Quotes from “The Sacred in Human Evolution”

By Roy Rappaport (1971)

• Sanctification presents to the individual as his own goals those of the society.#
  Religion
• Religious ritual played an important role in social and ecological regulation during a time in human history when the arbitrariness of social conventions was increasing but it was not yet possible for authorities, if they existed at all, to enforce compliance.#
• Through sanctification the purposes of higher-order systems may be injected into lower-order systems. As such, sanctification operates as a counterthrust to attempts by individuals or social groups to promote their own purposes to positions of dominance in higher-level systems.#
• To elevate the interests or goals of a lower-order system to a position of predominance in a higher-order system is to increase the specificity, and therefore decrease the adaptiveness, of the higher-order system.#
• [The infant] learns to trust before he learns, or perhaps can learn, language. It may be argued that it is the development of this trust that enables him to accept symbolic messages, first from the mother and then from others.#
  Language
• The con­cept of the sacred has not only been made possible by symbolic communica­tion, but it has made symbolic communication (upon which human adapta­tion rests) possible. This implies that the idea of the sacred is as old as language and that the evolution of language and of the idea of the sacred were closely related, if not indeed bound together in a single mutual causal process. It may be suggested, further, that the emergence of the sacred was perhaps an instance of the operation of Romer’s Rule, for it possibly helped to maintain the general features of some previously existing social orga­nization in the face of new threats posed by an ever-increasing capacity for lying.#
  LanguageReligion