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* Chapter 5*


      Cults and Rituals

Archaeologists tend to suggest that anything they do not understand is
ritual, whether it is a monument or an artefact, but this practice
should not be used as an excuse not to try to understand what might be
meant by the term in the particular context.

Ritual can mean any habitual activity and may not be religious in the
sense that we use the word nowadays. Veneration of the ancestors
involves ritual: nowadays it can be bound up with patriotism and
involves rituals like saluting the flag, laying wreaths at memorials and
singing the National Anthem. There are rituals connected with football
and cricket and other sports. The 'Ashes' for instance or the Olympic
flame are examples. So we should not immediately associate ritual with
religion in prehistoric contexts.

Prehistoric religion was an immensely complicated business and whenever
we try to understand it, we inevitably simplify it and lose most of its
sublety and possibly most of the significance that it had for early people.

Presumably, the change of susistance/life-style undertaken by Neolithic
people brought with it at a change or, at least, a modification of
belief into something that could become visible to us as an integral
part of man's way of life during the period. One important cult
concerned the very basis of existence. Hunting and/or farming depended
for their success on natural forces or whatever it was that controlled
these natural forces. Because of their lack of knowledge of these
natural forces, man?s method of getting to grips with them was to
personify and deify them. After that, it required sustained effort on
man's part to forge and cement a successful relationship with these
deities. Evidence of this can be seen in the use of fana during the
earlier Neolithic period and later in the construction of monuments 
that needed immense labour and time to build. This later effort seems
totally out of proportion with the economic prosperity of the times.

Whether we shall ever be able to understand the functions of these
monuments is a moot point. First of all we must make an effort to
understand the impulses that prompted the construction of many of these
monuments. One can suggest that they were the result of two impulses:

 

!.  The need to identify methods of communication with these natural
forces/gods.

2. The need to negotiate a contract (an understanding) with these gods.

 

Both would have involved sacrifices or deposits accompanied by rituals.
For these to be effective they would have required the establishment of
an especially sacred spot where these practices could most effectively
be carried out. The sacrifices would have been in the nature of
down-payments for benefits that the gods would bestow in future like
success in animal husbandry and prosperous harvests. Deposits would have
been in the nature of an indication of the sort of blessing the
supplicant desired.

Neolithic monuments like causewayed enclosures could have been sites for
both these activities. If this was so, their locations would have been
chosen by the religious leaders and their interiors tailored to the
rituals that took place within them. Distribution of the causewayed
enclosures is predominantly a southern and eastern one, areas where one
finds the lighter soils that the Neolithic cultivator could cope with,
and perhaps it defines the approximate limits of the earliest Neolithic
agriculture in Britain although, of course, the monuments did not appear
until people had been settled for a many centuries.

Religious leaders were the intermediaries between men and gods since
they had acquired or assumed the wisdom that enabled them to decide what
rituals would best propitiate the gods and the knowledge to interpret
the gods' demands. How they ccame to be credited with this wisdom is
difficult to understand. Their rituals were traditional and probably
only gradually changed with time and so perhaps brought about
modifications/changes in the designs of the monuments.

We know that not all of the later ritual monuments were constructed and
left unchanged. Some were modified, like Stonehenge that was rebuilt or
added to on several occasions, and presumably these phases reflected
changing rituals and/or beliefs that occurred over the centuries. A
surprising number were never finished (Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, for
example) and this may reflect change of religious belief or political
inclination or very slow building programmes that were not completed
during the lifetimes of the beliefs which gave rise to them.

What part death and burial played in religion at different times is open
to interpretation. Nowadays most people treat them as indivisible from
it but do not need to be. In earlier neolithic times there was probably
no link even though the cult of the veneration of ancestors resulted in
the construction of the large ossuaries we call earthern long barrows
and megalithic barrows. Veneration of the ancestors seems to have been
widespread in the British Isles, judging by the almost universal
distribution of these monuments. Variations in size, plans and
materials, described in the last chapter, prompt one to think that
within this creed there were a large number of sects, living cheek by
jowl, each with its own version of the sepulchre.

In Britain the occurrence of grave goods in formal burials commonly only
begins with the period of the late-neolithic Beaker burials and seems to
suggest a hope for life after death and therefore some new direction in
religious thinking but it is difficult to know how this could be linked
with the prevailing belief in the sanctity of natural forces. Only
important people appear to have been eligible for continued existence so
perhaps it was initially a cult restricted to the well-off that only
gradually percolated down to lesser folk.

Clearly, even when religion is in an early stage of development it does
not mean that it is   easy to understand at this remove in time nor is
it at any time uncomplicated or free from variations in belief even
within the same society. Such subtle diversities are probably beyond our
reach.

Later on, particular gods became identified with certain communities
(like Jehovah and the Jews) who looked after the particular interests of
their people. This becomes evident at least as early as the Iron Age in
Britain when evidence such as the Brigantian tribe naming themselves
after their goddess Brigantia appears.

With the coming of the Romans to Britain, religion became both a
personal matter and (for Roman citizens) an official observance. Each
Roman citizen could choose his or her own personal deity as long as they
also paid lip service to the gods of the Roman state. The Roman state
religion was universal and inextricably entwined with Roman imperial
power so it was the adoption of Christianity by the Roman authorities to
replace the earler state religion during the fourth century AD that
ensured the survival of the Church and its dispersion throughout the
western world as both an official belief and a bureaucratic and
centralised organisation.

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