The Psychology of Religion

Dr. V.K. Maheshwari, Former Principal

K.L.D.A.V(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.
Albert Einstein

If we define religion as the worship of supernatural forces, we must observe at the onset that some peoples have apparently no religion at all. But such cases are exceptional, and the old belief that religion is universal is substantially correct. To the philosopher this is one of the outstanding facts of history and psychology; he is not content to know that all religions contain much nonsense, but rather he is fascinated by the problem of the antiquity and persistence of belief. What are the sources of the indestructible piety of mankind?

Fear was the first mother of gods. Fear, above all, of death. Primitive life was beset with a thousand dangers , and seldom ended with natural decay; long before old age could come, violence or some strange disease carried off the great majority of men. Hence early man did not believe that death was ever natural; he attributed it to the operation of supernatural agencies. As for example in the mythology of the natives of New Britain death came to men by an error of the gods. The good god Kambinana told his foolish brother  Korvouva, “Go down to men and tell them to cast their skins; so shall they avoid death. But tell the serpents that they henceforth die.” Korvouva mixed the messages ; he delivered the secret of immortality to the snakes, and the doom of death to men. Many tribes thought that death was due to the shrinkage of the skin, and that man would be immortal if only he could mould.

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious faith. Wonder and mystery adhered particularly to sex and dreams, and the mysterious influence of heavenly bodies upon the earth and man. Primitive man marvelled at the phantoms that he saw in sleep, and was struck with terror when he beheld, in his dreams, the figures of those whom he knew to be dead. He buried his dead in the earth to prevent their return; he buried victuals and goods with the corpse lest it should come back to curse him; sometimes he left to the dead the house in which death had come, while he himself moved on to another shelter; in some places he carried the body out of the house not through a door but through a hole in the wall, and bore it rapidly three times around the dwelling so that the spirit might forget the entrance and never haunt  the home (S&K,859;Lippert,115).

Such experiences convinced early man that every living thing had a soul, or secret life, within it , which could be separated from the body in illness, sleep or death. ‘Let no one wake a man brusquely, “said one of the Upanishads of ancient India ,” For it is a matter difficult of cure if the soul finds not its way back to him”(Brihadaranyaka Upanished,4.,3;.). Not man alone but all things had souls; the external world was not insensitive or dead, it was intensely alive; if this were not so, thought primitive philosophy, nature would be full of inexplicable occurrences, like the motion of the sun, or the death dealing lightening, or the whispering of the trees. The personal way of conceiving objects and events preceded the impersonal or abstract; religion preceded philosophy. Such animism is the poetry of religion, and the religion of poetry. We may see it at its lowest in the wonder- struck eyes of a dog that watches a paper blown before him by the wind, and perhaps believes that a spirit moves the paper from within; and we find the same feeling at the highest in the language of a poet. To the primitive mind-and the poet in all ages- mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, stars, sun, moon and sky are sacra mentally holy things, because they are the outward and visible signs of inward and invisible souls. There is wisdom as well as beauty in this animism; It is good and nourishing to treat all things as alive.,

Since all things have souls, or contain hidden gods, the objects of religious worship are numberless. They fall into six classes

1. Celestial

2. Terrestrial

3. Sexual

4. Animal

5. Human

6. Divine

Of course we shall never know which of our universe of objects was worshipped first.

Most human gods, however, seem to have been in the beginning merely idealized dead men. The appearance of the dead in dreams was enough to establish the worship of the dead, for worship, if not the child, is at least the brother, of fear. Men who had been powerful during life, and therefore had been feared, were especially likely to be worshiped after their death. Among several primitive peoples the word for god actually meant “ a dead man “; even today the English word SPIRIT and the German word GEIST mean both ghost and soul. The Greeks, the Hindus, invoked their dead precisely as the Christians were to invoke the saints. So strong was the belief-first generated in dreams- in the continued life of the dead, the primitive men sometimes sent message to them in the most literal way; in one tribe of the chief, to convey such a letter, recited it verbally to a slave, and then cut off his head for special delivery; if the chief forget something he sent another decapitated slave as a postscript.

Gradually the cult of the ghost became the worship of ancestors. All the dead were feared, and had to be propitiated, lest they should curse and blight the lives of the living. The ancestor worship was so well adapted to promote social authority and continuity, conservatism and order, that is soon spread to every region of the earth. The institution held the family powerfully together despite the hostility of successive generations, and provided an invisible structure for many early societies. And just as compulsion grew into conscience, so fear graduated into love; the ritual of ancestor-worship, probably generated by terror, later aroused the sentiment of awe, and finally developed piety and devotion It is the tendency of gods to begin as ogres and to end as loving fathers; the idol passes into an ideal as the growing security, peacefulness and moral sense of the worshipers pacify and transform the features of their once ferocious deities. The slow progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.

Such experiences convinced early man that every living thing had a soul, or secret life, within it , which could be separated from the body in illness, sleep or death. ‘Let no one wake a man brusquely, “said one of the Upanishads of ancient India ,” For it is a matter difficult of cure if the soul finds not its way back to him”(Brihadaranyaka Upanished,4.,3;.). Not human alone but all things had souls; the external world was not insensitive or dead, it was intensely alive; if this were not so, thought primitive philosophy, nature would be full of inexplicable occurrences, like the motion of the sun, or the death dealing lightening, or the whispering of the trees. The personal way of conceiving objects and events preceded the impersonal or abstract; religion preceded philosophy. Such animism is the poetry of religion, and the religion of poetry. We may see it at its lowest in the wonder- struck eyes of a dog that watches a paper blown before him by the wind, and perhaps believes that a spirit moves the paper from within; and we find the same feeling at the highest in the language of a poet. To the primitive mind-and the poet in all ages- mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, stars, sun, moon and sky are sacra mentally holy things, because they are the outward and visible signs of inward and invisible souls. There is wisdom as well as beauty in this animism; It is good and nourishing to treat all things as alive.,

The idea of human god was a late step in a long development; it was slowly differentiated through many stages, out of conception of an ocean or multitude of spirits and ghosts surrounding the inhabiting everything. From the fear and worship of vague and formless spirits men seem to have passed to adoration of celestial, vegetative and sexual powers, than to reverence for animals, and worship of ancestors. The notion of God as Father was probably derived from ancestor worship; it meant originally that men had been physically begotten by the gods. In primitive theology there is no sharp or generic distinction between gods and men; to the early Greeks and Hindus, for example their gods were ancestors, and their ancestors were gods. A further development came when, out of the medley of ancestors, certain men and women who had been especially distinguished were singled out for clearer deification; so the greater kings became gods, sometimes even before their death. But with this development we reach the historic civilizations.

To quote Powys,John Cowper,in his book ,” The meaning of culture. Nature begins to present herself as a vast congeries of separate living entities, some visible, some invisible, but all possessed of mind- stuff, all possessed of matter-stuff, and all blending mind and matter together in the basic mystery of being….The world is full of gods! From every planet and from every stone there emanates a presence that disturbs us with a sense of multitudinousness of god-like powers, strong and feeble, great and little, moving between heaven and earth upon their secret purposes”.