Man is remarkably limited by his own body. He perishes comparatively easily, and he constantly needs food and sleep. His physical abilities are modest next to those of most of the planet's inhabitants: any large predator is stronger than he is, any bird is faster. Even his own life is a negligible span in the history of the species.

And yet man has spread across the whole planet, built himself an artificial environment, and then gone beyond the Earth itself.

How did this become possible?

We are used to explaining man's success by his intellect. But a mind enclosed in a single body is limited by that body. Even the most gifted person holds in memory only as much as fits in one head, and lives only as long as one body lives.

One may suppose that man's chief advantage became the ability to overcome these limits by uniting with other people. The knowledge of the dead remains, the tool they made passes into other hands, and their face is remembered by those who saw it. Society turned out to be a way of carrying the results of one life beyond its bounds. In the prologue we said that someday this ability may allow life to leave the Solar System. But before looking at the stars, we need to understand how a mortal creature assembled out of itself something capable of outliving it.

Aristotle defined man as a social animal (ζῶον πολιτικὸν). After two and a half thousand years of philosophy the formula seems obvious. But behind it lies a serious problem.

Man is capable of living alone. He can leave society, refuse contact with those around him, and even construct a philosophy that justifies freedom from social obligations. But the decision to live apart is made by a creature that grew up inside society.

His language, his knowledge of the world, and his ways of obtaining what he needs took shape from his own experience, from the experience of those nearby, and from that of previous generations. A hermit finds his own food and builds his own dwelling, but the knowledge he uses in doing so was received from other people. Physical solitude by no means always means independence from society.

Group living appeared long before man. Many animals live in groups, obtain food together, and look after their young. The ancestors of man behaved this way long before the appearance of Homo sapiens. The mere fact of forming groups can hardly be considered a purely human achievement.

Why did man's dependence on others grow so large in the course of evolution?

The answer should be sought in the structure of the human organism itself.

A child comes into the world almost helpless. Its physical development and the mastery of necessary skills take years. Even after learning to walk, it needs adult care for a long time. A child must be fed and protected for years, and then taught as well. If the parents die or fall ill, the child's survival becomes the concern of others.

Care for those who cannot feed themselves was not limited to children. In Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq, the skeleton of a Neanderthal (about 45 thousand years ago) was found, whom archaeologists nicknamed Nandy. He had lost his right forearm and, judging by a blow to the left side of the face, an eye. The ear canals, overgrown with bone, point to deafness. With these injuries he lived to be forty-odd — old age for a Neanderthal. Such a man could not hunt. The group fed him, and fed him for years.

Probably it was precisely this feature — the helplessness of the human young and the care of those around it — that became one of the causes of complex cooperation. Care for offspring went beyond the relationship of mother and child; relatives and other members of the community took part in it.

A long and costly childhood at the same time created conditions for passing on accumulated experience. While the organism grows, it learns the ways of living worked out by previous generations. A person receives knowledge that cost his ancestors whole lifetimes to obtain.

Here we first meet a feature of human existence to which we will return throughout the book. The individual organism is mortal, but the results of its labor outlive it. Evolution changes a species over many generations; the transmission of knowledge does so within one. Contemporaries can use the results at once to adapt to their environment.

Cooperation and Aggression

The need for other people gives rise to an obvious problem. Another person helps one survive — and at the same time threatens. He needs the same food and the same place by the fire. His interests may coincide with those of the people around him, or they may conflict.

Aggression is one of the most ancient ways of resolving such a conflict (Lorenz's fundamental study [of it]), and it is characteristic of all adaptive animals: obtaining food, defending territory and offspring.

Our ancestors were hardly an exception. In that same Shanidar, one of the men had a mark between his ribs left by a blow from a sharp object, most likely a spear; after the wound he lived for several weeks. The same cave where a "cripple" was fed for years also holds traces of violence.

