Quotessence
Home / Books / Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Book by Robert N. Bellah · 10 quotes · Civilization, Religion, Society

Filter quotes by topic

AllCivilizationReligionSocietyEvolutionMindMythAdaptationCognitionEnvironmentEvolutionary MismatchEvolutionary PsychologyTechnologyCommunityCultureHierarchyLifeMind TheoryOrderSacrificeTheory Of Mind

Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Quotes

“The descriptions of tribal rituals themselves usually exhibit features that we could characterize as play; such ritual is very much embodied as in singing, dancing, feasting, and general hilarity, but there is also a powerful element of pretend play that can have serious meanings.”

MindPlayReligionEvolutionHumanMythEvolutionary Psychology
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Create image

“Dominance hierarchy is probably as old as mammal societies. Among behaviorally complex mammals, certainly among chimpanzees, patterns recognizably like ethics and politics have appeared, how long ago we don't know, but probably millions of years ago. And mammalian play, the seedbed of later capacities, goes back probably at least as far.”

ReligionOrderSocietyCivilizationHierarchy
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Create image

“Nothing is ever lost. Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic ‘mortgage’, as Voegelin called it, reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial ‘breakthrough’. Kings who ruled ‘by divine right’, are obvious examples, but so are presidents who claim to act in accordance with a ‘higher power’. At every point as our story unfolds, we will have to consider the relation between political and religious power. But one thing is certain: the issue never goes away.”

ReligionCommunitySacrificeSocietyEvolutionary PsychologyCognitionTheory Of Mind
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Create image

“As we have seen, the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice -even human sacrifice- as a concrete expression of radical status difference.”

ReligionCommunitySacrificeSocietyEvolutionary PsychologyCognitionTheory Of Mind
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Create image

“If personal identity resides in the telling, then so does social identity. Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology) know who they are by the stories they tell. The modern discipline of history is closely related to the emergence of the nation-state.”

ReligionCivilizationAttachmentCohesionSocial CohesionSociality
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Create image