The Faith Instinct (20 page)

By 450 B.C., the Oaxaca Valley held a population of some 10,000 people and had become divided first into three warring states, and eventually two, Monte Alban and its rival Tilcajete. The temples at both centers had grown more elaborate with the addition of a second room, probably added so that priests could live in the temple.

With the emergence of full-time professional priests, a career often followed by the nobility who were not in line for the throne, the privatization of the ancestral religious behavior was complete. Control of religious practice was no longer exercised by the community but by a caste of religious officials.

As religion became more exclusive, and governable by an elite,
warfare in the Oaxaca Valley became more intense. At Tilcajete,
leaders built a civic-ceremonial plaza with a different astronomical orientation fr
om that of Monte Alban. The plaza was burned in 280 but the leaders of Tilcajete bui
lt a new one on a nearby ridge, with the same orientation as th
eir first. But the war was relentless. The Monte Alban army destroyed Tilcajete a se
cond time around A.D. 30, and this time its rival did not recov
er. The leaders of Monte Alban now controlled the entire Oaxaca
Valley, and founded the polity known as the Zapotec state.
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Over the span of 7,000 years, the communal religion of hunter gatherers had been developed into a priestly hierarchy that was a principal instrument of state governance.

The progression from hunter gatherer religion to that of the archaic state was completed by A.D. 30 in the Oaxaca Valley but had taken place much earlier in the Old World. The first settlements, those of the Natufian culture of the eastern Mediterranean, appeared 15,000 years ago, and the great city states of Mesopotamia had emerged by shortly before 5,000 years ago.

By 10,000 the Natufians had developed a disconcertingly intimate cult of the dead. They buried the bodies but kept the heads around in their houses. The heads were given new faces, made out of plaster, with shells for the eyes. This ancestor cult was widespread: “In view of their common occurrence in excavations, there can be little doubt that thousands of dead people were brought back to the world of the living in this manner, suggesting that the ancestors were crucial in the making and maintenance of the Neolithic communities,” write the archaeolog
ists Peter Akkermans and Glenn Schwartz. The heads are found in stable villages wher
e people lived for generation after generation, indicating stro
ng ties to the past. The purpose of the ancestor cult could have been to motivate pe
ople—all the ancestor’s descendants—to work together for the good
of society. Agriculture, which had only just begun, required forms of shared labor t
hat were quite alien to hunter gatherer societies. The cooperat
ion induced by the ancestor cult was “essential in the small communities that be
came increasingly reliant on farming, where people had to draw on each other’s
labor for survival,” Akkermans and Schwartz suggest.
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There is no continuous archaeological record in the Near East, equivalent to that of the Oaxaca Valley, to show the stages in which the religious behavior of hunter gatherers was transformed to that of settled societies. But an unexpected insight into the process has been gained through the careful work of the archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel.

Scanning archaeological collections from throughout the Near East, dating from 8000 to 4000 B.C., Garfinkel noticed that spread among the artifacts of the period, on wall and floor paintings, stone slabs, stamp and cylinder seals, and above all on pottery, were numerous figures of people dancing.

He collected 396 depictions of dancing figures, drawn from 170 archaeological sites, and began to notice certain patterns. In each picture, the dancers were all the same or dressed alike, indicating that these were communal dances with no one outranking anyone else. Men and women were usually shown dancing separately. The dancers were often depicted wearing masks or costumes or body paintings. There were no signs of buildings, suggesting the dances were being held out in the open. And many of the figures are in silhouette, suggesting the dances depicted are being held at night.

Since all these features matched the ethnographic data on hunter gatherer dances, Garfinkel concluded that his shards of pottery depicted the same thing—hunter gatherer dances that continued to be held after people settled down in villages and started to practice agriculture.

The practical role of the dances was social cohesion, he believ
es: “The major strategies used by the early farmers of the Near East and south
east Europe from the eighth to the fourth millennium BC to prom
ote the bonding of individuals into communities, and of individ
ual households into villages, were public assemblies for religious ceremonies.”
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Dancing not only encouraged unity but also served to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next.