The union of several individuals increased their chances of survival. But within the group the behavior of its members had to be regulated somehow. Who gets the food that has been obtained? How is space divided? What is to be done with someone who has struck another? How are the children to be kept safe?

Complex life together requires behavior to be predictable. If anyone can at any moment appropriate the fruits of another's labor or attack another to satisfy his own need, cooperation becomes too costly. One may suppose that the development of cooperation went hand in hand with the emergence and consolidation of ways of restraining aggression within the group.

Hence the question of freedom. Any life together limits the behavior of the individual. By entering into interaction with others, he gains new opportunities but is forced to reckon with other people's interests. Here we mean freedom in its manifestation as the right to satisfy one's desires immediately: to take what one likes, or to strike when it seems advantageous. By giving up part of such possibilities, a member of the group receives protection and care.

Desire and deed cease to coincide. Between them arise rules, the expectations of others, and the memory of consequences. A person living among people ceases to be the sole source of his own actions.

Gradually such limits become habit. A person learns to expect predictable actions from others and himself follows the accepted rules. The rules are fixed by upbringing and, where necessary, by compulsion. The restriction of the egoistic (directed only at the self) freedom of individuals gives rise to mechanisms of regulation and a supra-personal construct, which we will later call culture.

Limiting one's own behavior is by no means always experienced by a person as a sacrifice. What once arose from conflict or a forced agreement is perceived by later generations as the natural order of things. A person is born inside rules that already exist and absorbs them in the course of upbringing. As a result, society can govern the behavior of its members without resorting to force each time.

This is the most important function of culture — to sustain life in common (the community) by passing on accepted ways of behaving.

Culture as Accelerated Evolution

Man is an adaptive animal. His task is to go on existing by any available means. In a world where danger comes every second, where everything is set against him, he constantly has to solve problems of adaptation. Living organisms adapt to their environment through evolution — mechanisms that work across many generations. A genetic change can provide an advantage under particular conditions. As generations succeed one another, some hereditary traits spread and others disappear.

But man turned out to have one more way of adapting.

Let us imagine a group of our distant ancestors who have learned to make a new tool (a bow, say). This skill was preceded by years of observation and trial (or by an accidental discovery). But once the technique is mastered, the other members of the group adopt it through learning. In the next generation someone improves the tool: changes its shape or finds a new use for it. The acquired experience accumulates.

Cultural transmission of information makes it possible to change behavior within a single lifetime and to spread new techniques much faster than could happen through genetic inheritance. For man, culture became an accelerator of evolution.

Other animals also pass on skills. Japanese macaques on the island of Koshima learned from one another to wash sweet potatoes, and English tits to open milk bottles on doorsteps. In human society the transmission of information became so reliable that it ceased to be a bonus to instinct and became the basis of existence.

Culture made it possible to preserve the results of the labor of the dead. The inventor of a tool might perish, but the technology went on living. The knowledge of an individual became the property of the community. Culture passes on skills, information, the ability of the living to adapt, directly from person to person, including between people who are not related.

By culture we will mean the whole accumulated experience of life together — of Life itself — along with the ways of transmitting it: skills, language, upbringing, habit, mutual benefit, compulsion, and the rules that take shape from all of these. Habit or compulsion are the same kind of manifestation of culture as the ability to work stone. In the end culture is both the accumulated legacy and the agreement to live together, and the task of continuing the line.

With success in adaptation we will connect the growing complexity of the transmission of information. Hunting together requires coordinated action and the ability to understand one another's intentions; the raising of children requires the transmission of experience. For that reason the development of culture is inseparable from the development of communication.

Speech is what we are accustomed to and cannot imagine ourselves without. It is a technology for passing information from one person to another through a system of symbols (sounds). We need to understand by what means and how people could transmit an amount of information sufficient for learning, consolidation and use.

In her book "The Origin of Language," Svetlana Burlak examines the hypothesis of the psychologist Michael Tomasello, who links the emergence of language with the development of cooperation and even considers the drive toward cooperation the main driving force of glottogenesis (the origin of language) (Burlak, 2019, pp. 136–137).

