Intuitive Religion
Women and Religion, Reading 1
A historical exploration
Religion is one of our most complex human realities. It has been described and defined in a myriad ways. Reduced to its core, religion is all about meaning. Religion helps us to make sense of a chaotic universe.
Who am I?
Where do I come from?
Why am I here?
What is the meaning of my life?
What am I really worth?
Why do I need to suffer?
How can I find fulfillment and happiness?In this chapter you will not find a complete or exhaustive overview of what we know about religion. Rather, consider it as a walk through a landscape. You familiarise yourself with various aspects of it. You get to know terms that are commonly used. You get a feel of the implications for human life from meeting a range of sample personalities.
The list of ‘further readings’ may give you a taste of the academic discussion.
The beginnings of religion
Religion developed from the earliest ages of human existence. It probably arose as soon as the human mind was able to consider the world with some degree of abstraction. It may have begun more than a hundred thousand years ago, when small clans of human beings roamed from one hunting place to another in East Africa, Southern Europe or the sea coasts of Asia.
Let us put ourselves back into humankind's situation at the time. Relying on archaeological evidence and adding a little from our imagination, we can reconstruct people’s day-to-day life in quite accurate terms. Let us imagine enjoying the rare privilege of meeting a typical tribal group on the coast of the Mediterranean about 60,000 B.C.
We find the human family sunning itself and playing on the beach in an ideal spot. A little river flows near by—so necessary for supplying drinking water, for people have not yet invented pots and jars. There are some rocks with overhanging cliffs under which they can find shelter —they do not yet have the ability to construct artificial houses. And the edge of the evergreen forest remains within walking distance—that is where they have to hunt for their daily meat. [Further Reading 1]
When we approach the group we may find them in a relaxed mood. They have just finished eating a reindeer, cut to pieces with chips of stone and roasted over a fire. Baka who is sitting in the centre is their undisputed leader. She is scantily dressed, brown and hairy. She gives the impression of being a wary and tough person. Zalu is her husband. Talin and Teka are other adult men, Zalu’s brothers. The rest of the group are women and children of various ages. The whole clan is one big family, with Baka as the matriarch.
At first sight this human family would look to us very much like a troop of chimpanzees or gorillas. Many of their habits and customs seem so much the same. But soon we notice important differences. These human beings walk erect. Their hands are better equipped for precise work. Their eyes look more intelligent. And, above all, they can speak, even though their words are simple and short. If we watch them during the hunt or when preparing food we observe other features which we would never find with animals. Before undertaking any work they plan their action together. And to achieve their purpose they use instruments: pieces of wood, stones, animal bones or whatever seems to fit the need. [Further Reading 2]
An interview with Baka would prove an enlightening experience. Presuming that she was prepared to speak to us (after lengthy introductions, and with the help of an interpreter), she might describe the hunting expedition in words such as these:
- ‘Baka belly ache. Men belly ache. Children belly ache.’ (She means: Yesterday everyone felt hungry).
- ‘Women dance. Men dance. Women chant. Men power-catch reindeer.’ (Yesterday evening the family performed a religious dance during which they killed a symbolic reindeer that had been drawn in the sand.)
- ‘Moon power fill night. Moon power-fill men.’ (Because of the moonlight the men felt confident they would make a good catch.)
- ‘Men enter forest, walk, walk. Men see reindeer, power-circle reindeer, run, catch reindeer, kill reindeer, bring back reindeer. Baka skin reindeer.’
Analysing Baka’s language we would find a limited number of categories. Her thinking is bound up with the immediate visible realities of her world: the forest, the women, the men, the moon, the reindeer. Most of her thoughts move in the realm of food, family, hunting, travel. Her thinking has the main task of expressing and organizing her external behaviour: her walking, running, throwing, cutting. Baka does not distinguish clearly between human beings on the one hand and animals and objects on the other. Of course, she knows that there is a difference, but this difference is not fully grasped. For her all things are alive. The sand, the river, the tree, the moon, the reindeer: all are living realities she has to face.
