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The Illustrated World's Religions--Chapter IX

Chapter IX ("Primal Religions") Questions to Guide Your Study:

1. What are “primal religions” and what characteristics do they share in common according to Huston Smith (page 232)?

2. How do we know about primal religions if they are all pre-history religions (page 232)?

3. How do you respond to the statement, “If God does not evolve, neither (it seems) does homo religious; not in an important respect” (page 232).

4. What does Smith say about the role of the sacred and the profane in primal religions (page 232)? What similarities do you see between primal religions and Restoration philosophy?

5. What’s an archetype? What does Smith mean when he says “Only while they are conforming their actions to the model of some archetypal hero do the Arunta feel that they are truly alive, for in those roles they are immortal” (page 232)?

6. What do you think Smith means when he says “Aboriginal religion turns not on worship but on identification…no priests or congregations; only the Dreaming and conformance thereto” (page 232)? How does that contrast with modern Christianity?

7. Why is oral tradition considered more alive than written literacy (page 234)? What lesson does that hold for today’s church?

8. How does orality or the absence of a written “scripture” influence the religion of a group (page 234)?

9. What’s the meaning of the Oren Lyons (Onondagon tribe) story (page 235)? In that world view, “who are you?”

10. What is the effect of the various views of time (linear, cyclical, & atemporal/eternal) on the religious life of a person or culture (page 235-236)? Into which view of time does Restoration theology fall?

11. What’s a totem and what is totemism (page 238)?

12. Smith describes the primal world in terms of a) tribal identity, b) totemism, c) lack of separation between sacred and daily activities, d) the lack of separation between the visible and invisible worlds (one cosmos), and e) concern for harmony as opposed to this life being “a place of exile or pilgrimage” (page 238). What similarities and differences are their between this perception of “this world,” modern Christianity, and your personal religion?

13. Smith says “a common stereotype pegs primal religions as polytheistic (e.g. belief in or worship of more than one god).” Is this accurate (page 241)?

14. What does it mean when Smith says “Primal religions separate divine Unity from its expressions less than the historical religions do…they contain nothing that is comparable to the anthropomorphic (e.g. ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman things) polytheism of the early Europeans” (page 241)?

15. What does it mean when Smith contrasts the symbolist mentality (e.g. one who employs symbols or symbolism) of primal religions to stating that “modernity (e.g. involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas) recognizes no ontological connection[1] between material things and their metaphysical (e.g., of or relating to the transcendent or to a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses or supernatural), spiritual roots” (page 241)? Why does Smith then launch into a discussion of the shaman?

16. What’s the conclusion that Smith offers for this chapter (page 242-243)? What’s your conclusion?