Ending a bit over a year ago, I spent a year studying the sacred, landing on an extended version of Durkheim’s story: groups bind together by uniquely seeing certain things outside themselves as special.
I'd say maternal love preceeds even romance as a proto-sacred phenomenon. My mind goes (naturally) to the biochemical origins of romance, but obviously there's more than just neurotransmitters at play. The interesting thing about maternal love is how fused it is with the mundane. It's also unidealized and integrated rather than set apart, yet it is indeed considered sacred. This makes me think that it's earlier than romantic love. If sacredness is emergent, I imagine it would emerge from everydayness more gradually than the fully formed version you outline in the Seeds of Science piece. Fun to think about. Thanks.
Yes, maternal love is even more ancient, and plausibly romantic love was created out of maternal love. But it doesn't seem to have as many similarities to the sacred as romantic love.
And maternal love may tend to erode with adolescence pre-culture and not be as sacred-binding. Maternal love goes in, shake all the chemicals for a few years (for a few millennia), until lasting culture-accumulating bonds (romance) comes out the other side
I like the idea that the sacred comes from rituals around mating. But I suspect that "romance" is not the oldest form.
If you look at other primates, like chimps or gorilllas or baboons, they often have this "alpha male" structure around mating. The other males and females respect the alpha male, you go to the alpha male for protection, you give him sexual priority, you defer to his decisions for things like should the tribe move to other locations. There's something reinforcing all of these social rules. Perhaps these seem like "sacred rules" to the primates. And perhaps in our own evolutionary history the concept of "sacred" began as this sort of alpha male structure. A lot of religions have some sort of king-of-the-gods-as-alpha-male setup to them, too.
That's my hypothesis, based on a modification of your hypothesis here, that "following the alpha male group structure" was the original "sacred".
Kevin I like your idea that the "sacred" evolved around the emotion or the experience of "respect". There is the German term "Ehrfurcht" which is a mix of "fear" and "honor" ... maybe this kind of respect surrounded the leaders.
I like this hypothesis because it captures the collective nature of most sacred traditions. And it provides a very direct rationale for why we would have developed mental machinery to develop (and enforce) common group beliefs. In an environment of small warring clans (like chimpanzees have, and probably early humans), maintaining group cohesion is critical to survival. Those same group instincts toward followership became the foundation for religion, military service, corporate structures, and so on.
I already commented on Twitter. The biologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt argued that the mother-child bond came still earlier than the romantic bond and that the romantic bond got some essential features from the mother-child bond. So it could also be argued that the sacred was built by modifying the mother-child bond. And I really have to say, a significant experience that hit me (and surprised me somewhat) when I got my first child was that it almost felt like falling (for the first time truly, deeply) in love. These feelings were new (hard to compare) and were also somewhat different than a first deep infatuation with a woman, but in retrospect similarities are clearly present. They surprised me. They hit me. And the personal experience expanded. (It can also be argued that the personal experience expands when you fall in love with a woman: you focus, perhaps even more intensely than ever before, on another human being ... your experiential horizon widens ...)
The hypothesis sounds plausible. However, while mating is older than the sacred, I'm not sure romance as we know it is older. We would need to have a clear view of the practice of romance in mating pre-sacred to assess the claim that the sacred evolved from romance.
There's also an evolution of romance to consider. What was considered romantic even 30 years ago is long gone in many youths experiencing "romance" for the first time. I saw (and related to) a meme the other day that read, "What's a talking phase? Merge souls with me."
Might be possible to test this by doing an fMRI study comparing activation for newly in love people viewing images of their partner compared to viewing images of things they consider sacred. Then compare with viewing images of other things they have positive but non-sacred reactions to, and determine if the romance and sacred reactions are more similar than either are to the wider positive group.
Didn't the French invent romance in the middle ages in the age of chivalry? Nothing remotely like romantic love really existed in the West before that. It's hard to imagine marriage without the notion of romance, but marriage had nothing to do with romance for most of human history. The sacred seems more driven by the model of families, with God as Father and protecting and shepherding his kids toward beneficial paths and practices. Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by 'sacred' since it seems quite a bit more abstract than just 'religious' in your construction.
LMAO, bruh the Greeks... Plato's Symposium, Sappho's poetry, the Homeric hymns. Nah, saying the French invented romantic love is like saying Valentine's Day is the reason to give women flowers. They may have branded it, but it existed long before.
I must be misunderstanding what is meant by 'romance'. If it just means the emotion 'love' ok. But romance seems to me to be ritualized courtship - 'courtly love'. That's a pretty recent invention in the West, beats me if it existed elsewhere before that.