Reflection shows that we need not be surprised at this. We know that water flows because by gravitational laws it seeks the lowest place. Baka thinks water walks as a snake walks. For her the sun, the moon and the stars are mysterious living beings influencing her life. When Baka tries to understand this world, she will see in all things around her manifestations of ‘life’ or ‘power’. Moonlight is ‘power’. Rain is ‘power’. Plants, trees, animals and children grow by ‘power’. Accepting such a mysterious ‘power’ is an intellectual necessity for Baka, for it is the only thing that makes sense of her world. Believing there is such ‘power’, she need not be surprised at the inexplicable events of her daily life: the ebb and flood of the ocean storm and lightning, an earthquake, the birth of a baby in her womb. This is the origin of Baka’s religion. [Further Reading 3]
The birth of myths
Studies of anthropology and comparative religion prove that people slowly developed the idea of a divine reality, ‘power’, as distinct from the profane reality of everyday life. The concept of ‘tabu’, of the sacred prohibition, is one of the oldest religious notions of humankind, a notion derived from it. According to this notion one should avoid certain places, things, animals, practices or words because they would bring a person into conflict with the underlying divine ‘power’. The concept of the ‘sacred’ also grew out of this mode of thinking. This means that certain places (hill tops), days (new moon), things (stones), animals (the cow) and so on were considered to be especially filled with the divine reality. People would naturally tend to seek ‘power’ from living contact with these sacred realities which lie outside the world of ‘profane’ every-day life. After some time the divine ‘power’ experienced in such sacred objects and events was concretized in the form of ‘spirits’ or ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’.
When our ancestors conceived of the notion of ‘power' as a way of understanding reality, they produced the first ‘myths’. Anthropology defines ‘myth’ as the display of a structured, predominantly culture-specific, semantic system which enables the members of a culture area to understand each other and to cope with the unknown. In other words, myth is the way in which some important notions of a particular culture are related to one another. Myths are often expressed through stories in which the so-called ‘strong components’ of semantic systems (systems of understanding the world) are symbolically represented. [Further Reading 4]
To explain this, let us return to Baka. Baka’s family will always hunt in the same way. They will first draw a reindeer in the sand, dance around it, and then beat sticks on the figure. The men will hunt at night, preferably during the full moon. They will never kill pigs, for pigs are tabu. When we ask Baka about the reason for observing such customs, she might tell the following myth (here freely translated into our twentieth-century way of speaking):
‘Once upon a time Bina-Bina our great-great-grandmother sent her husband Rabu-Rabu to go hunting. He walked through the forest and saw a heavy sow, pregnant and ready to give birth to many young piglets. Rabu-Rabu saw that she was full of power, but he laughed to himself. He knew he should have respected the motherhood of the sow, but in his pride he did not care. He cornered the sow and clubbed her to death. He gave her and her young to Bina-Bina and her children as food. But Rabu-Rabu her husband and her eldest son died. And when the men went into the forest again, they could not catch any animal. For many days they roamed around, hunting in vain. Bina-Bina and her children cried for hunger. The whole family was desperate. In the middle of the night, while there was a full moon, they chanted and wept. And mother moon took pity. She came down to Bina-Bina and her family and showed them how to draw a reindeer in the sand, how to dance round it and how to power-catch it. The family learned this art and the men caught a reindeer during that very night.’
This kind of myth, of which we have many examples in primitive cultures, superficially resembles a simple story. We might be inclined to ask: Has it happened or not? But this would be a sorry misunderstanding. To Baka and her family the story does not express something of the past. It explains relationships with which they are vitally concerned in the present. It unifies the ‘strong elements’ of their world, such as hunting, reindeer, pig, moonlight, and fixes a norm by which they can judge them. For them the truth of the myth lies in the validity of the ‘structure’ which the myth imposes on the various ‘strong elements’ of their experience. [Further Reading 5]
As people’s thinking grew more conscious and myths more explicit, the notion of good and evil ‘spirits’, of ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’, became more pronounced. Often a ‘goddess’ as the one related in the myth, was nothing more than a personalized expressions of a power which had been experienced. Baka would speak of the moon as a ‘goddess’, because that expressed to her the fact that the men were successful in hunting on moonlit nights. But calling the moon a goddess necessarily entailed a mental picture or image of her. And having an image of her, people embellished her with a face, with weapons and with characteristic actions, until the moon goddess slowly became a real personality to them—never actually seen, but always thought to be present and encountered in her manifestations. [Further Reading 6]
Archaeology and comparative religion tell us that the most ancient representations of God which have been found are small statues which have been interpreted as ‘the mother goddess’ or the ‘goddess of fertility’. It shows that people felt the need of symbolically expressing to themselves the reality of the main divine figure shaped in their ‘mythopoeic thinking’ [= thinking that created myths]. The idol shaped in their hands was a copy of the notion that had earlier been shaped by their thoughts. [Further Reading 7]
The shortcomings of primitive religion
1. Primitive people ‘made their gods’ because they needed gods to understand the world. The historical origin of most religions can be traced to this beginning. And mythopoeic thinking is not restricted to primitive humankind alone. We may safely say that many religious convictions rest on the same grounds as those found with our ancestors. Even today many people believe in divine powers, and pray to them, because they are overcome by the same basic fears and lack of understanding that characterized our early ancestors.
