What is the "First/Oldest" religion ever known?

Ok, so I just got a question about all of these "religion" forums on Hipforums. So like, out of all of these religions, which religion is like the "First One" to ever become a religion period?? What is the First Religion ever known to man?

 

Animism. Followed closely by Sun God religions.

 

AFAIK all larger modern religions are adaptations of/spawned from hinduism, and the general consensus is hinduism is the oldest religion, in the sense that we know religion in the modern world.

Of course, it is impossible for us to know with certainty, spirituality and religion has been an integral part of human communities since before civilization, probably even since before the time of homo sapiens.

Animism, as Hecubus mentioned, would certainly be the first type of "religion" to be practiced, but it's not really fair to call it a religion as such, as it is not one doctrine, or one belief, but rather a type of religion/belief system wherein it is believed that spirits inhabit things in the world. Animism sprang up independently all over the world and is still practiced in many places, in some alongside with modern religions like buddhism.

 

hinduism in the modern sense of the word is considered the oldest religion to still be practised, but there are earlier examples, some of the most significant being the sumerian religion (iraq, went on to influence the three abrahamic faiths, you'll find the great flood, tower of babel and baby floating amongst the reeds here.) and the vedic religion (india, developed into hinduism) evidence of both being practiced have been found and dated as far back as 4000 BC. However, the sumerians were the first people to ever bother keeping written records of their religious beliefs and practices (because they'd only just got the hang of writing, to be fair to all the other people) so, although it differed from city state to city state, they were the first people to have an "organised religious doctrine"

 

true that, sumerian religions were the first recorded doctrines and literature in general, but theres evidence of religion as long as there is evidence of man,essentially. even bodies buried with posessions are thought to be evidence of superstition and ritual, otherwise, why bother?

the vedic religion has a fairly big pantheon of gods, presided over by ingra, the king. but does religion have to be theistic in order to hold the name? i'd have thought that religion is merely a doctrine enforced by rituals pertaining to some supernatural phenomenon (or what would have been believed to be supernatural at the time, lightning, for example)

many cultures involved ancestor worship, surely a religious practice, although it does not necessarily involve belief in a deity.

 

of the lineage that dominates today's world, the oldest revelation would have to be whatever it was that its so called first man, which it calls adam, was teaching. (25,000 years ago, and nothing resembling writing to write it down with). there is no real clear indication of what it was, only that its direct and immediate inhiereters found cause to battle one another.

 

I define religion as an institutional structure incorporating, and using belief to further its ends and goals. At its heart it has a strong socializing purpose, but it is a man-made institution and therefore requires, sustenance and growth--which is inevitably tied to power. Therefore religions create dogma for purposes of control and manipulation. They are always based on precedents--the beliefs that came before them. But they are also cultural phenomena, i.e. shaped by the culture that gave rise to them, as well as the subsequent cultures that adopt them. Spirituality on the other hand is not a religion--until it takes on an institutional structure at which point it becomes a religion.

IN my own research, I believe that the oldest belief system was an animisitic belief system--a spirituality--along the lines of what you still see practiced among indigenous people the world over today. The more closely these people embrace a planter culture, then the more likely this primal belief system is, or has, evolved to a pseudo-religion. Examples of a pseudo-religion would be those belief systems of the Hopis and Pueblos where you start to see a group ethic take over, and ceremony loses its focus on the individual. Compare, for example, the kachina ceremonies that are performed in a group atmosphere to the vision quest of the Plains Indians which is very much individualistic experience. There is stronger moral and ethical structure to the beliefs in the South West than in the Plains as well.

But the similarities to motifs and beliefs among indigenous people the world over is amazing. Cosmologies, ontologies, methods of achieving the ecstatic experience, how the sacred interacts with humans, and so on and so forth, are very uniform between all these beliefs, and in fact we find that these very similarities play out in the roots of every religion. This is part of the precedent that all our religions are based upon and the remnants still exist. For example, the Christian cross, the Buddhist Swastika, the Hindu Stupa, and the Muslim Kaaba, are all connected through the very old tradition of the World Tree, which goes back at least as far as the Paleolithic. These are only a few of the incredible number of motifs srrounding this concept found the world over, and in each religion, and it stems from the very earliest ecstatic experiences.

