by
Leila Kincaid
May 2022
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
~Robert Frost
Where did religion come from? Was it given to us in the Old Testament sense of God reciting the Tablets of the Ten Commandments to Moses, and the Godhead, and as the gods themselves personified in chieftains and leaders? Or is God in the trees, lizards, the sun and the moon? Is religion something humanity invented, or something given to us? How did our conception of religion come about? And did, and when and how did religion make humans self-reflexive? Is there a greater truth that we are all a part of, the way Brian Swimme describes in The Universe Story? Are we destined to claim our place in the universe and on planet Earth as co-creators and stewards as Sean Kelly writes about in Becoming Gaia? Was religion merely developed as a capacity to deal with and make sense of our existence, in the face of suffering and death? Is it an answer to the great mystery of life? Did humanity create religious explanations to make life and aspects of life sacred, or is it sacred in and of itself? Is sacredness something specific to human consciousness that is captured in religion and a lens through which we look at look at the phenomena of existence? While Robert Bellah addresses the origins and cause of religion in the first chapters of his book, he dedicates the majority of his analysis of religion in human evolution to the manifestations and expressions of religion with regard to their organization in the material milieu of human life and society.
How can we tease apart the human use of and influence on creating religion and its various manifestations in the socio-politico cultural realm of human existence and the mythopoetic, sacred, greater cosmological influence, origins, and nature of the religious spirit in human existence? Religion seems to have the function of providing an ethical framework with which humans organize themselves within socio-cultural structures, and it also provides a background of meaning and context for human life in general with regards to questions like, ‘What is the meaning of life and what is my purpose?” It also acts as a tool for political machinations of control, economic gain, and the hoarding and use of power, as well as providing a guideline and justification for the distribution and use of material resources (including human lives.) But on the deepest and perhaps most important level, religion is both an expression of and tool for understanding and organizing ourselves in relationship to a deeper, higher, more sacred sense of being a human. Its potential is that it can connect us to our true spiritual nature and help us sense and realize that we are greater than our material bodies and the material conditions that often seem to drive and define our existence, and that we are incontrovertibly part of each other, the planet, and the cosmos. The question is, does our sense of this spiritual reality that religion points to originate in the realm of these higher concepts, something akin to Plato’s Forms, the Christian God, or the Hindu Brahman or is it an innate part of the structures of our psyche in the Jungian sense?
In his seminal work, Evolution in Human Religion, Robert Bellah describes a rich typology of the nature of human religion with regard to the function, or ergon, the purpose of the function and the varieties of manifestations found within each stage of religious evolution: tribal, chiefdom, archaic, and axial. The existence of religion begs the question about its origin. How can we understand and describe the ontological nature of religion without falling into the trap of reductionist materialism or ineffable metaphysics? Do descriptive phenomenological qualities of religion point to its deeper nature in terms of its origins, causes, and purposes? This paper is an attempt to research theories about the origin of religion in light of Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution and the giants whose shoulders he stands on, from the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle to the foundational texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, to Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Jean Paul Sartre, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Antonio Dimasio, Anil Seth, and Sean Kelly, among others.
The use of Robert Frost as a source of understanding about the nature and origin of religion in human consciousness is based on his panpsychic metaphysics, as captured in the epigraphic quotation for this paper. The same justification is used with neuroscientists, Dimasio and Seth, whose core theories demonstrably describe the nature of consciousness, while skimming and hinting at causes beyond the mere biologic, even if this is not their project. For instance, Damasio’s descriptions of consciousness includes his startling postulate of an omniscient theory of epistemology when he says, “consciousness allows any object to be known” (56.) The teleological implication in his materialistic conception of consciousness, when he proposes that consciousness is capable of being conscious of, of knowing, everything, seems to belie his claim to the mere biologic-process-based causality and function of consciousness. That he proposes “like emotion, consciousness is aimed at the organism's survival” (37), and says that, “homeostasis is a key to the biology of consciousness” (40), he paints a picture of consciousness as a part of our survival instinct, but in his further descriptions of consciousness hints (intentionally or not) that the existence of consciousness points at a higher cause, one that is not dependent on biological mechanisms, and another that is perhaps capable of existing outside of mere material conditionality. Damasio promises to address “the mechanisms for the birth of consciousness” in his next chapter, and I cannot wait to learn what he has to say about it (58.)
