ETHOLOGICAL ASIDE

Here's a section of an online argument I had with an atheist poster who, as the final section explains, attempted to claim that early humans evolved "ethics" without any input from the abstractions of religion. Hope it makes sense on its own, which I preserve here for the possibility of further development. ______________________________________                                                        Animals of many species have demonstrated at least the possibility of very elementary reasoning processes. We know that ants use tools, as with transporting liquids. Did they reason, "if I do this thing with this thing X will happen," or did they just stumble across something that worked? We don't know. But in that case, as with the case of male lions murdering other lions' offspring, we're talking about observing possible consequences in the near future. Lions might not be able to articulate: "if I leave the lioness' other cubs alive, the lioness won't have milk for my cubs." But it's a zero sum game that a lion might observe, not any more abstract that making plans to find food. We know that cougars cache their excess of food, which also indicates some sense of future outcomes, though some have argued that the animals don't retain the memory of their caches very long. My earlier example of large rats giving in to smaller rats while in wrestling-play applies here too: it doesn't take abstraction for the big rat to figure out that he has to give a little to get a little. ALL of these examples depend on time-sensitive observations imbued with self-interest. But it takes abstract correlation of many factors to make the conclusion, "Hey, my cubs with a strange lion came out good and the cubs with my sister didn't; ergo, better avoid incest." It's particularly counter-intuitive because offspring with relations don't ALWAYS show immediate physical flaws. Maybe some primates *might* make some such connections, but if so we're getting back into the deep end of the brain-pool. Your concept of animals forming societies through an "ethics" based on acceptable/non-acceptable behavior is also predicated with pre-cognitive reasoning processes. I brought up the lack of strong incest avoidance in lower animals to show one of the places where humans diverged from animals, to give an example of an ethical conclusion founded in abstract conceptualizing. We know that in modern times tribal-level humans correlate their incest injunctions with their religious beliefs, so it's not a giant leap to theorize a parallel development in prehistoric eras. So again, your attempt to segregate "ethics" from "religion" is a dogmatic belief that isn't even justified by available anthropological and ethological evidence.    

FIRESTARTERS

 Another response-post; context should be evident.

__________

You don't have the slightest concept of how much experimentation would have gone into something like the making of fire. First, fire has to occur naturally, from bolts of lightning and/or volcanic matter setting combustible objects on fire. Slowly early people, doubtless in separate tribes all over the globe, have to pick up on the idea that fire might be worth incorporating into tribal life for its warming properties, even though it's both intangible and harmful to the touch. That means Thoth knows how much trial and error those people had to go through to figure out what materials kept fire going-- not always a simple matter, since fire will burn dry wood but will not flourish on green wood. And who knows how the idea of nurturing coals even started, or the use of tree fungus as tinder, or your fatuous idea of just "rubbing two sticks together."

And the really funny thing is that all that experimentation took place among primitives who were, en masse, still religious. Their science did not require the massive arrogance of atheist materialists, who presume that knowing this or that datum about material forces meant that they knew everything about all of existence.

LEVERAGING LEVI-STRAUSS

 

Given that I’ve claimed for myself the status of a “myth-critic” (a term that Northrop Frye claimed others foisted upon him), I’ve naturally read heavily into the various approaches to myth by anthropologists, religious historians, psychologists and literary critics. I’ve avoided delving into Claude Levi-Strauss, however, despite his celebrity as a major myth-theorist and as the founder of structuralism, which is also a minor interest of mine. I have a dim memory that some commentator spoke disparagingly of L-S’s tendency to reduce myth to mathematical formulae, and I would imagine that anytime I scanned L-S’s mammoth volumes, mostly on South American myth, his method of presentation would’ve confirmed that bias for me. I may have also been turned off by the fact that he’s a very pedantic writer in comparison with authors like Eliade and Campbell, and thus it’s difficult to find his insights persuasive. Looking back over my few Archive-entries on L-S, I find that I recorded an attempt to read THE ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP— which may have srruck me as pretty damn dull, since I don’t even remember cracking the covers.

