Early Evolution of Religion

86:3.1Death was the su­preme shock to evolv­ing man, the most per­plex­ing com­bi­na­tion of chance and mys­tery. Not the sanc­tity of life but the shock of death in­spired fear and thus ef­fec­tively fos­tered re­li­gion. Among sav­age peo­ples death was or­di­nar­ily due to vi­o­lence, so that non­vi­o­lent death be­came in­creas­ingly mys­te­ri­ous. Death as a nat­u­ral and ex­pected end of life was not clear to the con­scious­ness of prim­i­tive peo­ple, and it has re­quired age upon age for man to re­al­ize its in­evitabil­ity.

86:3.2Early man ac­cepted life as a fact, while he re­garded death as a vis­i­ta­tion of some sort. All races have their leg­ends of men who did not die, ves­ti­gial tra­di­tions of the early at­ti­tude to­ward death. Al­ready in the hu­man mind there ex­isted the neb­u­lous con­cept of a hazy and un­or­ga­nized spirit world, a do­main whence came all that is in­ex­pli­ca­ble in hu­man life, and death was added to this long list of un­ex­plained phe­nom­ena.

86:3.3All hu­man dis­ease and nat­u­ral death was at first be­lieved to be due to spirit in­flu­ence. Even at the pres­ent time some civ­i­lized races re­gard dis­ease as hav­ing been pro­duced by “the en­emy” and de­pend upon re­li­gious cer­e­monies to ef­fect heal­ing. Later and more com­plex sys­tems of the­ol­ogy still as­cribe death to the ac­tion of the spirit world, all of which has led to such doc­trines as orig­i­nal sin and the fall of man.

86:3.4It was the re­al­iza­tion of im­po­tency be­fore the mighty forces of na­ture, to­gether with the rec­og­ni­tion of hu­man weak­ness be­fore the vis­i­ta­tions of sick­ness and death, that im­pelled the sav­age to seek for help from the super­ma­te­rial world, which he vaguely vi­su­al­ized as the source of these mys­te­ri­ous vi­cis­si­tudes of life.