For joint action, people need to understand one another's goals. More than that, they need to take into account what each participant knows. Imagine a person pointing another toward an object lying nearby. The gesture conveys little. If both know that behind the indicated stone there is a source of food, the gesture takes on a concrete meaning. To someone who lacks this information, the same gesture says nothing. Understanding depends on shared notions.

Burlak cites an observation: great apes raised by humans master the pointing gesture and willingly show the experimenter what they need themselves. But, according to Tomasello, never what would be useful only to the human. Children, on the other hand, before they have speech, draw adults' attention to what they themselves see — simply in order to share. And conversely: when someone is pointed to with a hand in a certain direction, he expects in advance to see something there that matters to him. Without any further articulation, a person presumes the participation of the other.

The coordination of action itself could have existed long before developed spoken language. Gestures and facial expressions, sound signals conveyed intentions. We can hardly determine the day our ancestors first spoke, and there is no reason to think that early Homo sapiens lacked language abilities. Neanderthals too had the anatomical and cognitive prerequisites for speech. The only question is at what level their conceptual apparatus was developed, how far into abstract images it reached. One may suppose that the ability to convey complex meanings developed slowly.

Man learned to tell another about an object that is nearby. Then about what happened yesterday (about the past, which no longer exists). About a danger that has not yet arrived (about the future, which does not yet exist). About what exists only in his memory or imagination.

Language expanded the possibilities of collective adaptation. People received an instrument that lets them coordinate their actions concerning events that none of them can see at the moment. A question arises: how does a person determine that another's message corresponds to reality?

Trust as a Condition of Life Together

Developed communication presupposes trust between participants.

Imagine a person warning the others that danger is approaching. The others can check his message themselves. But in all likelihood checking will take time, and may prove altogether impossible. The members of the group have to act on the basis of someone else's words.

Trust makes it possible to take decisions relying on another's experience. But at the same time it creates the possibility of deception. He who can report a danger can also report an invented threat. The development of cooperation sets society an additional task — to learn to tell reliable behavior from unreliable.

In time people accumulate experience of dealing with one another. Some members of the group earn a reputation for reliability, others arouse suspicion. But the more complex the society, the harder it is to test each person by one's own experience.

We are used to considering knowledge the result of our own cognition. In fact an enormous part of our ideas about the world is received from other people. We know about places where we have never been and about events we have not seen. We use the results of research that we could hardly repeat ourselves. The life of society is built on trust in other people's knowledge. A person must be able to turn received information into his own conviction.

An individual organism has limited experience, but thanks to trust it gains access to the experience of the many, which is a fundamental adaptive mechanism that allowed society to reach incredible complexity.

Trust should be distinguished from faith. In trusting, a person relies on someone (including himself) and accepts the risk of error. Faith, by contrast, is unconditional acceptance, often without any specific source or bearer.

As soon as people begin to rely on what and whom it is hard or impossible to verify, there arises a need for ways of creating trust between those who do not know one another personally. Tens of thousands of years later, one of these ways will be called advertising.

Human culture turns into an enormous system of accumulated experience, available to each new generation. But along with experience, a person inherits notions whose origin and reliability he finds it hard to establish. So there arises one more ability, whose significance for our inquiry is hard to overestimate. Man is capable of living by convictions about the existence of what he has never seen.

Man and His Imagined Reality

Until now we have considered man chiefly as a social animal whose adaptation to the environment depends on other people. Now let us turn to the structure of his psyche.

A living organism constantly interacts with reality. It receives information through the sense organs and changes its behavior in response to changes in the environment. But the human brain can reproduce images of events in the absence of the events themselves. We can recall a person we have not seen for a long time, or be frightened of something that has not yet happened.

