PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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Eustacia Jennings
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1 In the period prior to 3000 B.C. -- as a matter of fact prior to about 600 B.C. -- there was nothing that could properly be called philosophy in our modern sense. What becomes philosophy in Greek civilization was in earlier times embedded in religion, magic, and myth. We must treat human thought and experience in these forms and at this level, however, because the problems are, in primitive forms, the same problems that we still deal with in modern science, philosophy, and religion. If we look carefully at the findings of anthropologists, we discover evidences which make it clear that human consciousness has been religious about as long as it has been human--from at least as early as the middle of the Paleolithic times (Old Stone Age), about 500,000 years ago. The evidences from this period that are pertinent to our interests are found in the practice of decapitation and the opening of human skulls and other bones, presumably to provide sacramental meals of the brain and marrow. In a sacramental meal people believe that the special powers in what is eaten are taken into the life system of the communicant, who, by participating in the meal, "communes" with--not just intellectually but in fact shares in-- the life force of what is eaten. The sacramental meal, therefore, was believed to be a way of tapping and drawing upon the life force itself. Other early evidences from numerous places show that skulls (and later still, whole bodies) were buried in groups, all facing westward and smeared with red ochre. Bodies were also found buried with weapons, personal belongings, and the bones of food animals. All such practices indicate ritualistic treatment of the dead in burial ceremonies, reflecting concern about death and a belief in afterlife. The red ochre suggests blood and primitive people's effort by magic to revive and to perpetuate life. Small figurines and cave drawings of pregnant women and animals are found in many places. These, together with the cave paintings in southern France and in northern Spain, give further evidence of humanity's sense of its unity with and continuity in nature. Some paintings indicate the use of magic in hunting, in animals drawn with spears or arrows sticking in them or missiles being hurled at them. There are also human figures with spears in them suggesting magic used Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 1

2 against personal or tribal enemies. While we cannot say with certainty that the drawings and figurines were intended to serve some magical purpose -- fertility, success in hunting, etc.--they do indicate an attempt to relate successfully and harmoniously to the ultimate powers that constituted reality. This same awareness and effort reached also to the heavens. Symbolic representations of the sun and moon appear very early in prehistory--and survive to the beginning of the Christian era -- drawn on weapons and tools, and later in the representations of the gods. Arrangements of stones, such as those at Stonehenge and many similar places in England, and in various forms of pyramids in numerous places as remote from each other as Iraq and South America, simultaneously demonstrate a growing interest in and a primitive science of astronomy and a religious outreach to set up fulfilling harmonies with the cosmic powers and the "high gods." Religious consciousness gave rise in primitive life to some common forms that are still found in primitive societies. Chief among these are The Holy, animism, totem, ritual, morality, taboo, magic, and myth. The idea that some things should be set aside as holy or sacred is not originally a decision that people make arbitrarily for the sake of having something holy or for some ulterior reason such as securing the person of the chief or priest against criticism or personal harm. The Holy is always given as holy. It is what is experienced as being ultimate, and basically The Holy is ultimate power. It is that which gives life and takes it away. It is that power upon which all things rest, in whose positive action rest the success and fulfillment of life--fertility, growth, healing, etc. It is the power in whose negative action rest the failure and frustration of life. The sense of The Holy experienced in relation to particular things takes the form of animism, the second characteristic of primitive consciousness. Anima is the power in particular things and translates "soul." It is the animating power in all living things, hence "animals." Other things grow, such as trees, grasses, etc., and so these too are said to have animating power. Thus, even a sophisticate like Aristotle talked of nutritive soul shared by vegetables along with all other living things. The soil is obviously essential to plant life, so it too is sometimes thought to have a soul. Rocks tremble, the earth quakes, volcanoes erupt. Power is certainly present. So all of life is believed to participate in anima (soul). They are Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 2