It does not take long to realize that such a mythological basis for religious convictions reveals inherent weaknesses. It looks as if the existence of the ‘supernatural’ itself derived not from actual fact but from the inner psychological necessity of primitive people. Some modern scientists, and especially psychologists, have maintained that belief in God is no more than an escape from a feeling of inadequacy in day-to-day living. As a young and weak child needs a father to support and protect him, they say, so primitive man and woman needed the father (or mother) figure of God to give him or her the psychological feeling of protection. Although the rejection of all religious belief on this ground is not justified, adherents of religion generally agree that a purely mythological basis for accepting God will not do. Just as exaggerated reliance on one’s parents makes it impossible for a person to be mature and independent, so a believer may never tolerate that his or her dependence on God be a psychological substitute, that makes up for his or her lack of maturity. [Further Reading 8]
2. Another obvious defect of the mythological approach lies in its inability to examine the approach to the divine critically. Because mythopoeic people see the divine in every sphere of nature, they are likely to experience divinity under the most diverse forms. The history of natural religions confirms this fact. Mythological thinking leads to thousands of different kinds of god or goddess, usually representing different powers of nature: the gods of the sun, the moon and the stars: the goddesses of beauty, prosperity, fertility and wealth; the gods of storm, rain, lightning, of health and many other things. In many religions, external objects and animals have been considered as direct manifestations of such gods and goddesses. In this way even the most unlikely animals, such as cows, monkeys and snakes, have come to be worshipped as divine.
The reason for this development is clear. In mythopoeic thinking logical argument has no place. It is not kept in check by a critical mind. It does not distinguish between what is divine and what the divine brings about. It does not have the power of reasoning by which contradictions between various statements can be pointed out and corrected. The confusion of ‘polytheism’ [= belief in many gods and goddesses] is the immediate result of mythopoeic thinking.
3. Mythopoeic thinking necessarily considers the divine in human terms. This gives rise to another basic defect of its approach, namely its tendency to attribute ‘anthropomorphisms’ [= human traits] to God as if they are real. In primitive people’s thoughts, a god or goddess eats, drinks, walks, sleeps, fights very much like a human person, even though he or she will do so in a very special way. Hindu gods and goddesses, for example, marry or get married as if they are sexual beings. They are imagined to have hands, arms, legs, a stomach, and all other parts of the human body, even if these differ from human organs in size and number.
The continuation of intuitive religion
In the next reading we will talk about the development of religions into institutionalised forms, as ‘organised religion’. Some organised religions corrected the naive illusions of primitive cults. But, in spite of this, it would seem that at the root of all religious belief some original elements of intuitive religion remain. The reason for this is that, basically, religion intuitively concerns itself with another dimension, a dimension that is beyond human concepts and thoughts, the higher, wider and deeper dimension of meaning.
“There is more to human life than meets the eye.
More to oneself;
more to one's neighbour;
more to the world that surrounds us.
There is more to the past out of which we come;
and especially, it would seem, more to the present moment, maybe even infinitely more.
There is more to the interrelationships that bind us together as persons.
And the further we probe as human beings, the deeper the mystery we find, or the reward, or the involvement.
It is this ‘more’ that provides at least one of the bases for human religion.”
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, New American Library, New York 1964.What does ‘intuition’ mean? Rather than referring to just a ‘hunch’, an ‘inkling’ a ‘presentiment’, in the context of religion it denotes a direct perception, an insight, a penetrating way of grasping reality. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan describes it in this way:
‘When a region of blurred facts becomes suddenly lit up, illuminated as it were, to what do we owe this enlightenment? It is due not so much to a patient collection of facts as to a sudden discovery of new meaning in facts that are already well-known.’
