ANCIENT WISDOM: A Series of Exploration Into the Ancient Faiths – The Beginning

At the outset, let me state that this is an exploration and not propounding any specific premise.  Neither is this Ancient Wisdom series an academic or unquestionably accurate series of articles.  These articles ARE reasonable for consideration, pondering, and meditation.

With this in mind let’s start at the beginning.  I asked our modern AI “what is the oldest faith in the world?”  It pointed me to Hinduism with “written texts dating back some 3,000 years”, according to Britannica.com.  Yet when I asked “How long have modern humans been on the earth?” The response is “Homo sapiens have been on Earth for approximately 300,000 years.”  It further notes that complex tool use and “behavioral modernity” emerged between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago.

So then, what was the faith of humanity for the 45,000-plus years before the first written texts concerning faith were generated.  We may never be certain, but in the DSU article Insights to Humanity’s “Nature Religions” we may gain some insights.  The genetic history of the people reported in this article extends back some 40,000 years.  For the details, I recommend the article linked  above, but allow me to summarize what I believe some of the earliest human faiths incorporated.

Cultivating Community Cooperation

Early humanity migrated throughout the Earth carrying with them only the bare essentials for life and living.  With small communities of wandering humans frequently on the brink of perishing from any number of environmental dangers, the need for cooperation among community members was evident. Clearly community cooperation made community defense easier than each individual “doing their own thing.” 

Urbanization and Cultivation

Humanity started to “settle” as it transitioned from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society.  Called the Agricultural Revolution, it is regarded by many anthropologists as the single most important contributor to modern organized society and the many civilizations that rose and fell thereafter. This transition led to the development of permanent settlements, cities, and civilizations. It also led to the domestication of plants and animals, which has resulted in the increase of the global human population from a few million to the nearly eight billion of today. 

In the northern climes where agriculture was less prevalent, the hunter/gatherer lifestyle prevailed and the peoples referenced in the above article maintained many of their ancient customs and beliefs giving us insight into where ancient humanity’s wisdom arose.

Cultivating the Soul of (the) Matter

Again, I refer you to the article series referenced above, more specifically the article A Glimpse Into Ainu Beliefs. 

A soul is said to be a substantial living being.  The word is suspected to have originally meant coming from or belonging to the sea which was the supposed stopping place of the soul before or after death.  This may be associated with peoples like the Hallstatt culture, the first Celtic culture known, which emerged around the shores of Lake Hallstatt in Austria.  Its descendants can also be found inhabiting the lake-rich regions of Britain and Ireland whose mists and fogs stimulated Celtic myths and legends featuring numerous water spirits.

The ancient Ainu hunter/gatherers classified all souls into three categories which can be classified as greater than (more powerful than) human;  human; and weaker than (less powerful than) human. 

The first classification, greater than human, consists of the souls of deities, specifically the souls of creatures having powers and abilities exceeding those of humans.  For example  owls typically have far better night vision than humans; bears have far greater strength than humans; wolves have an endurance, sense of smell, and cunning far exceeding that of humans; killer whales and sea lions operate with ease and ferocity in a watery realm that humans seldom enter; and snakes, though much smaller than humans possess poisons that can easily kill. The souls of such greater than human creatures were all regarded as deities who wore their animal bodies only temporarily and gave them up to Ainu hunters when they were ready to enter the spirit world and therefore allowed themselves to be successfully hunted. 

Even nature itself came to be considered in this classification of deity, often nature is more powerful than humanity. Fire is in the category of deities for it has the power to cook food and to heat bodies and more.  Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material.  It produces heat and light while smoke is the visible cloud of gasses and fine particles that is the byproduct of combustion.  The flame is the visible part of the chemical reaction and smoke consists of the particulates and gasses that are released as the fuel burns, or fails to burn completely.  

The ancient hunter/gatherers regarded fire as a goddess. As the fire transformed static flammable matter into dynamic fire and etheric smoke, the Ainu considered the “goddess of fire” the superior power which transformed a human from matter on this world into some form of spirit which rose into the heavens, as smoke rises from a fire, or mist from a lake.

The caretaker of the fire in a home or community was the female.   The word shekinah means “dwell” and refers to the Divine Presence dwelling in our midst. The Jewish tradition has many different names for the Divine, most of them are masculine, yet Shekinah is a feminine name for the Divine and describes the receptive holding place where the Divine dwells, just above the flame.  It is where the sacred flame exists, the place of transition into spirit.

To the Ainu the hearth of the home, the place of fire in the home, came to symbolize the place where spirit beings enter our world.  When someone in their family goes through transition, it’s believed that their soul goes through this gateway to the other world.  They believe that they can communicate with their ancestors through this hearth-based spirit gate. Females are responsible for tending the eternal flame of a community's hearth for females represent the power of creation in brining forth and sending forth life.

The second soul group consists of the souls of humans, the middle rank. The ancients believed that humans needed the deities as much as the deities needed their human dependents. Humans needed the deities for food and clothing and the deities derived their sanctity by the respect shown to them by the humans in a co-dependent relationship.

The third group of souls consists of the souls of tools such as ships, knives, bows and arrows, sewing needles, dishes, in other words utility items.  Just as humans and deities were co-dependent, so too were tools and humans dependent on each other. The soul of a tool fulfills its function only as a human fashions an inanimate item into a utility item, namely a tool. On the other hand, humans can’t survive without their tools and equally can’t conduct rituals for displaying their gratitude towards the deities. 

Respect

Having inherited this ancient belief system, many present-day Ainu still treat their tools with great respect. In traditional Ainu ways, tools that had become worn-out were not disposed of, but kept instead for two special periods of the year, namely spring and autumn (times when the heat of the year was beginning to either “wax”, or “wane”), when they were broken apart in order to release their souls. The ceremonies were solemn events at which the Ainu prayed and showed their gratitude to their former tools as they buried the pieces in special places.  Archaeology demonstrates that the Celtic peoples performed similar respectful rituals as they “retired” their tools by depositing them in nearby lakes and bogs. 

Since the souls of humans were considered to be lesser than, or a little below, the souls of deity, it came to be believed that if a powerful animal deity such as a bear, was killed by a human it was only because the animal deity choose to allow itself to be harvested.  Only when the hunter lived an ethical life would the bear-soul give up its body to the hunter.  In return the hunter/gatherers often had ceremonies and rituals that they would perform in honor of the deity whose choice allowed for a useful harvest.

While animals and plants were living in this world it was believed that they occupied the temporary forms represented by their physical bodies, yet their true forms resided in the world of the deities–the spirit world. This world was a world similar to what we experience here on Earth, a place where these souls spoke, acted and interacted as we ourselves do.

The prayers and rituals that only humans could perform, assured the smooth circulation of souls between our abode of the physically alive and the abode of the spiritually alive.  Physical humanity then, in effect, became the “heart” of creation ensuring proper circulation of souls between the worlds of the mainly physical and the purely spiritual.

This belief system, or something near to it, served humanity for more than 45,000 years (according to observations).  It would have undoubtedly evolved over time, but it wasn’t until after 1000 BC that faith systems began to be written down.  We’ll explore more of these in future articles.

Next:  Words of Faith