This ability has an obvious adaptive significance. By imagining the consequences of his actions, a person prepares for the future and protects himself from the past. Memory allows earlier experience to be taken into account, imagination to rehearse situations the organism has not yet encountered. The brain creates an internal model of reality.

In "A Scientist's Confession, or Consolation by Methodology" (collection "Three Approaches to the Study of Culture," pp. 93–125), V. N. Romanov treats cognition as the activity of a subject who himself builds an image of the surrounding world. He carries out a thought experiment: he returns the body to the "bodiless" subject of scientific cognition and finds that the subjective world is, first of all, a "modal reality," a world of possibilities that the surroundings offer to the body.

The ways of perceiving and making sense of reality depend on what a person can do in it. The same place, Romanov writes, will be a different world for animals with different motor abilities. The image of the world takes shape in interaction with the environment.

But as the psyche develops, a person gains the ability to interact also with images created by his own consciousness. Hence a curious contradiction. The organism exists in the physical world, but its behavior can be governed by events that take place only in its inner world. Fear of an imagined danger causes a quite real trembling of the hands. A dream leaves an experience that does not go away after waking (admit it, you have had dreams more vivid than reality, ones you did not even want to climb out of). For the brain, experience possesses a reality of its own.

This does not yet mean that a person fails to tell a dream from waking life. But the ability to distinguish states of consciousness does not in itself explain where the experienced images come from.

Imagine that your father died yesterday. The body lies nearby, cold and unresponsive. At night the father comes. He moves, he looks as he always looked, and one feels beside him what one felt when he was alive. In the morning the body lies in the same place.

What happened in the night?

A modern person has notions of memory and of the nature of dreams. We have concepts that allow us to separate a person's physical existence from his image in consciousness. Let us take them away for a minute. What remains is the bare contradiction: the one who is not, was. He acted, and the feelings he aroused go on in broad daylight.

How was this problem resolved tens of thousands of years ago?

One may suppose that the capacity for abstraction and for conveying complex explanations developed gradually. Early people had already mastered symbols — speech, ochre at their camps, pendants made of shells, even the flute. But they hardly possessed ready-made systems of concepts comparable to today's philosophical or religious teachings. At the same time the problem itself existed regardless of whether a person was able to formulate it.

Man saw dreams and remembered the dead. He encountered what he could find no cause for. His psyche continued its adaptive work (man is an adaptive animal), trying to fit these experiences into a picture of the world. Man could not separate or explain what was real and what was invented. But he certainly needed to manage this in order to go on surviving. He had to take command of himself. This is how cultic activity (proto-religion) arose.

Cultic activity arose as an attempt by people to adapt to the existence of imagined reality.

Death and the Emergence of Cultic Activity

Death has accompanied life from the moment it appeared on Earth. Organisms perish, and the species continues through reproduction. This law is far older than man.

But the development of memory and imagination creates an entirely new situation. The dead person continues to exist in the psyche of the living. His image is kept in memories, feelings and expectations are bound up with him (the past and the future — what does not exist in the moment). He comes in dreams, and familiar situations evoke a sense of his presence.

The collision of a person's physical absence with the continued existence of his image became, by our supposition, one of the sources of the most ancient cultic activity.

To lay a tool beside the dead, no theory of the soul is needed (but try asking what a soul is, and you will get completely different and maximally complex definitions from everyone, and what of the Neanderthal?). It is enough for one person to do it, moved by the living image of the one who is no more, and for others to repeat the action because there is relief in repetition. The explanation might come later, generations on, when the action had already become custom and demanded a meaning.

Let us try to test this hypothesis against the archaeological material.

Neanderthals — a separate, vanished branch of Homo that existed in parallel with our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons — deliberately treated their dead in a special way (by special we mean activity not directed immediately at preserving or continuing existence). Traces of such actions have been found, in particular, at La Ferrassie and Shanidar.

