Homo Religiosus: the origins of religious sentiment 

Reference page: Echoes: Reflections from the past, resonances in the present

Premise

With this first article, I wish to inaugurate what I hope will be a long series of articles, which I have called “Echoes”.

Every written word is an echo that passes through time, transforming with the person who created it. The thoughts, research and intuitions collected in my books over the years now find new life in this series of articles, the result not only of updates and insights, but also of an inner maturation that time has made possible.

“Echoes” It was born from the desire to reread my own work with different eyes, enriching what was written in the past with new perspectives, more mature reflections and an open dialogue with the present. It is not just a recovery of pages already written, but a process of reinterpretation, in which each concept is reconsidered in the light of experience and personal and professional growth.

Foreword to the first article

Beyond the intellectual and expressive differences that distinguish Paleolithic man from modern man, and beyond the different philosophies that characterize the various religions, religion, in a general sense, can be seen as "the attempt to reach the infinite".

An ancient Indian philosopher said more or less these words:

".. Religions are like rivers, the paths are many but the destination is one, the sea ... "

All religions have, therefore, a single purpose which is to get closer to God, not understood as Christ, Mohammed or Buddha, but as:

Absolute, Infinite, Cosmic Truth

***

At the origins of religious sentiment

Humanity has always tried to make sense of life, death and the natural events that surround it. It is probably in the Paleolithic that theHomo erectus begins to develop forms of symbolic thought and beliefs that could be interpreted as the first religious manifestations. This evolutionary stage marks the transition to theHomo Religiosus, a human being capable of elaborating transcendent concepts, developing rituals and projecting symbolic meanings into the world around him.

Although religious sentiments do not leave direct fossil traces, archaeology provides us with valuable clues through the study of rock art, ritual burials and cult objects.

Archaeological evidence shows that the birth of religious life is closely linked to the awareness of death and the need to exorcise the unknown through ritual.^[1].

A Sicilian example of graffiti with traces of rituals is present in the Addaura II Cave (or Cave of the Engravings) which is located in the north-eastern part of Monte Pellegrino, southwest of Mondello beach.^[2]. Some of the objects found in this cave, as well as those taken from the Genovesi cave, are currently in the regional museum of Palermo. The dating of the parietal works of Addaura dates back to about 12.000 years ago^[3]

The Addaura engravings replicated at the Antonio Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum^[4]

Addaura's graffiti represent a scene in which a group of human figures that look like dancers surround two men, with their backs arched backwards and with erect genitals (ityphallia). Furthermore, in addition to the human figures, the scene presents figures of animals, two bovids.

The scene, due to its complexity and particularity of the drawings, has given rise to various interpretations over the years, many deepened and correlated with each other by interesting studies including those of Antonino Filippi^[5] and G. Bolzoni^[6]. Among the various interpretations, the one linked to fertility rites stands out Bovio Marconi^[7], of the ritual sacrifice (goating) of Charles Albert Blanc^[8], that of the religious ritual of Sebastiano Tusa^[9]

Scene of the dancers. Transparency by G. Mannino (Fig. 1 Addaura Cave)^[10]

The first archaeological evidence

One of the most evident indicators of the birth of a religious sentiment is the treatment reserved for the deceased. Burial care in fact implies a reflection on the meaning of death and the possibility of an existence beyond it. Among the first examples of funeral rites we find the site of Qafzeh (Israel), where a burial dating back to around 100.000 years ago was found. The deceased, probably a specimen of Homo sapiens, had been placed with open hands facing upwards, on which funerary offerings had been placed, a practice that suggests the existence of some form of post-mortem belief^[11]

In the Upper Paleolithic, burials become more elaborate and rich in symbolic elements. The bodies were placed in shallow graves or inside “lithic cysts” (box-shaped structures made of stones), often in a fetal position, a detail that could indicate the belief in a cycle of rebirth or a symbolic return to Mother Earth.^[12].

