What Did People Worship Before the Big Religions?

Four Layers Beneath Every Religion

For three hundred thousand years, humans were religious without churches, without books, without priests. The great religions we follow today — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism — together claim some four billion adherents. They feel ancient. They are not.

The oldest of them is around four thousand years old. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least three hundred thousand. That gap — the ninety-eight point seven percent of human existence that no current religion accounts for — is the most interesting question in the study of religion. Because the gap is not empty. Every cave we have excavated, every burial we have opened, every fire pit we have dated, tells us the first humans were already doing something. We just stopped recognising it as religion. The video this essay accompanies walks through the four layers we have uncovered. This piece sits underneath the video and traces what those four layers still mean in your life.

The first layer is animism. The world is alive. Not metaphorically — concretely. Rivers, mountains, storms, stones, the sun, the dead, and the unborn all contain a spirit that can be spoken to. Edward Burnett Tylor coined the word in Primitive Culture (1871), and for a long time the West treated animism as a primitive failure to understand cause and effect. The Hadza of Tanzania, the Sámi of Lapland, the Ainu of Japan, the Khoisan of southern Africa, and the first nations of the Americas have always known otherwise. Recent anthropology — Robert N. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution (2011) is the foundational survey — suggests animism is the oldest, most universal, and most resilient pattern of human thought we have evidence for. You still do it. You talk to your car. You blame the rain. You sense the house is watching you. The wiring did not go anywhere.

The second layer is the ancestors. Sixty thousand years of Neanderthal and sapiens burials show the same thing: ochre, flowers, tools, food placed with the body. The dead were not abandoned. The dead were furnished. Death did not end the relationship; it changed the address. The grandfather who taught you is still teaching you, if you keep speaking to him. Every modern religion still does this — Mass on All Souls’ Day, Ching Ming, Día de los Muertos, the Hindu shraddha rite. So do the secular: the cemetery visit, the framed photograph, the lit candle on a death anniversary. You think you are honouring a memory. The ancient mind knew you were maintaining a relationship.

The third layer is the totem, and the law it carried. A totem binds a clan to an animal or plant: the clan does not eat the totem, does not hunt it, does not name it casually. The clan and the creature are kin. Religion was the law before there was law — the salmon clan did not overfish, the buffalo clan policed the hunt. The forbidden foods of the modern religions are totemism wearing scripture’s clothes: not the dog, not the horse, not the cow, not the pig.

The fourth layer is the mother. Around thirty-five thousand years ago, female figurines begin appearing in the archaeological record from Spain to Siberia. The Venus of Willendorf is the famous one; there are hundreds more. We are not certain they were gods. We are certain the pattern is too widespread to be decoration. Most scholars now read these as the earliest deities we have material evidence of. She survived: Isis, Inanna, Cybele, Demeter, Durga, Mary. The mother goddess never died. She was renamed.

Then, eleven and a half thousand years ago in southeastern Anatolia, hunter-gatherers built Göbekli Tepe — limestone pillars weighing twenty tons, arranged in circles, six thousand years older than Stonehenge, seven thousand older than the Great Pyramid, older than agriculture itself. Klaus Schmidt’s excavation reports rewrote the textbook story. Religion was not invented after we settled down. The temple came first. Worship came first. The gods built the city.

So what did people worship before the big religions? They worshipped what was alive, what was dead, what was other, and what was beginning. And then they built a temple before they built a town. Every modern religion is built on top of those four layers — and so, quietly, are you, even if you believe in nothing at all.

We did not invent religion four thousand years ago. We renamed something that was already three hundred thousand years old.

Watch the full video →

Sources

· Klaus Schmidt et al., Göbekli Tepe excavation reports — German Archaeological Institute, 1995–2014

· Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1 — University of Chicago Press, 1978

· Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture — John Murray, 1871

· Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution — Harvard University Press, 2011

· Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess — Harper & Row, 1989

· Frank W. Marlowe, The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania — University of California Press, 2010

· Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest — Harvard University Press, 1999

· Brian Hayden, Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints — Smithsonian Books, 2003

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