Foreign Idea of a Cosmic Kingship Religion

Foreign Idea of a Cosmic Kingship

Religion is one of the constants that exist for all the peoples of the world. When the as yet primitive tribes in South America and remote Pacific islands in the twentieth century, they had firmly ensconced religious beliefs. When Cortes arrived in the "new world" and made his men burn their ships, he found many people who worshipped different gods. Luckily for Cortes they worshipped him also. It made his conquest that much easier. A thread that entangles itself in all that mankind does or has done. Religion has been the cause of war and peace, sacrifice of both the body and nature, and it has given the world some of its greatest art treasures. It has definitely worked its way into every part of every culture.

Religion also takes on many forms. People are trying to understand elements of the world around them that are mysterious and frightening. So, sometimes the religion created has to be just as scary. There has to be some balance struck, so the people can feel at home with what they have created. It often happens that unscrupulous rulers want people to bow down to them, so they pretend to either control the messages of the gods, or they pretend to be gods themselves (much as Cortes did). When seeking out the form of religion, people often make it mysterious. Every culture has some form of creation myth which tells of how the universe came to be in a fantastic way. From the Judeo-Christian-Muslim view of a Creator Being, to indigenous tribes who imaginer the earth was created by a great bird (usually an eagle) which scooped out the mountain, valleys, lakes, and oceans as its wings dipped in flight. Whatever the myth or reality humans have always tried to put some face on the reality around them.

Another type of explanation is that the earth is the mother of all humankind and that naturally occurring elements of the earth are the gods. Many ancient peoples believed that gods resided in the most powerful elements that they could see. They were very familiar with the destructive power of wind, fire, water and the earth itself, so these four things became wrapped in the religion of these people. Often there were demigods who inhabited the trees, or a particular body of water, or lightening. In other words a feature of the larger gods, but the main deities in these cultures were the large, destructive elements themselves.

Researchers have also studied the religions of these peoples for many years and have determined that there are basically two types of religion. There are those that contain a metacosmic religiosity which can be seen to exist in all of the major western religions. Christians, Jews and Muslims all believe in a single entity that is controlling, and is outside the earth. The idea is the same as metaphysical, or above physical. This God is all powerful and exists apart from humans and nature. That is the nature of the term, that this God exists apart from humans and nature.

Then there is the term which is basically the converse of that, or cosmic religiosity. "Cosmic religiosity is the type found in Africa, Asia, and Oceana, sometimes called 'animism' by ethnologists. Characteristically it is a this-worldly which reveres nature and its forces, and also forms a basis for popular religiosity. Pieris points out that cosmic religiosity is present in many forms throughout the world for it represents a basic psychological posture that homo religiosus adopts subconsciously toward the mysteries of life." [footnoteRef:1] The key term here is "this-worldly." Many of the peoples wanted this type of religion because it was something that thye understood better than the metacosmic types. "Cosmic religiosity offers spirituality which does not focus on some 'metacosmic' beyond but rather on contemporary reality: the sacred, the womanly, the earthly."[footnoteRef:2] From this reality Oakley said, "there existed a consubstantiality between God, nature, and man, a divine continuum as it were."[footnoteRef:3] This means that all of the forces were intertwined. Humans, nature and the sacred were all part of the divine order. [1: Phillip Gibbs. The Word in the Third World: Divine Revelation in the Theology of Jean-Marc Ela, Aloysius Pieris, and Gustavo Gutierrez. Rome: Editrice Pontifica Universita Georgiana, 1996.] [2: Ibid, 199.] [3: Oakley, Francis. Kingship: The Politics of Enhantment. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. 149.]

It is interesting to note that "even the metacosmic religions are rooted in cosmic subcultures usually referred to as popular religiosity… where the cult of female deities has a more natural place."[footnoteRef:4] Therefore, it can be shown that not only did the cultures which adopted the major religions begin as people who were cosmic instead of metacosmic, but that the metacosmic religions were more of the feminine form than the cosmic ones. [4: Peter Scott, and William T. Cavanaugh. The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, 2008. New York: Basic Books]