The Evolution of Spirituality
Answering the Call of Spirit and Soul
As more and more people separate themselves from organized religion there is an ever-growing need to replace the function religion once held in our lives with a more personal spiritual experience.
Research shows every generation is becoming less religious than the generation before.
Over just the past two decades alone, the percentage of Americans who don’t identify with any religion has grown from 8% to 21%.
According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 31% of Millennials have no religious affiliation. 33% of Gen Z eligible for the poll had no affiliation either, and we can expect this percentage to only increase over time.
We are quickly evolving past religion’s traditional views on sexuality and gender turning religion into a politically divisive, rather than uniting force.
Every day, more corruption and abuse come to light, and more adults process the religious trauma of their upbringings. It no wonder why people are increasingly likely to leave religion behind.
But where do the religiously unaffiliated go?
It’s not a coincidence that along with the fall of religious affiliation we are seeing a rise in spiritual and mystic intrigue—a rise in the popularity of new age spiritualities, and spiritual tools like astrology and tarot.
"About a quarter of U.S. adults (27%) now say they think of themselves as spiritual but not religious, up 8 percentage points in five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted between April 25 and June 4 of this year.“
Though religion may not have a place in our lives anymore, that doesn't mean we are collectively abandoning spirituality altogether.
There is a way to practice spirituality without the religious dogma and restrictive traditions.
A means of fulfilling the spiritual void left by religion through personal spiritual experience. A spiritual framework that is rooted in the psychology of self actualization and self-transcendence.
Spirituality is both as ancient a practice as humanity itself, and a psychological need as real and as powerful as our need for food, water, or air.
It is an essential part of the human experience that we cannot ignore.
To understand the place it has in our modern lives we must first learn of its origins and the milestones of spiritual evolution throughout human history that have lead us to this point.
Our First Beliefs & Rituals: Animism & Ancestor Worship
As far back as we have historical written record and archeological evidence, humankind has always practiced some form of spirituality.
About the same time that ancient humans were mastering stone tools, mixing pigments for cave paintings, creating clay sculptures, and learning to carve instruments from animal bone, they were also burying their dead and practicing funerary rights.
Elaborate burial rituals took not only time, but energy and resources, all vital to the survival of these pre-agricultural, tribal societies.
Leaving precious tools and grave goods suggested that our early ancestors believed in some form of an afterlife.
Why would so much care be put into something if it didn’t have significant meaning to the people performing it?
"For anthropologists, mortuary rituals carry an outsize importance in tracing the emergence of human uniqueness—especially the capacity to think symbolically.
Symbolic thought gives us the ability to transcend the present, remember the past, and visualize the future. It allows us to imagine, to create, and to alter our environment in ways that have significant consequences for the planet…
Burials provide a hard, material record of a behavior that is deeply spiritual and meaningful.” - Paige Madison, “Who First Buried the Dead?”
This ability to understand abstraction and think symbolically led to another very important step in our spiritual development— Plants, animals, natural phenomena, and collective human experiences all became archetypal, mythological forces rich with symbolic meaning.
Ancestor, and Nature worship were perhaps the very first forms of human spirituality. The belief of Animism — that all things have a soul, was a universal concept among early tribal societies. The soul of nature, then of ourselves was lain bare of our ancestors to see.
We can even find traces of animistic thinking in classical mythology. Many Greek and Roman deities were based on the various aspects of nature.
The Titans were names given to the primordial parts of nature- the sky, the sea, the sun, the night. Natural disasters were said to be caused by the acts of the Gods atop Mount Olympus. Minors deities like nymphs, and daemons ruled over specific places in nature, such as rivers, trees and mountains.
Early humans learned to paint on the walls of their cave dwellings and etch their stories into stone so that they could memorialize their traditions and culture. So that, through symbolism, knowledge and information could be passed down from generation to generation.