Recently, though, I girded my cerebral loins (so to speak) and forced myself to plunge into the first two volumes of L-S’s four-volume MYTHOLOGIQUES. I made it through volume one, THE RAW AND THE COOKED, despite the fact that it consists of dozens upon dozens of South American myth-tales with only minimal interpretation, but then gave up halfway through volume two, FROM HONEY TO ASHES, because it all but duplicated the same niggling approach to the subject. However, in the second volume I skipped ahead to see if L-S offered anything in the nature of a summation. I was slightly pleased to see that he (finally) did so—and that said summation confirms my earlier bias.

To be sure, THE RAW AND THE COOKED does offer something akin to a theme statement, buried on page 240:

Myths are constructed on the basis of a certain logicality of tangible qualities which makes no clear-cut distinction between subjective states and the properties of the cosmos.

So far, so good. Most myth-theorists would agree that myth depends on the association between subjective factors in the human psyche and the objective phenomena of the cosmos, though that association is not always deemed “logical,” least of all by theorists of a Romantic bent. L-S goes on:

Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that such a distinction has corresponded, and to an extent still corresponds, to a particular stage in the development of scientific knowledge—a stage that, in theory if not actual fact, is doomed to disappear.

Even when L-S begin writing about myths in the late forties, the idea of a transition from mythical discourse to the discourse of science and theoretical philosophy can be found in Vico, Cassirer, and any number of analysts, even those of opposed methodologies. But it’s certainly odd that someone who’s writing so obsessively about mythology should claim that the impulse that spawned myth was “doomed to die,” even “in theory.”

Volume two more or less gives the answer: L-S comes to do the reverse of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, for he’s come not to praise myth, but to bury it, under his own mathematically oriented theory—whle tacitly admitting that many people may find his method enervating.

If any reader, exasperated by the effort demanded by these first two volumes, is inclined to see no more than a manic obsessiveness in the author’s fascination with myths, which in the last resort all say the same thing and, after minute analysis, offer no new opening but merely force him to go round in circles, such a reader has missed the point that a new aspect of mythic thought has been revealed through the widening of the area of investigation.—p. 472.

What is this “new aspect of mythic thought?” L-S tells readers on the next page:

…the demarcative features exploited by the myths do not consist so much of things themselves as of a body of common properties, expressible in geometrical terms and transformanle into one another by means of operations which constitute a sort of algebra.

Thus, L-S would argue, contra Yeats, that you can know the dancer from the dance, because the dance is also a body of common properties expressible in geometrical terms, whereas the dancers merely transmit the algebraic operations. This position proves problematic in that the stories, mythic or otherwise, told by human beings don’t arise out of nothing like the kinetic forces of physics, nor are the stories encoded in our genes like, say, the mating-dances of assorted lower species. L-S observes that the stories surveyed are composef of tropes—he uses the term “mythemes”—and that the tropes are frequently re-arranged by various storytellers, whether for similar or dissimilar effects. Elsewhere L-S used the metaphor of bricklaying—in French, bricolage—which assumes that the tropes are as inert as bricks. But the very fact that the tropes are plurisignative reveals the limitations of that metaphor.

Despite assorted theories, no human knows precisely how the human practice of storytelling originated. I would tend to think that profane stories arose before sacred ones, though even the profane ones may have been touched with elements of mythic imagination, derived from the worldview of primitive humans. But even in prehistoric times not every human would have had the same talents as every other human, and the talent of storytelling would have loomed larger in some persons than in others, resulting in any number of social specializations—the primitive analogues to shamans, priests and traveling bards. Skilled storytellers would know how to pick up on the tropes that their respective cultures favored, and to weave them into an assortment of shapes, whether for personal preference or to earn the storyteller’s daily bread. Some stories are less well-told than others, even allowing for the fact that the earliest stories might have been more like dreams than coherent narratives—but the ones that embed themselves in human cultures come about not because of abstract algebraic operations, but because of human will, playing with the shapes as on a loom, rather than setting them in concrete as one does with bricks.

Even though I reject L-S’s reductionism, I have to give him credit for being aware—again on page 473—that some readers may choose to dismiss his system as the projection of the author, rather than a true “science of mythology,” as he seeks to prove with numerous graphs and anatomical dissections. While I would admit that the more Romantic interpretations of myth may be more obvious in terms of their authors’ projections, they also may be more honest than L-S’s pseudo-scientific flummery.

REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER PT. 3

In the second section of REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER, I made reference to my concept of racial markers, speaking of a given subject's "conscious or subconscious responses to persons who do or do not share the overt physical markers" of the people he considers to be his ingroup. I'll elaborate this first.

Not long ago, I had a long discussion with some relatives regarding the current concept that "race does not exist." Most of the rhetoric for this position is based in biological studies that demonstrate the genetic unity of humankind-- which I do not dispute--and the supposedly concomitant idea that therefore the only reason the concept of race came about was as a strategy to tout one or more races over others in a superior/inferior relationship. This online essay is an adequate summation of this position. The author asserts that "biologists have set a minimal threshold for the amount of genetic differentiation that is required to recognize subspecies." Because so-called human "races" do not possess this level of differentiation, race does not exist.

In my debate I argued that this is an oversimplification, devised to combat all intellectual justifications of racial superiority-- to which, incidentally, I am also opposed. In the debate I used the term "markers" as a makeshift term to describe the outward features by which members of ingroups define themselves, even in times and climes that predate the spread of institutionalized racism. Such physical manifestations of a tribe's shared history heritage are far from the only way in which human beings define those ingroups. Still, while those associations are socially constructed, this is not quite the same as deeming race to be nothing more than a social construct. More on that later.

The linked essay also quotes Ashley Montagu as stating that "there are no races, only clines." Since Montagu's term means the same thing as my own makeshift term, I will henceforth use the word "cline" in place of "marker," as defined here.

Now what do I mean by saying that those clines that can be recognized by any ingroup are socially constructed, yet are not social constructs as such? My argument is based in my position that any ingroup forms its own inevitable aesthetic preferences regarding facial and body types, but that these are not rooted in any mechanism of social control. If these preferences are are any sort of construct, they would be psychological in nature, and then only socially constructed after the fact of their existence. In the 19th century many anthropologists, particularly Durkheim. chose to view every facet of tribal life to be reducible to some function by which order and the status quo was maintained. Malinowski, who coined the term "functionalism," seems to have been among the few anthropologists who believed that society strove to accommodate the individual rather than making the individual fit society's needs, but I confess that I've not read Malinowski in the original.

In any case, I'd argue that the aesthetics of any ingroup "just grow, like Topsy," and that even any ingroup-members with a mind to social control are influenced by those aesthetics whether they wish to be or not. No scheming priest or dictatorial ruler created the desire of parents and grandparents to see their own physical characteristics reflected in the parents' offspring. Admittedly, most if not all societies require some degree of exogamy to avoid inbreeding-- but most societies will be chauvinistic toward outgroups that possess a pronounced difference with respect to the outgroup-member's outward physical clines. While a given tribe may have elaborated social rules to prevent outsiders from joining the tribe, I suggest that these rules reflect the aesthetic preferences of the ingroup, which values visual solidarity, much as do many members of the animal kingdom.

At the same time, though the initial reaction to "the other" may be one of competitiveness and/or fear, I believe Sartre was wrong to believe it dominated all affects. Curiosity about "the other" who looks like your people, but isn't one of them, is attested throughout both mythic and historical narratives. In addition, though two tribes may initially compete over resources even as animals do, animals do not, to the best of our knowledge, feel pleasure at having a good fight against an equal from another species. Human myth and history, however, attest to the excessive joy that humans take in seeing their "home team" come to grips with the representatives of an outgroup.

Nietzsche caught the uniquely human contradictions of this desire for validation in this quote:


Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes.

Keeping in mind this prioritizing of the aesthetics of physical clines, I shall next try to demonstrate that the apparent stigmatization of the outgroup's representative-- particularly in the form of the "racial other"-- does not necessarily signify only fear or conservatism, even when "the other" is given dominantly negative traits. Those negative traits also function less as a means of social control, as many many Marxists have averred, than as an excuse to mount a challenge between two groups. I do not deny that many of these fictional challenges result in simplistic "racist myths," but there also exists the distinct possibility that they may result in the more benign "racial myths," which reveal a more complex level of meaning-- as I will next demonstrate with one of the best-known racial myths, that of Fu Manchu.

THE SOCIALIZATION NETWORK PT. 1

       In the comments-thread of OVERTHINKING PART 4 I made a distinction between two ad hoc concepts, “socialization control” and “tyrannical control.”  I call them “ad hoc” because they were a specific response to William Moulton Marston's presentations of positive and negative forms of “control”-- presentations which, as all comics-fans should know, translated into the concrete form of “bondage.”  Though these two terms were invented for that purpose, the concepts behind them have pertinent applications beyond the bounds of WONDER WOMAN comics.