(The Idealist View of Life, Penguin, London 1961, pp. 138-9.)He also calls it a ‘synthetic insight’, ‘which advances by leaps and bounds’; a ‘deeper consciousness’; ‘an intuitive experience’. This is the kind of experience primitive people had when they ‘understood’ that the world around them simply could not be explained without a ‘super-worldly power’ that made it what it is, an experience that still underlies religious conviction in our own time. [Further Reading 9]
Many scholars who study religion, following the example of Rudolf Otto, make the fact of religious experience itself the starting point of their apology for religion. All people and all nations give testimony of some spontaneous respect for the ‘holy’, for what is ‘numinous’, ‘divine’, ‘supernatural’. Even if in many cases this experience is linked to irrational fear of the powers of nature, the experience itself remains valid. Civilized and educated people also have this experience. [Further Reading 10]
Case study of Simone Weil (1909 – 1943)
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Simone was a radical freethinker and agnostic. She did not believe in God.
And she would remain a freethinker even after accepting Christ. She criticised the Catholic Church for not being objective in its appraisal of spiritual values in other religions (thus anticipating statements of the Second Vatican Council). She refused to be baptised in spite of believing in Jesus Christ and accepting Catholic doctrine as true. She loved Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies. After her conversion she used to attend Mass regularly and spend hours in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. In spite of all this, she did not want to enter the Church because she was critical of the Church’s stand on many issues.
The reason why I am introducing her here is that this critical, socialist, freethinking woman had religious experiences that demonstrate the intuitive side of religion.
On two occasions, she tells us, Christianity had made an impression on her. The first time was the summer of 1935 while she was with her parents on holidays in a small fishing town of Portugal. On the feast of the local patron saint she watched the women march in procession round the ship, singing very ancient hymns “of a heart-rending sadness”. It came to her in a flash of insight that Christianity was the religion of underdogs and that she should really belong to it, as she was an underdog herself The second occasion was a visit to Assisi, two years later, when she was overwhelmed by a profound religious feeling in the chapel of Saint Mary of the Angels. These contacts had predisposed her in a general sense, but they did not make her pray nor read the Gospel or other spiritual literature.
Her true ‘meeting with Christ’ came in the monastery of Solesmes in 1938 during Holy Week. Solesmes was famous for its Gregorian chant and perfect Roman liturgy. In spite of the splitting headaches she was suffering from in those days, a residue of neglected sinusitis, she enjoyed the beauty of the music and the meaning of the words. “In the course of these services the thought of the passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.” She was also helped by a young English Catholic who was a visitor at the monastery and who talked to her occasionally. She was struck by the angelic radiance on his face after he had received communion. In one of their conversations her new friend talked about English poets of the XVII century who had written mystical works and recommended them to her. Simone took the trouble to read them and was immediately intrigued.
There was in particular one poem, entitled ‘Love’ by George Herbert (1592-1633), which captivated her. She liked it very much. She learnt it by heart. She used to repeat it often, as she says “concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines.” The poem presents Christ as the embodiment of God’s love. Christ, love personified, invites us to enter his home. When conscious of our sinfulness we hesitate to come forward, Christ overrules all our objections and makes us sit at his table. We need not be afraid of him. He knows our human nature because he created it, he has forgiven our sins because he died for them. The poem expresses the essence of the Gospel message.
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack from my first entrance in,
drew near to me, sweetly questioning if I lack'd anything.“A guest”, I answer'd, “worthy to be here”. Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I the unkinde, ungrateful! ? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee.'”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, “Who made the eyes but I ?”
“Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame go where it doth deserve.”“And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?”
“My deare, then I will serve”.
“You must sit down”, says Love, “and taste my meat”.
So I did sit and eat.During one of the times that Simone recited this poem she had a direct experience of Christ. Without her realising it, as she confessed later on, the recitation must have assumed the virtue of a prayer. Then, unexpectedly, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me . . . In this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.” The experience took her totally by surprise. It had never occurred to her that this might happen.
“In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them . . . God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.”
Religion and the use of human imagery
Primitive people conceived of their gods and goddesses in human terms. When they stated that Wodan threw bolts of lightning, they thought he literally drew a piece of lightning from his quiver and threw it to the earth. They did not distinguish between the ‘image’ and the reality it portrayed. Wodan was not just in some respect ‘like a man’, he was in their eyes a real man, though a superman. The use of images itself, however, is unavoidable in any human thought and is part of intuitive religion.
People in developed religious beliefs still use imagery but – hopefully – use it with caution. Even religion that is based on critical thinking needs ‘images’ [= visual reproductions pointing to other reality] which can be metaphors, symbolic objects or rituals.
