Returning to the history of religions convinced me of the inadequacy of theories of religion, whether those of Aristotle, Hegel, or Durkheim, i.e., those based on individual subjectivity or on their social function. It is not possible, in fact, to remain at this level of generality and base these historical productions on the psychological structures of the species, nor to remain at this sociological functionalism (Durkheim) or at the representation of the truth of a people (Hegel), given their link to material conditions (hunter-gatherers, farmers, city-states, empires).
Once again, it will be a question of substituting multiple external causalities for lived interiority, emphasizing the political and military aspects that have been prevalent since at least the first city-states. Here, as elsewhere, selection after the fact, often through violence, is decisive, although it remains obscured by a supposed autonomy of ideology (belief). Indeed, religions are just one example of the dialectic between ideology and material causalities that are ultimately decisive. These causalities may be material, but they are neither mechanical nor immediate, leaving a certain autonomy to ideology, which is indeed a decisive actor in the dialectic while being subordinate to it after the fact. There is a three-way interplay between forms of social organization, political-military selection, and ideological progress, moving from tribal or pagan animism to the polytheism of city-states, with their tutelary god (totem), before the (never complete) monotheistic tendencies of empires that must integrate diverse populations and move beyond clanism, thus becoming universal. Comparisons between these different configurations will shed more light on the functions of religions and their history.
Aristotle
There could hardly be a true theory of religion when all philosophers believed in the existence of gods (even Democritus and Epicurus, who neutralized them). However, Aristotle provides a rough outline of a theory of religion that he is said to have expounded (according to Werner Jaeger, "Aristotle. Foundations for a History of Its Development") in his lost work Protrepticus, which retained a religious content (still believing in premonitory dreams) but which is then found in a fragmented way, and as if in passing, in various later works (Metaphysics, Politics, Rhetoric, Ethics).
For all his commentators, Aristotle's religion seems to be limited to his conception of God as the first cause, the unmoved mover, and thought that thinks itself (which does not prevent him from assimilating the stars to gods!). This "god of philosophers" is, however, not very religious, quite distant from both civic religions and mystical sentiments. In his Metaphysics, he gives the same origin to philosophy and religion, which arise from wonder and the need to find answers to what we do not understand, to explain what we do not know or what we fear and which is beyond us. The first religious need would thus stem from a cognitive requirement (as philosophy does for Hegel: "If the power to unify disappears from human life and if oppositions lose their living relationship, their interactions, and gain their independence, then philosophy becomes a necessity." G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference Between the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and Schelling, p. 110).
However, this cognitive issue (which regresses as scientific advances drive back obscurantism) does not account for the political importance of religion, which Aristotle nevertheless recognizes, nor the inner experience of the sacred or devotion, which he attributes to the fear and respect that seize us in the presence of the divine, in the presence of that which is superior to humans (the starry sky above me), purely individual reasons that are nevertheless common (yet if the feeling is individual, the sacred is social). This psychological experience, which shakes our entire being, is therefore supposed to be universal, an emotion of the soul detached from any particular theology, just like contemplation, but this is not enough to make a religion or anything other than simple superstition. By remaining within the realm of sensitivity, we also miss the important function of religions as guarantors of truth and social order, and ultimately as the foundation of morality.
This anthropology of religion is very inadequate, especially in that it does not take into account the content of religions, which Hegel sought to do, making religions the representation of the spirit of a people. He considered, in fact, that "it is absurd to believe that priests invented a religion for the people through deception and self-interest. It is as shallow as it is foolish to see religion as a capricious invention, an illusion." The problem is that this leads him to believe that the most absurd religions and myths come from an inner essence of peoples, through a kind of immanence and spontaneous generation that imposes itself, in symbolic or coded form, either through immediate certainty (conviction), oceanic feeling (participation), or abstract intellection (cognition). We will try to show, on the contrary, that the determinants of religions are external and that peoples adopt the religion of the prince. When Heidegger, in his Phenomenology of Religious Life, sought to reduce religious experience to the apocalyptic temporality of the early Christians, which is very reductive and idealistic, at least what he took to be an existential tendency rather testifies, in the adherence to a new religion, to the initial shock of tragic upheavals seeing the disappearance of his world — a shock that completely dissipates after its institutionalization.
