working

Edward Surman

MA Thesis Draft 2016

“The geography and history of Central Eurasia are inseparable.”¹

The Significance of the Natural Environment on the Development of Monotheism.

I have argued that the strict monotheism of religions such as Zoroastrianism and Judaism² must have originated as a refinement of a previously proto-monotheistic religious framework. This framework might have included the worship of a number of deities, but could be differentiated from neighboring polytheistic systems in specific ways that might directly facilitate the development of monotheism. The question, then, that this paper is aimed at addressing concerns the development of these proto-monotheistic religions. I suggest that there is a substantial correlation between the nature environment and the development of ancient religions and it is in the natural landscapes, which were home to the ancient Iranians and Israelites, that we can trace whence came their proto-monotheism, and consequently monotheism. Utilizing a comparative methodology I will argue that the religion, like the mobile pastoralist roots, of these two ancient religious communities developed as responses to specific geographic and ecological circumstances.

From Feuerbach to Frazer, there have been a number of scholars who cite natural phenomena as the inspiration for religious symbols, rituals, and mythologies.³ What appears to be lacking in scholarship, however, is work concerning the influences of the natural environment on the psychology of a people such that they develop religious beliefs or praxis. In his article “An Ecological Approach to Religion” Swedish anthropologist Åke Hultkrantz explains that he “…as a result of his own field research…became convinced of the fundamental importance of natural (environmental) conditions to religious development.”⁴ By engaging with Hultkrantz and Mircea Eliade, I will propose a theoretical framework for the study of religions which I will deploy in our discussion of ancient monotheism. Although it consider the human animal, in an environmental context to be functioning at-effect in relation to Nature, this framework is suggested in anthropologist Michael D. Frachetti’s words not as “environmental determinism but rather [as] environmental pragmatism.”⁵

In order to understand this connection between the land and religion, we must examine the situation of the societies of the ancient Iranians and Israelites in the respective landscapes of steppe and desert. It is important to consider the mobile pastoralism that likely characterized these societies before they moved into settled communities. For it is the same landscape that allowed for the socio-economic construction of mobile pastoralism which would influence the development of religious culture. This is concisely summarized in Frachetti’s observation that the “geography and history of Central Eurasia are inseparable.”⁶ Before we can examine the possible mobile pastoralist roots of ancient Iranian and Israelite societies, it is important to explore the defining traits that characterize mobile pastoralist systems.

Whether called 'semi-nomadic', 'nomadic', or 'mobile pastoralists', many different terms have been used to describe what Frachetti explains is “most commonly understood as a social and economic strategy predominantly based in routined (such as seasonal) migratory management of domesticated herd animals.”⁷ I use the term 'mobile pastoralism', after Frachetti, in an attempt to include in this study the various societies which have been constructed around the “management of domesticated herd animals” and acknowledge the range of modes of mobility which might have characterized each of these at different periods of time.⁸ Anthropologist Roger Cribb notes the way in which terms such as 'semi-nomadic pastoralism' are often used without addressing the two different concepts which have been merged into one:

Nomadic pastoralism is a dual concept comprising two logically independent dimensions – nomadism and pastoralism. Within each of these dimensions dualisms such as nomadic/sedentary, agricultural/pastoral, the desert and the sown, perpetrate gross distortions of our ability to understand the relationship between the two. Each dimension may be viewed as a continuum, and the relationship between them is best represented in terms of a probability space in which groups or individuals are uniquely located with respect to each axis.⁹

Cribb's suggestion that these two 'dimensions', which constitute the concept of mobile pastoralism, might be viewed as continua is valuable to our understanding of these societies. With the nuances of these dimensions acknowledged, we can examine ways in which the earliest societies of the ancient Iranians and Israelites have been characterized as mobile pastoralist.