The Greeks had two versions of romance precursors. One ruled by passion that leads to ruin, such as in Paris and Helen's passionate affair, and one that develops in an arranged marriage such as Odysseus and Penelope's. As late as the Renaissance Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was still promoting the common view that passion was the road to ruin.
Aristophanes in the Symposium gives a description of love that seems quite close to romance, where people are (literally!) hunting for their missing “other halves”.
Aristophanes' account was more a philosophical novelty than a reflection of common Greek views on romance. The social reality was that arranged marriages were common, especially for women, and romantic love was not typically a basis for marriage. But even the Greeks are not early enough to establish that romance is a precursor to the scared as they had already well developed notions of the sacred, and they could easily have developed new notions of romance from the scared.
At least in the West I would have thought it was the other way around, with romance being made sacralised in the middle ages - c.f. courtly romance and ideals like love.
For the ur-sacred, I can only speculate, but would guess it emerged alongside + to support high risk activities like war and hunting that required coordination + moral support. It seems useful enough that it could have evolved independently in multiple contexts though.
Fully disagree. Sacred is much more similar between cultures than mating practices are, and one can easily induce a "cargo cult" in other apes, which suggests the wiring for sacred likely predates the wiring for what WEIRD cultures call romance. On the other hand, sacred is _remarkably_ similar to various authoritarian practices, so the standard explanation of "absent chiefman" is much more likely.
1) "roman" in "romance" means "novel". It is unclear romance was such a big deal before romantic books. I am not sure how Shakespeare's contemporaries saw Rome and Juliet, maybe they saw the stuff about kings much more important, and this only a side-show
2) I also don't think our modern sensibiliites of the sacred are that universal. The Greco-Roman religion was very businesslike with the gods. In Judaism, the sacred has frightening, damaging, harmful tendencies - think Raiders of the Lost Ark. Christianity invented a loving and lovable god.
3) I think our modern sense of sacredness is a lack. Something is missing. The world looks cold, revolving around cash and personal branding. I think in the past people did not notice the sacred because they did not lack it, because they had tiny amounts of it everywhere. Remember "Our Sacred Honor". We moderns are careful about making promises. In the past, people made bold promises, bold oath and then they were really honour-bound to fulfill them. This for example was something sacred. They also took patriotism more seriously.
Romeo and Juliet was intended as a cautionary tale against youth stupidity and indeed was at least a third version of such a tale, it was never a "positive", romantic example.
Well, if you claim to have researched the matter you should have come across a fairly substantial body of Christian history around how chivalry, as the forerunner to the romantic, paved a theological pathway to romanticism. This was transformative in turning Christianity into the religion of love, as we tend to call it nowadays. The romantic is mantic and therefore, like geomancy and necromancy. These are all subsets of the sacred (although some might call various mantic branches of the arts profane).
Therefore the answer to your question is NO. Fascination, along with obsession and the other curses of love were originally feared in the early middle ages. Nowadays, without the heady madness of falling in love we tend to think something is missing.
The sacredness of love derives from the fact that love is a universal force of attraction that transcends space and time. The love for God, the love for life, and the love for one another are sacred because they give life a universal and unifying purpose to coexist and flourish. Even for millennia it has been written in Biblical scripture that heaven will be saturated to its greatest potential by love.
Ellen Dissanayake reckons it's the 'making special' with the children one has that leads to culture/personhood/worlding/art/religion and other outcomes like romance which are even more derivative but confounded with the acts and resources required to sucessfully raise children to become parents themselves. (doctrine and dogma are also derivative practices).
Although there were goddesses of "love" going back pretty far, there was a decided lack of "romance." Maybe the rarity of reports of romantic love makes the case for you. The Romans thought of love as a kind of madness, sometimes the mad are seen as possessed of the divine. Maybe the fact that all the goddesses of love are goddesses as opposed to gods is also supporting evidence (if that is, in fact, true).
A (somewhat) related story: when I was a teenager I remember that when I read about Evariste Galois, I thought: this is the real James Dean, the true Niezschean super man: he is a top mathematician, a liberal revolutionary, and dies in a duel, both romantic and political at 23 years old. This mix become my ideal, while I am happy of being 47…
Romantic love among equals is the greatest achievement of the West. Freedom
I'd say maternal love preceeds even romance as a proto-sacred phenomenon. My mind goes (naturally) to the biochemical origins of romance, but obviously there's more than just neurotransmitters at play. The interesting thing about maternal love is how fused it is with the mundane. It's also unidealized and integrated rather than set apart, yet it is indeed considered sacred. This makes me think that it's earlier than romantic love. If sacredness is emergent, I imagine it would emerge from everydayness more gradually than the fully formed version you outline in the Seeds of Science piece. Fun to think about. Thanks.
