He then moves on to the issue of Siberian shamanism, a source of long-term fascination for the Western world. He effectively debunks, to my mind anyway, a suggestion that it is an intact relict of Paleolithic practices, saying that records of neighbouring literate people such as the Han Chinese only go back 2,000 years, while archaeological evidence pushes it back about 4,000. He argues that there is some evidence that New World shamanism had cultural influences on the Old World, but that there’s no evidence of a continuous tradition back to the Paleolithic.
Whitley then goes back to looking for the origins of human belief in the supernatural, and the development of religion. He finds the core of the latter in minimally counterintuitive concepts – which are memorable and particularly susceptible to recall, likely to be remembered and repeated. But they can’t be too far from the everyday: a talking dog is fine, a flying, talking tree is too far out. He finds the former in human’s agency detection device, a hypersensitive aspect of human existence that sees agents that aren’t really there – the dark environment of the cave being particularly effective for that.
Whitley is convinced that although they probably didn’t have organized religion, Neanderthals certainly had supernatural beliefs – it must have been built into their brains. So he arrives at an account of the of religion’s arrival:
Religion – a shared social practice involving spirit belief and religiosity, but not always transcendence – developed first (insofar as we can tell) in western Europe, at least 35,000 years ago. This occurred when certain individuals with (I believe) specific emotional characteristics ‘captured’ the spirit world. By this act, they “created minimally impossible worlds that solve existential problems” – an evolutionary psychologists’ definition of religion.”
As evidence for the “emotional characteristics” claim, he combs written evidence of shamanistic societies and finds many examples of accounts that appear to match modern accounts of bipolar disorder. He also identifies a strong correlation between artistic creativity and mood disorders – with artists having rates of about 10 times higher than the general population.
And so he says, they invented “modern” human life – which he identifies with the start of religion. On that I part company with Whitley – why this, rather than art itself, or technology, or methods of social organization?
Still, it is an entertaining journey that Whitley provides, across fascinating terrain of human existence. He might not be – he says himself – a “spirit guide”, but he is an entertaining one.
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