At Shanidar the remains of several Neanderthals lay in a small space, and the same place was used repeatedly for the dead. In 2018 a team led by Emma Pomeroy found there one more adult (Shanidar Z), laid on his back in a hollow, with a stone under his head, next to those excavated half a century earlier. This place served for the dead, probably, for hundreds of years.

At La Ferrassie in France, a stone slab with hollowed-out cup marks lay over the burial of a child — and the cup marks faced downward, toward the body. The living could not see them.

Burial may have a practical sense: a buried body does not decay in plain view and does not attract scavengers. But that task can be solved in many ways. Why, then, were the dead left in places connected with the life of the group? Why was one place used again and again? Why spend hours on cup marks that none of the living would ever see?

Preserving the body or parts of it made it possible to continue the link with the departed and, more than that, to manage his image. You laid these bones and determined how they should lie. You can come at any moment and make sure: they are here. This verifiable fact is the support of the psyche. The father's image comes in a dream and goes when it wishes, but the bones lie where you put them. You control this reality and possess it.

Where one cannot make sure, the beyond-real has to be made controllable at least at one point. This is a way to go on with adaptive activity and not destroy the psyche.

Hence also the cult of the skull and the lower jaw — a special treatment of the head of the dead, traces of which remain at Paleolithic sites. Why the skull? When today we are identified by biometrics, the camera reads the face, that is, the geometry of the skull beneath the skin. The skull is a natural code that repeats in no one else. The psyche did the same long before cameras. A newborn turns toward a face sooner than toward any other object. An adult recognizes a person by the face, not by the hands. We look into a face when we meet; we turn away from a face when we are ashamed. Shame is a feeling not described in animals: it requires knowing that one is being looked at, and knowing by whom. The face and eyes are the place where another person is present for us most strongly.

That is why, of the whole body, it was the head that became the material support for the image of the dead. To hold in your hands the skull of someone who spoke with you is to hold the one part of the body by which he could be recognized.

The question, however, remains: why could a part of the human body keep its significance after the death of its owner? The remains made it possible to maintain a link with the image of the dead, which went on living in memory. To hold in your hands the jaw of someone who spoke with you is to have in the outer world something that belongs to one who now exists only in the inner.

Important. Such seemingly non-adaptive behavior arose among representatives of different branches of humanity. Neanderthals had a history of their own, in many ways independent of the culture of Homo sapiens. Both showed a special attitude toward the dead. Are some forms of cultic activity not a consequence of the development of the thinking psyche as such? If a living being possesses memory and experiences the absence of those it remembers, it has to somehow reconcile its own psychic experience with a changed reality.

What explanations Neanderthals gave for such experiences, we do not know. But the very repetition of actions with the dead allows us to regard these practices as cultural transmission of experience. The first person acted out of immediate feeling. The following generations repeated it — and along with the action they absorbed an attitude toward death. This is how the action became a tradition.

Must a person understand the reason for an action in order to pass it on to others? These cultural practices were widespread across the whole range of the various Homo, were at first reproduced thanks to imitation and the emotional significance of what was happening, were understood at once and by all, since given their prevalence they had no direct benefit, while coherent explanations of them took shape much later (acquiring the form of myths).

This allows us to look differently at the origin of religion. We are used to seeing it through developed notions of the supernatural and ways of communicating with it. But these very categories took shape in the course of the historical study of religions. European scholars, encountering foreign traditions, described unfamiliar practices in their own terms. Then came the theories of animism, fetishism and magic, with the help of which anthropologists reconstructed the most ancient forms of religious consciousness. But people of the Paleolithic hardly perceived their own actions in categories created by researchers tens of thousands of years later.

That is why we use the concept of cultic activity. By it we will mean the actions of a person directed at that part of lived reality which did not yield to objective explanation and control.

In other words, cultic activity became the first form of cognition. Cognition in the broadest sense — a way of obtaining information about the world and a way of coming to terms with it and with one's own inner self. The cult helped to process the information that the eye did not see and the hand could not reach: from the not-yet-known, from the dead, and from dreams. If the hypothesis is correct, cultic activity is older than the developed religious teachings, and its original significance lay in adapting the psyche to an inexplicable, unmanifested horizon of knowledge.