The argument of the paper is that Bellah’s book opens up new questions (or raises old ones) about, not only the origin and nature of religion, but also of consciousness itself. The topic is the origin and nature of religion in human consciousness in the context of pansychism, panentheism, pantheism, and unity theory, drawing on ideas from Plato, Spinoza, Tarnas, and others. The main points will be 1. Bellah’s Evolution in Human Religion causes us to inquire about the cause of religion in human consciousness. 2. Examining correlates in thought throughout history in the descriptions of the origin of religion in human consciousness, including Plato, Patrizi, Spinoza, Eastern religion, modern physics, Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Richard Tarnas, and Sean Kelly, and others. 3. Drawing on several great thinkers in human history, I make the case for panentheism and pantheism as the closest approximation of the origin of religion in human consciousness. The conclusion is made that human beings are in the world and of the world. As beings in the universe, created by and in the universe, humans have the capacity, ability, structure, and function to know the universe.
Friedrich Nietzsche says that our experience of reality is based on a collage of estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries (The Gay Science 57). It is in this collage sense that I attempt to glean what people throughout the course of human history have said about the origin of human religious consciousness with an eye to the numinous.
Hinting at a pantheist and panentheist view, Bellah suggests that aspects of human consciousness even in tribal and archaic religions are “cosmological in that supernature, nature, and society are all fused in a single moment… the cosmos was still viewed as a state of the homology between sociopolitical reality and religious reality" (266). It seems an age-old question and argument for the purely materialist, scientific, and atheist framework to insist that religion is an invention of humankind for politico-socio economic power organizations, and is not a spiritual reality unto itself of which human beings are an integral and central part. Can this more exalted conception of religion reconcile the materialist view that Bellah seems to portray in his definition of religion as a sort of Marxist conception of struggle within the confines of material reality, living in a sort of Maslovian D cognition of daily life? While recognizing the “limited purpose” of this definition, he nevertheless says, “let me define religion as a Set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence” (359).
Jacob Sherman, in speaking to the question about human beings inventing religion as opposed
to it being a revelation of the true nature of reality:
If these are not things I’m projecting onto the world and my participation in these modes of worldly engagements opens up new interiority that creates a sense of the numinous self, then self and world it dwells in are co-created and co enacted at the same time and thus, it is a critical error to describe them as fabulations and is instead a real experience of real beings.
Carl Jung describes “the form of the world into which [a person] is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image” (Jung, 1953, p. 188). He goes on, “the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relationship to God. Echoing Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels, when Jesus says that we must get to know ourselves in order to know God (Pagels), Jung links the ultimate structure and nature of human consciousness with God as “a correspondence in psychological terms, a god image” (CW. 1953, 12). In describing the soul of man as the Ancient Greek conception of psyche, the etymological correlate to physis (nature), Jung says, “it is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities” (ibid). In this sense, we can say that human beings are not limited to or confined by their physical bodies and the material conditions of existence. They are, in a direct, inherent way, connected to God.
This, then is part of the source and nature of the origin of religion. Because human beings have access to information about the nature of reality, including themselves, they can and do know God, the universe, and everything. It is second order thinking in the central area of culture previously filled by myths that gave rise to the idea of transcendence so often if it associated with the axial age” (Bellah 276). In a grand gesture of generosity to Faust, the universe imparts all that is knowable and all that exists to our minds, if we allow it, if we shape ourselves to conceive of and perceive it, and if we can break free of the shackles of constraint caused by historical conditioning and fear. This breaking free is the awakening that humanity needs in order to stop the current path toward ecocide and human extinction that we are currently on.
