Reconstruyendo el pensamiento religioso

Reconstruir el hecho religioso en las sociedades prehistóricas resulta una tarea compleja en extremo dada la opacidad de los restos arqueológicos. Es muy fácil caer en la pura especulación y dejar a nuestra imaginación volar utilizando analogías etnográficas con el comportamiento de tribus estudiadas en épocas contemporáneas.

El primer capítulo se ocupa del Paleolítico, donde las evidencias son escasas. El autor repasa los principales yacimientos pero tropieza siempre en la limitación de datos con los que reconstruir el modo de vida, la organización social y, desde luego, el pensamiento religioso.

We have no means of determining the origin and development of the belief in ancestors during prehistory. To judge by the ethnographic parallels, this religious complex is able to coexist with belief in supernatural beings or Lords of Wild Beasts. There seems to be no reason why the idea of mythical ancestors should not form part of the religious system of the Paleolithics: it is bound up with the mythology of origins -origin of the world, of game, of man, of death- that is typical of hunting civilizations. In addition, it is a religious idea that is universally disseminated and mythologically fertile, for it has survived in all religions, even the most complex.

Es sobre todo en la interpretación de enterramientos donde más dificultades se encuentran.

Con el final de la última época glacial las sociedades humanas se desarrollan culturalmente. Es durante el Mesolítico cuando encontramos las primeras pruebas de domesticación de plantas y animales que conducirán al desarrollo de sociedades agrícolas, mucho más ricas en restos arqueológicos; y, en relación con esto, el pensamiento religioso experimenta un cambio significativo frente a las sociedades de cazadores-recolectores nómadas que podemos reconstruir durante el Paleolítico:

In addition to agriculture, other inventions took place during the Mesolithic, the most important being the bow and the manufacture of cords, nets, hooks, and boats able to make fairly long voyages. [...], all these discoveries gave rise to mythologies and paramythological fictions and sometimes became the basis for various ritual behaviors. The empirical value of these inventions is evident. What is less so is the importance of the imaginative activity inspired by familiarity with the different modalities of matter. In working with a piece of flint or a primitive needle, in joining together animal hides or wooden planks, in preparing a fishhook or an arrow-head, in shaping a clay statuette, the imagination discovers unsuspected analogies among the different levels of the real; tools and objects are laden with countless symbolisms, the world of work -the microuniverse that absorbs the artisan's attention for long hours- becomes a mysterious and sacred center, rich in meanings.
The imaginary world created and continually enriched by intimacy with matter can be only inadequately grasped in the figurative or geometric creatinos of the various prehistoric cultures.

[...] It is unnecessary to emphasize the importance of the discovery of agriculture for the history of civilization. By becoming the producer of his food, man was obliged to alter his ancestral behavior. Above all, he had to perfect his technique for calculating time, the first discovery of which had already been made in the Paleolithic.

The domestication of plants gave rise to an existential situation that had previously been inaccessible; hence it inspired creations of values and reversals of them that radically altered the spiritual universe of pre-Neolithic man

Simplemente con tener en cuenta cómo aquellos grupos humanos de cultivadores explicaban la aparición de plantas para su alimento podemos encontrar justificación para algunos aspectos de su comportamiento.

Según Eliade existen dos grandes grupos de explicaciones sobre el orígen de la agricultura para las sociedades primitivas. Una es que todas las plantas comestibles conocidas se originaron a partir del sacrificio de una divinidad. Según ésto:

[...] all responsible activities (puberty ceremonies, animal or human sacrifices, cannibalism, funerary ceremonies, etc.) properly speaking constitute a recalling, a "remembrance", of the primordial murder.

Una variedad de este mito explica el origen de las plantas comestibles (generalmente tubérculos y cereales) en los excrementos y el sudor de la divinidad o ancestro mítico; al conocer el repulsivo origen de sus alimentos, sus beneficiarios asesinan al autor no sin desmembrar su cuerpo y enterrar sus piezas por separado, según su propio consejo. Eliade explica que:

By feeding himself, man [...] eats a divine being. The food plant is not "given" in the world, as the animal is. It is the result of a primitive dramatic event; in this case it is the product of a murder.

