The Origins of World Spiritual Culture

A few years ago, I had to travel around Central Asia and take a ferry across the Amu Darya. The ferry was moving slowly. Bare flat banks overgrown with rare shrubs, green dark water. As the ferry moved, I thought that the ancient Euphrates was similar to this river, and in general all the ancient rivers where civilizations began. And then I remembered that not far from this place, from the Amu Darya, a little further to the east, an interesting event related to the spiritual origins of the human race took place.

Even before the war, when many of you were not yet born, and I was a child, there, in Central Asia, a small expedition was moving along the gorges, led by the famous archaeologist Alexei Okladnikov. He was heading for a hard-to-reach gorge located between two great rivers. For a long time there have been rumors that people have found amazing bones in this gorge, there were strange stones, as if beaten by someone's hand. And Okladnikov, who had the flair of an experienced field archaeologist, organized a small expedition there in the summer of 1938. Archaeologists climbed the rocks where only mountain goats could make their way, and eventually reached the cave. This place was called Teshik-Tash, in Russian simply "cave". And when Okladnikov and his assistants got there, he found the remains of a man on an almost flat floor. He immediately realized that it was a child, at least a teenager. The archaeologist was especially interested in the fact that almost the entire skull has been preserved. Okladnikov collected and glued together one hundred and fifty pieces of the fossilized skull: the skull was preserved almost entirely.

It was the skull of a boy of a completely different race than Homo sapiens. And when it came to the jaw and brow ridges, Okladnikov identified him as a Neanderthal, homo neanderthalensis, or homo primigenius, as he is sometimes called. In the system of biological nomenclature, he was considered homo only by his kind; He was considered the predecessor, and some considered the ancestor of man. The question of how closely related we are to Neanderthals is still hotly debated. These people, or anthropoid creatures, lived in a vast area from Northern Europe to the eastern shores of China, from Africa to Central Asia. About 40 thousand years ago, they disappeared everywhere, their bones are no longer found; They are replaced by us, the genus Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens. And when Okladnikov dismantled and then reassembled this skeleton, he saw that the child had been buried, and not just abandoned; Moreover, this child of eight or nine years old in his makeshift grave was protected by the horns of a wild mountain goat. And, by the way, in Central Asia, in those places to this day, until the twentieth century, the cult of the mountain goat has been preserved. Okladnikov compared this find with others that took place in Western Europe. Several times the skulls of primitive people like Neanderthals were found, surrounded by stones of the same shape and size: the head lay like the sun, surrounded by rays. These scant but in fact impressive signs indicate that even before man became full-fledged, became a man in the full sense of the word, the only species that now lives on earth, he already harbored some religious ideas.

Scientists argue about the extent to which Neanderthals can be classified as human beings, but hardly any of them can prove their point and justify it, because we cannot penetrate the consciousness of this person, or human being, or subhuman being. After all, this is most likely a different species, undoubtedly inferior. In his culture we already find primitive stone tools, a fire that has been kept alive for quite a long time, but we do not find art, which is the most important companion of all human history. And the art of ancient people has always been associated with a spiritual, religious beginning.

A great deal in modern human society is closely connected with the beginnings of human existence in history. Social, family, sexual, cultural, artistic, traditional, territorial and xenophobic problems are all rooted in the life of an ancient man who lived on earth several tens of thousands of years before us. In our subconscious, there are still some motifs, some sounds, some echoes that echo from those times. But the man of the nineteenth century, proud, I would say, intoxicated with his civilization, believed that the world developed only in a straightforward manner, that primitive man was an inferior man in all respects, was a savage man.

We first encounter such an idea in the Roman poet Lucretius Carus, who viewed the history of mankind as an ascent upward: from darkness, barbarism, ignorance and savagery to civilization. True, Lucretius Carus believed that then everything would fall apart and degrade, but this is another matter. In the nineteenth century, it was thought that there would be no degradation. Borrowing from Christianity the idea of the Kingdom of God as the goal of human existence, as the goal of history, many thinkers of the nineteenth century, and the educated strata of society in general, for some reason came to believe that the world was flying upward like a rocket, and nothing could stop its progressive movement. The word "progress" has become something of a "sacred" term. When they said "progressive," it automatically meant "good." And it seemed that every conquest of man, every step he took on the path of complication of technology or new discoveries in the field of science, contributed to progress, and only darkness was behind, the darkness of the dark Middle Ages. Of course, there was a small gap in antiquity, and then the darkness of the East and, finally, the long darkness of primitive life.

Of course, this idea had to be confirmed by something, and confirmation began to be sought from the time of the great geographical discoveries, when Europeans first moved across the ocean, when they discovered America, when they first really got acquainted with the black inhabitants of Africa, the inhabitants of China and generally unknown countries until then. But at the same time, when faced with people standing at the lowest stage of material civilization, many decided that this was the same wild, ancient primitive man, and they were sure that these newly discovered people were creatures not much different from animals. In the late 19th century, Darwin's evolutionist Ernst Haeckel argued that savages had more in common with highly evolved animals such as apes and dogs than with advanced European humans. When Darwin came to Tierra del Fuego in his youth, he described the Fuegians as follows: wild people, eyes popping out of their sockets, a dull expression on their faces, foam on their lips – there is nothing human. And this opinion very quickly took root in science in general, and, in particular, in anthropology, which was emerging at that time. The thought arose that a person has everything bright only ahead of him and the sooner he gets rid of what was in the past, the better for him. And since everyone knew well that primitive people had some kind of religion, faith, they hastened to belittle this faith, to depict it as just a crude superstition, as some kind of barbarism; In general, they wanted to show that the beginnings of religion are rooted in the darkness of ignorance, in man's fear of the forces of nature, in powerlessness, in limitation, in other words, in something that progress can and must overcome.