It is difficult to assert, beyond a doubt, that the earliest forms of ancient Iranian, Indo-Iranian, and Israelite societies can be called mobile pastoralism. As with many ancient civilizations, the roots of these societies are clouded by time; this has not stopped scholars from supposing reconstructions, some more probable than others. One of the major sources which lends credibility, to the idea that the ancient Iranians and Israelites knew mobile pastoralism prior to becoming the settled peoples recognized by history, is the body of references, to mobile pastoral life, in each scriptural canon. Scholar of Zoroastrianism Mary Boyce notes the comparison of symbology: “The symbolism of the pastor or herdsman, v. 6, appears to be that of the man who nurtures good purpose, since Vohu Manah, Good Purpose, is guardian of cattle. Evidently the symbols of cattle and herdsman were as powerful for the ancient Iranians as those of sheep and Shepard have been for Jews and Christians.”¹⁰ Boyce's comments highlight the significance of comparing these two religions: independent of one another, these references might easily be lost in their respective geo-political contexts, but when viewed together, they suggest similar histories and begin to form a semblance of analogous developmental contexts more like one another than their respective 'neighbors'. Although a number of theories regarding the likelihood of mobile pastoralism in the respective histories of these societies utilize other evidence¹¹, it is the value of this comparison which centers the respective scriptural references to mobile pastoralism as the focus for our present discussion.

There are three important types of scriptural references to mobile pastoralism which we must briefly examine in order to consider the likelihood of this form of society in the respective histories of the ancient Iranians and Israelites: setting, symbolism, and sayings. The first of these three is easily understood in even the most superficial reading of the Zoroastrian Gathas or Hebrew Bible; in the former, it is clearly identified by historian of religion Jenny Rose: “The setting for the Gathas is presented as that of mobile pastoralism.”¹² The long-established position of the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus in European culture pre-empts, to Western minds, the need of such a statement with regard to the Hebrew Bible. It is worth noting that, particularly in biblical narratives, the setting of mobile pastoralism is not consistently presented in a positive light and this suggests that however settled or mobile the authors might have been situated they didn't universally elevate or vilify such a society.¹³

Returning to Boyce's observation, we can see that the symbol of what Frachetti called “domesticated herd animals”¹⁴ is present in both texts. Boyce writes:

In his Gāthās Zoroaster himself used it [symbol of the cow] with a range and complexity of meaning which for long baffled modern interpreters; and it is a striking fact that whereas cattle imagery recurs again and again in his verses, there is not a single simile there drawn from tilling the soil—no mention of plough or corn, seedtime or harvest, though such things are much spoken of in the Younger Avesta, gradually, indeed, replacing cattle in the religious symbolism.¹⁵

The last line is particularly notable to our discussion as it suggests that the dominance of the symbol of the cow, of mobile pastoralism, predated but was replaced in the scriptural canon by symbols of settled agriculture. In similar fashion the Hebrew Bible contains metaphors which make use of imagery that clearly indicates a familiarity with mobile pastoralism, archaeologist Roland de Vaux writes:

Death, for example, is the cut tent-rope, or the peg which is pulled out, or the text itself which is carried off. Desolation is represented by the broken ropes, the tent blown down, whereas security is the tent with tight ropes and firm pegs. A nation whose numbers are increasing is a tent being extended. Lastly, there are countless allusions to the pastoral life, and Yahweh or his Messiah are frequently represented as the Good Shepherd.¹⁶

It is important to note the use of symbolism and imagery associated with mobile pastoralism in the scripture of both Zoroastrianism and Judaism in order to establish the familiarity of those who would receive the language with the social systems to which they refer.

A final type of scriptural reference must be acknowledged which is directly connected to symbolism: sayings. Idiomatic references to mobile pastoralism are even more specifically dependent on and revealing of an intimate knowledge of the authors and audience with the life of a mobile pastoralist society. Roland de Vaux describes the usefulness of language in revealing history in this way:

Language is more conservative than custom, and Hebrew retained several traces of that [semi-nomadic] life of years gone by. For example, generations after the conquest, a house was called a 'tent', and not only in poetry (where it is frequent) but also in everyday speech. Disbanded soldiers return 'every man to his own tent'...Again, to express 'leaving early in the morning', a verb is often used which means 'to load the beasts of burden'; nomads use the word to say 'striking camp at dawn'.¹⁷

Like jokes, which are often culturally relative, one must be familiar both with the language and referent social context in order to 'get' the expressions which de Vaux describes. Similarly, Rose explains:

The struggle for sustenance and growth is expressed in poetic idiom, so that the so that the beleaguered ‘soul of the cow’ (geush urvan) can also be understood as the ‘soul of the world'. Just as the cow, under the good husbandry of the cowherd, yields beneficent by-products of butter and milk, so clarity of vision and integrity of word and action promote that which is ‘really real’ (haithya), bringing nourishment and increase to the world, rather than injury and decrease.¹⁸

Comparing the utilization of references to mobile pastoralism between these two religious texts reveals each to have had familiarity with that type of society which cannot be easily attributed to poetic creativity or propagandistic invention. It is reasonable to assume that both ancient Iranian and Israelite societies existed in some form of mobile pastoralism in their respective early histories. What implications does this assumption have for our understanding of the potential connections between mobile pastoralism and monotheism? It is to this question which we must next turn.