Anthropomorphisms continue to be used in all major religions. A Christian may say: ‘God, hear my prayer’, as if God possesses ears! Or she may say: ‘If you do this, God will be angry with you’, as if God has moods like a human being! Use of such expressions is inevitable, but risky. An anthropomorphic image of God, such as imagining God as ‘Father’, can have a very detrimental effect if its limitation as being only ‘an image’ is not realised. The image may shore up paternalism for instance. [Further Reading 12]
It is true that we cannot rely on a piece of poetry when we need evidence in a court case. Yet a poem does contain something valuable. It often expresses a gem of truth we cannot express in a scientific statement. Shelley once said: ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds’. Poetry expresses the intuition or insight a person has of reality at a particular moment. Poems and hymns may convey religious insights better than statements can.
George Herbert’s poem, cited above, describes our encounter with the divine in such images as us entering Christ’s home, as being invited to sit at his table and eat his food. Simone Weil transcended the images when she felt grasped and held in God’s presence. Images serve a purpose.
Intuitive religion finds its highest expression in mysticism which is an unmediated experience of the divine that goes beyond words and images.
Intuitive religion and women
The concept that the majority of pre-historical societies were matriarchal [= dominated by women] has been challenged by modern scholars. Among 565 primitive societies whose social organization was carefully studied, only 20% were found to be matrilineal [= membership in the family is transmitted through the female members]. Among them 84 societies were found to be matrilocal, [= after marriage the young couple resides with the parents of the bride, not with those of the bridegroom]. Anthropologists link this matrifocal [= women occupy a central position] organization to an economic situation in which the main property and source of income is the field from which women gather fruits.
We may rightly deduce from this that intuitive religion tolerated egalitarian human societies: cultures that did not enforce a patriarchal standard around sexuality, property, public office and space; that did not make females legal minors under the control of fathers, brothers, and husbands. Many primitive societies embraced female personifications of the divine, neither subordinating them to a masculine god, nor debarring masculine deities. [Further Reading 13]
Moreover, intuitive religion has been shown to have deep feminine roots in all of us.
Our first experience as a child is the embrace of our mother. As we lie in her womb or suck her breasts we receive warmth, security and satisfaction. Psychologists call this the oral phase of a child’s development and characterise the experience as a participation in the oceanic oneness of universe. It gives us the basic trust we need for life, trust in ourselves and in others.
Even in later life, when our mother has been gradually withdrawn, we retain the original experience so that we can face the reality of living confidently. In other words, the experience of our mother forms the psychological foundation on which and through which we can respond to the mystery of God. By our basic trust we can again experience participation in oceanic oneness, this time as a mystical [= mind transcending] approach to reality. And just as dolls and toys function as substitute mothers in our early life, so images and symbols can be the substitute ‘breasts’ through which we feel one with the ‘mother’ of ultimate reality. [Further Reading 14]
Intuitive religion led to polytheism, anthropomorphism and idol worship. Yet it gave people the first intuitive grasp of the religious aspect of all reality. With their slowly awakening intellectual powers, men and women could see what animals had never seen: the presence of the divine. They saw the glimmer of that light, and groping for it they blundered into many blind alleys. Today, in spite of more sophisticated thinking, religious experience still has aspects of ‘intuitive perception’.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER READINGS
A readable and attractive account of the oldest human societies can be found in: F. Clark Howell, Early Man, Time-Life International 1970. Other good background books are: G. Childe, What Happened in History?, Penguin 1957; W.E. Le Gros Clark, History of the Primates, British Museum London (also in paperback); T.H. Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, University of Michigan Press, Cresset 1950 (also in paperback); D. Morris, The Naked Ape, Corgi, London 1968.
Among anthropological classics on primitive societies we can recommend: A. Goldenweiser, Anthropology: An Introduction to Primitive Culture, London 1937; E. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, London 1926; B. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, Boston Press 1948; Peggy Reeves Sanday and Ruth Gallagher Goodenough (eds.), Beyond the Second Sex. New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender, University of Philadelphia Press 1990; Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, (eds.), Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Basil Blackwell, Cambridge 1991.
On the topic of the earliest ideas of the ‘divine’ the following books are considered classics: E. Cassirer, Language and Myth, Dover Publications 1946; J. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Macmillan, New York, 1924; A.R. Radcliffe Brown, Tabu, Cambridge 1940; M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Sheed and Ward, London 1958.
