In his book, The World's Religions, religion scholar Huston Smith discusses the primal faiths. He describes them as religions practiced by indigenous peoples around the globe, from Native Americans to Australian aborigines.
These faiths all share common characteristics. One is orality: religious stories, beliefs, and rituals are transmitted through word of mouth rather than through sacred written texts, and thus the focus is on the central tenets of the faith, rather than the details.
Second, place is extremely important: the geographic features of a particular area are infused and alive with the divine spirit. This makes it a violation of indigenous religious beliefs, to simply move an indigenous group from one geographic area to another: the religious faith is not portable but is tied to a particular piece of land and its sacred sites. It was, thus, very disruptive, for example, to move Native American groups to reservations in a different part of the country, as happened in the nineteenth-century.
This sense of a god being a god of a particular place would develop into henoism, which is the theological concept that different places are protected by different gods, just as different states in the United States have different governors, and if you cross a state line you are under the jurisdiction of a different government. In henoism, if you moved from your geographic area, your god would no longer protect you.
Third, along with the centrality of orality and place, Smith states that primal religions exist in an eternal now. If religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have a teleological view—meaning they are looking to a telos or end of history, in which heaven and earth will be joined—that concept of an end is completely alien to primal faiths. Through religious practice, often through a particular rock or stream or other geographic feature, indigenous people connect with the far distant past and distant ancestors as well as the future.
For most indigenous people, there is not a separation between everyday life and religious life (the profane and the sacred), as there is, say, in modern Christianity, where people enter a sacred place on Sunday and then go on the rest of the week with their ordinary lives. For the primal faiths, all of life is bound up in religious rituals.
Since I don't know what culture you are referencing, it is impossible to say how these chief aspects are reflected in "this" culture, but perhaps you could resubmit the question clarifying that—or simply apply these principles to the culture you are considering.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
What are the chief aspects of the primal religions and how are they reflected in this culture?
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