Experience taught the cavemen the difference between what poisoned them and what satisfied their hunger. Their minds collected experimental realities necessary for survival. They did the best they could in drawing conclusions about the world beyond them. They assumed that they were at the centre of the cosmos, which they saw as flat, small and under the sky.
They called themselves the people and thought that strangers were creatures of another sort, less human than them. They believed that if they ate the flesh of a strong beast, they might acquire its spirit, of if they ate a portion of the body of a leader who had died, they might acquire his special qualities. They assumed that the sun and the moon they saw, moving across the sky, were animate beings. A face of a dead person they knew and recognized in peculiar shapes on a face of a rock, was associated with the living spirit of that person dwelling within the rock.
With no defined difference between spirit and material, they believed that in preserving a corpse, they were helping to preserve the spirit of one who had died. They believed that a body went limp at death because the spirit had within it had left it for the invisible world of spirits. They felt no urge to meld these ideas of spirits and materiality into a consistent picture.
People correctly associated their own movement with their will, and believed that all movement was the product of will. They saw insects as moving by will. They assumed that plants grew because of a will within. They saw the sun, the moon and the stars as closer than they really were and as moving by will.
For the cavemen, will was spirit, and they saw the world as filled with many spirits. Or, to use any word, gods. They saw gods within everything that moved. There was a god within the wind, and a god within the rivers. A god in the ocean made the waters rush to the beach and then retreat. The sun was a god. They saw their reflection in water and believed that what they are seeing was their spirit.
People attributed much that happened to to the spirits and magic. Lightning, thunder, rain, the tides, procreation and fire were all magic. And fire was not only a product of magic, it was a manifestation of spirit.
Their view of the world cam to them with invented stories. These were stories that were told and accepted without recognition of a difference between fact and fiction. Every society had its stories and creation, each with a different twist.
Storytelling described their own world in a way that they could understand. There were stories of a god having created them from earth, and a story among other that they had been created from the bark of a tree. An occasional exception to universal order might described as the work of a demon spirit, an evil of of sorts. There were stories about evil and dread, a story with a threatening demon of some sort, producing more excitement than one without danger.
People believed that if the gods could perform magic, so they could they. The earliest form was an attempt at magic through imitation. Hunter-gatherers were trying to get by rather than change their world. They tended to believe the world would always be as the gods had made it. They had no sense of social progress image of humanity’s capabilities beyond their abilities. The imagination of those who had a biological potential for genius and those of normal intelligence were limited by their culture. Had it been otherwise, modern society would appeared much sooner.
