Totemism

 

ChatGPT goes full professor mood in this answer about "what is humanity´s oldest religion". Enjoy the nocturnal lecture!

Can something useful be said about the world´s oldest religion? For instance, Australia´s Aborigines were isolated from the rest of the world around 50,000 BC. This could mean that their totemism is that old, since totemism also exists in the rest of the world. So could totemism be one of the oldest *types* of religion?

Yes — something useful can be said, but only if we are very clear about what kind of claim we’re making. The moment we stop looking for “the first religion” as a doctrine and instead ask about the oldest religious structures, the picture sharpens considerably.

Your instinct about Australian Aboriginal traditions and totemism is basically sound — with some important refinements.

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1. Why “the world’s oldest religion” is the wrong question

No religion survives unchanged for 50,000+ years. What can persist that long are:

• Religious orientations
• Symbolic structures
• Ways of sacralizing the world
• Ritual logics

So the meaningful question becomes:

What religious patterns plausibly go back to the earliest Homo sapiens?

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2. Australia: why it matters so much

Australia is uniquely important because:

• Humans arrived ~65,000–50,000 years ago
• After that, no major population replacement
• No agriculture, no state societies
• Oral, performative, place-based traditions

This makes Aboriginal cultures not “primitive fossils,” but deep continuities of early sapiens religious orientation — heavily elaborated, but structurally ancient.

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3. Totemism: what it really is (and isn’t)

Totemism is often misunderstood as:

“Belief that you descend from an animal”

That’s a caricature.

In its classical anthropological sense, totemism involves:

• Humans, animals, plants, and places forming shared identity clusters
• No absolute boundary between human and non-human
• Social organization mapped onto the natural world
• Ritual responsibility rather than domination

In Aboriginal Australia:
• Totems are tied to landforms and Dreaming tracks
• Totemism is inseparable from place-based cosmology

This is not myth-as-story — it is ontology.

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4. Is totemism extremely ancient?

Yes — very likely.

Here’s why.

A. Totemism appears worldwide among early-scale societies

Independent appearances in:
• Australia
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• Siberia
• The Americas
• South Asia (tribal contexts)

This is not diffusion — it’s structural convergence.

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B. Totemism fits forager cognition perfectly

Early Homo sapiens lived in:

• Small kin groups
• Tight ecological niches
• Direct dependence on animals and plants
• No sharp nature–culture divide

Totemism:
• Encodes ecological knowledge
• Regulates hunting and reproduction
• Binds identity to landscape

It is adaptive, not speculative.

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C. Totemism does not require agriculture, states, or writing

This matters.

Totemism works with:
• Oral transmission
• Ritual enactment
• Embodied memory
• Landscape marking

These are exactly the conditions of early sapiens societies.

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5. Why Australian isolation strengthens the case

Your point here is important, but needs tightening.

Australia does not preserve an unchanged 50,000-year-old religion.

However:
• The structural logic of Dreaming–totemism likely reflects very early sapiens religious grammar
• Later elaborations occurred, but without replacement

So when similar structures appear elsewhere, the best explanation is:

Totemism is not borrowed — it is inherited from a common human cognitive–religious repertoire.

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6. Totemism vs. other very ancient religious structures

Totemism is probably one of several coeval deep structures, not the only one.

Other candidates of similar antiquity:

A. Animism (technical sense)

• Non-human persons
• Distributed agency
• Spirit-filled world

Totemism is often a subset or specialization of animism.

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B. Ancestor presence

• Dead remain active
• Place-based ancestry
• No final rupture between worlds

Appears everywhere early humans lived.

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C. Shamanic mediation

• Altered states
• Spirit travel
• Healing and guidance

Shamanism appears across continents and epochs.

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D. Sacred landscape

• Hills, caves, water sources as power-nodes
• Ritual movement through space

This may be older than formal myth.

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7. Why later religions don’t erase these patterns

As societies scale up:

• Totemism becomes mythology
• Animism becomes philosophy
• Sacred landscape becomes pilgrimage
• Spirit possession becomes “mysticism”

But the substrate remains.

Examples:
• Clan animals → heraldry
• Totems → gods’ animal vehicles
• Dreaming tracks → sacred geographies
• Aniconic presence → metaphysical immanence

India is especially clear on this point, as we discussed with AASI survivals.

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8. What we can responsibly say (carefully phrased)

Here is the strongest defensible statement:

While no specific religion can be traced to the first Homo sapiens, totemism, animism, and sacred-landscape cosmologies represent some of the oldest religious structures known, likely emerging among early sapiens populations before their global dispersal.

Australian Aboriginal traditions preserve one of the clearest, most continuous expressions of this early religious orientation.

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9. One final philosophical note (given your interests)

Totemism is not “pre-philosophical.”

It already contains:
• Relational ontology
• Non-duality of human/nature
• Ethics embedded in cosmology
• Meaning prior to belief

In that sense, it is closer to certain non-dual traditions than later theistic systems are.

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Bottom line

• There is no “oldest religion”
• There are oldest religious structures
• Totemism is very likely one of them
• Australian Aboriginal traditions preserve this structure with exceptional clarity
• Similar patterns worldwide point to deep sapiens inheritance, not diffusion

If you want next, we could:
• Compare totemism with early Indian or African material
• Examine why monotheism appears so late
• Connect to non-dual metaphysics
• Or look at what archaeology can and cannot prove about belief

Just say where to go next.