Many of the depictions show people dancing in circles, a practice Garfinkel believes held great symbolism for early agriculturalists struggling to march to the rhythm of the seasons and, on pain of starvation, to plant and harvest their crops at the right time. The hunter gatherer trance dance became entrained to festivals determined by the agricultural calendar. The echoes of this linkage are enduring. In Judaism, Sukkot originally mark
ed the end of the fruit harvest and the time for plowing and sowing for the next season. Passover once heralded the beginning of the barley festival, Shavu‘ot, the end of the wheat harvest. In the Christian liturgical calendar, Passover has been converted to Easter and Shavu’ot to Pentecost or Whitsun.

These festivals, Garfinkel says, became a means of transferring messages to the community about the correct timing of agricultural activities. The masks and body decorations, the music and rhythmic movement combining to induce trance, attracted the greatest awareness and attention from the whole community. “The high supernatural powers,” Garfinkel says, “also became involved in the process, as the circle of dance is the actual place where contact is made between this and the other world.” These encounters with the supernatural ensured, in the participants’ minds, a successful agricultural season and, on a more practical level, helped them accomplish it by informing everybody that it was time to clear the land or sow or harvest.

The dancing depicted on the pottery shards lasted for 4,000 years—longer than the existence of any modern religion. It began to disappear after 3500 B.C., just as the first city states of Mesopotamia were coming into being. Perhaps the priesthood that emerged after the first settled societies had little use for ad hoc dances and sought to confine dancing to the official festivals that they controlled. Perhaps dancing became associated with the rural poor and was looked at askance by the new city dwellers. Perhaps the priests, with their important administrative roles in the first city states, finally gained the power to suppress dancing. In any event, the record of the ubiquitous pottery shards collected by Garfinkel is unambiguous: by the time of the city states, the dancing floors had fallen silent. The ancestral form of religion was dead.

The new religions developed so as to match the needs of hierarchically organized societies. But they bore two critical legacies from their predecessor, one to do with genes, the other concerning the supernatural.

The neural circuitry that predisposed hunters and gatherers to learn the religion of their community remained the basis of religious behavior. However much the priesthood might suppress the ecstatic aspects of the ancestral religion, a propensity to follow the ecstatic behaviors of dance and trance was built into people’s minds and provided consistently fertile ground for revolts against established religion. The tension between the ecclesiastical and the ecstatic has persisted throughout history and is a major driver of religious change.

The second legacy of the ancestral religion was a preoccupation with the supernatural that many societies would later take to costly extremes. In the circle of dance where spirits from a parallel world seemed to seize those who fell into trance, hunter gatherers had found what seemed to them a window into the realm of the supernatural. Through the window, it seemed, they could communicate with the spirit beings that controlled vital matt
ers in the world of the living, such as the gift of children, or fair weather and fine harvests, or fortune in war. They seem not to have considered the possibility that the beguiling magic surface might have been no window, just a distorting mirror.

The ancestral religion left a vexing legacy to the hierarchical religions that succeeded it, that of people’s ingrained desire to communicate directly with their gods. Established religions are seldom fully secure: their priests’ assertion of exclusive access to the gods is often subject to question. Their leadership is frequently challenged from within, by movements or sects that may first insist on reform and then threaten to break off on their own. If these sects are not suppressed, the religion may be split. The schism may revitalize the culture or seriously weaken it.

Challenges to orthodoxy often follow a similar pattern: upstarts evoke the ecstatic methods that the priesthood has moderated or suppressed so as to bring the people under its control. The ebb and flow of the tussle between ecstatic and ecclesiastical forces has been described by the anthropologist 1. M. Lewis: “So if it is in the nature of new religions to herald their advent with a flourish of ecstatic effervescence,” he writes, “it is equally the fate of those which become successfully ensconced at the centre of public morality to lose their inspirational savour.” Inspiration becomes institutionalized and individual trances or possession experiences are discouraged and if necessary declared to be a satanic heresy.