3 all involved somehow in the continuum of power that constitutes the life systems on which our life depends and in which we are inextricably involved. Extend this idea now to the primitive form called totemism. A tribe would take an animal, usually, as its totem and believed that the tribe and every member of the tribe was related to the totem. Again, the concept of power over life was controlling, whether the totem was a crucial food supply for the tribe and, hence, to be dealt with as holy because the life of the tribe depended on its constant supply, or the tribe was believed to share in the kind of life force exemplified in the totem--the kingly soaring of the eagle and the deadly striking power of the snake, etc. Always there is the unity and continuity of the life forces from earth and sun and water to human beings, and it is all holy, because it is all a continuity of power, and such power may injure or heal, bring fulfillment or frustration, and finally may "approve" or "disapprove." Because these things are true, it would follow then that these powers, which make up the orders of reality upon which our very lives and fortunes depend, must be dealt with properly if they are to work for our good, or they will, by our default, work to our harm. Hence, people spelled out in ritual the proper way to approach these powers and to deal with them, as best they could understand how these "dealings" could be made to work. In this sense, there is a great deal of kinship between ritual and science in that they are both based on the belief that there is a right way and a wrong way to deal with the reality powers. We cannot deal with electricity or gravity, with the well-being of the body chemistry or the power of the emotions or psychological drives in any way at all that happens to please us. We may have some flexibility to be sure, but at last it is reality itself that sets the limits and the patterns to which we must conform if these powers are to do well for us and are not to destroy us. So ritual is society's attempt to discover and prescribe the rules, actions, and attitudes by which people establish and maintain the right relations with the ultimate powers. Whatever may be easily dismissed in primitive or modern ritual as superstitious or simply superfluous and irrelevant, the basic urgent need for the definition and celebration of the relations that must maintain between human beings and the powers of life and death in reality--and in a viable and just society--is always there, as an authentic necessity, and we ignore it to our hurt. Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 3

4 That such matters have priority above all other matters, and that the performance of these ultimate relationships must be "correct" is expressed in the precision and the invariability required in the performance of the ritual, and special men -- medicine men, shamans, priests -- are set aside to assure this correctness. It is no more strange an idea than the idea that we prescribe specialists to handle the performance of our dealings with electricity, or arsenic, with health or with the law. Again, it is point- less to protest that the prescriptions of the primitive were useless in many cases. That is only to observe an error. The point is that it is in the inner nature of religious consciousness that our life depends on making the attempt--the right attempt finally, of course--because we are bound up in the bundle of life with the ultimate powers. It is also important to observe that the primitive consciousness under- stands that these necessities are binding on all members of the society alike, for they are not matters for individual taste and election, but are based in the reality of our lives and are necessary for the life of the culture. But these ultimate relations and their performance are not limited to rituals that are for special social or group occasions. They are spelled out also in the morality of a people in mores and folkways, and later set forward in moral law or code so that all people in their individual actions and in particular circumstances of daily life shall know how to act so as to preserve their own lives as well as the life of the society. It is always understood in the religious consciousness that we depend on each other as we depend on the rest of nature for a viable culture. It is understood that to breach a viable social code is as dangerous to individuals and a culture as it is to breach the relations between humankind and nature. Thus, to speak of violating these relations between people, individually or socially, and the rest of reality is to speak of taboo. That is taboo in any culture, primitive or modern, which is believed to violate by de- liberate action or by neglect the ultimate relations between people and people and between people and the ultimate powers. It is believed that we cannot deal with ultimate powers with "unwashen hands" or with unprepared minds or with careless performance, any more than we should handle live power lines without insulating gloves and tools and with the right ritual and care. Thus, the unceremonial killing of the totem animal is taboo; the breach of tribal mores is taboo; women in their period or in Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 4

5 childbirth are taboo; the person of a chief and a medicine man are taboo; the diseased and the dead and the place of death are taboo. Thus, almost anything can become taboo as it comes in any particular time or circumstance to be associated with the ultimate issues of life or death. Magic, another characteristic of primitive consciousness, is but an unsophisticated and uneducated effort, by use of prescribed formula, to deal with the powers that lie beyond us and yet have power over our lives and fortunes. It is the effort of primitive people to control, perhaps to coerce, these powers to serve their needs or their wishes. But it is only the unsophistication that is at fault, for magic is the source of science as well as what becomes religious worship and devotion. The same need and motive to reduce the control of natural powers to formula and method that produce magic also produce science at a more informed and sophisticated level. Pure religion goes beyond both in worship and seeks to make the need and wish of humanity conform to the "will" of the transcendent powers. With the development of the earliest Western civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, we begin to have some written records of the religious life of the people, but we do not find a fundamental change in religious consciousness. Rather, we find in these civilizations what one scholar has described as "primitive religion grown large." The religions have grown large, first of all, simply because of the fact that they have grown with the emergence of cities and nations. This is most clearly seen in the growth of the Egyptian civilization from the primitive village, which probably began an advance in social evolution with "peace treaties" with neighboring villages to insure each against attack from the other and against common enemies. Small local wars also probably had the effect of expanding the territory and population of victorious villages or combinations of allied villages. This process finally produced the "names," or territories and social and political organization above the villages. Nomes finally gave place to kingdoms until the greater part of the Nile valley was organized into three kingdoms--the Upper Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the Lower Kingdom -- which were finally, through military operations, reduced to one empire. Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 5