Religious subjectivity
We can certainly identify a religious subjectivity, but one that is hardly distinguishable from culture itself, providing a general explanatory framework that gives meaning to all aspects of life, with a whole system of duties and prohibitions. This is why many people cannot imagine living without religion, which would seem to them to be like living without culture or morals—Gandhi even claimed that a life without religion is a life without a rudder. What is clear, in any case, is that religions are part of a particular culture (belonging) that justifies social organization.
What is surprising is that this cultural heteronomy imposed by common language is completely internalized by individuals (prohibition, guilt, debt, sacrifice), but this internalization is misleading, reversing the real causes. To account for subjective adherence to myths and religions, several sources must be combined: cultural transmission, community belonging, crowd enthusiasm, the presence of the Other of language (the imaginary friend or demon), the collection of prayers, the supreme judge who guarantees final justice, the dream of paradise or hell, but also the works of charity that engage us, solidarity in action. Instituted religion, which seems to embody a divinity that is only external, nevertheless leaves deep marks on subjectivities.
If, indeed, we believe first out of ignorance—and we understand the terror of lightning and the questions raised by death and spirits—we believe what we are told because these beliefs are passed on to us by our parents and our community, supported in particular by mothers who bear witness to their reality on a daily basis 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 cumbersome, cultivating hope or guilt, but to believe is always to believe in Santa Claus and that our hopes will be fulfilled, to believe that Good will be rewarded and Evil defeated, that everything has meaning (everything is language). Faced with powerlessness in the face of the unpredictable, religious behavior (prayer, sacrifice) logically becomes the only possible strategy to appease powers perceived as angry and dangerous. Beyond individual feelings, there is above all the sense of community that makes us more fraternal with our fellow believers, with whom we can trade and who can support us—other religions inevitably appear more hostile. The formation of close-knit communities is the principle behind sects and circles of believers, in a desire to experience true and complete relationships, but from the first large cities (not to mention empires) onwards, the community had to expand in a more impersonal way to include strangers, beyond the family clan.
Ultimately, the three theological virtues of Christianity sum up the three dimensions of religion: faith (symbolic), affirming one's belonging (credo quia absurdum); hope (imaginary), in some magic that will save them; and finally charity (real), which is not limited to Christianity, as temples have always been redistributors, ensuring social reproduction. It must be repeated that the hope of being saved in the afterlife can be just as much a fear of divine judgment and punishment, but it is a fact that religions mobilize subjectivities, capable of delivering tremendous energy (construction of pyramids or cathedrals), which proves vital for war. We can even conclude that as long as there are religions, it will be impossible to end conflicts—and religions remain largely dominant, poisoning our lives...
Chronology of religious transformations
To understand the genealogy of religious structures, we must start with the tribal cultures of hunter-gatherers and the narrative language that depicts a common world beyond the immediate environment and what we see. However, this common world is fragmented into a multitude of languages and cultures. In Papua New Guinea, for example, there were more than 800 languages! Languages form totalities, differentiated from other languages, but including within these totalities a whole culture of myths and rituals that organize oppositions and classifications, communication between groups, the definition of identities, and the regulation of exchanges (of alliances, goods, signs).
However, this apparent arbitrariness of signs must be strongly tempered by the fact that there are very few inventions. Myths are always modified versions of previous myths, most often reversing one of the themes to justify opposition or even hostility towards neighboring societies or former ideologies that have disappointed. Maurice Godelier showed that societies were formed and divided on the basis of shared beliefs, ensuring the unity of the group and its common law or prohibitions. While this identity function favors ideological causes, which are themselves overdetermined as we have seen, this does not prevent material causes from subsequently selecting beliefs that are compatible with the imperatives of survival.
