[MUSIC].

In the previous segment, we discussed

the basic realities of the lives of
ancient foragers.
What did they ate?
What did they do most of the day, and so
forth.
In this segment, I would like to take a
closer
look at their mental and spiritual lives.
This is much more difficult to do.
It is far harder to know what people
believe, than what people eat.
Because it's, especially when you don't
have any writing or much evidence.
Most scholars nevertheless agree, that
animistic beliefs were common among
ancient foragers, and are the basis for
most of their religions and
world view.
This word, animism, again, it comes from a
Latin word, the Latin word anima, which
means soul, or spirit.
Animism is the belief that the world is
full of animated beings.
All of whom can communicate with one
another directly.
Animists believe that almost every place,
every animal, every plant, and every
natural phenomenon has
a awareness, has a mind, has feelings and
emotions.
For example, animists may believe that the
big rock
at the top of the hill has feelings,
desires, and needs.
The rock might be angry about something
that people did.
Or rejoice over some other action
and, and be very happy about it.
The rock might ask people to do something.
Or people might come to the rock and ask
the rock to do something for them.
humans can not only address the rock, but
make all kinds of bargains with the rock.
We'll do this, and you in exchange will
help
us in, in, in, in, in some other endeavor.
Not only the rocks, the big rock,
but also, say, the oak tree at the bottom
of the hill.
What may be considered by the animists as
an animated being.
And so is the stream, flowing below the
hill, and the spring in the forest
clearing.
And the bushes growing arou-, around the,
the stream, and so forth and so on.
And also, of course, all the animal, all
the wolves, and

all the mice, and all the crows that come

to the spring
to drink.
They are, they are all animated beings,
they all have emotions and desires.
And humans can communicate directly with
all of them.
In the animist world, objects and living
things are not the only animated beings,
there are also immaterial entities, all
kinds of fairies, and demons, and angels
that also inhabit the world.
So it's not only the rocks, and the
springs, and the trees, and the wolves,
but the world is also full of all kinds
of immaterial beings, im-, immaterial
anima.
which you can talk with, communicate with
and make all kinds of deal with.
Animists, very importantly,
believe that there is no barrier between
humans and other beings.
We, too, we believe, most of us believe
that animals have,
have emotions and have minds, but we can't
talk with them directly.
Animist do believe that you can
communicate directly in speech, or song,
or dance, or ceremony with the wolves, and
with the clouds, and with the rivers,
and with the rocks.
A hunter that goes hunting deer may
address the herd of
deer and ask that one of them be willing
to sacrifice itself and to be hunted.
If the hunt succeed, the hunter may ask
the forgiveness of the dead animal.
So that the spirit of the dead animal
won't be angry.
And won't, won't cause damage later on to
the hunter.
If somebody in the band falls sick.
So the shaman, the, the person who is most
proficient in talking with spirits.
The shaman may contact the spirit who
caused the sickness
and try to either pacify it, or to scare
it away.
Go away from this person and, and, and he
can be healthy again.
If the spirit does not cooperate, then the
shaman
may ask for help from other spirits.
What characterizes all these acts
of communication, and this differentiates
animism from all kinds of later religions.
Is that the entities which you address,
which you communicate with, are local
beings.
They are a, a particular tree, or rock, or

wolf, or
cloud, or demon.
They are not great gods.
It's unlike, it's not like the case later
on with the religions of the great gods.
That you have a big god who is responsible
for many, many trees, and rocks, and
wolves, but in
the case of animism, the main
communication is with this
particular entities in your own valley, in
your own neighborhood.
Not with great gods who live somewhere
above, above the clouds.
Just as, according to animists, there is
no barrier
between humans and other beings, we can
speak directly with
the trees, and with the rocks, and with
the elephants,
so neither is there a strict hierarchy in
the world.
Non-human, en-, entities, like trees or
elephants,
they do not exist simply to provide for
our needs and desires.
We, men, humans are not above them.
They are near, they are in a similar
position to, to, to them.
Similarly, animists usually do not give
much importance to all-powerful gods
who run the entire world as they wish.
The world of animists does not
revolve around humans, and does not
revolve around any
other particular group of beings, like the
great gods.
It revolves around communication between a
lot of entities.
Which, all of them have relatively similar
status in the system.
The trees, and the rocks, and humans, and
mice, they're
not in a hierarchy, but they all share in
a community
of entities, which is the world.
So this is animism, this is the basic
animist belief.
But it should be emphasized that animism
is not a specific religion.
It is a generic name.
It's an umbrella name for thousands upon
thousands of very, very different
religions, and cults, and beliefs.
What make all of
these different cult and religion animist,
is a core, a common core
approach to the world into man's place in,
in, in the world.
The idea, there is no hierarchy and there

