later religious forms, most of the rites of animist hunter-gatherers will be recovered, if in attenuated or spiritualized forms. Nothing is fully erased: not sacrifice (the blood of Christ), not initiation (bar mitzvah), not totemism (the cross); myth becomes folktale or folklore, but everything is recycled and reinterpreted in later stages — even sorcery and magic (transubstantiation). With Göbekli Tepe, it appears we have a first form of religion — probably an intermediate form: collective rituals without deities yet, but invoking superior powers, centered on preventing the return of the ordeal just experienced.
If this new religiosity genuinely precedes sedentarization and agriculture — of which it will only be an "unintended consequence" — the original cause is indeed external: an anxious reaction to the catastrophe that destroys confidence in prior cults. These gatherings seem nonetheless to attest that distress produces solidarity and shifts in representation, symbolic productions intended to respond to it — which then bring, after the fact, material advantages that favor their reproduction and prevent any return to the prior state (agriculture eventually multiplying the population tenfold), as we shall see repeatedly.
It is difficult to know what may have remained of this initial religious revolution — which appears to have been repudiated (its temples buried several times over) — and it will transform profoundly with sedentarization and the beginnings of agriculture and then animal husbandry, this time following the schema of ideology as a reflection of relations of production (after the fact rather than before). One of its very first manifestations will be the new cult, oriented toward reproduction, of the Good Mother and the Bull (Isis/Apis, etc.), appearing as early as 9,500 BCE in the wake of Göbekli Tepe. Jacques Cauvin insisted on the priority of these figures over agriculture and animal husbandry, which is true at the global level, though not necessarily at the local level where these practices were beginning with grain storage. One may say rather that the promotion of these prehistoric representations (close to those of the decorated caves) may have accompanied, or even provoked, the first isolated attempts at them; for one must not imagine an immediate Neolithization — agriculture generalized only very slowly, driven by the climate change that made it necessary.
The next stage, which has never completely disappeared, is therefore that of pagan religions — the religion of peasants, themselves rooted in their territory but more attentive to cycles (death/resurrection) and the caprices of the elements (divination). There is first a continuity with the initial religion, visible in the construction of miniature Göbekli Tepe replicas integrated into the first Neolithic villages, then into domestic architecture, before their abandonment. The gods of rain or storms, like the goddesses of fertility or springs, are barely distinguishable from shamanic spirits — being local incarnations of natural forces (with no hierarchized pantheon). One notes that sedentarization is accompanied by veneration of the skulls of the dead, modeled and displayed around houses, while the bodies of the deceased are often buried within the house itself — testimony to a cult of the ancestors more intimate than that of the group's founding ancestors: veneration of parents and lineage (valued by animal husbandry), with a family altar dedicated to them, like the Roman lararium or, to this day, in China. However, the agricultural sedentarization at the origin of these religious evolutions will — notably because of the storage of foodstuffs — enter into contradiction with the old nomads (predators).
Polytheism and the City-States
We then enter the historical periods — those of polytheism and the Sumerian city-states, where religion becomes political, with priests linked to power (the Priest-King). Here again, at the outset, great climatic upheavals simultaneously make Mesopotamia fertile and flood the Persian Gulf as sea levels rise between approximately 7,500 and 6,000 BCE, driving Gulf populations to migrate northward all the way to Eridu — genuine climate refugees. Moreover, this rise in sea levels would have provoked, around 5,600 BCE, the breaching of the Bosphorus causing a sudden flooding of the Black Sea (the Great Flood), in turn pushing the northern farmers to migrate southward. One must also mention the later submersion of Uruk around 3,100 BCE — for all these episodes contributed to the formation of the flood myth recounted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, when everything must be rebuilt.
This constitutes a considerable ecological upheaval whose principal characteristic will be a mixing of immigrant populations from different origins (as attested by genetic analyses of burial sites) — uprooted populations cut off from their ancestral lands and therefore from the cult of their ancestors. The situation will be roughly the same, somewhat later, in Egypt, which received the climate refugees of a rapidly desertifying Sahara, who also found themselves cut off from their ancestors. The comparison with China and other countries without gods suggests that this characteristic of the oldest civilizations was decisive in the invention of the gods — distinguishing them from the natural powers and local spirits of animism, and from the pagan cults.
These deterritorialized, functionalized, and personalized gods would demonstrate their capacity to unify disparate populations, to give them an identity in conflict with other cities — the tutelary gods being a kind of totem, but more mobile.
This religious evolution fills the void created by a cult of the ancestors that had become unworkable. Once again, it is China above all that illustrates this: it did not experience such population movements and could perpetuate its cults of ancestors and local spirits without needing gods. Once again, we have a symbolic revolution that precedes an economic revolution — for the invention of gods will take on its full dimension only when coupled with city-states and then writing, which is why it is subsequently adopted by others (such as the Greeks). Civilization and the written fixation of a pantheon seem indeed sufficient explanations for the constitution of political religions (Priest-King, Pharaoh) and a clergy — except that, once more, the symbolic invention preceded their emergence, of which it was a condition before becoming its instrument.
The abandonment in the great cities of the cult of ancestors and clan memberships is unquestionably useful for constituting larger ensembles; yet this is not a subsequent political creation but rather the point of departure. When there is no rupture of the link to the ancestors, there is no religious evolution.