These hunter-gatherer societies can be called original societies because they are oriented towards the past, the cult of founding ancestors, and their original state, which must always be restored because it is constantly transgressed and must be restored through sacrifices. Sacrifices are, in effect, a form of gift/counter-gift to the spirits or natural powers that one claims to command (this is the role of magic and witchcraft) through incantations, fetishes, and offerings. There are no natural causes for illness or death, which are systematically attributed to evil spirits who have cast spells or disturbed the natural order. There are only good or evil intentions.
It was only after the volcanic winter that followed the catastrophic eruption of Mount Toba around 70,000 years ago, when populations from the Iranian plateau spread across the Earth, that we saw the cultural explosion that led to decorated caves—interpreted as a "religion of presence" (or rather contact with the other world by pretending to incorporate one's hand into the cave wall by covering it with pigment, leaving a "negative hand"). The hunter-gatherer tribes of the time were quite similar to the last "first peoples" studied by ethnology, but rather than religion, we should speak of a mythical era with a profusion of myths related to the myths of surrounding societies (Lévi-Strauss mapped these for North America). We already have the identity function of myths attached to a tribe (totem) and their normative character in group practices and unions.
The next stage, which is a moment of transition and has only recently been recognized, confirms what Jacques Cauvin had pointed out, to general incomprehension, about a religious revolution preceding and promoting Neolithization, rather than the opposite pattern with which we are more familiar. The cause is not, however, internal, purely symbolic, or the fulfillment of a previous potentiality, but is once again the result of an external shock. This is indeed what is suggested by the discovery of the temples of Göbekli Tepe and its surroundings (9,600 BC), which can be interpreted as a reaction to a cosmic catastrophe (comet/asteroid) around 10,800 BC, which would have caused a sudden cooling for 1,200 years (the Younger Dryas period), with mass extinctions of megafauna (mammoths, giant sloths, etc.). The representation of a falling star supports this theory, which is disputed by some despite fairly convincing evidence, but not the cooling itself. While this remains speculation, we can imagine that this devastating episode may have given rise to a new belief and rituals bringing together hunter-gatherers from across a whole region, encouraging them to gather regularly for large ceremonies where they feasted and drank grain beer. A similar reaction can be observed in Mexico at the same time, with large ritual gatherings involving feasts and mammoth hunts, but without the construction of monumental buildings. However, these territorialized customs preceded and encouraged sedentarization, initially around these sacred sites. This is what ensured their evolutionary advantage, after the fact and indirectly. The existence of a whole complex of temples near Göbekli Tepe bears witness to an initial small-scale semi-sedentarization (as in Jericho), thousands of years before definitive sedentarization (Çatal Hüyük, one of the oldest true cities, dates from 7000 BC).
After this spiritual upheaval, we find ourselves at a turning point between nomadic and sedentary lifestyles (as between myths and religion), which will be very gradual. Religions begin when we move away from animism and simple magic, from clan beliefs linked to the territory and the cult of founding ancestors. However, most of the rites of animist hunter-gatherers can be found in later religious forms, albeit in attenuated or spiritualized forms. Nothing disappears completely, neither sacrifice (the blood of Christ) nor initiation (bar mitzvah) nor totemism (the cross). Myth becomes story or folklore, but everything is recycled and reinterpreted in later stages, even witchcraft and magic (transubstantiation). With Göbekli Tepe, it seems that we have an early form of religion, an intermediate form, no doubt, centered on preventing the return of past trials.
If this new religiosity did indeed predate sedentarization and agriculture, which were merely a "perverse effect" of it, the original cause was clearly external, an anguished reaction to the catastrophe that destroyed confidence in the previous gods. These groupings seem to testify to the fact that distress produces solidarity and changes in representations, symbolic productions intended to respond to it, and then, after the fact, they bring material advantages that encourage their reproduction and prevent any return to the past (agriculture ultimately multiplying the population by 10).
