Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  The three dimensions of implicit theology, which, Assmann says, were “confined entirely to the sphere of practice,“93 comprise the basic continuity that makes it possible “to speak of `the’ religion of ancient Egypt, in the singular.“94 Although Egyptian religion had its unique features, it is not entirely wrong to see it also as a species in the genus “polytheistic religions of the ancient Near East,” as long as we realize that such religions “represent highly developed cultural achievements that are inseparably linked to the political organization of the early state and are not to be found in tribal societies.“95 As in other archaic societies, the king had a central role in each of the dimen sions of religious practice.96 The king was responsible for the performance of cult and the construction and upkeep of the temples where cult was performed, not only in the capital, but throughout the country. Although tombs were important in every period of Egyptian history, after the Old Kingdom, temples replaced tombs as the site of major construction under royal patronage, a practice that continued well into Ptolemaic times. Temples were so important and so numerous that in a late text Egypt was called “the temple of the whole world.“97 The king through ritual was also responsible for the maintenance of cosmic order, the daily passage of the sun and the annual inundation of the Nile. Finally, the king was at the center of the “central myth” that sustained the Egyptian state, namely, the myth of Horus as the son and successor of Osiris, but also as the beloved of all the The centrality of the king in every dimension of religious practice, however differently phrased in each society, was something common to all archaic societies.

  Myth as a symbolic form was basic to Egyptian religion, but myth in the sense of extended narrative does not appear to have been as highly developed as in Mesopotamia, where it largely supplied what secondary reflection on religious meaning there was. Although allusions to aspects of the myth of Isis, Osiris, and Horus can be found in many Egyptian texts, it is indicative that the only “complete version” of the myth is Plutarch’s hellenized version, written in Greek in the second century CE.99

  Mythospeculation (Assmann’s explicit theology), however, not unknown in other archaic societies, was particularly highly developed in Egypt, and underwent significantly more historical change than did religious practice (Assmann’s implicit theology). Its social location was the educated, literate elite, largely a product of the Middle Kingdom and later. In the New Kingdom the existence for the first time of a professional priesthood as a subgroup of the literate elite gave further impetus to mythospeculation. I will consider two texts of the Middle Kingdom to give some sense of what early Egyptian mythospeculation was like. It is important to notice that both texts either describe or are the words of “the god.” Much ink has been spilled as to whether they give evidence of a latent “monotheism,” a discussion that Erik Hornung has pretty well disposed of.loo The existence of the gods is taken for granted in both texts, so in that sense they are polytheistic. But they are also clearly addressed to a god who cannot be subsumed among the other gods and whose status is the focus of the mythospeculation. The “Instruction to Merikare” is attributed to the First Intermediate Period, but is almost certainly a product of the Middle Kingdom. After a good deal of worldly advice this Instruction has a “theological” coda of considerable interest:

  One cannot but observe in this passage themes that appear to be parallel to themes in the Hebrew Scriptures: mankind in God’s image, for example, and the combination of loving care and punishment of rebellion. But this is not Yahweh. What “god” means in such passages is problematic.

  Apparently a notion of the divine as having a concern for the welfare of humans was widespread enough to arouse reproaches during the First Intermediate Period, or in the memory of it in the Middle Kingdom. The “Admonitions of Ipuwer” complains that not only the king, but also “the god” have been derelict in their duty of taking care of the people. Ipuwer reproaches the god who brought human beings into existence: “Where is he today? Is he asleep? His power is not seen.””’

  But a remarkable defense of the “all-lord” is mounted in Coffin Text 1130 from the Middle Kingdom, a text that Assmann believes belongs in the de veloping tradition of wisdom literature. The text is an apology for the god against such accusations as Ipuwer’s. In order to “still the anger” the god recounts his “four good deeds”:

  What is striking about this text is the emphasis on equality. One can see in this text a remarkable forerunner of the assertion that “all men are created equal.” The god has given the wind (the prevailing north wind brings blessed coolness to Egypt’s otherwise desert heat), and the inundation of the Nile to all, rich and poor alike. And he made all humans alike, forbidding them to do evil. It is humans, not the god, who have created oppression and caused the difference between rich and poor, strong and weak.

  Significant in these early texts is their intertextuality: they represent a continuing dialogue about the nature of god and the relation between god, morality, and existing social conditions. The king is not missing-the Instruction to Merikare indicates that the god has created rulers to protect the weak-but the focus is not on glorifying the king but on justifying the god. If the form is not theoretic, it is surely forensic, and forensic is probably one of the sources from which theoretical discourse developed. It is worth noting the importance of the forensic mode in the Hebrew scriptures.‘04 All of this is to suggest that the axial age (mid-first millennium BCE), to be discussed in Chapter 6, did not come into the world unprepared. Much Egyptian mythospeculation is at least proto-axial, and we will have to return to it when we reach the axial age.