Jesus himself said the kingdom of heaven is within (Luke 17:21), “yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis” (Pagels. 1979). While not a pantheist, Christian Scholar, Paul Tillich, described God as the “structure of all things,” thereby making God an inherent quality of the nature of human being and human consciousness (1969). Within the structure of religion, God resides, as within the structure of the human psyche. This brings together the citation credited to Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels and the writings of John in which he describes Jesus as God incarnate through “the word made flesh” (1978).
Spinoza’s great contribution to an understanding of the origin of religion in human consciousness can be traced through western philosophy and its rich arguments to prove the existence of God. His ontological argument in The Ethics, contains a radical pantheism: “Whatever is, is in God” (Spinoza, The Ethics, Proposition 15, 40). Spinoza links the human mind to God/substance by saying that, unlike the human body, it is eternal (Axiom 7, 32). The mind does not die with the body. Thus, human reasoning is linked to the divine, as it liberates humanity from the fear of its own mortality (Definition 3, 31). He refers to the recognition of the essential unity of all existence as "intellectual love" (Definition 6, 31). Hegel famously said, “you are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all” (1896, 283). Perhaps this is what inspired Karl Jaspers to be a philosopher…
Carl Jung describes this link of the human mind with God when he says, “there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this center. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype of wholeness occupies as such a central position which approximates it to the God-image” (Jung, CW, Vol. 11, par. 757).
Echoing a sort of panentheism that can spring from this pantheistic view, Sean Kelly writes in his book, Becoming Gaia, about a Panentheistic view that we are part of the planet, and share consciousness with Earth. Echoing Einstein’s pangeism, Kelly calls on us to realize our unified nature with the planet and the cosmos as being at large, and through that understanding, we can claim our right and responsibility as co-creators in the reality we experience and the life we live on Earth (Kelly, 2021).
In this context, we could, in one sense, think of religion as an ergon of human evolution. In a Marxist sense, it is a species activity – creating meaning, making myths, participating in self-reflexive narratives, that ultimately manifest in myriad ways but all stem back to the same ontological and psychic root – the cosmological structure of the universe imprinted upon the human psyche.
Caught between the materialist, reductionist description of human consciousness as mere biologic process aware of itself and a nebulous spiritual explanation that can waft into the rhetorically florid and ineffable, we can get stuck or relegate the entire investigation into the nature of religion and consciousness as pointless, as Anil Seth does. He says, basically, that it’s useless to ask those questions when all that matters is how consciousness manifests, acts, and arranges itself in the world and what that has to do with being human. Asking where consciousness came from is irrelevant in his mind. But I think it is of utmost importance, and like Teilhard de Chardin and Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung, among countless others, believe that we absolutely must ask, know, and grasp, embrace, and affirm our exalted nature as one with the Cosmos, and reclaim our most basic existential position and right in the universe as creators, and therefore, assume the ultimate responsibility that comes with that ultimate freedom. The case for panpsychism and panentheism is a case for morality and ethics. If we can realize and claim that we are part of the Cosmos, and even one with it, then we must also experience a great compassion and realization of love that comes with that wisdom, in the Tibetan Buddhist sense. Ultimately, Faust, knowledge is love.
Jacob Sherman teases apart these two interpretations of the cause and function of religion in human consciousness as not contradictory, but two parts of a greater whole consisting of at least the material aspect of the human being for whom (individually and collectively) religious consciousness is an allostatic survival mechanism and the exalted manifestation of something like Platonic Forms that inform our consciousness through cosmic, panpsychic collective archetypal symbols, in a Jungian sense (Sherman. Lecture, March 16th, 2022.) The potentiality for downloading into our consciousness (individual and collective) exists in a supra human realm, perhaps, in an Aristotelian sense of pure potentiality. This pure potentiality can be considered an additional cause in Aristotle, unless it is interpreted as a part of the formal and perhaps, final causes in the realm of pure potentiality as a place beyond human bodies and brains where consciousness can be downloaded, in a Platonic forms sense, into the human being and inform their own views, perceptions, and experiences of being in the world.