Frachetti describes various theories concerning the origins or motivations for a society to develop mobile pastoralism and notes: ““Ethnographers have long recognized that mobile pastoralism is largely an ecologically strategic way of life...”¹⁹ He acknowledges various considerations which may factor into the construction of such a society beyond the natural environment, but concludes: “Regardless of the other significant motivations that contribute to their social and economic practices, pastoralists attentively monitor environmental conditions such as seasonal rainfall and pasture and water resources and adjust their schedules of mobility, settlement, and socialization to accommodate these rhythms.”²⁰ If social and economic practices are characteristically responsive to the ecological context, why not culture, specifically religion?

In explanation of his religio-ecological method, Hultkrantz suggests that "...by establishing types of religion instead of tracing religious complexes and historically delimited religions, we may arrives at both a fuller understanding of religious facts in their interactions with Nature and a more comprehensive knowledge of the religious past of pre-literate societies.”²¹. His approach considers the idea that religions, like economic and social constructs, might be influenced by the ecological context of development.²² Hultkrantz locates this focus in the same vein as other social science approaches at the time which borrowed the concept of ecology from the natural sciences.²³ Hultkrantz suggests that this approach "...leads to the recognition of fixed types and regularities in the process of cultural development, regularities which should not be considered as laws but as natural recurrences in similar situations.”²⁴ This is an important consideration in framing the potential for connections between the natural environment and religion:  too strict a suggestion of environmental determinism, Hultkrantz' 'regularities as law' fails to consider the differences between communities of human beings and their effect, in turn, on an environmental context which cannot be described as completely inert.²⁵ Similarly, it is beyond reason to deny that humans, as biological beings, would be molded by the natural environments in which they develop, live, and continue to interact, in all major areas of society but one.

Another scholar has suggested, though less directly, a theory of religion which is in line with Hultkrantz.  Writing on conceptions of the 'sacred' across human history, Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade theorizes that 'hierophanies' (revelatory epiphanies) of the sacred/transcendent natural world give rise religious experience.²⁶ Eliade interpreted the results of his comparative work as suggesting correlations between natural phenomena and religious experience.²⁷ Cogent to our discussion are his observations regarding environmental contexts which are dominated by the skyscape: “Simple contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience. The sky shows itself to be infinite, transcendent”²⁸ and “For the sky, by its own mode of being, reveals transcendence, force, eternity. It exists absolutely because it is high, eternal, powerful.”²⁹ Eliade's suggestion of the hierophanic interaction between humans and the natural world seems to go deeper than the simple inspiration of religious concepts by natural phenomena.  He specifically argues: “There is no question of naturism here. The celestial god is not identified with the sky, for he is the same god who, creating the entire cosmos, created the sky too. This is why he is called Creator, All-powerful, Lord, Chief, Father, and the like.”³⁰ To Eliade it is clear that human beings, find in our natural environmental contexts experiences of both the mundane and transcendent world.³¹ What is unclear, however, is whether or not the latter is a human construct.

A major criticism of Mircea Eliade's work is his apparent vacillation between theological and secular academic perspectives.  Comparative religion scholar William E. Parents describes the result of this back-and-forth in Eliade's work:

...two matrices [can be] distinguished in Eliade's writings, both of them linked with the concept of the sacred. The first is one most commonly associated with Eliade, where 'the sacred' refers to hierophanies of the transcendent, manifest through some part of the ordinary...In this model, religion begins with the revelation of the sacred....there is a second Eliade, a second voice, employing another model...about the human capacity to constitute multiple worlds, where the concept 'world' is clearly pluralistic and relativistic...Here Eliade is not theological at all, but postfoundationalist and to some extent postmodern. Here sacrality is a human value, not an epithet for divinity.³²

