The religious impulse has been with man since at least the beginnings of language. Monotheistic conceptions of the sacred and divine have come to dominate humanity's consciousness and practices at large. Prior to monotheistic and particularly Judeo-Christian hegemony, the diverse cultures and peoples of the human race acknowledged many gods and goddesses and other beings of supernatural power. This is not a revelation, of course, but I think it is not as commonly known or understood as many imagine.
For the overwhelming majority of the history of religion, human conceptions of the sacred have been by all accounts shamanistic, animistic, nature-centered, polytheistic, pantheistic, and quite frankly, in a word, magical. One might look to the ancient Celts, the Germanic and Norse pagans, the Sumerians, the Slavs, or any number of indigenous peoples from the Amazonian rainforest to the wide Siberian tundra--all such peoples venerated nature as a living creative force and all measured their being in relation to the cosmos. The monotheistic notion that sets a single and all-powerful (almost invariably male) God at the crown and source of creation--this was alien to the understanding of most of the peoples on the planet for literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. To believe their worldview and cosmology to be the naive and misguided product of savage ignorance or pagan superstition was as inconceivable to their minds as the sense and reality of their views have come to be seen by the majority of humans who walk in the world today.
To see this proven relativity of religious conceptions among the diverse peoples of the world both in the current and ancient worlds is the privilege of an anthropologically and historically trained mind. There is in fact nothing at first glance obvious about this relativity of religious perspective. For the mind and view of the monotheistic believer, any alternative religion must seem not only strange and other but wrong and in need of rectification and conversion. Indeed, it is due to the fervent missionary activities of the past two thousand years that such pre-Christian pagan and magical worldviews have been suppressed and silenced when not outright destroyed. Much of what has survived of the worldview and cosmology of the ancient, pre-Christian world has come to us through oral tradition and what scholars have come to call "folklore." In addition, it should be noted that a significant part of this cultural recovery process has the painstaking work of scholars and particularly philologists and literary historians to thank for it.[1] Much as is the case in the matter of anthropologists who have worked to "salvage" what they could of the dying languages and folkways of the Native Americans (and other aboriginal and First-Nations peoples), so too in the realm of folkloric research has much of what otherwise would surely have disappeared forever been preserved and passed on in some (albeit less than culturally pure) capacity. Storytelling traditions, too, have played their part in keeping some meaningful sense of the ancient worldviews, religions, and cosmological conceptions alive.
The origin of language is thus intimately and inextricably tied to the origin of religion, and to any and all conceptions of the sacred and divine. This, in short, is very largely why storytelling is of such ancient and vital and perennial importance, particularly at the level of myth and ritual, which are the most ancient and universal origins for any storytelling tradition proper. Storytelling and religious ritual are and have always been part and parcel of the human experience, and arguably the most sacred and vital of human symbolic expression.
Notes
[1] It is also very much the case that so much of the knowledge that has been preserved over the past two thousand years, both literate and oral traditions, has the painstaking work of scribes and monks, a great many Catholic, to thank for it. The history of religion, and all history, is by no means a simple or uncomplicated, one-dimensional matter. Politics is one thing, scholarship is always tuned to other purposes, particularly when the prime motivation is the search for understanding and the preservation of knowledge, wheresoever discovered.
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