animals signaled another quantum jump in the evolution of human culture. It added a dimension to the definition of home. It gave us the time and the luxury to reflect upon matters beyond our immediate survival. It was the beginning of surplus and of specialization, a time not only to tell tales, but to embellish them. Personal lives became stories, stories became legends, legends became myths, and our myths became our dreams.
If the traditional agricultural practices of Africa, India, and the Far East are anything to go by, it should not surprise us to learn that women were the first agriculturists. Who else would have intuited better the significance of fertility, pregnancy, and cultivation? Who other than the traditional gatherers of the plains would have recognized the potential of a new food source when it presented itself?
Agriculture has been important in our history but it came with a price. Cultivation is synonymous with growth and therein lies the shadow or the dark side of this evolutionary event. It is called expansionism. Staying in one place led to an unprecedented growth in local populations. This meant a need for more food. More food meant competition for more land and it is not difficult to see the link between land, territory, colonization, and the means of getting it—politics and war. Cultivation took on a new dimension—the cultivation of words, wealth, and weapons.
There was no turning back, but it had its positive side. Human language took on another form. Through exquisite, painstaking art, including our earliest scribbled signs and symbols, our agricultural ancestors wrote themselves into the record book. No longer restricted to body signals and to speech, language in its written form allowed the human animal to record, to think in words, and to read between the lines. From rock faces to papyrus and paper, the files of human history became indelible and, as every poet will tell you, ink and blood are the same thing.
W ith the onset of agriculture and the interweaving seasons of bread and wine, cultivation became a multifaceted metaphor for the human narrative—the seasons of birth, death, and rebirth. It reinforced in us the Neanderthal notion of continuity and an afterlife, for these relatives were the first hominids to add to the graves of their dead something for an afterlife—flowers, food, and sea urchins.
Continuity and the notions of deities, gods, and God represent profound leaps in the evolution of human culture. Let the histories of the world’s great religious philosophies speak for themselves. Accompanied by laws that would later be engraved on stones, scrolls, and in leatherbound creeds, it is a history of the human quest for a greater understanding of the creation and of its creator. Visible gods became an invisible God. Animism was replaced by theism, which in turn has been challenged by humanism and the supremacy of human rights. God moved from being outside us to being inside and then to being everywhere. Some say that He left and others that He will come back again. All things considered, the idea—or for some the conviction—of life everlasting appears to be deeply embedded in the human psyche, for, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz reminds us, “it has accompanied man in his wanderings through time. It has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds which expressed only one of its forms.”
Because of the meaning that is derived from them, the significance of the world’s religions should be neither negated nor underestimated. They are far more than mere codes of conduct or moral philosophies. Ligare , the Latin word which means “to connect” or “to bind” and from which the word religion is derived, plays no small role in the survival of a species that knows its ultimate fate. Continuity, connection, transformation, and transmutation are the hallmarks of evolution, are they not? Everything in life changes its skin…even the gods. Does it
If the traditional agricultural practices of Africa, India, and the Far East are anything to go by, it should not surprise us to learn that women were the first agriculturists. Who else would have intuited better the significance of fertility, pregnancy, and cultivation? Who other than the traditional gatherers of the plains would have recognized the potential of a new food source when it presented itself?
Agriculture has been important in our history but it came with a price. Cultivation is synonymous with growth and therein lies the shadow or the dark side of this evolutionary event. It is called expansionism. Staying in one place led to an unprecedented growth in local populations. This meant a need for more food. More food meant competition for more land and it is not difficult to see the link between land, territory, colonization, and the means of getting it—politics and war. Cultivation took on a new dimension—the cultivation of words, wealth, and weapons.
There was no turning back, but it had its positive side. Human language took on another form. Through exquisite, painstaking art, including our earliest scribbled signs and symbols, our agricultural ancestors wrote themselves into the record book. No longer restricted to body signals and to speech, language in its written form allowed the human animal to record, to think in words, and to read between the lines. From rock faces to papyrus and paper, the files of human history became indelible and, as every poet will tell you, ink and blood are the same thing.
W ith the onset of agriculture and the interweaving seasons of bread and wine, cultivation became a multifaceted metaphor for the human narrative—the seasons of birth, death, and rebirth. It reinforced in us the Neanderthal notion of continuity and an afterlife, for these relatives were the first hominids to add to the graves of their dead something for an afterlife—flowers, food, and sea urchins.
Continuity and the notions of deities, gods, and God represent profound leaps in the evolution of human culture. Let the histories of the world’s great religious philosophies speak for themselves. Accompanied by laws that would later be engraved on stones, scrolls, and in leatherbound creeds, it is a history of the human quest for a greater understanding of the creation and of its creator. Visible gods became an invisible God. Animism was replaced by theism, which in turn has been challenged by humanism and the supremacy of human rights. God moved from being outside us to being inside and then to being everywhere. Some say that He left and others that He will come back again. All things considered, the idea—or for some the conviction—of life everlasting appears to be deeply embedded in the human psyche, for, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz reminds us, “it has accompanied man in his wanderings through time. It has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds which expressed only one of its forms.”
Because of the meaning that is derived from them, the significance of the world’s religions should be neither negated nor underestimated. They are far more than mere codes of conduct or moral philosophies. Ligare , the Latin word which means “to connect” or “to bind” and from which the word religion is derived, plays no small role in the survival of a species that knows its ultimate fate. Continuity, connection, transformation, and transmutation are the hallmarks of evolution, are they not? Everything in life changes its skin…even the gods. Does it
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