Such was the ideology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but gradually this myth of inferior, savage people began to dissipate. Probably, many of you have heard the names of famous scientists in their time (about 100 years ago), such as Edward Taylor (he was one of the greatest specialists in mythology and primitive religions) and James George Frazer, whose books, for example, "The Golden Bough", have recently been republished in our country. Without communicating with people of the primitive level, with the so-called savages, receiving materials from third hands, they created their own constructions about the savagery, darkness, naivety and primitiveness of a person standing at a low material level of civilization development. But then many of them were forced to abandon this view. Miklouho-Maclay was one of the first who, albeit for a short time, entered the world of these people. And what did he discover? That these are the same people, with the same experiences, passions, sins, mistakes, with the ability to think logically, clearly. Miklouho-Maclay wrote: "I tried not to penetrate into their intimate life." He was a very tactful man; And in general, he believed that such a short time as he lived on the Guinea coast was not enough to understand the soul of primitive man. But Miklouho-Maclay and other pioneer explorers were followed by whole armies of new explorers of the mysterious inhabitants of forests, savannahs and prairies. What did they discover? It turned out that in the wilds of the Amazon or in the semi-deserts of Australia live people of high ancient culture. It is different, unlike ours. Australians, for example, have a complex system of relationships and rituals; They have a huge number of legends, tales, myths. Australians have a certain idea of man, nature and the supreme principle, and on the basis of these ideas they build social relations and culture. It began to become clear that primitive man is primitive only in one thing – in technology, in civilization, and mentally he is by no means primitive.

One of the researchers said: if you see a so-called savage who sits under a tree, motionless staring at one point, do not rush to think that he is simply sitting without a purpose, these people are characterized by a deep inner life. One of the travelers, who lived for a long time in the heart of Africa, in the dense forests of the Congo, where the oldest animals that have already become extinct all over the world have survived after meeting with pygmies, noted that these people have sincerity, wit, intelligence, and they have a number of the highest religious ideas. The moral level of these savages turned out to be not only not lower than European, but much higher. This does not mean that primitive man is necessarily virtuous, there is no direct connection. But low civilization and primitive way of life do not interfere with the development of a very delicate spiritual structure.

Eventually, many scholars began to come to the conclusion that there was an important spiritual element underlying these cultures, which gave us an outline, however inaccurate, of how our ancestors lived many millennia ago. And if this outline is at least partially correct, we must admit: yes, the supreme, spiritual, sacred, religious, moral were fundamental in their lives.

Here we come to a very important thing. Take, for example, a quaint Indian temple, Hindu or Buddhist, a stupa or a Muslim mosque with its austere forms, the Cathedral of St. Catherine. The Cathedrals of Christ the Savior, the Intercession on the Nerl, the Egyptian pyramids, the project of the Palace of the Soviets, in a word, any work of architecture or painting, ecclesiastical or secular: each of these structures is the inner embodiment of the vision that people have, the way they intuitively realize the essence of existence, the embodiment of their faith in the broad sense of the word. And if the Egyptian felt the life of the spirit as eternity, then the works of Egyptian art were the embodiment of eternity. If the ancient Greek felt that here, next to him, in his small secluded world, lived some living forces of the universe, he depicted them so humanly, so closely, that nymphs, satyrs and gods looked like his brothers and sisters.

When we speak of the foundations of any culture, we must first of all ask ourselves not what material forms forge it, but what spirit underlies it. And running through the history of civilization in our mind's eye, we can always determine exactly what spirit is behind the culture. Moreover, we know that when a person begins to be destabilized, confused, or crisis in the spiritual sphere, then destabilization embraces the entire culture. That is why today we want to look into the history of spirituality, into the past of the civilization of our country and the whole world, not out of idle curiosity ("how was it before?"), but in order to understand the deep and indissoluble connection between culture and faith, the connection that was forgotten, discarded, and deliberately denied. Life and practice have confirmed the old truth: when the roots are undermined, the tree also dries up, and in order to revive the roots, it is necessary to understand: what do they need? They need life-giving moisture and soil. Soil is life, earthly existence; The life-giving moisture is the spirit that nourishes it. That is why it is so important for us today to think about where a person comes from and where he is going. Of course, in the textbooks you have read, you have often come across the idea that primitive man was an atheist or, as we have been taught, a spontaneous materialist. It is rather difficult to accept this point of view, if only because if an idol can remain from a pagan, a fetish from a fetishist, a cross or some other sacred sign from a Christian, then what material sign can the spontaneous materialism of primitive man leave behind it? It is something like the wireless telegraph that the ancients had in one story: wireless because no wire was found in the ground.