The Sun & Moon:
The Origin of Our Earliest Myths
“Essential motifs of the hero's journey were apparently read from the heavens. Above all, the movements of the two great lights, the sun and the moon, have served as models. In order to understand this background, we must consider the world in the way that it looked to people throughout the millennia before Galileo and Copernicus brought about the great turning point.
Today we know that Earth rotates on its own axis and around the Sun. However, if we follow our perception, the Sun continues to rise in the morning and set in the evening. Despite all the scientific discoveries of past centuries, nothing has changed in this experience. And if we want to understand the story that the soul tells us, we must open up to its reality and see the world as it has shown itself to humanity since time immemorial.”
- Hajo Banzah, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero
The two most universal symbols in the lives of ancient humans were those of the luminaries —
the Sun and the Moon.
Their journeys through the sky formed the basis of many of humanity’s earliest recorded myths.
Our ancestors watched every day as the Sun rose up from the horizon, traveled across the sky, then disappeared, leaving the world in darkness, only to miraculously return the next day.
The Moon had a similar journey.
Night by night it would wax, growing to fullness, then wane, slowly disappearing before vanishing as a crescent of silver light on the eastern horizon, reappearing in the western sky three days later.
The lunar 29.5 day cycle also became our time-keeper.
Our agrarian ancestors used the moon to understand the life cycles of plants and the reproductive cycles of animals which became very useful as agriculture and animal husbandry were necessitated to sustain rising populations.
The Sun crossing below the horizon every night, reappearing in the morning, and the Moon disappearing every month, returning after three days inspired stories told over, and over by countless cultures.
The movements of the luminary bodies became the basis of universal mythos such as a chariot driven by a deity that would pull the sun across the sky, and the notion of an underworld; a place where the soul would return to after rising and setting, just like the Sun.
Cultures world-wide all had myths about heroes that would set out to vanquish some darkness and return victorious. Stories of deities who would die, usually in pursuit of some noble accomplishment, then would be resurrected, usually three days later.
This universal theme can be found in mythologies all around the ancient world including Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Norse, Aztec, Japanese, Egyptian, and Christian mythos.
The general motifs of these early myths can be found in our stories even today. It is what mythologist Joseph Campbell called the Monomyth, also known as the Hero’s journey.
It is a universal narrative theme that occurs throughout literature and mythology worldwide.
You may recognize it in stories even today:
The Hero sets out on a journey, leaving home. They rise to some challenge, or adversity, crossing some threshold or performing a trial. Empowered, the hero overcomes their fears, and vanquishes the antagonist. Finally, they return home, having gained something of significance to help their community.
“The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.” - Joseph Campbell
With the journeys of the Sun and Moon forming the basis of our earliest myths, our ancestors began to look to the other celestial bodies. The wandering stars, or what we now know as planets became the basis for many deities throughout cultures all around the world.
The Rise of of the Gods - Polytheism
Psyche receives the cup of immortality on the Olympus, Jacob Jordaens
As humans progressed into smaller-scale civilizations, stories of deities were more easily shared and expanded upon.
Likely as a result of animistic thinking and nature worship, Gods were distinguished by specific domains, or areas of influence related to the life experiences and environments of cultures who created them.
Individual civilizations each worshiped their own sets of gods specific to their history and geography.
Through cultural exchange, the expansions of civilizations, and war, pantheons of gods were slowly formed, and began to be recognized en masse.
As larger empires were formed, the folk traditions of the smaller civilizations they were composed of were syncretized. Their stories and traditions were shared amongst the populace. Shrines and temples to multiple gods could be found in major cities.
Polytheism, the worship of multiple deities, quickly became the predominant religion of the ancient world. Almost every major culture worldwide had some mythology surrounding a pantheon of deities somewhere in their history.
The world of antiquity is an especially potent example of this.
Much information was transmitted through Arabia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and thus we can see many similarities between their deities, especially when we look at their cosmogony. Each of these Ancient cultures connected their gods to the celestial bodies, the luminaries: The Sun and Moon, as well as the visible planets at the time: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Gods connected to each planet shared more than a few similarities to be mere coincidence.