This primal spirituality was multiplistic, not dualistic, and clearly developed out of a need to alleviate and protect from the more powerful forces of nature, including those forces of death, and the abundance of food. It grew out of the ecstatic experience--a profound experience of the sacred, and through which man was able to interact with the divine and manipulate the forces of nature.

As time went on, and the aurochs (the ancestor of cattle) was introduced into the Middle East and North Africa, an early herding culture began to rise. Fertility was very key to their endeavors, and therefore the Goddess, the Queen of Fertility began to rise in prominence above the rest of the pantheon of hunter-gatherer gods. Over time, the planter culture began to overcome the herders (just as you saw play out in the American frontier as cowboys were replaced by ranchers and farmers). But there too fertility was of utmost importance. As this occurred in the fertile crescent and along the Levant and across the Mediteranean, it also was happening in China, and also in Central America.

Foremost on the mind of the planters, was also the problem of fertility. But their planting required understanding of the vegetative cycle--the seasons, and the death and rebirth of the crops. This is the cycles that Meagain refers to, and the importance of the sun and Venus. Once again the Goddess reigned supreme. But as man began to move into villages and come together in groups, in order to undertake the huge task of clearing fields and growing enough food to provide surplus for the times his fields were not producing, he began to shape and understand the group ethic that has been a part of civilization ever since. He also, for the first time, understood the value of land---the land where his crops, and his fixed dwellings---his home, storehouses, barns, and that of his neighbors---his village--were. He had to work together in new ways to protect, sustain, maintain and grow this village, and this required a new social structure--that of the institution.

One of the most important institutions was the one that appealed to the Goddess, so that the fields would be fertile, and the rains would come. Therefore it was necessary for preistesses and a queen to have power in these early villages. The oldest and first religions were therefore the Goddess cults. But again as time moved on, the male god rose to power. The Bible in fact is largely a history of what was an ongoing revolt against the power of the Goddess, and a struggle to dominance, and the securing of that dominance of the male God.

Just as all organized religions have within them remnants of the older hunter-gatherer spirituality, all organized religions also have remnants of the older goddess cults too. And human language--through all the thousands and thousands of different languages around the world, these too show evidence of a common point of origin, a common spiritual origin, and an often shared spiritual development despite his migrations both near and to far corners of the globe.

 

The oldest religion is pussy. Men have worshipped it for as long as evolution.

 

Actually---that is very true----my research really began on this subject over the oldest word in the human language---I believe it is the oldest because the root is found in all languages, and is intricately connected to the feminine archetypes----the modern English version of this word is the c-word.

And yes---it is intimately connected to religion

 

whatever it was, it wasn't anything that exists in its present form today.

probably the idea that if you paint a stick figure killing a deer on the wall of your cave, you might have better odds of doing so.

 

I'd go along with animism, which is still practiced among a variety of aboriginal peoples. Of course, we don't know anything directly about prehistoric hunter-gatherer religions, and can only make inferences based on the archaeological evidence and the ways of present-day hunter-gatherers, who have admittedly been "contaminated" by some contact with the modern world. Religion seems to have developed about the time the modern human brain evolved awareness of other minds, and the ability to perceive patterns and agency in the environment, and to contemplate death. Humans are, to our knowledge, the only species who can contemplate their own death. Grave goods and red ochre on recovered skeletons going back to Paleolithic times suggest a concept of an afterlife. The notion that nature is animated by spirits was a rational outgrowth of the ability to perceive potential predators, the experience of encountering deceased ancestors and chimeras in dreams, and the perception of one's own nightly adventures while dreaming. The social aspect is also important. Dreamed experiences were re-enacted in powerful group-bonding rituals, and passed on to youth through initiation rites. So religion functioned early-on to tie members together and set them apart from other groups. Also, specialists developed who purported to have superior understanding of the spirit world and how to control it. These shamans were the precursors of priests who emerged with the development of chiefdoms and gods much later. Paleolithic cave paintings and bear cults indicate a belief in sympathetic magic. The buxom "Venus" figures of the Upper Paleolithic suggest fertility cults--either that or cave man porn!

