Early Man, Early Beliefs

I don’t know what made me do an internet search on Talmud the first thing this morning and when I traced an authentic translation on http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/t01/t0104.htmI, one of the first sentences that danced before my eyes was this:  Kal Hat'haloth Kashoth [‘All beginnings are difficult’]. It was so overwhelmingly, bizarrely appropriate to what I was setting out to do that I felt moved, humbled and encouraged.

So, like Maria in The Sound of Music let me too attempt to start at the very beginning [Let’s start at the very beginning/A very good place to start/ When we read, we begin with a,b,c/When we sing, we begin with do,re,mi...]

A book on the history of science that I read about a decade back drew a word scene that has remained with me. It said imagine Early Man at night standing in a clearing with nothing stretching in front of him but acres and acres of land and nothing above him but the overarching skies. What do you think must have run in his mind? Great scene, great question. Scientist Carl Sagan mentions this somewhere in Cosmos too.

Early Man must have been as overwhelmed by the scene as I was just ten minutes back when the wisdom of one of mankind’s oldest books warmly reassured me that ‘all beginnings are difficult’.  Even when roaming in the forests, Early Man who sought safety from wild animals on tree tops [orang-utans even now build their nests on trees] at night might have looked up to be overawed by the night sky. The darkness of night has remained to this day [notwithstanding the zillion-watt artificial lighting] a mildly frightening, uncomfortable presence. The lack of natural light and sunny warmth leaves us cold and threatened to this day. And the seed for that must have been sown when Early Man scanned the  night sky anxiously for signs of the coming of dawn.

 

As time passed, Man settled, learning to bring some energies under harness – fire, light – and learning to cope with others – protecting himself from the weather with clothes and shelter. This was the beginning of human thought, when man learnt to take control of his life.

About 10000 years back, early thinking man must have slowly learnt to discriminate between what he could control and what he could not. Discrimination must have led him to wonder at a power over which he had no control. Remember, he himself had tasted some power by then and knew how heady it was!

So early thinking settled man made up stories to explain the elements of nature and the powers that he had no control over. In Sophie’s World, Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder says that man’s first reaction to his world was through myth-making.

He first spun stories to answer questions like ‘What are those things up there in the sky? What do they mean to me? What do they do to me? What is rain and snow? What makes the sun shine and the wind blow?’ From what to why and how must have been a short leap, and then must have come the connection of everything to  ‘me’.

Hundreds of creation myths abound in the world and while some seem pretty crude today, there are those that even today surprise us by their sophistication. The American Indian Rainbow Crow story  is one of my favourites: http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/09/rainbow_crow.html [The Creator here has just to ‘think’ and what He thinks comes into existence – now that myth, to me, is verging on philosophy]. Look up also some of the Dreamtime Stores of the Australian indigenous peoples.

From the stories came inexplicable characters who had powers that man did not. Like the creator in the rainbow crow story. So from myth-making we move to religion, which organizes and places our Gods in time and space, gives them attributes we know of, give them powers over us that we fear, and craves their grace, which we recognise as necessary for our existence.

I think of all the gods of Greek mythology, of Roman, Egyptian and Nordic mythology – these being the mythology I love – and I think of all the Vedic gods [Agni, Surya, Indra, Vayu, Varuna – except surya, not one is propitiated today].

But they died – these early gods died when more sophisticated religious systems came into being. The more sophisticated systems that replaced them were the two Abrahamic religions in the west– Jewism and Christianity [and later Islam]. The only religion that has a continuous history in one form or the other for the last 4000 years is ours, Hinduism. [And of course, Jewism, about which I know nothing – so I will refrain from talking about it.]

So what made these other religions more sophisticated than the early ones? And was it the same thing that gave Hindusim the robustness and vitality that has led to its survival in one way or the other till today?

My guess is these new religions replaced those older ones because they introduced an undercurrent of moral philosophy. These new religions codified certain standards of ethical conduct for communal living, defined certain desirable human qualities and values, and refined notions of the Unknown and the Powerful. In effect, we had moved on from each one seeking the grace of the unknown to promote us and ours, to a higher level of understanding which recognised that the individual needs to feel, think and work not only for his gain but also for the society to which he belonged.

Every passing century has brought refinement in our thinking, and with it, our interpretation of philosophy, religion and the scriptures have also changed. Priorities have changed and focus areas have shifted.  We no longer think of breaking the Sabbath as a sin inviting punishment. Love, forgiveness, compassion and responsibility have become by-words. We Hindus no longer consider natal charts to determine auspicious time and days for doing things or undertaking travel [well, not always anyway!]. Our wedding rites and funeral rites and naming ceremonies have shrunk to adapt to our lifestyles.

Religion no longer dominates communal or social life as it used to in the ancient times. It runs parallel to our professional lives, our family lives, our social lives and our political lives. Our identities have become many-stranded and religion is today just one of the strands and not necessarily the most important one.

We have to recognise these subtle, slow, near imperceptible changes in our identities and beliefs over time because science is now challenging other notions and beliefs deeply ingrained in us by our religions.