En un segundo grupo encontramos el análisis del etnógrafo A. E. Jensen, para quien muchas culturas explican el origen de los cereales como un robo primordial:

cereals exist, but in the sky, jealously guarded by the gods; a civilizing hero ascends into the sky, makes off with a few seeds, and bestows them on mankind.

Los dos grupos de explicaciones se podrían agrupar, entonces, como mitologías "Hainuwele" y "Prometeo", según la clasificación de Jensen.

Las nuevas sociedades agrícolas comenzan a experimentar una "solidaridad mística entre hombre y vegetales" así como el ascenso al primer plano de la sacralidad de la mujer y, en general, la femeinidad:

The fertility of the earth is bound up with feminine fecundity; hence women become responsible for the abundance of harvests, for they know the "mystery" of creation. IT is a religious mystery, for it governs the origin of life, the food supply, and death. The soil is assimilated to woman. Later, after the discovery of the plow, agricultural work is assimilated to the sexual act. But for millennia Mother Earth gave birth by herself, through parthenogenesis.

[...] Parthenogenesis, the hieros gamos, and the ritual orgy express, on different planes, the religious character of sexuality. A complex symbolism, anthropocosmic in structure, associates woman and sexuality with the lunar rhythms, with the earth (assimilated to the womb), and with what must be called the "mystery" of vegetation. [...] The assimilation of human existence to vegetable life finds expression in images and metaphors drawn from the drama of vegetation.

En definitiva:

For religious creativity was stimulated, not by the empirical phenomenon of agriculture, but by the mystery of birth, death, and rebirth identified in the rhythm of vegetation. In order to be understood, accepted, and mastered, the crises that threaten the harvest [...] will be translated into mythological dramas.

[...]The agrarian cultures develop what may be called a cosmic religion, since religious activity is concentrated around the central mystery: the periodical renewal of the world. Like human existence, the cosmic rhythms are expressed in terms drawn from vegetable life. The mystery of cosmic sacrality is symbolized in the World Tree. The universe is conceived as an organism that must be renewed periodically.

El Árbol Cósmico es el centro del mundo en tanto que une las tres regiones cósmicas: sus raíces se hunden en el mundo subterráneo en tanto que su copa toca el cielo.

Otra consecuencia es la percepción del tiempo:

The experience of cosmic time, especially in the frramework of agricultural labors, ends by imposing the idea of circular time and the cosmic circle. Since the workd and human existence are valorized in terms of vegetable life, the cosmic cycle is conceived as the indefinite repetition of the same rhythm: virth, death, rebirth.

... y también del espacio:

A sedentary existence organizes the "workd" differently from a nomadic life. [...] the "true world" is the space in which he lives: house, village, cultivated fields. The "center of the world" is the place consecreated by rituals and prayers, for it is there that communication with the superhuman beings is effected.

[...] the habitation is considered an imago mundi [...] The division of the habitation between the two sexes [...] probably had a cosmological meaning. The divisions exhibited by the villages of cultivators correspond in general to a dichotomy that is at once classificatory and ritual (sky and earth, masculine and feminine, etc.) but also to two ritually antagonistic groups.

[...] confrontation, jousts, combats awaken, stimulate, or increase the creative forces of life.

A modo de conclusión de los primeros dos capítulos sobre la reconstrucción del pensamiento religioso en las sociedades prehistóricas Eliade concluye que:

[...] reduced solely to the archeological documents, and without the light thrown by the texts or traditions of certain agricultural societies (traditions that were still alive at the beginning of this century), the Neolithic religions run the risk of appearing simplistic and monotonous. But the archeological documents present us with a fragmentary, and indeed mutilated, vision of religious life and thought. [...] the religious documents of the earliest Neolithic cultures reveal: cults of the dead and of fertility, indicated by statuettes of goddesses and of the storm god (with his epiphanies; the bull, the bucranium); beliefs and rituals connected with the "mystery" of vegetation; the assimilation woman/cultivated soil/plant, implying the homology birth/rebirth (initiation); very probably the hope of a postexistence; a cosmology including the symbolism of a "center of the world" and inhabited space as an imago mundi