This will have to only be a cursory sketch of some ideas that I would have like to compile as more evidenced research before publishing at all, but as I feel the direction will be intuitive, I’d like to start my own thoughts moving (or pacing back and forth) on the subject.
In the field of comparative religion, as well as in psychoanalysis, we find recurrent themes of life after death (continuity of non-corporeal consciousness) and other attempts to reconcile consciousness by assigning the personality to some extra-corporeal soul-essence that is at once identified with the physiological body, and also capable of transcending it—sometimes in journeys through reincarnation (bardos), sometimes as the moral conscience judged by universal supra-conscience (as in Egyptian or Christian afterlife judgement by omniscient dieties), and sometimes in dreams or intuitive states that seem to transcend familiar spaciotemporal bodily senses (such as “knowing” when a friend is going to call before they do, or other feats of seemingly mystical intuition and premonition).
These clusters of belief form vague cultural notions about our identities in subconscious ways that shape our cultural and personal relationships to life, grief, kinship, and morality.
But archeological evidence (and common presumption) seems to suggest that the conception of non-corporeal consciousness is a cultural development that in some way precedes complex social organization (civilization, domestication, and agriculture)—particularly since when we examine the archeological record, we find changes in burial or mortuary practices to equate to changing feelings and beliefs around the nature of individual identity.
The onset of ritualized burial suggests to archeologists and anthropologists a newfound mortuary sentimentalism, likely borne of a postmortal grief experienced by surviving members of the lost member’s tribe, family, clan, or kinship group.
Burial itself seems to our modern sentiment to suggest an evolution in awareness around the role of the rational mind and the place of human empathy in collective conscientiousness. Yet there is no evidence that the relationship between humans prior to archeological records of mortuary sentimentalism were any less fond, endearing, philosophical, and wholesome—only that they did not ascribe living personality to the unliving remains of the human they had once loved and shared life with.
Often, paleolithic remains of relatively sedentary dwelling places (seasonal shelters inhabited periodically by early bands of hunter-gatherer humans) are found in waste middens, such as those used for shells, craft fragments, or bones which accumulate from long term local harvesting patterns.
Now, before anyone feels that this topic is dismal or discouraging, or that I am implying that mortuary rituals are simply frivilous idolatry, I have to stress that this is furthest from the case. I should point out that all evidence would suggest that the full depth and spectrum of human attachment and emotions was always present—that grief and a deep sense of reverence and respect may have accompanied the remains even in their journey to the midden or shell mound. This perhaps could even be seen as a way to highten the spiritual relationship between community, food source, locale, ecology, and individual identity within the group.
If anything, ones gets the sense that there may be something abstract or alienating about the later rituals that suggest non-corporeal identity to be preserved symbolically after death in the memory of the living.
Intuition would suggest that this may entail an exceptional sense of greif, or perhaps reluctance to part with the living individual’s character due to the impact of its absence.
Yet the formalization of early burial practices suggests a kind of admixture for prima causa of ritualized, symbolic internment (say with status symbols, grave goods, or totemic artifacts). The origins of this uniquely human demonstration of grief and sentimentality may lie in the role of early shamanism and its proto-hierarchal role in creating a kind of abstract identity based on ritualized division of labor, rather than a simplistic cognitive shift in awareness that suddenly apprehended individual lives as irredeemably valuable and precious to memory and social function.
Furthermore, it is exactly in line with early symbolic representations of human imagery (in effigy, art, or fetish, for example) that we see this abstract impression of an individual yet incorporeal soul-essence—or perhaps a related sense of reticense and inconsolable grief and resentment at having lost an individual who could not be reclaimed—coming into form in the paleolithic proto-religious movements which would later give rise to domestication and agriculture, perhaps through similar themes of ritualization and reification.
[Early thoughts. To be continued.]
