When he said an army marches on its stomach, Napoleon Bonaparte was not being cute. But does his moral — no victory without victuals — apply to matters of the soul and salvation too? US President Woodrow Wilson thought so, “In the Lord’s Prayer, the first petition is for ‘our daily bread’.”
“No one can worship God or love his neighbour on an empty stomach,” Wilson added. A Marathi proverb is more salty: Worship of the Lord of the Belly comes first! Then that of Lord Vithoba! (Adhi Potoba mag Vithoba).”
The belly is at the bottom of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s five-step pyramid of needs. Archaeologists propose something similar. According to their theory of neolithic revolution, invention of agriculture and food surplus led to a new way of life. This included culture and religion.
That ‘Burp-first-Brahman-later’ view is being challenged by the discovery of huge temples reportedly “thousands of years older than agriculture”. This take on civilisation’s ‘true dawn’ suggests that “culture arose from spiritual hunger and not full bellies”, says David Robson in New Scientist.
Why else would supposedly starving hunter-artists waste their lives decorating caves and caverns with magnificent murals that few were expected to see? They may have had a magical or religious significance that is lost to posterity.
One theory evokes paleolithic shaman-priests. Another talks of hunting magic. Yet another links it to origins of religion: the hunters were humane enough to feel the guilt of slaughter, which they tried to expiate through rites and art.
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