P. Maranda (Ed), Mythology: Selected References, Penguin 1972, is a good compact introduction to authors and opinions on myth. Two earlier collections are also very informative: T. A. Sebeok (Ed), Myth: A Symposium, Indiana University Press 1958 (also in paperback); J. Middleton (Ed), Myth and Cosmos: References in Mythology and Symbolism, American Museum of Natural History 1967; see also Carol Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell and Paula Richman, Gender and Religion: on the Complexity of Symbols, Beacon Press, Boston 1986.
C. Levi-Strauss is one of the recognized authorities on primitive myth-making. I recommend: The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press 1966; The Raw and the Cooked, Harper and Row 1969. Colin Renfrew and Ezra B. W. Zubrow (eds.), The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994; Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past, Routledge, New York 1999.
On the characteristics and origin of the oldest religious beliefs information can be had from: P. Radin, Primitive Religion, Harnish Hamilton, London 1938; J. Maringer, The Gods of Prehistoric Man, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1960; E.O. James, Prehistoric Religion, Barnes and Noble, 1961 (also in paperback); T.L. Sweely (ed.), Manifesting Power: Gender and the Interpretation of Power in Archaeology, Routledge, London 1999.
Comparative religion is the science that collects and analyses data from religions that exist or that have existed. A.C. Bouquet, Comparative Religion, Penguin 1941, updated 1967, provides a good survey of the results obtained. A systematic observation of religions is given by G. Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, George Allen and Unwin, London 1938; see also: Ursula King, Women and Spirituality - Voices of Protest and Promise, McMillan, London 1993; Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (eds.), Womanspirit Rising. A Feminist Reader in Religion, Harper & Row, New York 1992.
The most influential writer on the psychology of religious belief at the beginning of last century was W. James. His books are still widely read in paperback reprints: The Will to Believe, Dover Publications, New York 1956; The Varieties of Religious Experience, Fontana/Fount 1960. Other leading psychological authors who ascribed belief in God to the immaturity of primitive people: S. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Hogarth, London 1949; E. Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, Yale, New Haven 1950; M. Murray, The Genesis of Religion, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1963.
S. Radhakrishnan develops the idea of the ‘integral experience’ of God in many publications. Available with Allen and Unwin are: Indian Philosophy; East and West in Religion; The Hindu View of Life; Recovery of Faith; etc. Read also: J.G. Arapura, Radhakrishnan and Integral Experience, Asia Publishing House, Calcutta 1966.
Previous centuries counted quite a few European exponents of the approach to God through the ‘numinous’. Principal works of that time have been reprinted: R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, London 1923; A.E. Taylor, Does God Exist?, Macmillan and Co., London 1945: excerpt in J. Hick (Ed.), The Existence of God, Macmillan, New York 1964, pp. 153-64. Modern forms of the intuitive grasp of God are defended by J. Maritain, Approaches to God, Harper and Row. New York 1954; J. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, Oxford University Press, London 1937; The Sense of the Presence of God, Oxford University Press, London 1963; H.D. Lewis, Our Experience of God, Allen and Unwin, London 1989.
For a full description of Simone’s religious experience, see J. Wijngaards, Come and See, TPI, Bangalore 1983, pp. 167-185. See also: J. M. Perrin and G. Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. 1953; S. Weil, Waiting on God, Fontana, London 1963; Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil, London 2001; Stephen Plant, Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction, London 2007.
A thought-provoking discussion on mythological thinking in Christianity was initiated by Bishop J.A.T. Robinson in Honest to God, SCM, London 1963. See also: D.L. Edwards (Ed), The Honest to God Debate, SCM, London 1963. Robinson presented later his more matured ideas in The Human Face of God, SCM, London 1972.
13. Women in primitive religion
Defending the pivotal role of women are, for instance: Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, Harper and Row, San Francisco 1979; Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1976; Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: A Treasury of Goddess and Heroine Lore from Around the World. Beacon Press, Boston 1978; J. F. del Giorgio, The Oldest Europeans, A. J. Place 2006; Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, Thomas & Hudson, London 2001. The opposite view is represented by Steven Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, Morrow 1973; Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance, Open Court 1993; Philip Davis, Goddess Unmasked, Spence Publishing, New York 1998; Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future, Beacon Press, Boston 2000. More in: Peter N. Stearns, Gender in World History. Routledge, New York 2000.
E.H. Erikson, Identity. New York 1968, pp.96ff.; H. Faber, Cirkelen om een geheim, Meppel 1972; W. Veldhuis, Geloof en Ervaring Ambo, Bilthoven 1973.