In an often-overlooked grand gesture, Karl Marx makes the case that human life is for the actualization of our potential, and that, in order to develop our lives beyond the material conditions of our existence we need to be free from the constraints put upon us by economic and political oppression. This is the ethical and humanist ethos that drives and lies within Marx’s great critique of capitalism that is usually ignored, forgotten, or misinterpreted. I include Marx in my case for the panentheist and panpsychic nature of reality and of the human consciousness and origin of religion because Marx writes about it extensively, and his deep care for human actualization of potential saturates most of his work.
Bellah describes religion in human consciousness, but he limits his inquiry to the “behavioral and symbolic aspects” of religion, and not to the origins, causes, or reasons (Bellah. xii). His definition of religion “for limited purposes” is “a Set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence” (359). Here, he doubles down on the manifestations of religion rather than origins and causes. While he discusses theories of origin in his first chapters, specifically in the context of his concept of play as motivation human care, which leads to a sense of ethics, and gives rise to religion, he tends to focus on the material conditions and political manifestations in the context of religion in human evolution. His evolutionary theory is partial, and like Anil Seth, he hones his focus on describing the what, the function, and the manifestations in type and form of religion in human evolution. What, like Anil, he does not do is talk about or investigate the causes and origins or religion in human consciousness. Finding out about causes can shine a light on natures and manifestations (2018). Religion seems to function in some ways to help answer universal questions about the nature of reality, the meaning of life, and the reason and purpose of suffering and death. Scholars and thinkers like Richard Tarnas and Baruch Spinoza think that religion can also function as something more – as a manifestation of the Cosmos into the Psyche of humankind. This is what Bellah talks about a bit in his introductory chapters and what I am interested in. Cataloging of types is fascinating and important, as is understanding causality and origin. These ontological queries can often lead to ethical imperatives. Like Kant, I think we can say that understanding the origin of consciousness can lead to an understanding of our part within the conscious milieu and therefor instill in us a sense of responsibility to act ethically. This is at the crux of the way sense can inhere value (Kant, 1998). Bellah does look at the origin of religion in his description of the role of play in its inception. By describing this phenomenological state of bracketed consciousness, humankind experiences care and meaning. But, even his description of play as a causal phenomenon of religion is bound to a materialist conception of human being in that he links it to cognitive and behavioral human (Marxist species) activity. He does not indicate, intimate, or imply a top-down sense in which human consciousness is instilled with the religious sense through God or cosmological structure or function. Play is merely animal behavior that arises and gives rise to consciousness that inheres care. This is a stark removal from the notion that God created consciousness or that the human psyche is imprinted upon by the cosmos. I’m not sure Bellah realizes this is how he comes across, but it is something that both Jacob Sherman and Richard Tarnas repeatedly emphasize through their course on the Evolution of Religious Consciousness – namely, that Bellah can seem to be merely materialistic in his description of the nature of religion in human consciousness. They point out that he also means more than that. For instance, he cites Eric Chaisson in chapter 2, the central theme of which is the emergence of religion through play, “intelligent life is an animated conduit through which the universe comes to know itself… the scenario of cosmic evolution provides opportunity to inquire systematically and synergistically into the nature of our existence” (Bellah. 46.) He further emphasizes this point by quoting Oliver Sacks and saying that it is “an indisputable truth -kinship with all life on our planet is several billion years old and we literally embody this deep history in our structures, our behaviors, our instincts, our genes” (49). Perhaps in a moment of self-awareness about his project, Bellah says, “I try to tell the modern scientific metanarrative,” couching his book firmly in the socio-anthropological framework from which he analyzes and describes Religion in Human Evolution (48). Then he doubles down on the “emergence of parental care” that is “absolutely basic to the entire story” he wants to tell (70). At the same time, he states that “we are, quite literally, part of the universe…we did not come from nowhere. We are embedded in a very deep biological and cosmological history. That history does not determine us, because organisms from the very beginning, and increasing with each new capacity, have influenced their own fate" and “our remarkable freedom is embedded in a cosmological and biological matrix that influences everything we do" (55, 83). While Bellah’s project seems to be to show how the evolution of human religion resulted in the human capacity to think rationally, giving rise to theoretic culture and the birth of the first axial age, he remains, often couched firmly in material, and anthropologic descriptions of how human beings organize themselves in societies, and less about the spiritual dimension of consciousness that characterizes these individuals and cultures.