is direct communication
with all the other entities, this is the
core of animism.
But, aside from these core beliefs, there
could be very big differences between the
religion
of one animist group, and the religion or
beliefs of, of another animist group.
It's, like, today, or, or not, not only
today.
In the last thousands of years, there are
many groups
of people who had shared common belief in
great gods.
So all of them, you can call them theists.
Theists, it's come from theos, which is
God, not in Latin, but in Greek.
Theos is God.
So you can call many, many different
religions theist religions, like
Greek Pagan religion, and Hindu religion,
and Islam, and Judaism and, and so forth.
They are all theist religions.
They are all, they all believe in great
gods, they all approach the
world with the basic understanding that
there is a hierarchy in
the world, in which the single god of the
great gods are
at the top, and humans and other entities
are a subject to them.
And it would be true to say that most
cultures, after the agricultural
revolution in the last thousands of years,
that most cultures were theists.
They believed in great gods.
But this,
this does not tell us much about the
particulars.
About what they actually believed and, and
practiced in their day to day lives.
Because, under this general heading of
believing in great
Gods, you can find Jewish Rabbis from 18th
century Poland.
They believed in a great god.
And you find Protestants and, and Puritans
from the 17th century.
They also
believed in a great god.
And you find Aztec priests, from 15th
century Mexico, they believed in great
gods.
And you find Muslim Sufi mystics from say,
12th century Iran.
They also believed in a great god.
And you have viking warriors from 10th
century Scandinavia who believe in great
gods.
And you have Roman legionnaires, and

Chinese bureaucrats, and

Egyptian peasants.
And they all believe in great gods.
So they are all theists.
But it doesn't really tell us much about
the more de-, more detailed aspects of
their beliefs and practices.
Just to know that they all believe in a
great god.
And there are huge differences as
everybody knows.
Between other religions that I, I, I
mentioned in, in the last few minutes.
The differences
between the beliefs and practices of
different groups of
animists, might have been just as
big as the differences between Islam and
ancient Greek religion.
So, both Islam and ancient Greek, Greek
religion, they both believe in, in great
gods.
One god or many gods.
But we all know that there are huge
differences.
So,
similarly, 30,000 years ago, two foraging
bands might both have been animists,
believing in this basic idea of the
world being suffused by all kinds of
entities that
have emotions, and feelings, and can
communicate with one another.
But the differences between them could
have been
just as great as the differences between
Islam and
ancient Pagan, Greek religion.
As a religious experience, therefore,
of the world, tens of thousands of years
ago, might have been very diverse.
And there might have been not only
different religions, but also
religious controversies before movements
and religious revolutions.
Like, for many years, people believed one
thing and suddenly came a very charismatic
leader, and
start convincing them to believe in a
different kind of religion.
Can we then say anything more specific
about the beliefs of particular bands?
Not just that all bands or most bands were
probably animists.
But can we say anything more specific
about the
actual beliefs of this band or, or that
band?
We have some pieces of evidence, like cave
art, and, and

jewelry, and statues.

But unfortunately, in almost all cases,
this is not enough evidence to reconstruct
from it
the world views, the detailed world view
of people who lived 20 or
30,000 years ago.
because again, most of the evidence
we have about their religions come from a
very limited number of
statues and paintings.
And we don't have any written evidence.
So we can't be sure how to interpret these
statues and these cave paintings.
There are scholars who give detailed
accounts of what ancient foragers
believed.
You can find articles and books, will tell
you
in page after page, very many details
about it.
But most of these accounts are a good
source for in-, of information for the
prejudices of modern scholars who imposed
their own prejudices on the evidence.
They are, unfortunately, a poor source of
information about what our ancestors
actually believed.
take, for example, this cave painting
which you can now see.
A very famous one, it was found in the
Lascaux Cave in France,
and it was made by people who lived there
about 15 or 20,000 years ago.
What exactly do you see in the painting,
and what is its meaning?
Take a minute to, to, to think, to just
look at the painting and think what
is being depicted, and what is the meaning
of, of, of the painting?
Well, some scholars argue that what you
see in this painting is a man,
with the head of a bird, and an erect
penis being killed by a bison.
And under the man, you see another bird.
This is what you see in painting according
to some scholars.
These scholars also argue that the bird
symbolizes the soul.
That the people who painted this cave art
20,000 years ago, they believed
in souls, and they represented the soul
with the shape of a bird.
And what you're seeing in the painting is
actually the
soul being released from the body at the
moment of death.
This is why it goes through the head, and
this is
why the head is the head of a bird,

