The dance/song
Firedance - 5:44 – Jaiya
This ritual dance and song is from Jaiya, a trio founded in 2003 based on Mayne Island, another one of the small islands that is accessible only by ferry from Vancouver Island. It is another close-knit community, with a year-round population of a little over 1000. In fact this, their first album from which this is the title song, was “dedicated to both the people and the spirit Mayne Island. We are grateful for the warmth and vitality of our small island community, and for the wild beauty of the landscape which inspires and sustains us.”
I suspect that most south Vancouver Island residents don’t even know about our Mayne Island neighbour, but they have seen it many times. It is on the south side of Active Pass, the narrow channel that the big ferries have to slow down for about halfway through their sailings from Victoria to Vancouver (and vice versa.) I, like many regular passengers, always go outside during that stretch of the rout to enjoy the close-up view of scenery and wildlife.
Jaiya was comprised of Lael Whitehead, Miranda Brown and Kim Darwin. Miranda wrote this pagan ritual dance/chant. In fact, celebrating pagan festival days seems to be the theme of the four albums they released.
The words for meditative chant part of this dance are:
Cast the old year into the flame
Cast the dust of the year to the flame
All hope is reborn in the light
Hope is reborn in the light
Jaiya’s albums are still available in digital form on their Bandcamp site. The group appears to have disbanded now as a trio, although singer-songwriter Lael Whitehead has issued two recent releases of similar style music under the group’s label. Lael is also an early music aficionado and a member of the Banquo Folk Ensemble.
Essay: Paleolithic paganism – origins of religion
I think it is best to begin this story about one million years ago. I could start at 1.75 million years ago with the same story, but the confirmation dating evidence for then is scarce, so one million years is a conservative figure for when when our ancestors in Africa began to make and use more sophisticated stone tools. It is also when they could speak sufficiently well to tell stories, and began to use (but not make) fire. This chapter will give a brief overview of development from that time until about 100,000 years ago.
Learning to control and use fire was a big thing for human evolution: Charles Darwin put it right up there with speech. And language – well words are the building blocks for our thoughts. Thus, language and culture, as well as our history of technology go back a long time.
We know about language from changes in bone structure of the throat and skull as well as from linguistic archaeology. See below for storytelling. We know about the last two attributes about fire and tools from physical evidence and artifacts they left behind.
The tools we began making at that time (called Acheulean tools) required more planning and precision in their making and using than had been needed for earlier tools. The making of such tools is the first human activity that can be called an industry.
Our ancestors then still mostly lived in Central Africa and this was long before agriculture was invented. They lived as hunters and gatherers, and in a place where the lengths of days and nights, and the temperatures, do not change much throughout the year. But I suspect that their survival already depended upon recognizing and understanding the annual pattern of the wet (Nov-May) and the dry seasons.
The sun’s maximum height in the sky differs little throughout the year in that part of Africa but the night’s bright stars and constellations reappeared at the same times each year. I don’t know when our early ancestors first linked those celestial indicators to the wet and dry seasons and knew which times when various plants and animals were abundant or scarce, and when storms were more likely or unlikely.
My guess is that sort of knowledge was available by then, but even if they did not associate them with the night sky before their eyes, they may have developed some proto-religious beliefs regarding seasonal cycles. However they are not likely to have related the seasons to the summer or winter solstices which they could barely perceive.
It is not clear when human language (gestural or vocal) first developed; I have seen estimates that go back as far as 2-4 million years ago and it has been steadily developing since that time. But speech greatly expanded from 150,000 to 50,000 years ago. At the time, people still lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer extended family groups, but had expanded beyond of Africa.
Some scientists think that language begun as an aid for coordinating hunting but soon was applied to other communication that was important for group cohesion, including storytelling. In any event, paleo-linguistic and biological research indicate that language and vocal capability developed rapidly during this period.
A general principle of understanding the past is that the more widespread something is among people around the world, the older it likely is. It could be that it is descended by everybody from the same root. Alternatively, it could have been invented separately by many different cultures. But if something is easy to invent, and would be useful for everybody, then the various origins too were probably invented very long ago.