Yes, maternal love is even more ancient, and plausibly romantic love was created out of maternal love. But it doesn't seem to have as many similarities to the sacred as romantic love.
And maternal love may tend to erode with adolescence pre-culture and not be as sacred-binding. Maternal love goes in, shake all the chemicals for a few years (for a few millennia), until lasting culture-accumulating bonds (romance) comes out the other side
Erich Fromm had a lot to say about this. Maternal love transforms during adolescence. It doesn't necessarily erode. Well, it shouldn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vmYjs5VFhY&t=665s
I like the idea that the sacred comes from rituals around mating. But I suspect that "romance" is not the oldest form.
If you look at other primates, like chimps or gorilllas or baboons, they often have this "alpha male" structure around mating. The other males and females respect the alpha male, you go to the alpha male for protection, you give him sexual priority, you defer to his decisions for things like should the tribe move to other locations. There's something reinforcing all of these social rules. Perhaps these seem like "sacred rules" to the primates. And perhaps in our own evolutionary history the concept of "sacred" began as this sort of alpha male structure. A lot of religions have some sort of king-of-the-gods-as-alpha-male setup to them, too.
That's my hypothesis, based on a modification of your hypothesis here, that "following the alpha male group structure" was the original "sacred".
Kevin I like your idea that the "sacred" evolved around the emotion or the experience of "respect". There is the German term "Ehrfurcht" which is a mix of "fear" and "honor" ... maybe this kind of respect surrounded the leaders.
I like this hypothesis because it captures the collective nature of most sacred traditions. And it provides a very direct rationale for why we would have developed mental machinery to develop (and enforce) common group beliefs. In an environment of small warring clans (like chimpanzees have, and probably early humans), maintaining group cohesion is critical to survival. Those same group instincts toward followership became the foundation for religion, military service, corporate structures, and so on.
I already commented on Twitter. The biologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt argued that the mother-child bond came still earlier than the romantic bond and that the romantic bond got some essential features from the mother-child bond. So it could also be argued that the sacred was built by modifying the mother-child bond. And I really have to say, a significant experience that hit me (and surprised me somewhat) when I got my first child was that it almost felt like falling (for the first time truly, deeply) in love. These feelings were new (hard to compare) and were also somewhat different than a first deep infatuation with a woman, but in retrospect similarities are clearly present. They surprised me. They hit me. And the personal experience expanded. (It can also be argued that the personal experience expands when you fall in love with a woman: you focus, perhaps even more intensely than ever before, on another human being ... your experiential horizon widens ...)
Damn I love intuiting things that other people have written dissertations about. LOLOL
The hypothesis sounds plausible. However, while mating is older than the sacred, I'm not sure romance as we know it is older. We would need to have a clear view of the practice of romance in mating pre-sacred to assess the claim that the sacred evolved from romance.
There's also an evolution of romance to consider. What was considered romantic even 30 years ago is long gone in many youths experiencing "romance" for the first time. I saw (and related to) a meme the other day that read, "What's a talking phase? Merge souls with me."
Might be possible to test this by doing an fMRI study comparing activation for newly in love people viewing images of their partner compared to viewing images of things they consider sacred. Then compare with viewing images of other things they have positive but non-sacred reactions to, and determine if the romance and sacred reactions are more similar than either are to the wider positive group.
Didn't the French invent romance in the middle ages in the age of chivalry? Nothing remotely like romantic love really existed in the West before that. It's hard to imagine marriage without the notion of romance, but marriage had nothing to do with romance for most of human history. The sacred seems more driven by the model of families, with God as Father and protecting and shepherding his kids toward beneficial paths and practices. Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by 'sacred' since it seems quite a bit more abstract than just 'religious' in your construction.
LMAO, bruh the Greeks... Plato's Symposium, Sappho's poetry, the Homeric hymns. Nah, saying the French invented romantic love is like saying Valentine's Day is the reason to give women flowers. They may have branded it, but it existed long before.
I must be misunderstanding what is meant by 'romance'. If it just means the emotion 'love' ok. But romance seems to me to be ritualized courtship - 'courtly love'. That's a pretty recent invention in the West, beats me if it existed elsewhere before that.