because the soul is emerging from the head

at the moment of death, and being released
to its next incarnation.
If so, according to these scholars, the
picture that you see does not depict a
prosaic hunting accident, but rather it
depicts the
passage from this world to the next world.
Or from this life
to the next life.
Now this is a very, very interesting and
imaginative theory.
But we have absolutely no way of
knowing whether any of these speculations
are true.
We are not even sure what we see in
the picture, let alone being sure about
the meaning.
Like, the idea that the bird symbolizes
the soul.
We have absolutely no idea for no evidence
for this.
We don't
have any, say, written record from people
who lived 20,000 years ago, that they
wrote we think that the soul is like a
bird, or something like that.
Similarly now look at this statue, also a
very famous statue.
It's called the Venus of Willendorf.
This is the name that scientists gave it.
it was found near the village of
Willendorf
in Austria.
And this was made by people who lived in
what is today Austria, about 20, 25
thousand years ago.
And many similar statues, that looked a
bit
like this, were found all over Europe and
Russia,
and in, and in other places, made from all
kinds of materials, like clay, and stone,
and ivory.
Now, some scholars, when they
look at these statues, they say that what
we see
in them is a depiction of some great
mother goddess.
Or some great earth goddess, and that
these stat-, statues are proof that
ancient, ancient foragers believed in the
predominance of the maternal, of feminine
element.
That they worshiped
femininity and women, and that they
actually lived in matriarchal
societies headed by women.
Because they say we find all these statues
of women figurine, of female figurine, but

we don't find any similar statues of men.

So this is one very famous theory based
just on these statues.
That people 20, 30,000 years ago
in Austria and other places, they lived in
matriarchal societies, and they believed
in great mother figures as their dominant
religious leaders.
But, there are other explanations for
these statues, which are exactly the
opposite.
Some scholars, looking at exactly the same
statues, say that these statues
are actually proof of a very chauvinistic
and patriarchal society.
These statues are a relic to the male
obsession
with the female body and with female,
fert-, fertility.
They represent an ancient attemp, attempt
by men to control
female sexuality in a society dominated
by men.
still other scholars argue that this
statute has
nothing to do with religion, it's simply
pornography.
It's ancient pornography, that's all.
Now who is right in this argument?
We don't know.
We don't have any records from 20,000
years ago of the people who made these
statues, or who worshiped or, or used
these
statues about what they had in mind when
they created them and when, and when they
used them.
Now take a look at this third example of a
really amazing cave art.
It's not really a painting it's a, a, it's
a collection of hand prints,
that hunter gatherers, who lived 9,000
years ago in Argentina,
made this amazing collection of hand
imprints
on the walls of the cave.
Which is therefore known today as the Cave
of the Hands.
Now, it looks as if these long dead
hands are reaching towards us from within
the rock.
And this is, therefore, one of the most
moving
relics of ancient forager society, of the
ancient forager world.
But, what is the meaning?
Why did they made
with giant wall full of hand prints of
different people?
We know it's different people.

It's not one artist who went and put his

hand in all kinds of places on the rock.
Because there are differences, and there
are very interesting studies about the
composition of this ancient society based
on these hand prints.
Because you can see who made the hand
prints, men or women, old people or young
people, so it's a very interesting and
moving relic to this ancient world.
But what is the meaning behind it?
What kind of beliefs caused people to make
all the effort?
We just don't know.
There are, again, all kinds of theories.
But we have no hard evidence which enables
us to
say, this theory is correct and this
theory is wrong.
Instead of building all those big theories
on
the basis of very flimsy evidence, perhaps
the best
course of action is simply to be frank,
and to admit that we have only
a very hazy notion about the religions of
ancient foragers.
We assume that they had religions.
And we probably, and, and we think that
probably most of them were animists.
But that's about as much as we can be
certain of.
We don't
know what spirits in particular they, they
worshiped.
We don't know what festivals they
celebrated.
We don't know what kind of taboos and ru-,
and rules they observed.
So, I'm afraid, that this segment may have
been very disappointing to some of you.
You wanted to hear details about the first
religions of our
ancestors, and what you got is only a very
few extremely general speculations but
that's all we have.
As I noted several times already in
previous lessons, in science if you
don't know something, the best thing to do
is simply to say I don't know.
It's much better than to start
constructing all
kinds of fanciful theories and tales based
on very little real evidence.
Because it just causes confusion.
In the next segment, we will take a look
at another
aspect of ancient life, at the political
world of our ancestor.
And we'll try to see what was the politics

like and, I'm afraid, that we will be

encountering
similar difficulties with understanding
ancient politics and ancient warfare.
as we've encountered now in trying to
understand ancient religion.
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