  The New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE) was founded by Ahmose, who succeeded in driving the Hyksos out of Egypt and reuniting the country. But the early rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty not only drove the “Asiatics” out, they pursued them into their hinterland, establishing what is often called the New Empire, including Palestine, parts of Syria, and even, more briefly, northern Iraq. It was thus one of the first multiethnic empires (the Hittite Empire being another) already in the middle of the second millennium BCE, a phenomenon that would be increasingly important in the first millennium BCE. Even while recognizing that there were other realms, particularly in the northeast, the Egyptians laid claim to universal rule, a development that has often been linked to the increasing sense of universality in the Egyptian understanding of divinity. With the New Kingdom the promising beginnings of Middle Kingdom mythospeculation became far more explicit.105 Without becoming God in the sense of the monotheistic religions, the god (who is often unnamed, but who could be identified as Re, Amun-Re, Ptah,106 or others) has a kind of reality that transcends not only humans but “the gods.” Without ever losing connection to the social order and its earthly upholder, the king, the god becomes more clearly than ever, the god of individuals, and, although the evidence is uncertain, almost surely the god of ordinary people, not only the cultured elite.

  A priest of Amun composed the following hymn to Amun (whose name means literally, the hidden one) in the 1330s:

  Amun fulfils the old understanding of divine assistance to the poor and the weak, but the idea is now personalized, available to the individual. It is a passage like this that allows us to understand why Assmann says that in the New Kingdom the ideal has changed from the king-guided individual and the heart-guided individual to the god-guided individual, so that in another text, something like the idea of “salvation” appears:

  Here the god, Amun or whoever, seems almost to be outside time and beyond the cosmos (you were here before the beginning and will be here after the end), but another side of late Egyptian mythospeculation, never seen as contradicting the side tending toward transcendence, symbolizes the god not as beyond the cosmos, but as the cosmos:

  Seeing the god as the cosmos, particularly as the sun, allows for a sense of human participation in the divine life, for the light of the sun, which surrounds us, is the presence of the god. As one hymn to the sun puts it: “All eyes see thr
ough you. They can do nothing when Your Majesty goes down.“110 Assmann cites a passage from Goethe that picks up the theme of human participation in the light of the sun:

  It is the very capacity to think of the creator god now as Amun, now as Ptah, as beyond the cosmos and identical with the cosmos, as distant from humans yet participating in them, without worrying about apparent contradictions, that keeps this remarkable tradition of reflection within the realm of mythospeculation rather than theoretical discourse.

  Except for one brief moment: Akhenaten (1352-1338) and his so-called (from the name of his capital city) Amarna religion.112 The pharaoh Amenophis IV changed his name to Akhenaten, obliterating Amun from his name, and, in intention, from the whole of Egypt, proclaiming Aten, the sun disk, as the sole god. The experiment lasted twenty years at most and by fifty years after Akenaten’s death had been obliterated from conscious memory, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century. Though clearly indebted to the mythospeculation that had arisen in the Middle Kingdom and flourished in the New Kingdom, Akhenaten’s religion prefigures and is perhaps even subterraneously related to axial religions, in particular the religion of Israel, and had best be considered in Chapter 6. But however radical the Amarna religion was in some respects, it was regressive in one respect that links it indelibly to the archaic, not the axial, religious moment: there was no way the people could relate directly to Aten; knowledge of him came only through pharaoh; and even if there was one god, pharaoh, as his son, and even pharaoh’s wife, were also divine.

  However variously the relation between the divine and the human was figured in archaic religions, the role of the king was always central. Even when, as in Egypt, piety had become democratized and private devotion was widespread, the formation of religious community depended on kingship. The conquerors of Egypt knew this well: the Persians, Alexander, and the Ptolemies, even the Romans, took the role of pharaoh as essential for the maintenance of religio-social order in Egypt. Only when Christianity had decisively replaced the ancient religion could the vestigial role of pharaoh be abandoned altogether.

  Shang and Western Zhou China

  The first thing to note with respect to ancient China in comparison with ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt is that the absolute chronology of the archaic begins significantly later. The earliest writing we have from China dates to about 1200 BcE, nearly 2,000 years later than in the Middle East. Nonetheless there is every reason to believe that archaic civilization in China was largely indigenous and owed little to any other civilization. The Chinese Neolithic is exceptionally well known so that we have a picture of a long gradual development toward a stratified society and an early state by the middle of the second millennium BCE, with little indication of significant influence from the outside.113 Chariots certainly and metallurgy possibly were introduced from the outside, but well into the second millennium BCE. And, although early Egypt shows a number of Mesopotamian influences, early China’s writing, art, and architecture show no influences from abroad. It is of course possible that some influences from the Middle East or the Indus Valley could have reached China via Central Asia in the third and early second millennia, but we have no evidence that they were extensive, and the great distances and geographical barriers involved suggest that such influences were unlikely, even though in later times significant trade routes through Central Asia would be developed. But perhaps the most powerful argument for indigenous Chinese development is the unique style of Chinese society, culture, and religion, which sets it markedly apart from the cases discussed so far.

