the need for religion has always been there, religion makes us human
- ice age cave paintings - 30k 40k years old
- how were they painted and why in the cave?! its dark and cold and hard to breathe inside
- what do they represent?
- these questions and its evidence is far less
interpretation of prof jiang
- its been cold for most of human history, general warming has led to agri being feasible
- africa to europe to asia and na to sa
- chauvet cave, france, not all done in one go. many animals overlapping
- lascaux cave 20000 bce - we learnt nothing in thousands of years, picasso
- altamira spain
- red and black, got fire from animal fat
- why? the location is a clue, acoustics were the best. part of ritual, music part of it. part of the religious belief systerm of the time
- they didnt write anything, they didnt know how
- eg - childbirth, stars, vast expanse of the sky, healing, nature. death
- cave resembles a mothers womb
- animals, killed, eaten by humans, pray to bring them back
- to maintain balance and harmony in nature
- mother nature give slife
- if animals not killed, humans will die.
- world works in a cycle
- animism = one of the first religion, every living thing has a soul and are interconnected. imp to maintain balance and harmony.
- theory- trees talk to each other through roots, forest as one big brain. trees communicate their needs and problems and help each other. trees recognize their own children and send nutrients to it
- shamans dressing as birds to portray communication with mother goddess, nature etc
- romito 2 skeleton of a dwarf - dna analysis show same quality of food and nourishment even though it wasnt contributing productively in the society, also given elaborate burial
- the dawn of everything - david graebar and david wengrow - both anthropologists
- buried were disabled, disabled viewed as more special, as shaman lavish funerals
- symbols as mythology,
- emmaunel kant - reality is not something we experience its something we imagine with our minds
- neuroscience affirmed kant
- drugs change the structure of the brain to imagine reality
- mystery makes things sacred and divine, birth divine hence women also divine
- only in recent history men have more power, women used to be considered special than men for most of history
- art as a means of visualize mythology
- common memory and knowledge creation
- which is actually called society today.
"religion is above all a system of ideas by which men imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it" - emile durkheim on religion, elementary forms of religious life.
- construction of relationship between kinship
- religion is all about hypothesizing, it has to be iterative and re-imagine it with changing times.
- it is important to not let the mind not to be dominated by what the senses portray instead we need to imagine reality
- religion led to the development of science and philosophy.
- religion is a collective consciousness