PREHISTORY (Religious Manifestations). - By prehistory is meant the most ancient phases of human civilizations for which written evidence is lacking and which can be partially reconstructed only on the basis of excavation remains and, secondarily, of arguments drawn by analogy from ethnological and sociological comparison with present-day primitive peoples. The division of prehistory into cultural aspects is made on the basis of the nature of the tools left by prehistoric man, which are of rough stone (Paleolithic), polished stone (Neolithic), and metal (copper, bronze, iron). The discovery and use of metals gave a more vigorous impulse to the development of the various peoples and hastened their entry into history.
Prehistoric knowledge is derived almost exclusively from excavations. From these there also emerged documents, by now copious, of religious manifestations of the most ancient Mediterranean and European peoples. The immense span of millennia embraced by prehistory, not calculable with sufficient approximation, goes back to the first remains known today left by man, that is, to the first phases of the most ancient period of the Quaternary geological era, the Pleistocene.
It is characterized by the enormous expansions of the glacier of northern Europe, of the Alpine, Pyrenean, etc. glaciers. A grandiose and complex fact: the phases of expansion were in fact interspersed with interglacial phases, that is, of retreat of the glaciers themselves. Gradually, from the general Pleistocene environment, one passed to the present one of the Holocene, that is, to the second period of our Quaternary era.
The term Paleolithic designates the industries and human civilizations that developed during the Pleistocene: weapons and utensils were almost exclusively of stone. Even pottery vessels were still lacking. From those most remote times prehistory descends to the first development of civilizations and of the protohistoric cultural aspects, to the dawn of classical times. It is not easy to set a precise limit between prehistoric and protohistoric cultural aspects, also because peoples far from the great centers of early cultural development (the countries of the eastern Mediterranean) lagged behind, often preserving archaic usages and customs for a long time.
The life of Pleistocene man depended on an extremely harsh environment; he would have remained defeated if in the hard struggle for existence he had not possessed, besides exceptional physical aptitudes, particular spiritual dispositions, which also led him, even from that time, to a gradual perfecting of the stone industry, to a first social development, and to religious and artistic manifestations. There is, for example, probable evidence of a cult of skulls as far back as the lower Paleolithic phases. In large natural recesses existing at Choukoutien near Beijing, beside hearths and remains of a very rough stone industry, lay skulls of an extremely primitive human being. Skulls of the cave bear, an extinct species, and selected long bones of the same beast, carefully placed in special stone caskets within the anthropic deposits of two caves situated at great altitude in the heart of Alpine valleys of St. Gallen in Switzerland, the Wildermann'sloch (1,628 m above sea level) and the Drachenloch (2,445 m above sea level), are considered offerings of first fruits to a divinity. In these caves bold hunters, precisely of the cave bear, had had temporary dwellings during the recent interglacial phase.
Indications of the practice of cannibalism have been believed to be found as far back as the times of the last great expan-
glacial expansion, in one of the caves of Monte Circeo, the Guattari cave. At the bottom of it, within a kind of stone circle, lay an isolated skull, lacking the lower jaw, whose posterior part of the base had been demolished ab antiquo. It is known that modern primitive populations used precisely, for rites of cannibalism, to extract the brain from the lower part of the skull. It cannot however be excluded that it was a case of human sacrifice. The oldest burials known today, brought to light in French deposits from the times of the last great glacial expansion, already attest the general diffusion of the concept of a prolongation of earthly life in an invisible and mysterious world in which the individual preserves his own personality. This concept, which emerged ever more evident in the burials of subsequent prehistoric times, was amply declared by the written texts of historic Egypt (Book of the Dead, Book of Funerals, etc.). As one descends from the Lower Paleolithic to the more recent prehistoric civilizations, an ever broader diffusion of funerary customs and rites is perceived. The tombs of the Upper Paleolithic came to light far more numerous than those mentioned of the Lower Paleolithic. From the more recent Neolithic, Eneolithic, Bronze and Iron Age times, besides a very great number of isolated tombs, there are also numerous burial grounds of hundreds of tombs. There was in general a continuation of already ancient funerary customs, albeit with many varieties. The use of cremation of the corpse, in place of the primitive inhumation, began to spread only during the Bronze Age; but it never suppressed inhumation, always very widely used and dominant in many regions.
Foods were offered to the deceased. The grave goods themselves (tools, weapons, pottery) attest the intention of providing the deceased with the viaticum indispensable for the afterlife. Not a few already prehistoric concepts remained also in historic times. The numerous and varied manifestations of spiritual and religious life of the Upper Paleolithic peoples now attest the existence of a higher degree of civilization.