  Linked to the fact that Chinese culture is indigenous and unique is its unparalleled continuity. Although in the archaic cases we have considered so far it is not difficult to trace continuities from the Neolithic to the early state, in every such case, and this is true of the New World archaic cultures as well, the axial “breakthrough,” though not without precursors in the archaic cultures, occurs outside them and leads eventually to their demise, marked most clearly by the loss of their writing systems and thus their literature, not to be recovered until modern times. China is the one case, however, where there is a continuity not only from the Neolithic to the archaic, but from the archaic to the axial, a continuity marked by the persistence, not without development to be sure, of the same writing system from the archaic to the present.114

  In our current postmodern mood, questions have been raised about such perhaps reified denominators as “Mesopotamia” and “Egypt,” not to speak of “Israel” and “Greece,” and there have been some who have questioned what “China” is as well. Yet major scholars in the field seem more than ready not only to preserve the term, but to push it ever farther back in history. The Cambridge History ofAncient China, published in 1999-though not definitive, it is as close to definitive as for a while we are likely to get contains a remarkable series of assertions from its various authors about when “China” begins. Kwang-Chih Chang, a distinguished archaeologist, writes that “By 3000 BCE, the Chinese interaction sphere can properly and appropriately be called China.“115 David Keightley, a leading specialist on the Shang, writes a bit more hesitantly, “It is only with the late Shang and its written records, however, that one can, for the first time begin to speak with confidence of a civilization that was incipiently Chinese in its values and institutions.“116 Edward Shaughnessy, a specialist on Western Zhou, however, writes that although many features of later Chinese culture may have had roots in the Neolithic and the Shang, “nevertheless, if those earlier periods can be said to be the foundation of Chinese history, necessary, to be sure, but underground and all but invisible throughout most of that history, then surely the Western Zhou would have to be called its cornerstone.“117 And of course there are many who would date “Imperial China” only from the Qin (221-206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE-220 CE) dynasties. No one, however, has claimed a sharp break from the Neolithic to the present. Such continuity surely puts China in a class by itself.

  Though the Chinese development is clearly unique, there is a problem in defining its uniqueness. Chinese civilization in the axial age is extraordinarily rich, providing a wealth of material and a diversity of views that make comparison with other axial civilizations most rewarding. Unfortunately, such is not the case with the Chinese archaic, particularly with its earliest phase in the Shang dynasty (ca. 1570-1045 BCE), but even for the Western Zhou (1045-771 BCE) the evidence is spotty and its interpretation contested. For Shang culture we are dependent, as far as written records are concerned, almost exclusively on the so-called oracle bones (there are a few inscribed bronze vessels), that is, the 100,000 or so inscribed cattle scapulas and turtle shell fragments that survive from the Anyang period (ca. 1200-1045 BCE). The texts, numerous but mostly quite brief, are evidence of an elaborate practice of ritual divination. Fortunately the subjects of divination are diverse so that a considerable amount of interesting information can be derived from careful analysis of the texts. Nonetheless many of the things we would most like to know are simply absent from this data. With regard to religion, the primary subject of this book, David Keightley has written, “the inscriptions provide a flat and abbreviated view telling us more of the notes of Shang cult than of the music of Shang belief””’ Given the great importance of the later Chinese development, we must use the limited information we have to try to understand its background.

  One source of frustration is the lack of myths from surviving archaic texts. Large books have been written on Chinese mythology, but they derive their data largely from texts composed late in the pre-Han period, in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 cE) itself, or even later.”’ Some of this material may date from Shang and Western Zhou times, but we cannot know exactly what. There is a little data from the Western Zhou, though even that is hard to date, but the oracle texts are entirely devoid of mythic narrative.

  These texts, however, are not devoid of data significant for the understanding of Shang history, most importantly data about royal genealogy. From them we
can construct a list of six predynastic kings and twenty-nine dynastic kings.120 It is only from the time of the twenty-first dynastic king, Wu Ding, that we have archaeological and textual data because it was only under Wu Ding that the Shang ceremonial center at Anyang was established, a site extensively excavated in modern times. For kings earlier than Wu Ding we have only the order of succession, and the relationship between predecessor and successor, that is, whether the successor was a brother or a son of his predecessor. For Wu Ding and later kings, scholars have established approximate dates: Wu Ding’s death date is given as 1189, and the last Shang king, Di Xin, is said to have ruled from 1086 to 1045. Several sites have been suggested as earlier Shang capitals, but without writing associated with them it is impossible to be sure when or if they were indeed capitals. Thus most of what we know of Shang society derives from its final approximately 150 years when the capital was at Anyang.121

  Shang Society was, in Weber’s terms, a patrimonial state, that is a state organized as an extension of the ruler’s court, augmented by associated lineages and various kinds of servants. Incipiently, at least, it was a patrimonial bureaucracy in that a variety of appointed civil and military officers served under the king, though such officers were only incipient bureaucrats insofar as they were merely an extension of the personal rule of the king, lacking a strong sense of responsibility to the office itself. Paul Wheatley argues against those who see the Shang polity as feudal insofar as the king appointed local officials in outer regions of the realm and even recognized as subordinates some chieftains beyond the borders. Wheatley holds that these appointments should be seen as “benefices,” dependent (in theory at least) on the pleasure of the king, and entailing no legal rights of the local ruler, as true feudalism would.122