From Individual Mind to Social Organization:
Religious Beliefs between Animist and Social Theories
Alessandro Lazzarelli
Institute of Anthropology
National Tsing Hua University
Among the early works on the study of religion both Tylor’s theory of animism and de Coulanges’ work “The Ancient City” provide a thorough explanation upon the origin and development of religious life. It is interesting to note that although adopting different perspectives in the study of religion, the two studies share a common evolutional conception of the development of religious beliefs. Indeed we may consider the theoretical framework traced in “The Ancient City” as a continuation of the idea elaborated in Tylor’s theory of animism. In fact they both proceed along an evolutional line, even though, whereas the latter deals with the origin of religious beliefs in the individual mind, the former explains how these beliefs became a practice in more complex social organizations, such as family, tribe, and city-state.
Let us first consider the animist theory. Tylor (1979) conceives of animism as the belief in spiritual beings, which in his opinion constitutes the basic definition of religion. The author is concerned with the origin and development of animism, for this purpose he attempts to elaborate an explanation upon the origin of the concept of the soul or spiritual beings in the individual mind. In this regard he suggests that such idea comes from certain psychic phenomenon such as dreams and hallucinations, which have been experienced by human beings since primitive people. Among the words used by various populations to express human soul or spirit, Tylor cites the shadow or shade (representing the ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary), the act of breathing (identified with the life or soul itself), and ethereality or vaporous materiality (expressed by transcendental definitions of the immaterial soul in many philosophical schools). Moreover, Tylor points out that death contributed largely to the formation of the idea of the soul or spirit, as the belief in the after-life or a spiritual world transcending the material one has always attracted human imagination. Yet, the idea of “the world beyond the grave” gave rise to the creation of burial religious rites and funeral human sacrifice for the service of the dead.
Similarly, in “The Ancient City” (1980) Fustel de Coulanges suggests that the idea of the supernatural or spiritual beings is strictly connected with the observation of the dead. To put it with the author’s words “death was the first mystery, and it placed man on the track of other mysteries”, subsequently “it raised his thoughts from the visible to the invisible, from the transitory to the eternal, from the human to the divine” (1980:17). Anyway, beyond this supposition upon the origin of the idea of spiritual beings, the author moves on explaining how religious beliefs constituted a fundamental aspect in the family’s everyday life of the ancient Roman and Greece cities. Indeed, the main purpose of his work is to set a link between religious beliefs and the social organization of the ancient city, showing how this creed produced domestic institutions and private law at a time during which the family was the basic unit of society. In fact, in the first part of his work, Coulanges focuses on domestic religion, pointing out that the family of the ancient city was the cradle of religion, for in each house of Greece and Roman there was an altar with the fire that was worshiped. Later, when people of Greece and Italy began to represent their gods as persons, giving each one a proper name and a human form, the old worship of the fire was replaced by the personification of the altar, or, to put it differently, by the personification of the gods. In this sense then, the house preceded the consumption of religion in temples, it was in the ancient city the basic and local sacred place wherein religious beliefs found their expression. In this context, religion was the foundation or constituent principle of the ancient family, as all the rights and duties of property, succession, and filiation served the function of preserving the family’s worship of its gods.
As Finley (1977) remarks, it is important to underline that de Coulanges refers to the city as a “city-state” in the meaning of a political and economical organization, not as a town with its physical boundaries. Moreover, he addresses family, religion, and property as the three dimensions most characteristic of the ancient city, which in historical perspective have constituted the larger kinship unit (gens) and ultimately the earliest state.
In short, I have introduced previously the animist theory in order to show a possible explanation of how religious beliefs could have originated in the individual mind. In addition, I have presented de Coulanges’ analysis of religious life in the ancient city as a continuation of the animist theory, as he set religious beliefs in the context of the family, not excluding an individual origin of these beliefs. But are there other aspects that need to be considered in the development of religion? Are religious beliefs necessary for the production of religious life, or also other elements may have influenced it, such as religious practices, the observance of certain rules, and social institutions? These questions represent the central concern of Robertson Smith (1972) in his work “The Religion of the Semites”, in which he focuses on religious practices of the Semitic people, which are those populations that in ancient times occupied the great Arabian Peninsula. It is interesting to note that Smith takes into account the social institutions and practices that contributed to shape religious life. In fact, in his opinion, for the ancients religion was a matter of conformity to prescribed traditional practices, rather than depending on individual conviction or beliefs. For this purpose he focuses on the observance of certain fixed rules of conduct, controlled by social institutions, according to which individual used to take part in religious activities for a simple conformity to the practice, even though no meaning was attached to the practice itself. Viewed from this perspective then, religion appears more similar to a political duty rather than a matter of personal choice.
References
De Coulanges, Fustel
1980 [1864] The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece an Rome. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Finley, M.I.
1977 The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond. Comparatives Studies in Society and History 19(3):305-27.
Smith, Robertson W.
1972 The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions. New York: Schocken Books.
Tylor, Edward Bennet
1979 Animism. In Reader in Comparative Religion. William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, eds. Fourth Edition. Pp. 9-18. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