Paden's interpretation finds this "second Eliade" picking up Durkheim in his conception of the world-building power of human experiences of the natural world.  Given this plurality of voices in Eliade's work, and the well established history of criticism it has since fueled³³, Willam E. Paden considers the position of such a theoretical framework as Eliade's in more recent comparative efforts:  “I do think that the relevant Eliadean discourse for our present secular, comparativist generation is not Eliade-the-monist for whom a monolithic religious reality termed 'the sacred' grounds all and manifests through all, but rather Eliade-the-pluralist interested in the myriad ways religious worlds are formed as cultural creations.”³⁴  To Paden, the effects of the natural world on the religious experiences of human individuals and communities functions within the innate concept world-building activities which are also responsible for producing, among others, economic, social, and cultural constructs.  He writes:

Humans create their worlds, inhabit them, and assume responsibility for them...Sacrality is therefore not just something that manifests or shines through worlds or through the symbolic structures...but also the factor that gives a world its standing against the forces of chaos. In the basic sense Eliade is linking religious worldmaking with the process of human worldmaking itself.³⁵ 

This is important to our discussion, for among the variables which influence the "process of human worldmaking" surely the ecological environment must be acknowledged as a dominant factor for the majority of human history.  

William E. Paden provides an interesting excavation of Eliade's theoretical framework. His interpretation of “Eliade-the-pluralist” as a theorist of religious worldmaking requires some clearing away of the theological language which has driven so much criticism. But it is important to note that Paden's efforts do not seem aimed at redeeming Eliade's complex interweaving of perspectives, but appears, rather, to be revealing a secular framework of which Eliade himself may not have been cognizant:

I am not grounding this chapter on the analytic force of proving different historical or linguistic levels of Eliadean thought, and then maintaining that one of them is the 'real' Eliade. Nor am I even certain that Eliade himself would have understood these distinctions. But I do find a constructivist, humanistic strain in his work that coexists with and often underlies his rhetoric about 'the manifestations of the sacred.'³⁶

Paden's efforts allow for the inclusion of Eliade in the development of the theory which underlies this paper. It is Paden's neo-Durkheimian Eliade who can offer support for a powerful and relevant theory of religion which has yet to be explored in any depth.³⁷ When read with Åke Hultkrantz we can begin to see the foundation for a framework of understanding the influence of a natural ecological context on religious development.

To be sure, the theory which grounds this paper, that the development of monotheism correlates to a particular natural landscape, does not resolve the tension between Eliade's two perspectives. This argument does not (and should not) seek to alleviate Hultkrantz and Eliade of the burdens of their methodologies or conclusions, entrenched in Eurocentric elitism. Each of these theorists does not distance their work enough from the colonialist ancestry of religious scholarship by the likes of Tylor and Frazer. A student of Mircea Eliade, scholar of Indo-European religion Bruce Lincoln approach his work in Priests, Warriors, and Cattle: A Study in the Ecology of Religions, differently that either Hultkrantz or Eliade, stating at the end of his introduction: “At all costs, reasoning such as 'In East Africa..,therefore among the Indo-Iranians...' will be avoided. Such a statement proves nothing and only serves to confuse the issue. Similarity between the two religious systems is that which is to be proven, and to do this we must first study each system in its own right.”³⁸ Lincoln's statement serves, here, as an example of what Eliade and Hultkrantz failed to consider in their conclusions “on the religious history of primitive peoples.”³⁹

If we are to apply the theory presented in this paper beyond the Levantine desert and Eurasian steppe, then it is vital to situate its genesis and applicable character against the support provided by these theorists. Rather than picking up where they might have left off, it is important to consider the quality of the contexts from which we are plucking the seed of the theoretical framework functioning within our present discussion. Anthropologist Alice B. Kehoe offers a critique of Eliade and Hultkrantz which fits our purpose and clarifies the problematic nature of blindly theorizing in their vein:

Two Europeans, Mircea Eliade and Ake Hultkrantz, have inspired a generation of academics and the public fascinated by the field of comparative religions. Intellectual brilliance, passion, vision-in short, charisma-mark these savants. So, too, does an arrogant cultural imperialism that denies full humanity to the first nations of the Americas. Eliade, and to a much lesser extent Hultkrantz, have fed the romantic demiurge presenting American Indians as primal survivals husbanding an archaic ecstasy that may yet save the White millions who suffer, in Hultkrantz's words, an 'inability to lead authentic lives'.⁴⁰

Kehoe's comments recall the long-established history of Western comparativism which privileges and normalizes Christianity as the benchmark against which all other religions are 'compared'. Having argued for the importance of ecological context to the development of religions, we next must examine three cases in which this theory might be applied. With Kehoe's critique in mind, it is vital that the application of this concept be aimed at further broadening our knowledge of monotheism and mobile pastoralism, rather than attempting to re-frame other religions to fit a biblical framework as so many have done before.