 

Moon worshipping matriarchal religions. or as someone else said, pussy. <3

 

It should be noted that "hinduism" as such does not even conform to many moderners' understanding of "religion." There are a lot of confusing issues that come into play, but hinduism is kind of a catch-all term for an extremely varied group of belief systems that don't necessarily share any doctrines or common origin.

Versions of Hinduism differ greatly from many people's understanding of the term religion in that: many strands of Hinduism are not theistic; Hinduism has no church or unifying institutional structure; Hinduism has no creedal system and is usually fairly unconcerned with orthodoxy in general.

Hindu-ism as such is a misnomer. "Hindu" simply means "coming from the Indus region" and was a term applied to the native belief systems by outsiders when they arrived in India.

THAT SAID, among the so-called "world religions" it is probably true that Hinduism is the oldest. One reason is that it was probably a continuous outgrowth of man's oldest religious yearnings and as such had no "starting point"...even the penning of the Vedas was not hugely revolutionary as they were probably simply codifying what was believed by the Aryans for centuries before. Most other religions have some dramatic "starting" point: a founding prophet or historical event, for instance. Hinduism has no such; it wasn't "started" by anybody or anything, or if it was that figure is lost in prehistory. When the Vedic religion infiltrated and suffused the subcontinent, it readily absorbed beliefs and practices from the native tribes, which again were as old as man's presence in the region (probably animistic or similar), and which have as much claim to being the authentic roots of so-called "Hinduism" as the Vedic religion of the Aryan invaders.

EDIT: The last parapgraph also holds true of animism. It depends, I suppose whether one is considering the so-called "world religions" (a title reserved for religions with a certain number of adherents or with certain institutional structures), or whether one is indeed taking in the scope of ALL human beliefs and practices. If the latter, yes animism is seemingly the oldest.

 

Some good points and I largely agree except that I would say that it most certainly had its starting point--largely at the hands of the Aryan invaders. The Dravidian and other indigenous followers tended to be followers of Goddess cults, and while the Aryan invaders brought their own goddess traditions, their focus was on the masculine. There are historical traditions that point to their being offended by the blatant sexuality of the darker skinned indigenous Indians. There was a period when they tried to stamp it out, and put people to death for their pre-Aryan tantrism.

However they did eventually come to accept it, and created one of the first, and most far reaching examples of what has been a very long tradition of Indo-European cultural-spiritual assimilation for purposes of control, socialization, and institutionalization. In other words they assimilated the local traditions into their own, but in a hierarchical framework that gave them the superiority. The Goddess cults they absorbed were born of planter cultures but were probably more pseudo-religions than actual religious institutions (but at least in the planter cultures, they had certainly given up part of their more indigenous animism, much like the other goddess cults that stretched across the fertile crescent and into the Mediterranean). The Aryans arrived in India with an early form of religion born of a planter culture that still also had retained some of its animistic roots---which are clearly seen in the Rig Veda---but just the nature of the traditions they carried with them, the caste system, and even just the ability to swing things so heavily in their favor suggest that the institutional structure was strongly there, and probably more advanced than that of the goddess cultures.

The religion they created in India after absorbing the indigenous elements is one of the most succesful institutions of all time. Europe has given up the Indo-European caste system many centuries ago, yet in India it is still going strong. The subjugation of women is still live and well, even despite the spiritual respect given to the feminine. Any outside threat to the institution that comes to India in the form of an alien religious institution is quickly absorbed into the overall Hindu framework----for example, Christianity---has been absorbed and Jesus is just another deva in just another set of unique sects.

This has been repeated over and over by Indo-Europeans entering new lands---for example, the Romans entering the Celtic and Pictish lands of the British Isles----ghosts and demons that still exist today in British folklore and superstition are former Gods that the Romans did not want, while others became Saints or were turned into versions of Jesus or Mother Mary or what have you. In Mexico the Aztec Corn Maiden became Mother Mary of Guadelupe, the Philippine Rice God, the Santo Nino (or Baby Jesus) and so forth...