An important part of the story of religion in human consciousness considers the relationships of religion and awe, religion and ethics, religion and empathy (or care), religion and thanatophobia, religion and meaning, religion and ceremony, religion and ritual, religion and the sacred, and the reality of our connection to the numinous.
Jacob Sherman says, in describing what William Desmond talks about regarding the origin of metaphysics as “the origin of primal astonishment preceding all forms of curiosity or perplexity… our sort of waking up to the world. That astonishment is value laden. Perception of something marvelous that is lovable and valuable. Awe might be bound up with that.” This awe is something that captures our spiritual sense, and points to it at the same moment. The experience is the proof that something exists, something exalted that unites us and informs our lives and being, beyond our mere animal life of surviving in material conditions.
While some argue that religion is merely a desperate, if not at least creative, human reaction in the face of death and suffering to make sense of life, the world, and the universe. In a thanatophobic movement, religion is orchestrated as a defense against the inevitable tyranny of mortality. The invention and creation of stories, myths, and beliefs about a higher purpose and even a creator hangs in the backdrop of our daily human lives from the early tribal cultures, through the archaic and axial to the modern era, for sure. But religion and religious consciousness cannot be relegated to mere thanatophobic, hyperbolic, and reactionary mythmaking – as useful, beneficial, and beautiful as those myths are. So many thinkers and systems of thought throughout human history point to higher and deeper causes and origins of religion in human consciousness. For instance, there are substantive and exhaustive descriptions in the eschatological texts of Hinduism and Buddhism in which we find a telos pulling us toward a final consciousness, that is freedom, liberation, awakening, ultimately manifested and expressed as unconditional, ubiquitous love (Thurman. 1995).
Bellah describes religion as arising out of play and associates play with coming from parental care, which “seems to be an important precondition for the development of play” where empathy and Ethics arise (79). In this sense he accounts for ethics as an ergon of religion, and he also seems to posit that religion has a hermeneutical function whereby we make meaning. Perhaps this is what he means when he says, “play is the ultimate source of virtually all human cultural systems: myth and ritual, law, poetry, wisdom, and science” (76). Does he also see religion as a top down imprint from God to man or is it merely a function of our reason and psyche as Jung asks?
In an attempt to understand how religion came about and what it has to do with consciousness, we could look to Nietzsche, who claimed that historical consciousness is a condition of all consciousness. This is an important part of the story of the origin and nature of religion in human consciousness, because he says that we cannot possibly understand ourselves or do anything about it, that is re-evaluate ourselves and make changes to overcome ourselves and our conditions, without understanding our history and all of the things that have lead up to where, how, who, and what we are right now (The Gay Science. 1882). This is part of the research into the questions that Bellah’s work elicits, in a Heidegerian sense, by pointing to greater questions than the ones answered through his own questioning (1962). Leaping off the page from Bellah into the curiosity to understand leads to an inevitable invitation to inquire into not just the nature of the stages of religious (primitive archaic historic pre-modern, and modern) evolution in human consciousness he describes but also their causes and characteristics (systems, actions, social organization, and implications), their ergon (meaning and purpose of a function) and perhaps eventual destination, or telos (Bellah 360-61).
We are, in a sense, the blind men, in the Tittha Sutta’s Buddhist parable about the elephant – each describing a different part of the whole, all correct and incorrect in our own way as we try to paint the bigger picture of reality (Bhikkhu. 2008). Each of the sources in this paper inform and contribute to the story of the origin and nature of religion in human consciousness. Joseph Campbell describes, in his Hero With a Thousand Faces, the “common structural elements in all myths” and stories throughout human history that point to a greater truth that underlies them all (1949). In a grand, panpsychic sense, human consciousness and religion are downloads from the cosmos at large and drive us, in a way that Albert Einstein describes:
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind (2005.)