For instance: As the largest of the planets, Jupiter, in his many incarnations is always seen as a sky god, and typically assumes the role of the King of the Gods.
The sumerian Enlil, the mespotamian Marduk, the greek Zeus, the egyptian Amun Ra, and the roman Jupiter all share these two traits. Even the word Jupiter comes from the latin ‘Dyeus Pater’, latin for “Father Sky-God”.
The planets forming the basis for many of the major polytheistic cultures in the ancient world lead to a wealth of mystic traditions like astrology, hermeticism, and alchemy. All three of these ancient philosophies were heavily transmitted throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia because of their connection to the celestial bodies, and hold significant value, even today.
The “One God” Solution - Monotheism
The transition from the worship of many gods to one came much more easily than one might expect. As empires and nations expanded, the cultures within them were blended together and syncretized.
As a result, many religions adopted the concept of Divine Unity.
Across cultures, groups of deities specific to a particular geographical region were often written about as being the manifestation of one supreme deity.
We have evidence of this thought as early as 1200 BC. Mesopotamian poems refer to the god Marduk as the supreme god, and all other divine entities as different manifestations of him.
This concept even existed in ancient Greece and Rome, perpetuated around 400 BC by stoic philosophers who equated god with the totality of the universe, and creation as the outpouring of god’s soul.
This leads us to believe that ancient cultures, despite observing multiple gods, likely viewed them all as part of the same divine source.
If we trace Christianity to its roots in ancient Israel, we see that monolatry—the belief in the existence of many gods, but the worship of only one, was the dominant belief.
Even the Bible makes mention of other Gods. It doesn’t deny their existence in the ancient world. It says only that thou shalt have no gods before ‘God’.
This is much different than Christianity today which is Monotheistic, believing only in the existence of one supreme God, and believing all other gods to either be malevolent demons, or simply nonexistent.
Though it’s impossible to tell at which point world religion switched from polytheistic to monotheistic, monotheism became a popular solution as Empires began to grow so large and populated that the inevitability of political and religious discord was too large to ignore.
For instance, it was during the reign of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great that Christianity began to rapidly spread throughout Rome’s lower class.
Seeing a fractured, crumbling empire, Constantine legalized Christianity, and used the power of the state to proliferated its observance in place of paganism and polytheism.
State-Sponsored religion soon became the norm, and with it, pagans, polytheists, and anyone labeled a ‘heretic’ were targets of persecution.
Monotheistic Christianity quickly spread throughout Europe. Pagan cultures were soon Christianized and integrated into Christianity.
In the centuries since, western religion — Christianity, Islam, and Judaism— have ruled the globe. It is only in recent decades that we are beginning to see a decline in religion, and a return back to our more spiritual roots.
Conclusion
As a society, we are beginning to evolve past the need for organized religion, but this should not lead us to believe that we no longer have a need for spirituality altogether.
Seeking something greater in the world, whether that be divine experience, meaning, or purpose has always had its place in lives. It is truly a practice as old as our history.
We recognized the human soul and buried our dead with tools and goods to aid them in their next lives, then we acknowledged the souls of nature and worshiped the Earth.
We watched the journeys of the Sun, Moon, and stars as they travel across the night sky and created stories and myths about their travels that were memorialized around campfires and on cave walls.
We went from believing in many aspects of god, to One God, to None.
Now, more than ever, we need to return to our spiritual roots. We need to remember just how important spirituality is in our lives.
We need a method of seeking the spiritual that is focused on personal choice, and self-actualization. A spiritual modality that is rooted in psychology, and informed by the history and mythology of our ancestors.
So, I hope you’ll join me in my quest as I explore the history of spirituality, the problem with religion, the psychospiritual solution, and the tools that I use to reclaim spirituality and invite the mystic experience back into our everyday lives.