But none of these later versions were as strong and succesful as the institution of Hinduism. And at the very top of that institutional structure today---you still have the lighter skinned descendants of those same Indo-European invaders.

 

I thought **** came from the Sanskrit word kunda, meaning starting place of kundalini. Apparently women are more spiritually inclined.

Ok just found more information

So in a way kundalini rises from the root chakra which is associated with the sex organ, but also stored at the base of the spine.

 

Perhaps this
http://www.apex.net.au/~mhumphry/aborigin.html

 

Religion is a definitive term. Animism is probably as close as it gets to primitive man having first discovered religion as an explanation for his genesis. After that was the Goddess religion, then polytheism, then monotheism through the influence of the Judeo-Christian belief system.

 

The word is the base of a huge constellation of words that are attached to the feminine archetype. Actually just the sanskrit root for kunda covers everything from the menses to a sacred basin or vase for offerings. But at the center it refers to the female organ and goes way back into ancestral Africa. You mention Ancient Eqyptian, and even Budges dictionary of Hieroglyphics has tons of feminine words connected to the K~n~t root that apply to the female organ, sexuality, or the feminine.

Here is some basic examples I provide in Chapter 1 of my book on this subject just to make a basic case:

"Consider, for example, the following words for vagina: cont (Welsh); cunnus (Latin); kunthus (Greek); kunti (Sanskrit); kuntil (Tagalog for clitoris); ku (Archaic Japanese); kuma (Swahili); kuhr (Chorti dialect of Mayan); komari (Rapa Nui); chumim (Yoeme (Yaqui)); choocho (Alabama); gusina (Tairona---tribal group in Northern Colombia). All of these are easily traced back to primal etymological roots, such as k–n or k-n-t.

In order to validate that there is a common evolution, we should look not only at the words representing the vagina, but other words that are part of the archetype of the vagina. For example, kuntkunta (Lakota for grooved); kund (Bantu, to love, copulate); kantut (Tagalog, to copulate); kona (Icelandic, woman); cu (Old English, cow---one of the oldest forms of the Great Mother, or creatrix); container (English); gon (Lao---cavity, concave shaped hollow); kun (Mandarin---female or feminine element of nature); cwn (Celtic---cleft, valley); kuu (Finnish---moon); kund (Old Frisian---birth); khoon (Punjabi---blood); gonna (Italian---skirt); kenah (Semai (a tribal group of Indonesia)---wife); khnmt (Ancient Egyptian---prostitute); gelin (Turkmen---girl); Gua (Chinese creatrix); kangusina (Tairona---the Mother Vagina, creatrix); zhena (Czech---woman).

Our generic term, vagina, fits this same etymology. It originally meant ‘sheath’ which is part of the constellation of concepts and words that surrounds the archetype of the vagina, and as we shall see, the ~gin~ part of the word is clearly an evolution, just like the Czech word zhena, from the k-n root."

These are just items I pulled out of the air--there are plenty of stronger examples---but I also wanted to include examples here that demonstrated the devolution of consonants.

But what is more interesting I thnk is that you find a lot of evidence of the feminine terms being applied to the male, and you find the vestigial results in modern languages as well. This tells me that in the earliest usages of this language, it was not strictly feminine---but that both the male and female had an equal standing in the powers (inclusing the creative powers) of the universe. This certainly fits a multiplistic understanding of the world that is common even among hunter gatherers and indigenous today.

An example of this is the English term for penis---it uses an ~n~ which is very feminine, and the ~s suggests a possible devolution from a harder consonant-----i.e it could have devolved from a ~n~t. Coincidentally the p~ suggests a connection to a seconday word for the female organ that is found through out the world as well----peki, puki, poki. (By the way, languages that use this seconday form are still very abundant in the kund root referring to the feminine, and often use kund too to also referencing to the female organ).

 

The oldest known temple is in Turkey and is 11,000 years old.