“PRIMITIVE man believes no less firmly than the religious man of the higher civilizations in the existence of a spiritual world upon which the visible world and the life of man are dependent. Indeed, this spiritual world and the life of man are dependent. Indeed, this spiritual world is often more intensely realized and more constantly present to his mind than is the case with civilized man. He has not attained to the conception of an autonomous natural order, and consequently supernatural forces are liable to interpose themselves at every moment of his existence. At first sight the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, seem inextricably confused. Nevertheless, even in primitive nature-worship, the object of religious emotion and worship in never the natural phenomenon as such, but always the supernatural power which is obscurely felt to be present in and working through the natural object.
“The essential difference between the religion of the primitive and that of civilized man is that for the latter the spiritual world has become a cosmos, rendered intelligible by philosophy and ethical by the tradition of the world religions, whereas to the primitive it is a spiritual chaos in which good and evil, high and low, rational and irrational elements are confusedly mingled. Writers on primitive religion have continually gone astray through their attempts to reduce the spiritual world of the primitive to single principle, to find a single cause to from which the whole development may be explained and rendered intelligible.”
~Christopher Dawson: from Stages in Mankind’s Religious Experience.
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[Navajo medicine and healing are deeply tied with religious and spiritual beliefs. A young patient observes a medicine man (on the right) and a helper prepares a sandpainting as part of her healing ceremony.]
