aborigines (Australian)

68:5.42. The hunt­ing stage. The in­ven­tion of weapon tools en­abled man to be­come a hunter and thus to gain con­sid­er­able free­dom from food slav­ery. A thought­ful An­don­ite who had severely bruised his fist in a se­ri­ous com­bat re­dis­cov­ered the idea of us­ing a long stick for his arm and a piece of hard flint, bound on the end with sinews, for his fist. Many tribes made in­de­pen­dent dis­cov­er­ies of this sort, and these var­i­ous forms of ham­mers rep­re­sented one of the great for­ward steps in hu­man civ­i­liza­tion. To­day some Aus­tralian na­tives have pro­gressed lit­tle be­yond this stage.

92:6.1Twen­ti­eth-cen­tury Uran­tia re­li­gions pre­sent an in­ter­est­ing study of the so­cial evo­lu­tion of man’s wor­ship im­pulse. Many faiths have pro­gressed very lit­tle since the days of the ghost cult. The Pyg­mies of Africa have no re­li­gious re­ac­tions as a class, al­though some of them be­lieve slightly in a spirit en­vi­ron­ment. They are to­day just where prim­i­tive man was when the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gion be­gan. The ba­sic be­lief of prim­i­tive re­li­gion was sur­vival af­ter death. The idea of wor­ship­ing a per­sonal God in­di­cates ad­vanced evo­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ment, even the first stage of rev­e­la­tion. The Dyaks have evolved only the most prim­i­tive re­li­gious prac­tices. The com­par­a­tively re­cent Es­ki­mos and Amerinds had very mea­ger con­cepts of God; they be­lieved in ghosts and had an in­def­i­nite idea of sur­vival of some sort af­ter death. Pres­ent-day na­tive Aus­tralians have only a ghost fear, dread of the dark, and a crude an­ces­tor ven­er­a­tion. The Zu­lus are just evolv­ing a re­li­gion of ghost fear and sac­ri­fice. Many African tribes, ex­cept through mis­sion­ary work of Chris­tians and Mo­hammedans, are not yet be­yond the fe­tish stage of re­li­gious evo­lu­tion. But some groups have long held to the idea of mono­the­ism, like the one­time Thra­cians, who also be­lieved in im­mor­tal­ity.

103:3.1While the be­lief in spir­its, dreams, and di­verse other su­per­sti­tions all played a part in the evo­lu­tion­ary ori­gin of prim­i­tive re­li­gions, you should not over­look the in­flu­ence of the clan or tribal spirit of sol­i­dar­ity. In the group re­la­tion­ship there was pre­sented the ex­act so­cial sit­u­a­tion which pro­vided the chal­lenge to the ego­is­tic-al­tru­is­tic con­flict in the moral na­ture of the early hu­man mind. In spite of their be­lief in spir­its, prim­i­tive Aus­tralians still fo­cus their re­li­gion upon the clan. In time, such re­li­gious con­cepts tend to per­son­al­ize, first, as an­i­mals, and later, as a super­man or as a God. Even such in­fe­rior races as the African Bush­men, who are not even totemic in their be­liefs, do have a rec­og­ni­tion of the dif­fer­ence be­tween the self-in­ter­est and the group-in­ter­est, a prim­i­tive dis­tinc­tion be­tween the val­ues of the sec­u­lar and the sa­cred. But the so­cial group is not the source of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. Re­gard­less of the in­flu­ence of all these prim­i­tive con­tri­bu­tions to man’s early re­li­gion, the fact re­mains that the true re­li­gious im­pulse has its ori­gin in gen­uine spirit pres­ences ac­ti­vat­ing the will to be un­selfish.

68:1.6That con­tem­po­rary cul­tural so­ci­ety is a rather re­cent phe­nom­e­non is well shown by the pres­ent-day sur­vival of such prim­i­tive so­cial con­di­tions as char­ac­ter­ize the Aus­tralian na­tives and the Bush­men and Pyg­mies of Africa. Among these back­ward peo­ples may be ob­served some­thing of the early group hos­til­ity, per­sonal sus­pi­cion, and other highly an­ti­so­cial traits which were so char­ac­ter­is­tic of all prim­i­tive races. These mis­er­able rem­nants of the nonso­cial peo­ples of an­cient times bear elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the fact that the nat­u­ral in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic ten­dency of man can­not suc­cess­fully com­pete with the more po­tent and pow­er­ful or­ga­ni­za­tions and as­so­ci­a­tions of so­cial pro­gres­sion. These back­ward and sus­pi­cious an­ti­so­cial races that speak a dif­fer­ent di­alect ev­ery forty or fifty miles il­lus­trate what a world you might now be liv­ing in but for the com­bined teach­ing of the cor­po­real staff of the Plan­e­tary Prince and the later labors of the Adamic group of racial up­lifters.

70:4.9The clan head­men were al­ways sub­or­di­nate to the tribal chief, the early tribal gov­ern­ments be­ing a loose con­fed­er­a­tion of clans. The na­tive Aus­tralians never de­vel­oped a tribal form of gov­ern­ment.

69:8.7The in­sti­tu­tion of slav­ery com­pelled man to in­vent the reg­u­la­tive mech­a­nism of prim­i­tive so­ci­ety; it gave ori­gin to the be­gin­nings of gov­ern­ment. Slav­ery de­mands strong reg­u­la­tion and dur­ing the Eu­ro­pean Mid­dle Ages vir­tu­ally dis­ap­peared be­cause the feu­dal lords could not con­trol the slaves. The back­ward tribes of an­cient times, like the na­tive Aus­tralians of to­day, never had slaves.

91:0.3When the con­cepts of ghosts and spir­its evolved, these pe­ti­tions be­came super­hu­man in ad­dress, and with the con­scious­ness of gods, such ex­pres­sions at­tained to the lev­els of gen­uine prayer. As an il­lus­tra­tion of this, among cer­tain Aus­tralian tribes prim­i­tive re­li­gious prayers an­te­dated their be­lief in spir­its and super­hu­man per­son­al­i­ties.

84:3.6The herds­man looked to his flocks for sus­te­nance, but through­out these pas­toral ages woman must still pro­vide the veg­etable food. Prim­i­tive man shunned the soil; it was al­to­gether too peace­ful, too un­ad­ven­ture­some. There was also an old su­per­sti­tion that women could raise bet­ter plants; they were moth­ers. In many back­ward tribes to­day, the men cook the meat, the women the veg­eta­bles, and when the prim­i­tive tribes of Aus­tralia are on the march, the women never at­tack game, while a man would not stoop to dig a root.