In European Upper Paleolithic deposits (French, Austrian, etc.) female statuettes in the round, of stone and ivory, were collected: idols or symbols of fertility. The woman is represented nude, almost always steatopygous. The female idol appears subsequently very widely diffused, especially in Eneolithic times, and then during the Bronze Age, from the Indus valley, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, to Crete, to the Cyclades, to Asia Minor, to Greece, to the Balkan Peninsula and throughout the European West. Not improbably to the primitive concept of fertility was added the more or less vague one of Tellus Mater.
In the innermost parts of caves frequented by Upper Paleolithic man in the regions of southwestern France (Font de Gaume, Lascaux, etc.) and, in the Iberian Peninsula, in the Cantabrian Mountains (Altamira, etc.) true artists engraved or painted with perfect style and naturalness the wild beasts that were hunted or of which memory was preserved: the mammoth, rarely; frequent the reindeer, the bison, the horse, etc. These works of art were in relation to concepts, customs, critteriolatric or, if one wishes, magico-religious. There are in fact various indications of practices plausibly held to be suitable for facilitating the capture of the animals depicted, which provided a notable part of the diet. It appears improbable that these were totemistic practices. Small figures of the animals themselves, sculpted in the round or engraved on reindeer antler or on small stone slabs, lay within Upper Paleolithic deposits of caves of the same regions. Throughout the Mediterranean slope of the Iberian Peninsula, from Malaga and from Almeria to Lerida and Tarragona (the so-called Spanish Levant), there are overhanging rocks and rock shelters, evident seats of a cult, or of cults having a connection with the life of those peoples, with painted scenes, sometimes grandiose, of deer hunting, of combats and other scenes of lived life. The figures, men and animals, still preserve naturalistic traits. They are attributed to the Upper Paleolithic. Simultaneously there develops on the same rocks a tendency toward ever more schematic representations of men and animals. Schematic representation replaces [naturalistic representation] on the rocks in Mesolithic times, and persists until Eneolithic times. At the beginning of the Holocene, once the ice had retreated, the natural environment (climate, fauna, flora, modeling of the soil, etc.) was slowly transformed into the present one. Also with slow continuity human industries and Upper Paleolithic cultural aspects passed first to those called Mesolithic and then to those called Neolithic. Neolithic man in Eurasia and Mediterranean Africa turned chiefly to pastoralism and agriculture. The fertile zones of the Near East appear to have had a preponderant role, especially in the rise and diffusion of agriculture. At the height of the Neolithic there is the introduction of the first weapons and tools of copper, the first metal used. Its metallurgy, practiced in the Near East from the 4th millennium, spread to the Mediterranean and European countries in the course of the 3rd millennium. Thus there arose the civilization to which the name Eneolithic or Chalcolithic is given, which in the island of Crete, in the Cyclades and in Asia Minor had luxuriant aspects. Funerary customs and rites developed and, as has been said, became fixed.
The action exercised by the superior cultural aspects of the Near East is discernible also in the very wide diffusion of the female idol already mentioned. The female idol also appears, painted, together with other depictions, on the aforementioned rocks of the Spanish Levant, which were seats of cult. Sometimes it is accompanied by the divine symbol of the axe: for example, in the burial hypogea of the Petit Morin valley (Seine-et-Marne). In the full Eneolithic, worship was already rendered to a bull-shaped divinity, which, for example, in Sardinia, appears represented schematically in the burial hypogea of Anghelu Ruju (Alghero). In a generically "Ligurian" and Eneolithic environment, in various French regions, in Lunigiana, in the upper Adige, the so-called anthropomorphic steles and the statue-menhirs came to light. The anthropomorphic steles are large slabs, whose anterior part bears carved a primitive and schematic human figuration. The statue-menhirs are true statues in the round. The French steles generally have a funerary character. It is unknown whether the Lunigiana steles were markers of tombs or were in relation to the cult of a divinity expressed anthropomorphically. It was also thought that they were hyperonological figurations.