The new form of religion will develop — before writing — first at Eridu, on the edge of the Persian Gulf, in a small temple dedicated to Enki, god of underground waters (of welling springs) as well as of knowledge and techniques (including magical and ritual ones), creator of humankind, who would have warned of the flood in a dream. In fact, if one trusts the Sumerian myths, floods are experienced as destruction by jealous gods who erased their creation age after age, as Kronos devoured his children. The solution offered by the myth (Enûma Eliš) is that humans escape destruction only by serving the gods, working for them, in their stead (in place of nature), to offer them sacrifices. This is a new religious regime and a new relationship to the gods, characterized by figures in prayer (the orants), arms raised skyward (in the Enûma Eliš, Marduk is celebrated for having "created the Incantation so that the gods might be appeased," p. 646). One may see in this a new notion of originary debt, instituting a relationship of submission wherein the serf, having lost his "natural" freedom, produces through labor the powerful freedom of humanity (notably by maintaining the irrigation canals).
The city will be built around the temple according to a schema subsequently taken up elsewhere, notably at Uruk — the first city-state, though this time dedicated to Inanna (goddess of love and war) — illustrating this totemic practice of the tutelary god differing from city to city, administered by the temple priests and the Priest-King himself. We are no longer in the realm of popular beliefs but of a hierarchized pantheon of gods: a gallery of functions that will recur in other polytheisms (especially the Greek) and is more familiar to us, but which henceforth comes from the scribes and from writing — barely invented — that defines dogma. It is a fact that civic cults, with their staging of power and great ceremonies and sacrifices, have a persuasive effect — reinforcing social unity and easily carrying along the enthusiasm of crowds ready to believe any spectacle or state propaganda. The city-states represent an incontestably essential milestone in the sedentary peasant's journey toward populous, mixed cities — economic and military powers that, while distinguished from the empires that will succeed them by their local anchorage, are no longer clannish, and produce a different type of subjectivity and practice.
It should be noted that the first empires of Akkad or Egypt did not modify the functioning of the city-states, nor the local religious practices — though Akhenaten felt the need to unify the different peoples under his authority in the solar cult of Aten, "god of all nations," which, as we know, provoked general rejection. The domination by Indo-European chariots and cavalry, which led to the Hittite Empire, did not change local cults, integrated into the syncretism of a "religion of a thousand gods"; yet the promotion of Shamash as supreme judge would bring a minimum of imperial unity — a judge who sees everything, guarantor of oaths and treaties, unifying its territorialized polytheist pantheon in the name of the single Truth, though without real power. This is a new dimension, magnified by the Persians (good faith/bad faith), that will prove essential in empires needing an external judge as guarantor of Truth and contracts.
The Axial Age and Beyond
The final act was once again provoked by a climatic catastrophe: the general collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age (around 1,200 BCE), when cities and civilizations disappeared (Egypt alone would resist) — a period of chaos and roving bands of raiders, further opposing settled peoples (farmers) against nomads (Indo-Iranians). We enter the Iron Age and the generalization of the horse, which expands zones of influence. One must also cite the impact of Croesus's introduction of coinage around 550 BCE — a factor of abstraction and even a certain egalitarianism (commercial isonomia). All of this will lead to what Jaspers called the "Axial Age," centered around 500 BCE, which saw the appearance of numerous sages (Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Socrates) and founding texts that still speak to us. In all of them one finds the same moral internalization, the same spiritualization of ritual, the same critique of the clergy and of bloody sacrifices — even of sorcery.
These tendencies will recur in Roman Christianity — the exemplary case of an empire co-opting a spiritual apocalyptic movement (with its martyrs) it did not initiate. Born of the catastrophe of the crushing of the Jews and the destruction of the Temple, it will be profoundly transformed: in it the empire finds a universalist foundation (catholicon) more powerful than the cult of the emperor for unifying all its peoples ("There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female"). It is a religion of slaves perfectly suited to an empire in which all citizens are slaves of the emperor, and one that will reveal its full value to soldiers sensitive to promises of resurrection. Religion, this time, is no longer clannish or localized (except in Rome) — it claims universality, yet cannot deny its link to power and to effective social organization.
Conclusion
We can stop here to avoid encumbering the demonstration of what we have attempted to show: the interplay among traumatic events that discredit prior beliefs, the spiritual responses to them, and their recuperation by the powers that adapt them to material conditions and actual social organization. Far from a simple "religious need" — where one might have looked, with Alain, for the objectification of subjectivity — one encounters an entire chain: External shock (catastrophe,
collapse) → Collective trauma → Religious innovation → Institutionalization. This gives an external cause to a symbolic revolution and a concrete origin to the feeling of debt and guilt toward the gods. The external cause may be a collapse, a catastrophe, an unbearable chaos. The cause of the rupture may just as well be overpopulation or some other dysfunction (an internal cause) as climate change; but this introduces — as in evolutionary theory — a dramatic element of urgency that subjectively implicates the believers. If one cannot therefore reduce this to a simple cognitive evolution, one must not lose sight of what belongs to a general progress that is also constrained by its historical position: belonging to the same cognitive/technical stage dependent on what precedes it and needing to be surpassed.
It must be emphasized that, in the scientific era and the age of the death of God, this dialectic of ideology with relations of power and production applies just as well to Soviet communism — an ideology built on the utopia of an exit from capitalism and from History, supposedly bringing paradise on Earth, but which could only endure through an imperial dictatorial power sustaining this ideology despite its perversions.
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