ANCIENT MONUMENTS: Centers of Religion or . . . ?

We humans are, by nature, curious creatures. . . Ostensibly, we inherited this trait as one of the most dominant characteristics of the primates from which we descend. “Curiosity killed the cat”, or so says an old axiom; however, our ever-growing body of knowledge in animal behavior suggests that “curiosity” is, in reality, far less a feline trait than it is an apelike one.

So, as naturally investigative creatures, we humans love a good mystery. . .

Therefore, it is not surprising that, for centuries, our collective curiosity has been piqued by ancient, monolithic structures such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica, Macchu Picchu, Angor Wat and others in various places in the world, which stood as silent and imposing testaments to their creators, only to have been inexplicably abandoned by those creators and left to face the inexorable march of time -- alone.

From the first moment that one beholds such a structure as, say, “El Castillo”, the grand pyramid in the Mayan city of Chichen Itza -- even before the question of who those creators might have been enters the mind -- one wonders what possible purpose the pyramid served that would have warranted such an obviously huge investment of the labor and resources of its builders.

I confess that it has long been a source of consternation to me that, when called upon to offer a likely explanation in these cases, archeologists and anthropologists will -- almost without exception -- turn to religion for that explanation at the exclusion of a myriad of other possibilities.

"Oh, it was probably some sacred structure, built as a place of worship of the gods," they utter with no small air of sanctimonious self-assurance.

I, for one, have never found this line of reasoning completely convincing, however. . . 

For one thing, the parameters of biology and genetics necessarily dictate that all human beings -- indeed, all of any one species of plant or animal -- are, regardless of time and place, unavoidably similar and (with all due respect to the archeologists and anthropologists of the world) there seem to be precious few examples of modern structures today that one can point to which might be considered relatively equivalent (as far as the amount of commitment of community resources is concerned) to a Mayan “El Castillo” of which it can be said that their creation and existence are due, for the most part, to strictly religious purposes.

Our largest modern structures are, for the most part, office buildings like the (now-destroyed) “World Trade Center” of New York or Chicago’s “Sears Tower” -- which appear to be testaments more to our “economy” than to our “spirituality”, it would seem. Of modern monuments such as Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower -- which were created for some purpose other than housing human beings at work or play -- not one was originally intended as a place of worship -- not ONE!
 
Were I an ancient architect or builder of an extraordinary ancient structure such as Stonehenge, I would find this all-too pat “blanket explanation” of “they built it in worship of their gods” supremely insulting!

If you will, let us try an experiment. . .

Let us imagine that we are citizens of some far, distant future -- a future when economic, ecological, martial or social upheavals have taken the modern, familiar world in which we now live and brought it, first to its knees, and then, gradually, to oblivion. . .

It's really not so difficult to imagine. . .

Every day, headlines speak to us of potentially grave threats to our present way of life: Cataclysmic climate changes, nuclear weapons in the hands of dark, clandestine, fanatical groups bent upon revenge and destruction, pandemic outbreaks and the gradual repression of civil rights and personal freedoms combined with an increasing disparity between the "haves" and the "have-nots" -- any of which could, over time, spell disaster for our present way of life.

Imagine, then, that any (or, God forbid, all) of these dire possibilities come to fruition and it caused people all over the world to dessert our present centers of knowledge and culture -- our cities, towns and universities -- and take to the remote frontiers for a better chance at survival.

As time passed and generations of human beings came and went, what if -- without the sophisticated resources needed to support them -- all of the present knowledge in our most advanced fields of study fell by the wayside and became obsolete because they no longer aided our immediate survival in this rugged, “new” world?

Now, in our scenario, imagine even further into the distant future to a time when human beings might have raised themselves back up, technologically and culturally, once again to a level equal to (or even more advanced than) before the mass migration out of the cities. 

Then, let us say that, one day, while on a promising archeological “dig” in this far, far distant future, an archeologist discovers the remains of one of our present-day great cities and, as he carefully goes about inspecting and cataloging each piece and conjecturing on the original purpose of each one, he is overjoyed at the sheer abundance of artifacts he finds there.

Now let us conjecture that this far-far-future archeological dig might be located in the southern part of the state that we now call “Nevada” and that our archeologist is unearthing the “lost city” of Las Vegas. . .

How silly it would seem, then, to hear him say:

This was obviously a place where, thousands of years ago, ancient native peoples came from far and wide to worship their gods. You can tell by the sheer height of the structures that they were attempting reach to their gods in the heavens. We have found giant statues and reliefs which all seem to confirm this hypothesis. So far, we have unearthed objects that depict large birds, pyramids, sphinxes and other fantastic, bizarre representations of animals and humans that were obviously created as likenesses of their gods -- which we now believe were called ‘Money’ and ‘Automobile’.

Discoveries are being made every day that are causing us to revise our world-view about the level of sophistication of the abilities of so-called “primitive” cultures. In recent years, archeologists have discovered much evidence which supports the contention that many ancient civilizations possessed complex and technically advanced knowledge in the areas of hydraulics, metallurgy, medicine, mathematics and mechanics.

I foresee more revelations of this nature as time goes on. . .  

I would offer another explanation for how and why present-day archeologists and anthropologists might be “fooled” into thinking that most of the world’s ancient, monolithic structures were somehow connected with the practice of religion:

Let us change slightly the vision of the future that we offered earlier and suppose that, after spending hundreds, perhaps, thousands of years “in exile” from the cultural and social centers that are our modern-day cities, these “future primitives” just happened to come upon the ruins of these once-great cities in their wanderings.

Awestruck, they might marvel at the huge buildings, monuments and other structures fashioned by a race that they no longer remember. . .

After a time, they might take up residence in such an abandoned city -- thinking, surely, the gods must have built it.

As time passes, we can imagine an entire system of belief that might crop up within their ranks that would attempt to explain how the city came into existence and the nature of the deities who built it. Then, our future primitives might find themselves taking up rituals of worship of these long-gone “gods” using the mammoth former office buildings or other civic projects as their temples.

Let us now conjecture that, by the time our future archeologist begins his “dig” of Las Vegas, the people who had “re-populated” the city have long since also passed into history. But let us say that their cult worship of the original builders as gods was left behind and that it is this body of evidence that then becomes the main reason behind the archeologist’s beliefs that these secondary people were the original builders and the original purpose for the huge structures that they inhabited was the worship of their gods.

This postulation is not simply the musings of a creative mind. . .  In fact, as fairly recent archeological discoveries have confirmed, most of this scenario echoes the actual history of the ancient site of Teotihuacan in Mexico where the original builders and purpose of the site are still unknown. What is known is that some 2,000-3,000 years ago, a people who would later be named “Aztec” accidentally stumbled onto the already-existing site and made it their own -- making it the center of worship for their gods.

My feeling is that we must cease to think of ancient peoples and civilizations as “primitive” -- completely without advanced knowledge of the sciences -- and we would do well to curb our tendency to jump automatically to the conclusion that they created grand structures like the pyramids solely as tributes to their gods, as well.

It is quite possible that this mindset may be limiting our understanding of our own history and, without that understanding, we may also be dooming the preservation of our present collective knowledge and separate cultures because “Those who remain ignorant of history are often doomed to repeat it”.