The Bronze Age civilization, which arose from the Eneolithic, developed in the second millennium B.C. The manifestations of religious concepts and cult attributable to this civilization, particularly numerous, offer evidence of broad, sometimes intense, cultural contacts between the Mediterranean and European peoples. They corresponded to concepts which profoundly permeated spiritual life, from the place of worship to the tomb: concepts more or less different in the various regions, which came to play a notable part in the formation of prehistoric and historic religions. Such concepts indeed possessed the continuity naturally inherent in whatever pertains to religion. The Bronze Age civilization in Crete and in the Aegean lands, itself also a continuation and development of the Eneolithic one, appears as a luxuriant protohistory. In Crete, in the properly Minoan times and in those immediately following, places of worship were mountain peaks, caves, and shrines within the great palaces (Knossos, Phaestos). One of the most frequent symbols of the divinity was the double axe, often depicted superimposed on the so-called "horns of consecration," that is, on the schematization of the bull's head. At other times the head of the bull, the sacred animal par excellence in Crete, is reproduced instead in its entirety. Another symbol of the divinity was the defensive weapon, the typical bilobate shield. A baetylic cult was also practiced, that is, a cult rendered to a sacred stone or baetyl. The symbols mentioned were represented in sacred or religio-funerary scenes, in which the sacred tree is also seen. Probable religious symbols were also the pillar and the column, which in the representations often appear associated with evidently sacred animals: the lion, the dove, etc. Some scenes present the female divinity dominating the forces of nature and of generation. Most of her qualities passed into Greek mythology to Rhea, to Cybele, etc. Fantastic monsters, the griffin, the sphinx, etc., were repeatedly depicted. In the Mycenaean world of the second half of the 2nd millennium as well, the figurations of the bull's head with the double axe, the naked goddess with the doves, and other symbols reappear. The Aegean cultural action radiated widely also onto the coasts of the Ionian Sea, in Sicily and in Sardinia.
The multiform religious manifestations of civilizations already known in considerable number in our country and in western, central and northern Europe give the idea of a variety of conceptions of the divinity, which not infrequently appear akin or analogous to the Cretan-Mycenaean ones. Various divinities had their seat, or were personified, in mountains, rivers and springs. Man, shepherd and farmer, rendered a form of cult no longer to the animals that were hunted, but to the one that was most useful to him, the bovine. Let one cite a sacred mountain, Monte Bego (2873 m) in the Maritime Alps: in the varied rock engravings of the smoothed rocks, situated above 2000 m a.s.l., the figure of the bovine predominates. The animal is represented for the most part with extreme schematism; sometimes also yoked to the plough. In Sardinia the cult of a bull-shaped divinity, already documented in the aforementioned burial hypogea in Anghelu-Ruju of the full Eneolithic, continued also in Nuragic times; the bull protome adorned the megalithic construction covering, in the temple of S. Anastasia di Sàrdara, the spring of health-giving water. The bull-shaped divinity, protector of the tomb, thus appears connected also with the cult of health-giving waters. The cult of the weapon is repeated; examples are the very engraved rocks of Monte Bego, where alongside the bovine the dagger, the sword and the battle-axe were represented with great frequency. In the Nuragic temple of S. Vittoria di Serri (Cagliari), the true double axe — a Cretan one — was raised on a slender pillar. The farmer looked upon the Sun as the star that gives light, the star that makes the seed germinate. The solar cult was widely diffused among the Mediterranean and European peoples. Thus on the engraved rocks of southern Scandinavia the cross-bearing wheel, image of the solar chariot, appears lifted by a human figure or carried on a boat. Exceptionally, also on the engraved rocks of Monte Bego the cross-bearing wheel is seen, here closely connected with the bovine. The solar cult in Egypt was the foundation of that religion, demonstrated by the colossal temples, the great monumental inscriptions, the numerous papyri. Another solar symbol in central and northern Europe was the swan. The already mentioned cult of health-giving waters was widely diffused: here one should recall, for example, the caves of Pertosa and of Latronico in the mountains of the Salerno area. Great monuments of cult were, from the Paleolithic to the dawn of historic times, the rock figurations. Numerous ones are found in various parts of the world, also among modern primitive populations. Mention was made of the varied figuration of the rocks of the Spanish Levant, which persisted until the Eneolithic. The figuration at Monte Bego began, with a particular character, in the times that preceded the copper civilization: it continued, with the forms mentioned above, at least until the beginning of the Iron Age. It is likely that the rocks on which one engraved, or less frequently painted, were generally considered the seat of divinities. On rocks of Scandinavia, in the vicinity of watercourses or waterfalls, Neolithic peoples still devoted to hunting engraved figures of elk and of other animals, which constituted their food. During the copper civilization the agricultural peoples of Scandinavia engraved the solar wheel, the plough and other associated figures. In northern Africa, perhaps from the last times of the Paleolithic until, one may say, historic times, on rocks near springs various animals were represented, some of which later migrated and disappeared. From the most ancient times multiple other figurations accompanied, or followed, them. One may hold that the various religious concepts, in embryo in Neolithic times, developed and gradually determined during the Eneolithic and Bronze Age civilizations, did not disappear, but gradually transformed themselves, during the Iron Age civilization, with greater or lesser delay in the regions more or less distant from the great Mediterranean centers of civilization. The engraving of Monte Bego, for example, continued for several centuries still during the Iron Age. A strong Mediterranean substratum is recognizable also in the classical religions, Greek and Latin. - See plate CXXXI.
Bibliography7 works
Pietro Barocelli