For the record, check if your interpretation of shamanism is not based upon modern human thinking and a view of religion and politics in which human beings are always looking for increased powers and perks.
I did leave things open in my post by advising that others’ mileage might vary. In today’s world, almost everyone’s mileage varies. That’s the medium we live in.
Celtic polytheism has a wiki page.
All the evidence we have says that human beings are always looking for increased power and perks. The question is whether the structure of prehistoric supernatural observance enabled this or not. I suspect it varied between tribes, with some having a more democratized observance while others perceived certain people to have special insights, some of whom used this “ability” and/or role to pursue power.
Looking for increased power and perks isn’t “modern human thinking” it’s a human quality observed throughout human history. Furthermore I’m not presenting “my interpretation” of shamanism, I’m pointing out that you don’t have any sensible reason why your interpretation should appear to people tens of thousands of years ago.
YMMV doesn’t mean “this is just my interpretation, man”, nor does it make your wild conjecture a better attempt at “fighting ignorance”.
Just this one point. I do agree with what you both postulate as a general rule about human behaviour. But are you both saying that there have never been any people throughout human history, and even modern day, who do not fit into this category?
On this point, I have no quotes from Wikipedia or the NY Times to back up anything I wrote. I have known and been with Shamen and so I speak from experience personally experienced. That’s the extent of my “fighting ignorance”.
I believe there exists the possibility that you might be doing that. I thought, correct me if I’m wrong, that it was a given that history, and especially ancient history, is almost always interpreted through the tinted glasses of the era in which folks live present day, whatever and whenever that present may be.
So do we have any evidence that the congregation would get together on Sundays, so to speak… that is, that there were regular and organized services?
We have fairly good writings, for example, in the Book of the Dead from Egypt - but IIRC that’s more about funeral procedures than regular religious services. Not sure if there’s much on that, other than the occasional sacrifices to mark special occasions.
Presumably, if someone went through the trouble to put together a Stonehenge and an altar(?) there’s a ritual that was performed at the solstice? There are (IIRC) some descriptions of Aztec or Inca rituals before the Spaniards go ahold of them and straightened them out.
However, much of what we have is special ceremonies described, rather than regular recurring “services”.
As for Shamanism, you may see something similar to that surviving until recently in some cultures - when I was a child I recall newspaper articles in Toronto about the police cracking down on various Mediterranean ethnics who claimed to have magical powers to heal or ward off bad luck and were exploiting their communities.
There are some indications of sacrifice of both horses and men to Odin via hanging at the sacred tree and temple at Uppsala, as well as drowned sacrifices, but solid proof of this is lacking. If it did happen it was something local to that site. There were probably rituals around butchery of food animals.
Some, but not definitive proof of much.
Oh, most certainly - I was initiated as a NeoPagan back in the 1970’s. By the 1980’s I was being solemnly told that bloodshed and blood had absolutely no part in rituals and was barred from the Circle (to the extent some groups even barred menstruating women). This rather surprised me, as I have a portion of my Book of Shadows (now Hard Drive of Shadows, because, you know, 21st Century now) devoted to spells and rituals utilizing blood. In quantities measured in drops, I hasten to add, not buckets full. So yes, changes and re-writing of history even within my lifetime. NeoPagans are not, as a general rule, reliable historians.
The Aztecs had their entire freaking calendar arranged around regular sacrifices. Those WERE their recurring “services”.
Some religions were based not on belief but on acts. For example, the Ancient Romans didn’t care if you believed in their gods, they only cared that the prescribed sacrifices were made when required. Judaism is somewhat like that, as actions are in many ways more important than belief, hence the phenomena of observant atheist Jews. For people with little experience of religion outside Christianity wrapping their heads around religions that are based more ritual than belief can be difficult.
I recently read “Rome: An Empire’s Story” by Greg Woolf. In describing Roman religion, he says that the main point of religious practice was not piety per se but rather making sure that rituals were conducted exactly as prescribed. From this I gathered that at least some of these rituals were known, but I don’t recall any detailed descriptions in the book.
ETA: ninja’d by Broomstick.
Even if you had quotes from an expert on modern Shamanism that would not tell us all that much about the religious practices of people 20 000 years ago. Yes, their practices would most likely be much closer to modern Shamanism than to e.g. Christianity, but they have had 20 000 years of development and can’t barely be used as evidence (by themselves) of what practices and beliefs existed thousands of years ago.
Let me try this one more time. I’m not saying “This is how things were”, I’m saying “We don’t know as much about practice that far back as you appear to indicate, for instance this could occur …” And saying that such occurrences are likely isn’t an interpretation colored by the current era either, it’s based on the evidence of it occurring in wildly different times and places with a quite high frequency.
Almost all of them had designated days where they had feasts and prescribed sacrifices. There were also occasions when they would re-enact a certain myth or famous incident. In most cases the details of these are lost.
It would definitely help if we narrowed the discussion to a single time and place, rather than trying to put the entirety of the pre-Christian ancient world under one thread.
We have many surviving copies of the Book of the Dead, but they are compilations of ideas rather than a single text. Virtually every copy is different. It appears that the wealthier you were, the longer the book you got. Anyway, most of the Book is a list of spells for the deceased when he encounters various hazards in the afterlife. Like, “At some point you will encounter X deity, and you must recite Y words…” My understanding is that the BotD did not have much in the way of prescribed observances for the living.