First, a definition of “socialization” from Dictionary.com:

      " a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position."

Socialization, then, takes in any number of societal controls, ranging from punishments for whatever a society deems a “crime” to rituals designed to initiate its members into the society as productive citizens.  WONDER WOMAN’s Amazon society is clearly modeled on the relatively static practices used by tribal-level societies to enact initiation and/or punishment.

However, the society of an industrial nation, such as that of (obviously) the United States, cannot follow the practices of tribal societies, whether real or imagined.  When a society embodies a level of discursive thought that makes industrialization possible, that society’s members must choose a more dynamic model as regards socialization.  This means that the society must be continually debating, also in discursive manner, the nature of the practices necessary to enculturate the young or to correct those who break the society’s laws.

In a dynamic society, however, “correction” isn’t confined purely to literal crimimals.  Irrespective of the specific purposes of any given political activity, that activity generally possesses the potential to enact practices that have a socializing effect. 

  To be sure, a media-campaign to discourage some behavior—often one without overt political content, such as the advisability of smoking—is not reified by the mythopoeic beliefs that inform, say, a young man undergoing penile circumcision. 

There may be any number of attempts to confer an unquestionable mythic status upon the society’s artifacts— the assorted debates on the “essential nature” of the American Constitution, for example.  But, contrary to Roland Barthes in MYTHOLOGIES, this practice is not the result of some bizarre “myth-language” devised to facilitate the repressive bourgeoise.  It is the outgrowth of the language of socialization, which has liberal accents as well as conservative.  However, no matter what the accent, the message will always received with acrimony by someone.

I’ve defended the principles underlying William Moulton Marston’s version of “socialization control” based on its status as literature, not political discourse.  In this my OVERTHINKING essays parallel the earlier essay TORTURE GUARDIN’, which defends the fictional depiction of inquisitorial torture based on the fact that it is (usually) no more than a fictional device, functioning as a element of plot-convenience in a fictional cosmos.  In such a cosmos, Batman will always threaten criminals with dire fates, or may even dispense literal physical harm, but it will almost always be too “fictional” in its base nature to be seen as an endorsement of actual torture.  By the same token, in the world of Wonder Woman the element of “play” should defuse the seeming dictatorial methods of Aphrodite’s Law, not least because it’s a world where Aphrodite unquestionably exists.

Now, if Marston had presented his ideas in the form of political discourse, I would have opposed such a practice being enacted in reality.  I’ m sure that as a young child I would have found Marston’s instruction-through-bondage no more palatable than the real socialization practices that I did experience.  Mere dislike in itself doesn’t invalidate the proposed practice, though, since socialization practices are designed to be disliked.  Almost no one likes to be told what to do, and even those who relish being ordered about only relish that experience under specific circumstances.

Nevertheless, even small children soon absorb the basic “it’s for your own good” rhetoric, whether they mentally accede to every dictate or not.  Were it possible for any child to be reared so as to exercise unconditional free will, the wakeup call for that child would surely sound as soon as he tested his inviolability by sticking his finger in a light-socket.  It may be that in a static tribal society, rebellious members may not attempt to suss out what socialization practices can be altered.  In a dynamic one, rebels may always find some cause for revision.

It remains a fact that all societies, in order to survive, must adumbrate the unconditioned free will of their members as parents modify the behavior of their children.  Some might defend Marston’s “socialization control” on that basis.  However, though it is important to point out that dimension of Marston’s thought, this cannot be a full justification.  Phrased thusly, it would be tantamount to saying that fiction is only justifiable when it mimics the conditions of real life.  In addition, such a justification would be the simple obverse of critiquing fiction for not emulating real life closely enough, a position with which I quarrel in the OVERTHINKING essays.

Leslie Fiedler founded his theory of literature on the quasi-Freudian notion of its value as an escape valve from reality.  In 1975 he edited a science-fiction anthology entitled “In Dreams Awake,” but his critical work bestows that power upon all literature, not just science fiction: the power to mirror our nature through our dreams.