“This certainly is that pattern which is clearly and deeply inscribed in the long history of Christianity,” Lewis says.
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Christian sects such as the Pentecostalists and the Charismatic Movement represent modern attempts to revive ecstatic means of communion, such as speaking in tongues.

Ancient Greek culture was a wellspring of rational thought. The philosopher Zeno declared that the human intellect was the true temple and no others were needed. But the classical era of Greece was punctuated with outbursts of maenads and bacchants, throngs of people who danced themselves into frenzy. The frenzies culminated in rending apart and eating a living animal or even a human being. Greek vases depict the dances as being accompanied by flutes and kettledrums. “To the Greeks these were the ‘orgiastic’ instruments par excellence: they were used in all the great dancing cults, those of the Asiatic Cybele and the Cretan Rhea as well as that of Dionysus,” writes the classical scholar E. R. Dodds. The cult of Dionysus may have been an attempt by authorities to channel these frenzies into an organized rite that took place once every two years.
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The prophets of ancient Israel also came from a tradition of ecstatic song and dance, though the allusions to it in the Bible
are often brief and disapproving. When Saul was being prepared
for the kingship by the prophet Samuel, he was told to go to a place where he would
meet “a company of prophets coming down from the high pla
ce with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shal
l prophesy: and the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy
with them, and shalt be turned into another man.” But the
sight of Saul prophesying shocked his friends, who exclaimed to one another, “
What is this that is come unto the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?”
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King David too, a musician, was associated with the ecstatic tradition. When the ark was brought into the City of David, he “danced before the Lord with all his might” wearing only a linen apron. Saul’s daughter Michal caught sight of him through a window and “despised him in her heart.” She chided him sarcastically on his return to the house: “How glorious was the king of Israel today, who uncovered himself today in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!”
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By the time of the early Christians the texts of the scripture, not trances and prophecy, had become the principal source of religious truth. Still, there are hints that, like the other mystery cults that swept through the Roman world, the early Christians sometimes practiced ecstatic forms of religion. In Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians—his letters are among the earliest authentic Christian documents—he addresses the subject of speaking in tongues (glossolalia), a form of possession that, like trance dancing, could reliably be made to appear in a ritual setting. Speaking in tongues, says the historian Wayne Meeks, “occurred within the framework of the assembly, performed by persons who were expected to do it. It happened at predictable times, accompanied by distinctive bodily movements, perhaps introduced and followed by characteristic phrases in natural language. It did what rituals do: it stimulated feelings of group solidarity (except, as at Corinth, for those nonspeakers made to feel excluded)....”
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A Christian sect of the mid-second century, that of the Montanists, was marked by ecstatic outbursts which it regarded as the central focus of Christianity. Charismatic preachers like Montanus threatened to drown the church’s unifying voice in a cacophony of personal prophecies. The Montanists, with their emphasis on personal connection with the supernatural, posed a serious challenge to the early church, particularly when they were joined by the leading theologian and antiheretic Tertullian, who refused to accept that contact with the deity could be conducted only through official church channels.

Montanus was declared a heretic around A.D. 170 and his sect was suppressed by the church. His doctrines were not heretical, but too much enthusiasm—the original Greek word
enthousiasmos
means to be possessed by a god—was regarded with suspicion by the church authorities. “As the early Christian community became the institution of the Church,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich in her history of ritual dancing, “all for
ms of enthusiasm ... came under fire. And when the community of believers could no longer access the deity on their own, through ecstatic forms of worship, the community itself was reduced to a state of dependency on central ecclesiastical authorities. ‘Prophesying’ became the business of the priest; singing was relegated to a special choir; and that characteristic feature of early Christian worship—the communal meal or feast—shriveled to a morsel that could only tantalize the hungry. But it was to take many centuries before large numbers of Christians came to accept this diminished form of Christianity.”
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