Cult and religion in the earlies human societies

By Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, with the cooperation of EURO INNOVANET srl

The definition of cult is hard to be found. The closest seems to be Colombia encyclopedia where the cult is defined as ritual observances involved in worship of, or communication with, the supernatural or its symbolic representations. A cult includes the totality of ideas, activities, and practices associated with a given divinity or social group. It includes not only ritual activities but also the beliefs and myths centering on the rites. The objects of the cult are often things associated with the daily life of the celebrants. The English scholar Jane Harrison pointed out the importance of the cult in the development of religion. Sacred persons may have their own cults. The cult may be associated with a single person, place, or object or may have much broader associations.

Pianu de Jos ritual shrine reconstruction with original pottery, Petresti Culture, The National Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu Romania. The painted pottery is concentrated on the altar table and indicates a ritual place. The big pot under the table is connected with grain. Could be an ritual linked to Great Mother.

The word origin is derived from the Latin word cultus (worship), from past participle of colere, (to cultivate).

In prehistory the cult is associated with religious and it is hard to be understood by a non-religious person because the cultic places or cultic objects were alive, full of life and integrated with the individual and communities. Each member of the community had a very well defined behavior. Each special gesture or ritual could interact with the divinity. Each stage of transformation in the life of an object, as in that of a person, is surrounded by ritual and often secrecy. The cultic objects and places are full of power and the impact was great at the individual levels. In special rituals objects were granted with supernatural powers who that grant the owners honor and prestige.

 

Unfortunately, is very hard to reconstruct the cultic environments because of scared sources who survived till us.

Colin Renfrew identifies four classes of evidence pertaining to ritual: (1) verbal testimony about religious activity, (2) direct observation of cult practices, (3) study of nonverbal records depictions), and (4) study of material remains of cult practices.
Most prehistorians agree that the context of discoveries and their relationships are key elements in using material evidence.
Magic accompanied the human and cultural development since earliest times, together with cultural practices.

In earliest human societies, the cult practices walks together with the cultural human development. Cultural tools that survived and arrived to us, tell the history of a human concrete action toward the world, also if on a magic plane.
Interpreted both as a primitive attempt to interpreter the world and its phenomena, and as a way to control life and its events in a time in which people had no possibility to control the world outside them, magic pervaded human lives even when human beings didn't yet develop a structured and articulated "religion".

 

Animal figurine, 1100-1000 BC, The Pigorini Museum, wealth of an important person or merchant  or cultic object. It has been suggested that, because of the nature of the objects (intact and mostly ornamental) that it was a cult deposit, an offering to the gods.

Humans celebrated their ceremonies to the deities or to the natural forces and dedicated their prayers to ask for crops abundance, good health for the domestic animals, and protection against malefic forces which could always affect their existences.
Birth, life and death were, yesterday like in today's traditional or ethnic cultures, at the centre of cultural practices of prehistoric people, whose believes left us a large number of tools for rituals helping us in reconstructing their magic thoughts.
The cultural practice requested, since very ancient times, specific places where rituals were carried out and tools by means of which to concretely acting the rituals. 
Most of the ritual activities took place in sanctuaries and other religious places
Within the "religious places", magic tools for cults and ritual were placed. Commonly, the most diffused tools for cults that we can find in religious places were altars, burners for smoking offerings, cult tables - differently shaped-,like the items showed in the left side.