But dreams by their nature are as given to darkness as to light.  Socialization practices of all creeds exist to curse the darkness.  In dreams we light candles not to dispel the dark, but to find out just how deep it is.

More in Part 2.

          

   

            

A PAGE RIGHT OUT OF PREHISTORY

At the end of INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 2 I said:

Next essay: why the bourgeoise productions of Lee and Kirby do indeed contain "a true relation to the conditions of their existence," albeit not one of which Althusser would approve.

The more I thought about this, the more daunting the project seemed. How could one hope to make clear to any Marxist the terms of my argument, when so many Marxists lack any broad historical perspective with regard to the many-faceted nature of human language and literature? After all, to this day Roland Barthes is still a name to conjure with, with barely anyone pointing out that l'empereur is missing his vetements:

"...myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language."-- Barthes, "Myth Today."

Marguerite Van Cook's essay, which prompted the INVADERS series from me, never mentions Barthes, but whether she's read him or not her own Marxist argument reproduces the same hegemonic argument with respect to how the "signifying" diction of Stan Lee establishes authority over the "raw material" of Jack Kirby's art. These are Barthes' terms, not Van Cook's, but a similarity of theme can be observed in Van Cook's essay:

Implicitly, art is produced in a strangely abased position in the social hierarchy of production. Art appears to be the tool of the intuitive, untamed mind, while writing evidences intellectual precision and authority.

Later in INVADERS PT. 3 I pointed out that if Stan Lee had "abased" the "intuitive" and "untamed" mind of Jack Kirby with his "elevated diction," then it was an abasement to which Kirby also submitted himself, by conferring "elevated diction" upon characters like Orion and Darkseid.

There are, it happens, various correctives to this Marxist overemphasis on hegemonic oppression in the world of literary narrative. One is Philip Wheelwright, who points out that language is not merely one unitary phenomenon, and that it can be productively separated into two broad "complementary uses:"

"...to designate clearly for the sake of efficient and widespread comunication, and to express with humanly significant fullness."-- Wheelwright, THE BURNING FOUNTAIN.

Where Barthes imagines a conflict between denotation and connotation (though he manages to bollix up his concept of denotation). Wheelwright sees the two "strategeies" of language as not only complementary, but necessarily intertwined throughout history. "Steno-language" (the language of plain sense) is, he tells us, the "negative limit" of language in its more expansive form, "expressive" or "poeto-language."

Ernst Cassirer, in books like his MYTHICAL THOUGHT, goes so far as to figure his version of "expressive language" as the means by which early man formulated his first abstract thoughts, in the forms of myth, folklore and religion. Of course, it should be said that even early man surely had his own version of "steno-language," in which one caveperson might tell another, "Go fetch me that rock," or "Watch out for that woolly mammoth." It's a leap of poor logic to imagine that one came before the other, and Cassirer does not, unlike Barthes, make the mistake of asserting one linguistic form's primacy over the other.

Through what remnants we have of early literature we can see the two strategies being carried out, even in the earliest civilizations. Take as example the myth sometimes called "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld." This is a great example of mythic discourse at its most expressive in that, even putting aside specific terms for which we moderns don't know the meanings, the story's logic is entirely governed by such mysterious cosmic presences as Inanna, the huluppu-tree, the Anzu-bird, and of course Gilgamesh and Enkidu themselves. In contrast, although the better-known EPIC OF GILGAMESH is replete with such presences, they have been made somewhat less mysterious in that the epic places greater realistic emphasis on understanding why Gilgamesh takes this or that action. Though the Gilgamesh Epic is certainly not an example of Wheelwright's "steno-language," one may imagine its composer-- almost certainly some anonymous court poet working with raw mythic materials as did the better-known Homer-- using the type of "plain sense" reasoning found in steno-language to figure out, for example,why Gilgamesh might decide to reject Ishtar's offer of love, which would then lead dramatically to the death of Enkidu.

The contrast between these two mythic stories is but one of many I might use to portrary the interweavings of Wheelwright's two linguistic strategies, one which, I must repeat, depends more upon the nature of what is being communicated than on some imagined hegemonic incursion of a "signifier" over a "sign," or a wordy editor over an "intuitive" artist.