The World Drawn by Man

Let us go on watching the formation of Homo and move to the Upper Paleolithic (40 to 10 thousand years ago). Across the whole range of habitation, images of animals and people appear on cave walls, and beside them geometric signs. Some astonish with the precision of form and movement. Others depict beings that man could hardly have met in nature.

On the wall — a wounded bison with its entrails spilling out. Beside it a man with a bird's head and an erect phallus. Nearby a bird on a pole and a rhinoceros. "The Paleolithic Sistine Chapel" — the famous scene in the shaft of the Lascaux cave.

The meaning of the composition remains a riddle. Before us may be an incident from a hunt, or it may be a dream or someone's idea of something, the content of which is of course lost. But on any interpretation we see the capacity of the human psyche to create an image of a being that does not exist in the surrounding world. Or the reverse? That it exists, but cannot be controlled? Cannot, for example, be hunted? The cave man combines familiar images and obtains new ones, and this activity of his is understood by the other members of the group, although he is evidently neither tending the fire in the hearth nor raising future generations. In this dark, hard-to-reach, damp cave he does every day a thing that is clear to everyone, but not to us.

The inner world of one person takes material form, can now be managed, and, what is more, becomes part of shared experience. Another person, seeing the image created, can discuss it and give it a meaning of his own. Such images became a way of conveying notions that were still hard to express in words, in language, in that verbal apparatus which did not yet allow the creation of complex abstract constructions.

It is worth looking closely at the negative hand stencils found in many Paleolithic caves. They differ greatly from the images of animals. To make such a print, it is enough to press a palm to the wall and apply pigment around it. When the hand is removed, its outline remains on the stone. The person depicts his own hand, using its physical presence.

The hand belongs to a living body. But after the pigment is applied, its image remains on the wall and becomes part of the space of images. For a person who already knew how to create images of imagined reality, this act could have had a special significance. By placing his hand against the wall, he as it were entered the world he had created. And then he withdrew it, leaving his trace there. The real body for a moment touched the world of images and discovered the border between them: along the outline of the palm one ends and the other begins.

There is a parallel here with burial practices. The dead person vanishes from the life of the group but remains in memory. The hand vanishes from the wall but leaves its image. In both cases a person confronts the fact that an image or trace exists in the absence of the object itself. Could this have become the basis for special notions about the nature of man? We do not know. But the very act with the hand allows us to suppose that the image was perceived as something more than a copy of an outward form.

Another example is the geometric signs of the Paleolithic caves. French researchers noticed recurring images, which they called tectiforms. The meaning of these signs is unknown. But the same tectiforms occur in several caves of one valley — Font-de-Gaume, Bernifal, Rouffignac — and have a stable form. This means the image could have had a meaning known to the bearers of one cultural tradition.

Particularly interesting are the groups of dots at Lascaux. André Leroi-Gourhan drew attention to six dots gathered into three pairs, in the farthest parts of the cave. One such sign stands near the rhinoceros in the shaft, another deep in the Gallery of the Felines. The similarity of the signs and their placement allowed him to suppose that the images in the cave are not scattered at random but subordinated to a common design.

If the images formed a special space, the signs might have marked its boundaries. They might have marked the transition between parts of the cave, or limits possessing a special significance. And if for the people of the Paleolithic the depicted world was really connected with the lived experiences and workings of consciousness, such signs could have performed a protective function. They marked a boundary that a person crossed on entering into interaction with that world. Could not the six dots at the edge of the shaft have held in that into which the outlined hand entered?

The content of these notions we will not recover. But we can ask where such an attitude toward an invented, virtual world comes from at all. Why do certain places and objects begin to be perceived as possessing special significance? The answer lies in the capacity of the human psyche to project its own experiences onto the surrounding world. The cave wall remains stone. But the image on it evokes fear or memory. And repeated interaction with the image becomes part of collective experience. Here lie the preconditions of cultic activity.