The Greeks had two versions of romance precursors. One ruled by passion that leads to ruin, such as in Paris and Helen's passionate affair, and one that develops in an arranged marriage such as Odysseus and Penelope's. As late as the Renaissance Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was still promoting the common view that passion was the road to ruin.
Aristophanes in the Symposium gives a description of love that seems quite close to romance, where people are (literally!) hunting for their missing “other halves”.
Aristophanes' account was more a philosophical novelty than a reflection of common Greek views on romance. The social reality was that arranged marriages were common, especially for women, and romantic love was not typically a basis for marriage. But even the Greeks are not early enough to establish that romance is a precursor to the scared as they had already well developed notions of the sacred, and they could easily have developed new notions of romance from the scared.
I mean yeah, but marriage and romance haven't really been synonymous. Agreed that the Greeks aren't the earliest occurance.
The Song of Songs is literally a description of the sacred relationship between humanity and G-d through romance.
At least in the West I would have thought it was the other way around, with romance being made sacralised in the middle ages - c.f. courtly romance and ideals like love.
For the ur-sacred, I can only speculate, but would guess it emerged alongside + to support high risk activities like war and hunting that required coordination + moral support. It seems useful enough that it could have evolved independently in multiple contexts though.
Fully disagree. Sacred is much more similar between cultures than mating practices are, and one can easily induce a "cargo cult" in other apes, which suggests the wiring for sacred likely predates the wiring for what WEIRD cultures call romance. On the other hand, sacred is _remarkably_ similar to various authoritarian practices, so the standard explanation of "absent chiefman" is much more likely.
1) "roman" in "romance" means "novel". It is unclear romance was such a big deal before romantic books. I am not sure how Shakespeare's contemporaries saw Rome and Juliet, maybe they saw the stuff about kings much more important, and this only a side-show
2) I also don't think our modern sensibiliites of the sacred are that universal. The Greco-Roman religion was very businesslike with the gods. In Judaism, the sacred has frightening, damaging, harmful tendencies - think Raiders of the Lost Ark. Christianity invented a loving and lovable god.
3) I think our modern sense of sacredness is a lack. Something is missing. The world looks cold, revolving around cash and personal branding. I think in the past people did not notice the sacred because they did not lack it, because they had tiny amounts of it everywhere. Remember "Our Sacred Honor". We moderns are careful about making promises. In the past, people made bold promises, bold oath and then they were really honour-bound to fulfill them. This for example was something sacred. They also took patriotism more seriously.
Romeo and Juliet was intended as a cautionary tale against youth stupidity and indeed was at least a third version of such a tale, it was never a "positive", romantic example.
Well, if you claim to have researched the matter you should have come across a fairly substantial body of Christian history around how chivalry, as the forerunner to the romantic, paved a theological pathway to romanticism. This was transformative in turning Christianity into the religion of love, as we tend to call it nowadays. The romantic is mantic and therefore, like geomancy and necromancy. These are all subsets of the sacred (although some might call various mantic branches of the arts profane).
Therefore the answer to your question is NO. Fascination, along with obsession and the other curses of love were originally feared in the early middle ages. Nowadays, without the heady madness of falling in love we tend to think something is missing.
The sacredness of love derives from the fact that love is a universal force of attraction that transcends space and time. The love for God, the love for life, and the love for one another are sacred because they give life a universal and unifying purpose to coexist and flourish. Even for millennia it has been written in Biblical scripture that heaven will be saturated to its greatest potential by love.
https://www.samstorms.org/all-articles/post/when-the-perfect-comes:-the-ever-increasing-joy-of-heaven--1-corinthians-13:8-13-
Ellen Dissanayake reckons it's the 'making special' with the children one has that leads to culture/personhood/worlding/art/religion and other outcomes like romance which are even more derivative but confounded with the acts and resources required to sucessfully raise children to become parents themselves. (doctrine and dogma are also derivative practices).
https://www.ellendissanayake.com/
Although there were goddesses of "love" going back pretty far, there was a decided lack of "romance." Maybe the rarity of reports of romantic love makes the case for you. The Romans thought of love as a kind of madness, sometimes the mad are seen as possessed of the divine. Maybe the fact that all the goddesses of love are goddesses as opposed to gods is also supporting evidence (if that is, in fact, true).
A (somewhat) related story: when I was a teenager I remember that when I read about Evariste Galois, I thought: this is the real James Dean, the true Niezschean super man: he is a top mathematician, a liberal revolutionary, and dies in a duel, both romantic and political at 23 years old. This mix become my ideal, while I am happy of being 47…
Romantic love among equals is the greatest achievement of the West. Freedom
And Science are not bad, either…