Prehistoric burials in Italy

Even in Italy there are important testimonies of prehistoric funeral rites. Cave of the Children in Red Cliffs (Liguria) the skeletons of an old woman and a young boy were found, both laid in a crouched position. The young man's head was adorned with a shell headdress, while the woman had a small flat stone on her head and two shell bracelets on her wrists. Traces of red ochre had been scattered on both bodies, a practice that recalls symbolic rites widespread in many prehistoric cultures^[13]

In Sicilia, the Cave of San Teodoro (San Fratello, Messina) has returned four burials covered with red ochre, a further sign of the importance attributed to funeral rites and spiritual beliefs^[14]

From Funeral Rites to Organized Religion

These examples suggest that Homo Religiosus was already present in the Paleolithic, had become aware of death and tried to overcome it, believing that something of himself (the soul or something similar) remained even after death.

We can speak of organized religious manifestations only after the affirmation of the first forms of social aggregation, favored by the first collective hunting trips and the discovery of agriculture, which led to more or less stable forms of settlement and the birth of the first villages. We could assume that, at least in its primitive form, religious thought was born when man began to perceive himself as a limited being and sometimes powerless towards external reality and began to intervene on it. The first religious manifestations probably consisted of magical rituals that had as their objective that of carrying out a sort of manipulation or, in any case, of interacting with a reality that was, at times, hostile. Magic rituals were practiced to favor hunting, to ward off drought or to fight the demons of disease.

Prehistoric Caves of the Island of Maros, Indonesia (40 thousand years ago)^[15]

Chauvet cave - France – 30.340 and 32.410 years ago^[16]

Venus of Willendorf (Lower Austria) (24.000 – 26.000 BC) [17]

1. Mircea Eliade: The Sacred and the Profane. Milan (1957) p.50. ↑

2. Ignazio Caloggero: Sicily Unveiled – Before the Greeks 2022 – p. 40 ↑

3. Alda Vigliardi: Rock and movable art from the Paleolithic to the Eneolithic. In First Sicily p. 130. ↑

4. Source: Wikipedia – By Bjs – Own work, CC 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=675290 ↑

5. The Addaura dancers. The prehistoric roots of religiosity in Sicily – Di Filippi Antonino – Il Sole Editrice – Erice 2015 ↑

6. New engravings of the Addaura Cave of Monte Pellegrino (Palermo) - G. Bolzoni in acts Tuscan Society of Natural Sciences Series A, 92 (1985) pag. 321-329 ↑

7. Bovio Marconi: On the Graffiti of Addaura. Riv. di Antrop., 40, 55-64 (1951-52) / Bovio Marconi: Rock Engravings at Addaura. BuI/. Paletnol. /tal., NS, Ann. VIII, S, 5-22. (1953) ↑

8. Carlo Alberto Blanc: The human sacrifice of the Addaura and the ritual execution by strangulation in ethnology and palethnology. Quaternary, 2, 213-225 (1955) ↑

9. Sebastiano Tusa: Prehistoric art in Sicily, in "Bulletin of the Center for Prehistoric Studies", XXXIV-2003, Capo di Ponte (BS), pp. 33-88 (2004) ↑

10. Mannino G. 2012, The prehistoric parietal graffiti of the Addaura Cave: the discovery and new acquisitions, in Proceedings of the XLI Scientific Meeting of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory, Florence, page 418 ↑

11. Bernard Vandermeersh: The oldest burials. In “Religiosity in Prehistory” (1997). p.50 ↑

12. Jacques Hergoun: The Western Mediterranean (1986). p.23. ↑

13. Guidi and Piperno: Prehistoric Italy (1992). Page 206 ↑

14. Leroi-Gourhan, Andrè. The gesture and the word. (1965) p. 210. ↑

15. Nature magazine: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13422 ↑

16. Data reported on the Internet at the following address: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/)  ↑

17. By Don Hitchcock – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16414348

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