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