Civilization #3: The Religious Imagination

Shamans served as religious leaders in early human societies, holding higher status than other community members due to their spiritual authority. Both men and women could become shamans, evidenced by elaborate burials according them special recognition. Contemporary indigenous communities in Amazon forests, Africa, and Australia maintain shamanic traditions.

Anthropologists like Wade Davis study contemporary indigenous cultures to understand early human religious practices and worldviews. These scholars travel to remote regions of South America, Africa, and Australia, documenting peoples who maintained traditional practices for thousands of years.

Early humans and contemporary indigenous peoples practiced sophisticated religious systems where imagination shaped their entire understanding of reality. Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist, documented these worldviews in The Wayfinders through extensive fieldwork with indigenous communities.

All powerful religions, from indigenous belief systems to major world religions like Judaism and Christianity, rely on three essential qualities to establish authority and convince believers of their correctness. Early humans developed these sophisticated validation mechanisms to legitimize their cosmologies.

Indigenous peoples developed elaborate cosmologies demonstrating sophisticated completeness rivaling later major religions. Amazon forest communities created vast explanatory frameworks accounting for all observable phenomena, from creation’s beginning to its eventual end.

Indigenous peoples of the Amazon forest, South America, Africa, and Australia practice animism, viewing all elements of nature as possessing spiritual essence. For these communities, humans, plants, animals, rocks, and waterfalls share the same cosmic origin and spiritual substance.

Indigenous hunter-gatherers, particularly Amazon forest peoples, treated hunting not as a right but as a sacred privilege requiring spiritual permission. Shamans mediated these contracts between hunters and animal masters, negotiating terms for taking life.

Indigenous communities practicing animism structured all spiritual relationships through reciprocity, the fundamental principle of give and take. If one receives, one must give in return. This governed interactions between humans and spirit worlds, animals and plants, and within communities themselves.