Abstract
What is Religion? What are the earliest forms of religion?
What is Religion? What are the earliest forms of religion?
To answer these questions, we have to travel back the earliest human settlements and look at the material artifacts that they left behind. Which we find starting in the Old stone age extending to the New stone age.
Timelines are 2 million BC the start of the New stone age that lasted to about 10 thousand BC. Then we pick up the Old stone age that lasted from about 10 thousand BC to around 4500 BC to 2000 BC. It is at this juncture generally accepted at 4500 BC that man crosses into the early Bronze age the creation of weapons and the strengthening religious beliefs.
The start of the journey revolves around ancient Mesopotamia down the Mediterranean coast into Egypt.
Early man had established an equilibrium with nature and the instinct to co-exist in a balance that produced desired results of surviving the harshness of the environments he found himself in.
Man created an equilibrium between himself and creation by providing shelter, fire, hunting and the gathering of food within his own kind. We find evidence of these events in the material objects left behind that we find in archeological digs.
Somewhere in time man used his intellect to ascend his beliefs into the heavenly realm to the creation of divine entities to provide another layer of symmetry to explain the transformation of external events that affected him on a daily basis.
It is at this point in time that we find indications of the earliest religious beliefs indicating this transformation found in material objects that have been left behind.
However, these finds and scholarly assumptions as to their religious beliefs on divine intervention relies only on theories. We cannot fully grasp the mentality of the people that left behind these artifacts and how these material objects are related to their understanding of creation and of religious belief they clothed themselves with.
To understand a culture and their religious beliefs is to understand how they viewed death. If they can think on an abstract level whether they think death is final or irreversible. Death reveals these markers how societies ability to think, feel, believe and act in life and in the afterlife.
The first indication of a complex burial comes from the Middle East around the lands of Israel dating back to about 100,000 years ago. Homo sapiens buried their dead in carefully placed fetal positions with grave goods and animal bones in the grave. Grave goods of grains, beads, jewelry, weapons with the body usually covered with red ochre. This reveals an abstract thinking of the afterlife and to how to take care of that person in their journey after death.
Revealing customs, beliefs and practices in how cultures at this time viewed death and the afterlife. How death was dealt with.
Religion in its singularity is the abstract thinking of imagination of the afterlife. Attempts to answer what happens to one when he or she dies. The customs and beliefs that preceded one in death and preceding one in the afterlife to maintain an equilibrium between themselves, others and the Laws of Nature.
Death was understood as a reality of life but when you had death occurring that you could not see, like the current Corvid virus. Religion over time morphed death into acts of divine retribution. When in fact this can be attributed to what man does when he violates the Laws of Nature.
Religion started out with abstract thinking of simple ceremonies, beliefs and customs that increasingly became more complex and political when the Stone age moved into the Bronze age, the advent of cities. Where religion became a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Death in its own right is a commodity to be bought and sold in modern times.