Christianity formed as a way to organize larger groups than, for instance, the tribal gods at the time would allow for. Creating monotheism is kind of a natural outcropping from theistic beliefs in the first place. Let’s think about how this got created because clearly it was the creation of the empire that shifted humanity out of a lot of the things that they were doing.
This is to a large extent one of the components leading to the origin of marriage. Everyone experiences the bond of falling in love so there’s a natural tendency for that to take place. It’s all part of the mammalian socialization process. We’re not laying eggs and humans take a long time to develop and to become mature adults, so we have this need to bond emotionally in order to create the groups that have allowed humans the time necessary to evolve.
We had to be able to kill the type of game that was present at the time and it was mostly large game. We had to be able to hunt it or we simply would have starved. If you’re following some large animal around that’s the size of a mastodon and then you kill it a few miles away from the camp, it’s probably going to go to waste if there are only a couple of people to carry it. Larger groups of people allowed for the hunting of larger animals. Conservation and cooking and thinking together allowed for all these things.
So many of these tribes had a medicine man and we don’t really know what the social structures were. It could be that local tribes knew each other, in some of these areas where food was abundant and the tribes were not nomadic. If you have an abundance of food you tend to just stay in that area, you don’t have to go anywhere.
The Pacific Northwest was like this. They had no wars or anything else and there was enough food and land for everybody. I don’t even think that they had a vocabulary for matters of warfare when the French and the Americans fought for settlement on that side. The French were thinking that they were going to fill in across the top of the Americas and turn the area into a French colony; this was one of the disputes. There was a battle there over land and the Native Americans just didn’t know what to do about it. They hadn’t had any wars until then.
If you visited the Pacific Northwest you’d realize that the land is rich with animals, fish, and everything that you could possibly need. Everything just grows in abundance there. It’s kind of an amazing place. The winters are not even harsh, not particularly anyway. They do get snow but it usually only lasts for a few days, and if you get down near the Sound in the Seattle Tacoma area, then it’s not going to stick very long at all.
The social structures that existed within the tribes were largely patriarchal and (considering that there’s a lot of talk about gender equality nowadays) I think that in certain environments and given the need to be protected plus the high vulnerability that women have during and post pregnancy, that’s pretty much understandable and also functional. When women are pregnant and when they’ve recently had a child, their bodies take time to recover. The child requires a period of bonding and as a result you have a lot of the decisions being made and the work being done by the men.
It eventually becomes a patriarchal society. I don’t know how the matriarchal societies are really run, but it seems like a natural evolution to have men doing the commerce and things like this, because of how vulnerable women can be at certain times. They’re unavailable to perform certain tasks, at least part of the time. This creates a lot of problems in the modern world because of the notion of equality. It’s more than only a notion, but I’m just saying. The male and female naturally take different roles in society so it’s going to be hard to have straight equality since we don’t really know what that looks like. It may very well be that the system that we have is a generated equality, in a certain context at any rate.
Let’s get back to the power structure. What happened is that these shamans, these key tribe members or elders, were trying to discuss the awakened mind.
They were trying to communicate it to their people. Now the tribe may or may not have had hallucinogenic experiences. There’s no telling whether they’ve had lucid dreams or if there’s some other sort of state of awareness that they know of from performing rituals that generate altered states. We don’t know for sure, but we assume that these things were going on, based on the stories that were told.
There are several aspects of storytelling and one of them is that you want your audience to be able to relate to the story. You want to have enough references to current events and relevant topics to make things work, but you also can certainly bring up historic events and use them to tell your story. You can actually get your point across even if you’re making the story up. Just look at the Mahabharata if you want to know more about that. There’s an entire history that was created through that story. So they’re looking for ways to tell a story that’s relevant enough to get a point across.
In the West, Zoroastrianism took the idea of good and evil and the different worlds, the contrast between polar opposites, and began to work with that, while the other religions may have taken other aspects. A lot of the text in Judaism covers topics relevant in the dark ages, with a lot of animal sacrifice and that sort of thing. They were documenting the lineage going back generations, and the fascinating thing about that is that it tells you that they thought they had a handle on exactly who they were in relation to the creation story. They were trying to trace their roots back to Adam, it’s very interesting. So they actually believed that the Garden of Eden was a place on the earth.
So they had the patriarchal family structure and this is what they used. Now remember they’re using this when they’re drawing the people from their tribal nature into the monotheistic nature. The tribal nature probably being somewhat earth based unless they were deists, which is what they called the people in America that dealt with the constitution and the formation of the government. Many of them were what they call Deists, which means that they believed in certain deities. It’s basically the spirit model of the universe, the spirit model of reality.
So in trying to describe this idea of God and to relay these stories in a way that the people were likely to understand they used the social structure that was most obvious to them. They said: “hey, there’s a God that’s above the other gods, the supreme God. There’s really only one God and if you were to see it this way you’d understand.” So the problem came in with the storytelling because if you only had one God, where would you find that God, if it was not necessarily place and time specific?
- Know Your Purpose
- About Us
- Contact Us