Like Chihuahua says, it’s difficult to generalize all of pre-Christian religious practice. In the context of the Egyptians, though, there was no Sunday “get together”. Egyptian temples simply were not built to accommodate this function. They were dark, secret places. If the public came to visit, they were only intended to view the religious & political propaganda inscribed on the exterior. Like every rule, there is an apparent exception to this, however. During the Amarna heresy, I think there is substantial evidence of just such an occurrence. The Great Temple of the Aten in Amarna was a large open air structure which had 1000 “offering tables” set up. From a practical stand-point, however, I think these “offering tables” really functioned as “dining tables” intended to accommodate communal meals.
Well, to take a completely random starting point:
Rigvedic hymn 1.162, about the ancient Indian horse sacrifice, has been described (by Prof. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty) as “strikingly concrete in its detail,” “beginning with the ceremonial procession of the horse with the scapegoat, leading to the actual slaughter,” and then listing and describing even “the material instruments of the sacrifice which are to accompany the horse to heaven.”
So, voilà - a very detailed description of a pre-Christian religious rite, written by insiders then and there, as opposed to outsiders of other faiths (such as Tacitus writing on the Germanic peoples, Snorri and Adam of Bremen writing on Norse paganism, Spaniards and Jesuits writing on the Aztecs, Incas, etc., and so on and so forth).
Others have already mentioned Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the religions of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. Then there’s Mesopotamia, with plenty of hymns and prayers - to Ishtar, Shamash, Nabu, Gula, etc. - that have been preserved to the present day.
This is a very interesting topic. Books of the Dead do abound in many ancient cultures dating back to the dawn of what we like to call civilization, in Sumeria and Babylonia. I admit to having studied and worked with several of these books. A Book of the Dead basically serves or served two functions in ancient and modern usage.
One is/was to serve as a guide as the voyager passes through the state of what is sometimes referred to as “transit”, the state between death and rebirth. One who is still present in this life, each day for 49 days, reads a passage that corresponds to one of the 49 what are called “chambers” to guide the deceased, sometimes called the 'Voyager" through this transit period. In an abbreviated explanation, the deceased has to be, first, made aware that he or she is dead and then listen and heed the instructions to overcome many of the different “ambushes” in the chambers in the between lives state.
A second use of a Book of the Dead is/was actually for the living, that is those who are in the Kingdom but have no clue they are in it, and whose attention is fixated solely upon the veil, which corresponds to the fable of seeing only the King’s clothing, and yet the deepest reality is that the King is naked. (An ancient fable that all children listen to and that can be traced to medieval times and way, way beyond.) Quantum physics will tell us the same thing using a different vocabulary. Nuff said.
Was listening to some Dan Carlin today, and he (via Herodotus and others) describes in a bit of detail the experience of visiting the Oracle at Delphi, as well as more passing mentions of sacrifices intended to divine the best course of action on the battlefield.
He also mentions the practice of capturing a city or empire’s “god,” ie the statue of same. Supposedly the Persians took the gold statue of Marduk from Babylon and melted it down, thus preventing the Babylonians from having their own ruler, since ritual demanded that a Babylonian ruler clasp hands with the statue.
I also recall reading about the Solar Boat - a small “boat” that carried the idol of the local god; there’s a replica in the Edfu Temple (a ways south of Luxor) and the original, like so much else, was taken from Egypt in the 1800’s - it can be found in the Louvre, I think.
Similarly, there’s a processional “Avenue of the Sphinxes” slowly being dug up that runs from Karnak temple to Luxor Temple, about two miles(?).
It seems that various religions did have the variety of assorted rituals, probably tied to annual or lunar events (and special events like coronations and royal funerals), often being reenactments or processions.
I guess an interesting question is, where did regular weekly services come from? I’m assuming we Westerners or Middle Easterners appropriated the Jewish “Day of Rest” as a concept and added mandatory worship. Did the Hebrew tradition include a service on every Sabbath or is that a recent adoption?
My understanding is that the early Jews had a tradition of assembling in the synagogue for worship on the Sabbath. Then they went through a schism after the death of Christ, in which the new Christians were not permitted to join the Sabbath worship. So Christians started gathering on the next day, which was normally the day they set aside for social events. By the 2nd century the idea of Sunday being the Christian worship day was pretty much set.
Then Constantine came along. He wanted to convert Romans to Christianity and noticed that the whole Sunday thing lined up nicely with Mithraism, which was a big deal at the time. As the Catholic Church became established, it started hammering out the details of mass as a scheduled weekly event that took a certain ritualistic format every week.
This is highly questionable “history”.
My understanding is that Constantine codified the idea of Sunday as a day of rest and worship specifically because that was the day of worship already used by the Mithraists, and he made it the official day off by Imperial decree.
If this is incorrect, please provide an explanation as to why.
It’s incorrect because early Christian writings show that by the second century AD, Sunday had already become the preferred day of worship for Christians.
You may argue that there were Mithraic influences far earlier than Constantine, and that is a very real possibility. Again, judging by references in the church fathers, there were plenty of Christians who practised sun worship as well as Christianity, or considered Jesus to be a manifestation of the Sun God. The 25th December was the “Birthday of the Invincible Sun” (Natalis Solis Invicti) long before Christians decided to call it the birthday of Christ.