It is difficult to know what remains of this initial religious revolution, which seems to have been rejected (its temples buried several times) and which will be profoundly transformed with sedentarization and the beginnings of agriculture and then animal husbandry, this time following the pattern of ideology reflecting production relations (after the fact and no longer before). One of its very first manifestations was the new cult, focused on reproduction, of "the Good Mother and the Bull" (Isis/Apis, etc.), which appeared as early as 9,500 BC, following on from Göbekli Tepe. Jacques Cauvin emphasized the anteriority of these figures in relation to agriculture and animal husbandry, which is true at the global level but not necessarily at the local level, where these practices began with the storage of grain. It is more accurate to say that the promotion of these prehistoric representations may have accompanied, or even prompted, the first isolated attempts at agriculture, as we should not imagine that Neolithization occurred immediately; agriculture spread very slowly, driven by the climate change that made it necessary.
The next stage, which never completely disappeared, was therefore that of pagan religions, the religion of peasants, who were also rooted in their territory but more attentive to cycles (death/resurrection) and the whims of the elements (divination). There was initially continuity with the original religion, visible in the construction of small miniature Göbekli Tepes, which were integrated into the first Neolithic villages and then into domestic architecture before being abandoned. The gods of rain or storms, like the goddesses of fertility or springs, are hardly distinguishable from shamanic spirits, being local incarnations of natural forces (there is no hierarchical pantheon). We see that sedentarization is accompanied by the veneration of the skulls of the dead, which were modeled and displayed around houses, while the bodies of the deceased were often buried in the house itself, evidence of a stronger but more intimate ancestor cult, not of the ancestors of the group this time but of the family line or lineage (valued for livestock breeding), with a family altar dedicated to them (as in China or the Roman lararium). However, agricultural settlement with its food storage came into conflict with the former nomads (predators).
We then enter historical periods, those of polytheism and Sumerian city-states where religion becomes political, with priests linked to power (the Priest-King). Initially, there were once again major climatic upheavals which, between 7500 and 6000 BC, made Mesopotamia fertile and flooded the Persian Gulf as the sea rose, forcing the Gulf populations to migrate north to Eridu as climate refugees. In addition, around 5600 BC, this rise in sea levels caused the Bosphorus to break, leading to a sudden flooding of the Black Sea (the Great Flood) and forcing farmers from the north to migrate south. We must also mention the later submersion of Uruk around 3100 BC, as all these episodes contributed to the formation of the myth of the flood recounted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, when everything had to be rebuilt. This was a considerable ecological upheaval that called for a new form of religion, which first developed in Eridu, on the edge of the Persian Gulf, in a small temple dedicated to Enki, god of underground waters (springs) as well as knowledge and techniques (including magic and rituals), creator of mankind, whom he warned of the flood in a dream.
In fact, according to Sumerian myths, floods were seen as destruction wrought by jealous gods who wiped out their creation, age after age, just as Kronos ate his children. The solution offered by the myth (Enûma elis) is that humans can only escape destruction by serving the gods, working for them, in their place (in place of nature) to offer them sacrifices. This is another religious regime and relationship with the gods, characterized by figures in prayer (the orants), their arms stretched toward the sky (in Enûma elis, Marduk is celebrated for having "created the Incantation so that the gods would be appeased" p646). We can see here a new notion of original debt, establishing a relationship of submission in which the serf, having lost his natural "freedom," produces powerful human freedom through work (notably irrigation through the maintenance of canals).
The city will be built around the temple according to a pattern that will be repeated later, notably in Uruk, which will be the first city-state, although this time dedicated to Inanna (goddess of love and war), illustrating this totemic practice of a different patron god in each city, administered by the priests of the temple and the priest-king himself. We are no longer in the realm of popular beliefs but in a hierarchical pantheon of gods, a gallery of functions that we find in other polytheistic religions (particularly Greek) and which is more familiar to us but which now comes from scribes and writing, barely invented, defining dogma. It is a fact that civic cults, with their displays of power and grand ceremonies or sacrifices, have a persuasive effect, reinforcing social unity and easily winning over the enthusiasm of crowds ready to believe any spectacle or state propaganda. City-states undoubtedly represent an essential milestone in the transition from peasant settlement to populous and mixed cities, economic and military powers, distinguished from the empires that would follow by their local roots, but which were no longer clan-based, producing a different type of subjectivity and practices.
