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The Religious Cults of Euro-Nordid Agriculturalists Clickable terms are red on the yellow background |
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Agrarian Cults of Neolithic Peasants and Farmers (Caucasoids, Elamitoids,
Europids) |
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Polytheism: cults of many celestial and subterranean deities Chthonism: cults of Mother Earth
and the underworld deities (from Greek χθών (khthṓn, “ground, soil”) Elementalism: belief in four primordial
elements: air, earth, water and fire Naturism: belief in natural elements
of the nature (from Latin natura “nature”)
Hylozoism: belief in the spiritual
nature of matter (from Greek hylos “matter”) |
Manism: cults of ancestral spirits of dead fathers
(Latin manes “spirit of the
ancestors”) Bovinism: cults of bovine deities
(bulls, cows, calves) Passionalism: worshiping
martyr gods of corn, death, sacrifice and suffering
Eleotheism: worshiping female goddesses of love and mercy
(from Greek έλεος, éleos “mercy”) Filial piety: cults of Chinese Confucianism expressing sons’ worship of dead fathers |
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Map 1. The
evolutionary tree of religiogenesis, folklore
traditions and magic cults (from P. Bělíček: The Synthetic Classification of Human Phenotypes and Varieties. Prague 2018, Table 8,
Map p. 24) |
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Chthonic and Hylozoic Naturism: Agricultural Polytheism The oral tradition of Neolithic peasants
can be tracked back far into remote prehistory and old myths of naturist
religions. All agricultural cults coincide in worshipping Mother Earth,
Father Heaven and their divine children symbolised by the sun, the moon,
thunder or water. Their divine family was divided into several generations of
natural phenomena with the philosophy of sexual dualism and labels of sex
gender expressing their cult of fertility. This naturist religion permeated
the polytheist faith of most peasants’ tribes all over the world and guided
also the first steps of ancient philosophical thought. Ancient Greek, Indian
and Chinese philosophy derived the origins of existence from four primordial
elements, earth, air, water and fire. Their interest in elements was not due
to chemical alchemy but to primitive agronomy focusing upon the agents of
water, soil, light, heat and fertility. These agents were animated as divine
deities that control the weather and regulate the supply of nutrient
substances needed for rich harvests. The central figure of chthonic cults
(Greek χθών, khthōn ‘earth’) was
Mother Earth, her daughter goddess of love together with her lover adored as
the god of vegetation (Egyptian Osiris, Sumerian Dumuzi, Babylonian Tammuz).
This god was celebrated as a martyr deity who departs as an old man to the
underworld every autumn and the next spring he is resurrected with the
budding spring vegetation as a little child. In The agricultural folklore gave a vivid
description of early farmers’ matriarchal communities living in quadrangular
longhouses and villages with male and female moieties. The all-pervading
principle of sexual dualism was visible also in the declensions of
Indo-European languages labelling all live and inanimate things by the
opposition of masculine or feminine gender. Their original shape is still preserved
in Negro-Australian classifiers dividing all entities into humans, animals,
trees and plants. Sex categories were subordinated to age classification and ancestral
cults worshipping old grandmothers and dead ancestors as divine
deities. In China Confucius reformed the vernacular tradition of ancestral
cults into rites of filial piety.1
In The unity of agricultural folklore is
perceptible also in fairy-tales about kings (gods of heavens) coping with
drought, dragon-slayers (gods of sun) and princesses (goddesses of mercy and
love) sacrificed to dragon monsters (gods of water) controlling the supply of
rains. It included also Australian plant-gathering aborigines whose fairy
tales told about girls raped in woods by gods and metamorphosed into trees
and flowers. Their atmosphere was reminiscent of Greek myths relating legends
about pastimes of Zeus raping nymphs on |
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The feudal regimes of the Middle Ages
subdued peasants to merciless bondage and compelled them to accept either Christianity
or Moham-medanism. Their outer appearance inherited
the mythology of the Hebrew Old Testament in adoring the monotheistic creator
Jehovah together with the entourage of his angels, but the medieval peasants
filled these legends with their own traditional religious motifs: the cult of
wooden idols, statues and icons, worshipping the martyr god Jesus, the
polytheist adoration of saints and martyrs and enshrining their relics in
reliquaries and sanctuaries. Saints were celebrated in a yearly circle of
festivals according to the time-schedule of calendaria
‘calendars’ edited by priests so as to coordinate sowing and harvesting
activities with church masses devoted to sacred patrons. Other common rites
included marching in processions to chapels and shrines of saints, singing
hymns led by priest precentors and praying for
drops of rain. The chief item of liturgy consisted in administering the act
of Holy Communion with drinking Jesus’s blood
incarnated in wine and his flesh incarnated in holy wafers. The same process of infiltrating Islam
with motifs of agrarian faiths took place in Shi'ite
cults. It involved passionate adoration of suffering saints and martyrs with
rites similar to Christian flagellant ascetism. Shi'ite men performed dancing processions with
ostentatious self-injuring, corporeal self-torture, flogging their back and
horrible bleeding while their wailing women watched the parade with cries of
merciful compassion. Such rites turned into Persian passion plays called Ta'zieh or Ta'zïye
‘condolence’. Their theological motivations was to pay homage to the tragic
fates of Shi'ite martyrs Hassan
and Hussein. These rites bore great resemblance to ancient Greek Eleusinian and medieval French mysteries and exhibited an
independent Muslim road to genres of stoic tragedy and tragic opera. The common origins of Indo-European and
Caucasoid peasants are proved by the predominant occurrence of quantitative (timekeeping) metres in Greek, Latin, Indian and Arabic
agrarian hymnology. Medieval folklore represented a two-storey building. The
upper social story was occupied by heroic epic about battles of good virtuous
and bad fallen angels while the lower ground floor was inhabited by agrarian
mysteries revering suffering martyrs. Agrarian pagan cults, however banned,
survived tacitly under the official cover of Catholic dogmas preached by the
class of feudal lords recruited from aristocratic castes of warriors of
eastern descent. Despite bans the Persian, Greek and European agriculturalist
heathen faiths stamped their way through the adversity of thraldom and gave
vent to their performative genres of miracles,
mysteries and tragedies. Extract from Pavel Bělíček: Systematic Poetics II. Literary Ethnology and Sociology. Prague 2017, pp. 43-45 |
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