Honey-hunters in New Guinea welcoming a new "man"
Humans are meant to live in cooperating groups of fewer than a hundred people and did that for so many millennia and epochs that our bodies and brains have been shaped into what works for that context. And yet the group and the individual are both constrained by the ecology of their existence. Early peoples who lived on grassy plains organized themselves differently than those who lived where there was forest because they were hunter/gatherers and different strategies worked if the prey were different. Fishermen were quite different from buffalo hunters.
Lately there has been a lot of reflection about the change made possible by agriculture and domestication, which meant that people didn’t have to travel around to find food, esp. in places with seasons, and also meant that they could store grain. But now the energy that went into moving around had to be devoted to walls for defense or a kind of military specialization for raiding other group’s bins.
In the original basic group, the people knew each other and their skills and temperaments. Specializing was results-oriented: the best hunter was the go-to guy for bringing in some meat; the best weaver of baskets was the chief of baskets. But staying in one place caused other kinds of sorting that created what in a flock of chickens is called “pecking order,” meaning who can dominate which others, beak to beak. One big alpha chicken can peck all the others, while some poor little moulting poultry is on the receiving end of every other bird’s ire. This is the origin of stigma, based mostly on appearance. Of course, it’s a loop because the hen that got the most food was the biggest and glossiest. The upshot is that the Big Pecker makes the most new chickens and the little limpies get weeded out. Until the terms of success change -- maybe the climate or maybe the intervention of humans.
A much more subtle version of both these forces -- skill and appearance -- also shape human communities. Soon a village begins to sort itself out into best families and those who can be pushed around. Parallel, the original naively spiritual folks (the ones who loved the dawn, the ones with empathy) begin to form institutions, often around promises of success embodied in sacrifice (bribes). In the fiercer and more primitive places, the sacrifice might be human, a loser. Or an enemy.
Pyraethi: a version of priesthood that suggests the flaming chalice.
In the villages who are prosperous enough that not everyone has to go into the fields or arm-up for fights, a class of people might develop who seem to know more, to be charismatically and then later institutionally entitled to think their way to a priest-like status. Maybe when writing develops, they are the keepers of the book (er, scroll) or the ones who pray on behalf of all the others. Of course, it’s good to have an impressive building for them and natural for people to gather -- maybe to engage them with arguments, ask for their help with the gods, or share some kind of experience led by them. This is so natural it feels like the only way to understand religion.
There are few places on the planet that have not been settled to some degree by humans, but there are edges where they can barely survive. It is never by being independent individuals and yet it is, because if someone hadn’t been pushed out or cranky enough to want territory of his or her own, the place would never have had founders. One of those nearly impossible places is the New Guinea Highlands where tectonic drift has pushed the land into high sharp ridges and deep narrow valleys, so separating the people that those whose village are on one ridge, barely know the people on the next ridge, and keep their morale up by aggressively hollering insults across the difficult-to-cross valleys. The Umeda are one of the most isolated tribes, which made them attractive to an anthropologist who lived with them for a while and tried to psychoanalyze their felt concepts about the world.
Umeda world view
Everything was food, exertion, and children. The staple food was the pulp of the sago palm which is poisonous unless it is washed and pounded for a long time: hours. This is done with a big section of wood pounding the starch in a sort of canoe. The Umeda do not miss that the action of mortar and pestle are like the sex act. Nor do they discount the apparent similarity of breast milk, semen, and ready-to-eat sago mush. They wear gourds over their penises, not out of modesty but to make sure no semen escapes. When it dries into powder, they sprinkle it on food as a condiment. They think that ejaculate feeds babies before they are born, so the men increase their efforts when a woman is pregnant.
The rest of the menu is yams grown in small clearances, fenced to keep out the elusive pigs (walking feasts), and whatever living protein is in small creatures like fish, lizards and insects. Some tribes are cannibals. But the king of the jungle is the cassowary, huge bird we now conceptualize as descendants of dinosaurs, and a very convincing bit of evidence they are. Very hard to hunt, they live as solitary animals in the highlands, a state that is appealing to old men who have spent their lives in hard labor and combat. A man too old to work will go into the jungle and built a little hut where he spends his time meditating and dozing. People bring him food and might even say he was a cassowary.
"Felt meaning” ceremonies were hard to perceive at first. These ceremonies are strung out through a whole year but climax at about nine months, the period of a human pregnancy. At the intense liturgical time of eventfulness, song and dance prevail, but the dances are separated according to age classes indicated by animal metaphor masks: very large, scary, and heavy. For men, the periods of ceremonial dance are ordeals. Women dance in place, defining the circle of the dance arena, and the male children stay in mobs, like flocks of birds or schools of fish, rushing in and out.
At the very end of the days of exertion, there is a solemn climax that is said to be two cassowaries, two old men who hold hands while dancing. They are considered to be brothers. The anthropologist, who is the only solitary human present in the village, interpreted all this in terms of the child rearing pattern for boys. Babies are carried in a net on the mother’s back until they are toddlers. Then girls stay around the village near their mothers, but the boys are carried on their father’s shoulders, on-lookers at the times the men sit together considering plans or walking through the jungle to look for animals or signs of sneaking enemies.
Papa and his boy
When the next boy comes, the father puts the older son down and takes up the younger one. If there have been girls in a row, then the de-shouldered dethronement will be harder because the riding son has assumed an entitlement. When the set-down boys see each other, they form a group and begin to imitate what they learned from fathers by mock-hunting small creatures, sometimes with success. They get better and better at it until they begin to hunt with the men, and pretty soon are old enough to be pressed into marriage, which means swidden clearing and sago palm pounding. The transitions between stages are psychologically painful, as they mean going from comfortable dependence to a scary and perhaps starving status.
To the anthropologist (who has been accused of projecting his own issues), the key to the cassowary dance is the reconciliation in old age between the two resentful brothers. One of his clues was that the villages were encircled with palm trees, each -- planted at the birth of the boy -- was considered the birth tree of a specific man. The men and their trees were so closely connected that if a man’s tree were cut down, he would be very sick and maybe die. The two dancers in cassowary masks didn’t look at all like cassowaries; they looked like the palm trees.
There’s a lot more to the story, but this particular ceremony says nothing about God or Gods, is not linked to a specific historical event, is not verbal, and comes directly out of the lifeway forced by the ecology. Is this religion? Not if you think “religion” has to have a book, a bell, an altar, a priest, a building, a candle, a lot of rules. This is the human substrate of felt meaning out of which formal religions develop. The key is always survival, that of the tribe (the group) and that of the anthropologist’s career (the individual).
The book I'm drawing on here is called "The Metamorphosis of the Cassowary" by Andrew Gell.
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