6 As the socio-political and military organizations grew larger and the territories expanded, the gods of the dominant group became the dominant gods. By this process, in Egypt for example, the sun god was elevated to the supreme place under different names--amon, Aton, Ra. That the sun was such a dominant natural force in Egypt also played no small part in making the sun-god a dominant figure in all stages of religious-cultural development and, hence, in his final supremacy over the other ods. Other gods remained, of course, (except for Akhenaton's monotheism but with lesser and specialized functions. The same kind of process was true everywhere. Marduk, for example, originally a local sun deity in the city of Babylon, became head of the Babylonian pantheon when Hammurabi brought the first Babylonian empire to its peak. Throughout these long periods of violent changes in the fortunes of such kingdoms and empires, and the accompanying varying destinies of the gods, the nature of religion as religion did not change very much. People continued to think of gods basically as nature-forces. Amon and Marduk, Ra and Shamash were still sun deities. But now they had been assigned new duties. Marduk became god of Babylon and of war. Shamash, an Assyrian- Babylonian sun deity, also became god of wisdom and righteousness. Anu, the god of heaven, became the chief deity of the city of Erech (Urak). The god of the air, Enlil, was now the god of the city of Nappur. Ea, the water god, became god of Eridu. Ishtar, the mother goddess of fertility, became the goddess of the city of Kish. New social forms called for new duties. Cities required guardian deities. More sophisticated concepts of wisdom and righteousness called for gods of wisdom and righteousness. In this process of social evolution from strictly primitive life to national states, it is important to notice an intermediate state in which the gods are given combination forms. Gods in primitive times were given purely animal forms -- the crocodile, the monkey, the lion, and so on. They were in this national period combined with human forms. The sphinx was a lion's body with a man's head or a ram's body with a human head. Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, had a human body with the head of a jackal. Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, was sometimes represented with wings. Thoth, the Egyptian god of the moon of wisdom, had a human form and an ibis head. Even as late as the Persian Empire and the emergence of Zoroastrianism, the monotheistic deity, Ahura Mazda, was Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 6

7 represented by the sun-disk. As human beings emerged out of nature, so their gods became first, part human, and then, all too human. In the process of urbanization and the development of national identities in the arts and crafts, agriculture, architecture, and other "civilized" activities and frames of reference, so much of human life became removed somewhat from the old intimacy with nature. People came to think of themselves as less directly involved in nature and more apart from or different from nature; their life was urban, more "personal." The imaging of gods, therefore, also became less embedded in nature and somewhat re- moved from nature. The gods were given human form in people's minds and crafts and thought of more as persons in charge of natural forces than being themselves those forces. Thus, with the emergence of city and national cultures, the gods became more urban and national, and more human in form and character, and finally in the later classic period of Greece were given the purest human form that the arts could devise. People were obviously becoming more self-conscious, more aware of the dimensions of being human that seemed to set them apart from the lower forms of nature. It is in a way, of course, that in such emerging self- consciousness that human beings really become human. It is in those dimensions of their nature that transcend "nature" that the evolution of their highest possibilities is achieved. And yet, perhaps it is in their forgetting that these highest possibilities of their consciousness are rooted in nature and emerge as nature-process that they cut themselves off from the source and support and fulfillment of their being. Perhaps it is exactly here that there lies their greatest danger and their fatal error. Perhaps our modern problems in ecology and morality alike are rooted in this historic-cultural transition. It is important to observe that at this state we are still in a period of polytheism rather than monotheism, with the noted brief exception of Akhenaton. Chief gods were still conceived as being in competition with other chief gods of other civilizations and territories, and in Greece as late as the classic period, even Zeus, along with all the other gods, was conceived as being subject to moira -- fate -- which was always an ultimate impersonal force. Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 7

