Some thoughts after reading about ancient Egyptian religion
April 20th, 2007Serialization of the imagination to a non-volatile archive is the human species attempting to preserve itself from an evolutionary standpoint. This was the first leap in the process of evolution from a purely physical adaptation path to one that is virtual.
To the conscious mind, void is the greatest evil. Hard drive failure is catastrophic. Religion was the first attempt at a backup & recovery mechanism (called the afterlife) for the human consciousness.
As soon as consciousness was born - represented as the result of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that serpentine ontology - death became intolerable because it was known.
Death, as defined as a natural process of life, put nature at odds for the first time with a species that nature herself had nurtured (perhaps ‘forged’ is a better word). Only the conscious mind can perceive death and what it means. Thus the quest for immortality was born.
Since that time, the human future has always been a post-human future. For this reason, technology and the promises it offers will become the religion of the 21st century.
April 27th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Ray, I’m not exactly sure what to make of this post. I think your final point, technology as religion, is probably accurate if religion is simply “species memory” or a perpetuation of the individual after the individual has died. Perhaps among the ancient Egyptians—at least among the Egyptian elite who had a life, and materials, worth hanging onto—this was true. Perhaps among their Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Minoan contemporaries, this was also true. But I’m skeptical of this as a blanket characterization.
The problem is that classical archaeology has tended to focus on the cool stuff that rich people and rulers left behind. If we define the very beginning of religion’s story as perpetuation of self or of species, we are only taking into account evidence left by those who made it clear that they wanted to be remembered and talked about over eons.
When we find votives and other archaeological detritus of death assumed to belong to those in the “everyone else” class, we don’t find a preoccupation with perpetuation. We find the focus on newness—fertility and rebirth stuff, for example. The evidence is very sketchy, but it looks like “common people,” were more interested in the same things we are today: memorializing, grieving, and moving on. Maybe I’m making too subtle of a distinction here, but I think that “perpetuation,” with the expectation that class/caste/power relationships continue after death, and nihilistic materialism, with the expectation that nothing happens after death both lead to the kind of fetishism of technology that you’re talking about. No one wants to die if dying means losing what you’ve gained in life. Stretching life out in its current state (that’s the key point) seems all important.
But for the masses, for lack of a better term, where death might mean an escape into a new order based on different rules than what kept them on the social bottom on earth, death might be sad and welcomed at the same time.
The “sad welcome” of death experienced by the vast majority of every group of people that have ever lived, perhaps, seems not to fit with the kind of perpetuation after death ideologies offered by both philosophically materialist evolutionary thinkers and technophiles worried about their own “deletion.”
Does this make sense? I don’t feel like I explained myself very well here. Perhaps I was making something out of nothing…. I dunno.
April 29th, 2007 at 5:40 am
Erik -
You bring up some really good points. I hadn’t thought, when writing this post, about the distinction between the organized religions of the powerful elite in ancient Egypt - which probably were an important precursor to the dominant monotheistic religions of our day - and the more animistic / pagan practices of the lower classes.
Your response brought into focus another lens on this issue: the question of how reliable any knowledge is beyond immediate, local contexts. One could draw an analogy between the lower class’s cyclical views of life and death and their immediacy with their environment combined with their lack of access to the esoteric musings of the elite.
Conversely, the elite, because they had a different set of assumptions about the world AND were very motivated to maintain control over the wealth they had accumulated were perhaps more willing to look beyond immediate, local knowledge and make suppositions about the future, the afterlife, and how one might exist after death.
Fast forward through history and we see that not only have the religious traditions of the elite evolved into much larger, more sophisticated systems, these systems also exert tremendous control over the larger population.
Furthermore, if one were to take an optimistic view on the economic impact of this and what it means for species preservation — I may be revealing some unconsciously held capitalist assumptions about economics that I’m wasn’t aware of nor am I entirely comfortable with — one could see a correlation between species perpetuation, massive religious systems, and the global distribution of material wealth, or at least a narrative of that distribution.
In effect, the seeds sown in the early religious systems of the elite have grown into deeply rooted systems that now control the thoughts of the majority of those on this planet, rich and poor.
One other interesting point to note is that religious systems that previously were by and for the elite achieved critical mass when they redefined themselves as primarily for the poor and the oppressed. The line blurs in the case of Judaism and its early Egyptian roots, but the transition seems more clear in the case of the transition of the earlier forms of elite, tribal Indian religions — possibly a primitive form of Hinduism? — into Buddhism. The pivot point for the Judeo-Christian-Muslim vector came, of course, with Jesus Christ.
Obviously, there is no real way to validate my theory about religion being an evolutionary attempt on behalf of the human mind to perpetuate itself, and we may have indeed created too simple a model for ourselves here, but you’ve definitely given me more to think about.
April 30th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Dang! This is a good topic. And your response requires more careful thought than I have time to give it at the moment. Had I been in Cali longer—and had I time to make it all the way down to your shiny sand pit of a city
, I would have loved to talk about this in more detail.
Alas, I was only there for a weekend conference and had no access to transportation shy of what nice people were able to offer me.
Even though the trip was so brief, I find myself immediately buried in work upon arrival.
I need a freaking vacation! It’s all California’s fault!