One characteristic that all cultures share is storytelling. Here is the full abstract from a recent peer-reviewed academic paper from the discipline of Anthropology that has 13 authors about the importance of storytelling for hunter-gatherer societies (Again, I have divided one block of text into paragraphs for easier reading, and have added my own emphases.):
Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling.
Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller.
Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a foraging ecology, such as cooperation, sex equality and egalitarianism. These themes are present in narratives from other foraging societies.
We also show that the presence of good storytellers is associated with increased cooperation. In return, skilled storytellers are preferred social partners and have greater reproductive success, providing a pathway by which group-beneficial behaviours, such as storytelling, can evolve via individual-level selection.
We conclude that one of the adaptive functions of storytelling among hunter gatherers may be to organise cooperation.
Evidence for having fire in peoples habitations goes back at least 1 million years, but evidence for using it for cooking only goes back 400,00 years. Early people probably first learned about the advantage of cooking when they foraged for food in areas that had been scorched by wildfire. The dead animals that had been killed in the fire were easier to eat and digest. Roots and tubers that are inedible when raw become a good food source after they have been cooked by fire.
The process of controlling fire involves learning a new technology. It needed to be kept lit. One type of fast-burning fuel is needed to produce heat and light; another slow-burning fuel, like dried dung, could keep fire smoldering without much time needed for fuel-gathering. Scientists believe that specialized roles developed for individuals who were both knowledgeable and responsible. Perhaps shamanism developed from fire-keeping.
150,000 to 50,000 years ago is probably when humans learned how to make fire. When controlled, fire gives enormously practical benefits: It is a source of light and heat, a tool for cooking food and fending off prey animals. But people also must have learned very early on that fire also needed to be shown respect and feared: Fire can cause great pain, debilitating injuries and death.
I’m sure that our ancient ancestors found out very early that its smoke can keep biting insects away, and I suspect that the storytellers probably had some pretty good yarns about why that is the case. Remember, this is a time when humans used fire but could not make it. Someone would have been responsible for maintaining the family’s fire. A nomadic or semi-nomadic family might have to keep a single fire going for many generations.
In the 1981 French movie La guerre du feu (called Quest for Fire in English), directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, tells the tale of a Neanderthal family that loses its fire to raiders and three warriors must go on a difficult and dangerous search for a new one. Here are some scenes from that movie, edited into a 3:00 tribute short (click on image below):
What stories would have accumulated in ancient times about such a family’s generations-old fire? Might the family heirloom fire itself be personified as an intangible member of the family? Or as its patron?
Even today, when we know from science what fire is and how it works, looking into a blazing fire or a glowing candle seems magical. I have not yet found any date estimate of when concepts of “sacred” first appeared, or belief in higher powers began. But when our ancient ancestors first began to have religious beliefs hundreds of thousands to a few million years ago my guess is that fire figured into them. I can think of nothing else more likely to inspire the invention of the concept and word “sacred”.
The first thing to be considered sacred must have been something very important, very mysterious, and very out-of-the-ordinary. While many things in their world had great value for our early ancestors, there are no better candidates than fire for the thing to have meaningfulness as well as utility.
Fire also must have been an inspiration for storytellers. Its inherent mysteriousness - what it is and where it comes from – sparks (sorry!) the imagination. If this is true, fire worship, or at least acknowledgement of its spirit, may be the root ancestral “religion” for humans all over the world.
Attribution of a spirit or soul to plants, animals and inanimate objects in nature, or to a natural phenomenon such as fire, is the very definition of “animism”. You may recall that the research paper abstract quoted at the end of the first essay in this Ancient Origins series found that animism was the first “trait of religion” found as a common denominator in a present-day hunter-gather people.
For our ancestors, there may have been an obvious relationship between their hearth-fires’ source of light and heat, and the blazing Sun in the sky. (By the way, just for fun google “is the sun on fire.”) It is possible that they saw a kinship between these two phenomena/objects. It is also possible that this kinship was extended to the Moon, the Sun’s highly visible and natural counterpart in the heavens.
All of this speculation has been in the context of our ancestors’ capabilities and possible world-view a million years ago. In the next chapter of this series on Sunday, Dec 12 I will discuss the beliefs of the people that left Africa to settle in what we now call the Middle East and Europe. They too were hunter-gatherers from the days before the invention of agriculture, but after fire-making was a common skill.
Share this post