There are three cases which will be examined in the application of this theory: the Maasai and Kikuyu in East Africa and the Lakota in the Great Plains of North America. In the way of further contextualizing this effort, it must acknowledged that there is a great need for modern, indigenous scholarship of these civilizations. Many of the most 'authoritative' sources available on the subject of Native American or African indigenous religions are outdated and colonial in perspective. Sadly, it is all too frequent to find tomes of religious descriptions of religion on either continent lumped together as though the religious beliefs of all African or Native American nations belong to a respective single “traditional” religion.

The survival of the mobile pastoralist societies of Maasai and Kikuyu despite specific efforts on the part of colonial powers to both settle and depopulate (a historically sanitized way of describing genocide) East African 'nomads' reveals, by itself, both the historical situation of land and societies. Human ecology scholar Katherine Homewood describes the context in which mobile pastoralists in Africa function: “African pastoralist groups have generally been mobile peoples, commonly exploiting lands that are marginal for agriculture, often operating outside formal administrative networks and maintaining few records.”⁴¹ Both Homewood and Lincoln confirm that the economic foundation of the herding societies of this region is primarily possession of cattle.⁴² Frachetti directly connects the variable ecotones of marginal environmental landscapes, such as those found in East Africa, with the strategic opportunities exploited by mobile pastoralists.⁴³

Famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey authored a voluminous study of the Kikuyu in 'British East Africa', a mobile pastoralist society the religion of whom he describes as being centered around one god, Ngai.⁴⁴ In a fascinating lack of interest in the apparent monotheism of a culture which anthropologists William and Katherine Routledge described as belonging to a “prehistoric people,”⁴⁵ Leakey's description of the religion of the Kikuyu seems to hardly gloss the conception of the deity while offering sections on subjects such as “Departed Spirits...Dreams...Ghosts...Animistic Beliefs...[and] The Spirits of Trees.”⁴⁶ It is clear that, from an anthropological view, Leakey was not concerned with the development of monotheism in this civilization which was considered, in British imperial thought to be anything but civilised.

Important to our discussion is the connection between the religion of the Kikuyu and the Maasai: according to both the Routledges and Leakey, the “term usually employed [by the Kikuyu] in speaking of the Deity (N'gaí) is of Masaí origin.”⁴⁷ Most curiously, by whatever source, the monotheism of the Maasai even finds its way into a children's book by Russian author Sonia Bleeker: “Actually, the Masai believe in only one god, Enkai. Enkai is spoken of as the Black God when he answers his people's prayers by sending them rain and tall grass.”⁴⁸ It is worth noting the number of references to the religion of these societies in order to raise the question of where is the scholarship on religions of the Maasai and Kikuyu? It is clear that further research is required to understand how monotheism is expressed in these cultures and how that might affect theoretical models of monotheism and related issues. Additionally, it seems that the societies of the Maasai and the Kikuyu, in their respective monotheistic mobile pastoralism validate the theory presented in this paper. It is not enough to simply check a box of 'validated', however, there can be no question that the gaps in scholarship on these peoples are numerous and more research, specifically from non-European perspectives, is vital to understanding the complex reality of these religions. Having found support for the connection between natural environmental contexts, mobile pastoralism, and monotheism within these two cases, we next must turn to the Great Plains of North American to explore the applicability of this theory to the society of the Lakota.

If the minds of humans are affected or inspired in certain ways by natural phenomena such that they comprehend a particular religious idea or belief, then what does it mean to have that belief taken out of its environmental context? In the modern world questions of relevance are regularly put to traditional religious beliefs, scriptures, and practices and as scholarship continues to examine the factors contributing to the origins of religious thought, it seems a concept such as we have discussed here must be considered and discussed. It is important to realize that despite our built environments and technology advanced civilizations, human beings are still biological animals living within a natural world. If our ancestors were affected by sky and steppe in a way that resulted in religious beliefs that continue to be relevant to humans today, in what other ways might our minds and thus religious beliefs be informed by natural influences that are so easily forgotten in air-conditioned apartments and traffic filled highways?

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