In the question about the origin of religion lies another question: where does consciousness reside? I think of the universe as full of information and our brains are from and in the universe and thus, designed and able to access the information in the universe.
To obscure us away from the mere profane material conditions of our existence, we bring in the sacred, as Mircea Eliade points out, through religion as a “breakthrough” of “the sacred into the world” (1961). Neuroscientist and philosopher Christine Horner, in her work on collective evolution says, “Our brain is not a stand-alone information processing organ: it acts as a central part of our integral nervous system with recurrent information exchange with the entire organism and the cosmos. In this study, the brain is conceived to be embedded in a holographic structured field that interacts with resonant sensitive structures in the various cell types in our body” (that resonate with correspondent structures in the universe). Horner references Dr. Dirk K.F. Meijer, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who describes consciousness as existing in a “field surrounding the brain in another dimension. The entire body is a conduit and a collaborator with consciousness as a feedback loop” (Horner, 2013). In this sense, consciousness is seen as a universal phenomenon existing unto itself which the human being is able to access through the structure and function of being human.
This brings to mind Jung’s description of our minds, “It is certain that we are born with a certain functioning…that is expressed in the form of archetypal images and forms, for instance the way in which a man should behave is given by an archetype” (Jung, 1953, p. 188). Jung describes the common human inheritance of patterns and says that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world.
Plato’s concept of forms informs this concept of panpsychism through his theory of knowledge, concept of the Forms and Ideas, and the nous (most probably influenced by Anaxagoras, among others). Teilhard de Chardin describes this in his Phenomenon of Man as complexities and probabilities on axes that rise upwards and downwards as part of the evolution of the cosmos and energies rise up into us and down into us. Jung speaks of the collective conscious (not collective unconsciousness) and the Psyche as a state beyond the individual I or self. Even now, the collective uprising against ecological destruction is a unified voice crying out in harmony with supra-arching principles of oneness, compassion, and dire concern about the fate of humankind. This expression in our world today is a manifestation of collective realization of our oneness, unity, and connection to not only the planet, Earth as Gaia – our mother and home and source of life, but to the greater Cosmos at large which is our ultimate source and destination.
The overarching conclusion of this paper is that human religion points to the existence of causality and structure that create, inform, and organize consciousness beyond mere biologic allostasis and cannot be relegated only to elusive mystical notions. A variety of thinkers and belief systems point to the existence of a higher causality, something akin to the Platonic Ideas, God, and the Cosmos pouring itself into human consciousness. Important thinkers throughout human history describe and point to evidence and descriptions of this nature of reality that not only creates consciousness but is the background that informs the entire evolution of religion in human consciousness. Bellah’s tome as a descriptive narrative of the nature of religious consciousness in human evolution functions as a jumping off point, a springboard and catalyst into research and query about the nature and cause of religion and consciousness itself. Through and by understanding the nature, cause, ergon, and descriptive manifestations of the phenomenology itself, we can, perhaps, come to a greater understanding of ourselves in the world at this time in history, and through that understanding find ourselves better equipped to face the challenges of this time, great as they are.
With threats to our survival on the planet, such as the climate crisis, nuclear devastation, capitalism, racism, and rape, I often wonder -will we become more mindful organisms and change our behaviors so that we have a better likelihood of survival as a species, or will we perish? Will we transcend our current state or self-destruct? Will our brains function to help us survive by causing shifts in culture to create conditions that guarantee a better chance of survival? I do not know. But calling forth, thinking upon, and discussing an essential spiritual reality of our existence perhaps hold the key to our necessary and imminent global transformation as a species.
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Above Image: A king who kneels before an empty throne… Cuneiform from the reign of King Marduk of Babylon, around 1230 B.C
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