History seems to suggest that the earliest phases of all - a sweeping but justified generalization - human civilizations had, not religion, but something just short of religion: a system of myth and magic.
Here, ‘myth’ is understood to be narratives which are designed to explain; in this sense, a myth can be true or false, but in either case it’s still a myth. In addition, the creation of such myths, and their role in culture and society, are to be considered.
‘Magic’ is an attempt to manipulate or control nature: the weather, agricultural fertility, human fertility, disease, and health.
Hegel, in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, notes:
The first religion is this, that consciousness of the highest is consciousness of a human being as dominion, power, and lordship over nature. This first religion, if we can call it that, is the religion of magic.
The myths left to us by primitive civilizations seek to explain: the cycle of the four seasons, the patterns of visible stars and of other celestial bodies, the origin of the earth and of the universe, the features of natural geography, etc.
The magic of those early cultures included attempts to influence, primarily crops and harvests, but other events as well, by means of song, dance, chanting, incantations, the building of altars and temples, etc.
Sacrifice falls under the heading of ‘magic.’ Animals and edible plants were sacrificed to idols or effigies which were the personifications of natural forces like rain, sun, water, etc. The extreme case was common: human sacrifice has been documented in every known primitive civilization.
These early belief systems lacked elements which are found in religion: they focused almost exclusively on the attempt to explain or influence the course of nature. Even their hypotheses about the afterlife quickly returned, in one way or another, to the natural world.
Although these systems of myth and magic may seem very metaphysical, with their reliance on things unseen, they are, from another perspective, rather lacking in metaphysics, inasmuch as they are completely concerned only with the physical world. That which may seem metaphysical in these belief systems is merely an ad hoc explanation.
Hegel continues:
This earliest form of religion - although one may well refuse to call it religion - is that for which we have the name “magic.” To be precise, it is the claim that the spiritual aspect is the power over nature; but this spiritual aspect is not yet present as spirit, is not yet present in its universality. Instead the spiritual is at first just the singular and contingent human self-consciousness which, in spite of only sheer desire, self-consciously knews itself to be nobler than nature, and knows that self-consciousness is a power transcending nature.
To be sure, there are elements of myth and magic in modern culture, and even more in postmodern culture. In modern culture, however, these are less common than in early human civilization, and are often in the realm of politics and natural science, and less frequently in the realm of religion.
Further, myth and magic seem to be present, even in modern and postmodern contexts, in what one might call ‘folk religion’ or ‘disguised superstition.’ While religion itself in the current time has shed much of myth and magic, it is not difficult to find individual people, or individual events, in which both are significantly present.
Indeed, it is possible that one way to describe the emergence of postmodernism and the simultaneous recession of modernism is to depict it as reemergence of myth and magic. Postmodernism can be seen as more hospitable to both.
Another marker of the transition from pre-religion or proto-religion is the concept of relationship. In pre-religion and proto-religion, the deity, if present at all, is there to be cajoled and begged. The relationship to the deity, if it is a relationship at all, is one of manipulation. The deity is an object but not a subject, and although the deity may have power - to make it rain or to make the crops grow, etc. - the deity is not treaty as a fully knowing conscious agent with personhood, and no attempt is made to relate to the deity as a person.
By contrast, in the transition to religion, the deity is treated as a person, and the goal is not to manipulate the deity, but rather to know, and be known by, the deity. The goal of religion is relationship. Mature religion is not primarily focused on controlling nature or explaining it: hence the concepts of acceptance and surrender to what is.