It should be noted that the first empires of Akkad and Egypt did not change the functioning of city-states or local religious practices, although Akhenaten felt the need to unify the different peoples under his authority in the solar cult of Aten, "god of all nations," but we know that this was met with widespread rejection. On the other hand, while the domination of Indo-European chariots and horsemen, which led to the Hittite Empire, did not change local cults, which were integrated into the syncretism of a "religion of a thousand gods," the promotion of Shamash to supreme judge brought a minimum of imperial unity, a judge who saw everything, guarantor of oaths and treaties, unifying his territorialized polytheistic pantheon in the name of the one Truth, although without real power. This was a new dimension, magnified by the Persians (good faith/bad faith), which would prove essential in empires needing an external judge as guarantor of Truth and contracts.
The final act will once again be triggered by a climatic catastrophe causing the general collapse of the late Bronze Age (around 1200 BC), when cities and civilizations disappeared (Egypt resisted), a period of chaos and bands of looters, which further opposed sedentary (farmers) and nomadic (Indo-Iranians) peoples. We enter the Iron Age and the spread of the horse, which broadens areas of influence. We must also mention the impact of the introduction of currency by Croesus around 550 BC, which will be a factor of abstraction and even a certain egalitarianism (commercial isonomy). All of this led to what Jaspers called "the Axial Age," especially around 500 BC, which saw the emergence of many sages (Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Socrates) and seminal texts that still speak to us today. Indeed, we find the same moral internalization, the same spiritualization of ritual, the same criticism of the clergy and bloody sacrifices, and even of witchcraft. These trends can be found in Roman Christianity, which is a prime example of the empire's appropriation of an apocalyptic spiritual movement (with its martyrs) that it did not initiate, born out of the catastrophe of the crushing of the Jews and the destruction of the temple, but which it would profoundly transform, finding in it a universalist (catholicon) foundation more powerful than the cult of the emperor to unify all its peoples ("There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female"), a religion of slaves perfectly suited to an empire in which all citizens are slaves to the emperor, and which will reveal its full value to soldiers sensitive to the promises of resurrection. This time, religion was no longer clan-based or localized (except in Rome), claiming universality but unable to deny its link to power and social organization.
We can stop there so as not to weigh down the demonstration we are attempting of the interplay between traumatic events that disqualify previous beliefs, the spiritual responses that answer them, and their adoption by the powers that adapt them to material conditions and effective social organization. Far from a simple "religious need," where we could seek, like Alain, the objectification of subjectivity, we have encountered a whole chain, ranging from an external shock (catastrophe, collapse) → to collective trauma → then religious innovation → then institutionalization by the powers that be, which gives an external cause to a symbolic revolution and a concrete origin to the feeling of debt and guilt towards the gods. This external cause can be a collapse, a catastrophe, or unliveable chaos. The cause of the rupture can be overpopulation or other dysfunction (internal cause), as well as climate change, but this introduces, as in the theory of evolution, an element of dramatic urgency that subjectively involves believers. While we cannot therefore reduce it to a simple cognitive evolution, we must not lose sight of what constitutes general progress, which is also constrained by its historical position, belonging to the same cognitive/technical stage depending on what has gone before and must be overcome.
It should be emphasized that in the scientific age and the death of God, this dialectic of ideology with power and production relations can be applied just as much to Soviet communism, an ideology built on the utopia of an escape from capitalism and history, supposed to bring paradise on Earth but which could only last through an imperial dictatorial power supporting this ideology despite its perversions.
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