8 It is very tempting to explore here the great religious documents and mythologies that belong in this period--the Book of the Dead and the myths of Isis and Osiris in Egypt; the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the myths of Demeter and Persephone of Mesopotamia, and many such. But these belong, more properly, in a discussion of literature. We must satisfy ourselves here with the idea that myths are never to be taken as literal, scientific, or historical truths. They must be under- stood as expressing dialectical truth; that is to say, we must remember that while, for example, the ritual performance of the marriage of the gods and their "dying" and "rising" might have been believed to induce the fertility of the earth and its creatures, it was the observed facts of the order of nature that suggested the mythologicalritual marriage, and that it was the observed facts of the combined forces of nature producing the fertility of the earth and its creatures which were celebrated in the myth and the ritual performance. There is a fundamental and enormously important distinction between observing and celebrating what happens on the one hand and believing on the other hand that the celebration is what causes things to happen. Superstition is the latter. Religion is the former. And we must keep this distinction constantly in mind when we study the classic myths and their ritual performance. Apart from the Egyptian monotheism, it was not until the sixth century B.C. that monotheism emerged in both the Persian and the Hebrew cultures, with one God, creator of the whole natural universe, and now importantly God of history and the moral order. He will discuss the Hebrew monotheism in more detail in later units. It is of interest to observe here, however, in connection with the emergence of monotheism in Egypt, that monotheism emerged in the evolution of religion in Egypt at a moment when the whole of the Nile civilization was unified and still pretty much isolated from the rest of the world in its cultural development, while in Israel it emerged at the moment of Israel's absolute collapse as a nation in the Babylonian captivity. The one was born out of a socialpolitical military achievement in cultural and national isolation; the other was born out of national tragedy by the overwhelming proximity of other more powerful nations. Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 8

9 Throughout the multiplicity of detail in this period, which we have been able only dimly to suggest, it is important to remember two things. First, that the gods retain their functions for human thought as nature forces. Second, that there emerges the belief, consistent with the earlier natural- ism, that the same powers which are at work in nature, e.g., in the processes of fertility, the order of the seasons and the heavenly bodies, are at work in human thought and moral judgment. The Code of Hammurabi (about 1700 B.C.) and the Sinai Code of Moses (which emerges about the end of this period and the beginning of the next, and which we shall discuss in the next unit) make the moral code and the will of God one thing. And again it is superficial to observe that some of these laws or all of them are hardly the last word on the will of God or were ever, for that matter, the will of God. What is pertinent is the conviction of people that the moral law which is finally obligatory on humanity is rooted in the ultimate nature of things, in The Holy. Human thought and moral judgment, it came to be believed, are just as much processes of nature and growing out of nature as are fertility or the turning of the seasons, and that the orders of reason and morality are, therefore, just as continuous with the order of nature as are the orders of fertility and nutrition, the order of the seasons, and the movement of the heavenly bodies- that they are all ultimately rooted in the same HOLY power. To miss these facts in the multitude of external cultural and religious forms, which can be easily dismissed as idle superstition or childish fancies, would be to miss the inner genius of religious consciousness which always makes religion, religion -humankind's response to reality as a continuous and unified order of ultimate power. Whatever else religion believes or does not believe, it is religion because it believes that the orders of nature in the seasons and the orders of reason and morality in human life are at last, if we can ever come to grasp it fully and properly, one order, created and moved at last by one ultimate power. We may not agree with the view, but in any event we must avoid losing the inner essence of religion in its cultural accidents. R.J.M. Rev Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 9

10 FOR FURTHER READING Bertocci, Peter A. Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Englewood Cliffs, N.Y.: Prentice Hall, Inc., l95l. Breasted, J. H. Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt. New York: Harper & Row, Inc., ' Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York: Sheed & Hard, Inc., I958.. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, Finegan, Jack. Light from the Ancient Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press, I946. Hutchison, John A. Paths of Faith. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1969 Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford University Press, Re-formatted as digital text by Gentrain Society volunteers 2016 pg 10

World History Unit 2 Lesson 1 Ancient Egypt

World History Unit 2 Lesson 1 Ancient Egypt Lesson 1 Ancient Egypt Egyptian Geography 1) Egypt is surrounded by deserts that gave it some degree of protection. 2) The Nile River was essential! It provided water for crops, silt to enrich the soil,