With this linguistic schema as a propositional aesthetic foundation, my next essay on this subject should at last address the matter of how the works of Lee and Kirby could indeed have a "true relation to the conditions of their existence," whether that relation is anything a Marxist could relate to or not.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE STORM

I mentioned in the essay "Myths of Sociology" that I have a problem with thinkers who reduce every aspect of mankind to sociological parameters, as do many anthropologists and social scientists. And while I hardly want to find myself going to the opposite extreme of Rousseau, who liked to define mankind as utterly independent of society, it should be made clear that "mankind" and "society" are not coterminous concepts.

Take religion. (Please.)

I have no opposition to the notion that religion evolved out of contingent factors, but I part company with many prominent anthropologists-- notably, Claude Levi-Strauss-- in seeing religion's as having evolved out of predominantly social factors. This is where a knowledge of Campbell's "four functions" of myth may prove a useful corrective, even when applied to the beings from which humans themselves evolved. Of course, anything one speculates about the early origins of human culture or those damn dirty ancestors is necessarily a heuristic assumption, based on fragmentary evidence of archaic times and backward extrapolations from our present reality.

The aspect of present reality to which I'd call attention is an anecdote from Jane Goodall related in her book on the chimpanzees of Gombe, IN THE SHADOW OF A MAN. In SHADOW, Goodall relates that during a particularly fierce thunderstorm that struck over the heads of a tribe of chimps, some of these anthropoids were submissively terrified while others ran up and down the hills, hooting and waving sticks at the storm, as if the storm were an enemy to be repelled.

Now, let us make the heuristic assumption that something like this happened in the days before hominids evolved, when chimps were the highest form of life. We do not necessarily have to suppose that early hominids inherited this pattern of behavior from their nonhuman brethren; only that big-brained species may be more capable in general of forming at least rudimentary concepts of unseen enemies, which in humans would then be articulated as gods, spirits or what have you.

Now, the notion that religion might ultimately stem from some combination of "challenge patterns" and "abasement patterns" is not original with me. It can be asserted that other animals lower on the "brain-chain" may well sometimes reflexively fall into "fight or flight" patterns when faced with unknown phenomena, but I would be surprised if there was any evidence of their conceptualizing the unknown phenomena. Of course the skeptic will point out that it's still dicey as to what extent chimpanzees can form concepts, though we know that at very least they can conceive of tool-using ("It is easier to dig up an anthill with a stick than with my fingers.")

What I wish to make clear with this heuristic example is that IF religion had its own beginnings as a set of "challenge/abasement patterns" in reaction to unknown phenomena, then this would challenge the notion of religion's origins as a sociological phenomenon. Challenge and abasement patterns are intrinsically biological responses keyed to promote the survival of the individual. They are not keyed to help the society, as one can say that "a protective response toward children" IS a pattern to aid society. Challenge and abasement indirectly help the individual survive in society, but there is no automatic benefit to society thereby, and indeed, depending on the individual, the survival of that individual may be a burden to his society.

Ironically, of the three functions Campbell sets down, the sociological is the weakest link, so to speak. One may characterize the chimps' reaction as a purely somatic response to the excitation of the storm, which would fit broadly within the category Campbell calls "cosmological." One may characterize it as "psychological," insofar as the reaction involves individual psych0logies (i.e., some chimps challenge the storm but others don't). Or, given that the imagined author of the storm's flashing and booming may be the ancestor of Old Yahweh himself, one could also see the reaction as belonging to the matrix of the "metaphysical."

We do not know the beginnings of Beginning, but one chooses to entertain this heuristic example (the sociologically-inclined, of course, will not) as forming at least part of the foundations of that Beginning, then one must concede that religion could not have been conceived simply to bind people closer together, or for the priesthood to keep the people buffaloed, as in scenarios popular with everyone from Ayn Rand to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Religion then would proceed from individuals first-- albeit as an "intersubjective" spirit, to flagrantly borrow Husserl's term-- and then society would cope with the religious tendency in the form of rituals and other paraphernalia. Only the existence of an intersubjective tendency to believe in invisible spirits would thus be able to convince the "laity" of primitive societies to do all sorts of things contrary to their immediate interests, such as the sacrifice of time, hard work, and perhaps other creature's lives.

We're a long way now from Rand's goofy notion of primitives falling down in fear before the ravings of an epileptic priest, so-- let's stay as far away from that notion as possible.