On my morning walk I took a different route, through the valley fields, instead of through the wooded hills. Along part of my way there was the roar of traffic from a nearby road, then, moving away from it, I could hear the birds again. According to the Merlin app, these differed from the ones I hear in the forest: crested lark, meadow pipits and the Eurasian jackdaw were the ones identified. I also saw two mountain gazelles, gliding away from me through the tall grasses. They too emit a hoarse caw like a bird and, with their long leaps, they almost fly.
Then, through my earpods I listened to a lovely set called Massar (Arabic for Journey) by a female DJ new to me who goes by the name Zaia: “based out of Tulum” says SoundCloud. Where is this Tulum?
And I heard a bit more of The Patterning Instinct – a chapter dealing with the development of religions. Hunter-gatherer societies worship nature spirits: trees, sacred springs and animals figure in their religions; they develop skilled shamans, rather than priestly classes and express greater trust in a bountiful universe to provide all that humans need for their sustenance. Agrarian societies approach nature with greater prudence and less trust. They give rise to anthropomorphic gods who need to be propitiated in order for the crops to grow and celestial order to be maintained. Agrarian societies develop polytheistic, henotheistic or monotheistic religions. The features of these religions diverge according to the differing characteristics of their societies. In some, there’s a heavenly leader requiring obeisance, in others, an empyrean bureaucracy with its own fastidious taxation system.
Jumping ahead of my reading, I know that modern faiths like Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Sikhism, Bahaism and others have been based on the teachings of a single half-mythical personality, and come in response to the development of the more sophisticated spiritual needs of city dwellers and subjects of empires. Sometimes their adherants elicit a desire to escape the settled, regimented or dissolute life of the cities, as have the desert fathers, bhikkus; Jain samans, bauls, saddhus and the modern hermits of China’s Misty Mountains.
If religions adapt and change their character according to their societies, I wonder how will be the religions of a post-apocalyptic future? Will we see the development of Zensunni wanderers and Bene Gesserits sisterhoods, as in the Dune books?