The Shock Absorber of the Human Psyche

Let us return to the original problem. Man is a living organism whose psyche took shape in constant adaptation to the environment. Memory and imagination greatly expanded the possibilities of this adaptation. But along with them man acquired the capacity to live through what is not present in immediate reality. He could fear a supposed danger and see the dead in dreams.

Such experiences demanded interpretation. A living organism needs to keep the ability to act even when what is happening is not understood.

Hence the hypothesis: cultic activity became the shock absorber for the human psyche. The explanation of the incomprehensible made it possible to fit disturbing experiences into a picture of the world. And repeated actions returned a sense of predictability.

A caveat is important here. Cushioning is only one side of the matter. To soothe the psyche, an explanation had to say something about the world: where the dead one comes from, why the herd has gone, what will happen tomorrow. Cultic activity was a way of asking the world and receiving an answer. A way of coming to terms with the surrounding world and with oneself. What researchers would later call magic or fetishism were the first techniques of such questioning. And precisely for that reason the cult stands on the same foundation as the exchange we will discuss below: on the transmission of information.

For this a developed conceptual apparatus was not required at all. It was enough to connect an experience with an action that helped to cope with it. A person saw the dead in a dream — and did something with his remains. Or repeated the actions of his elders, because they had emotional force for him.

Gradually such practices were consolidated in culture. Later generations received them together with explanations and rules of conduct. With developed speech, man could pass on to others his notions about the causes of what happens. It became possible to form shared notions about what lies beyond the reach of observation. Throughout history these notions took different forms, and some turned into complex religious teachings.

Cultic activity became a way of organizing the behavior of people: at first it helped a person adapt to his own experiences, then through culture it spread to the whole of society. The members of a group shared one picture of the world and expected the same behavior from one another. In this way mechanisms of individual psychic adaptation were incorporated into the system of collective life.

It is just this transition from personal experience to shared conviction that will become one of the main subjects of our further inquiry.

Society as a Superorganism

Now let us return to man as a social animal. Over an enormous period of history, people perfected the ways of living together. Culture passed on experience within the group and between generations, and speech made it possible to coordinate ever more complex joint actions. Communities grew, and the division of labor became ever more important.

In a small group, its members satisfied most of their needs themselves. As the structure of society grew more complex, resources had to be distributed among people engaged in different tasks. The one who made tools received food from the hunter; help today created an expectation of help in return tomorrow. In such relations the economic ways of organizing social life took shape.

Economics, understood as the production, distribution and exchange of limited resources, has accompanied human society since the most ancient times. But complex economic systems became possible thanks to mechanisms of cooperation that already existed. Exchange requires agreement about the value of things, distribution requires recognized rules, and dealing with a stranger requires trust.

Gradually society learned to sustain the life of an enormous number of people, each of whom does only a small part of the common work. Today almost any object we use is made by a multitude of people who do not know one another. A person may know nothing about how his clothes are sewn or his medicines made, and still enjoy the fruits of the most complex technologies. Such a life is supported by a social system that far exceeds the capacities of the individual.

Hence the temptation to compare society with an organism, in which the organs perform different functions and their coordinated work sustains the whole. As in society, where functions are likewise divided: some produce goods, others maintain common institutions.

The analogy has its limits. Society consists of independent people with interests of their own. Its unity is continually reproduced through their interaction. It has no single body and no single will.

And yet the idea of a superorganism helps to see an important feature of human existence. Society continues to act after the death of individual members. It keeps accumulated knowledge and passes it on to following generations. It has a memory older than any of the living, and goals that none of the living will see achieved. It seems, it can want what not one of its members wants singly.

More than that, society sets tasks beyond the reach of an individual organism. The settling of new lands or flight to other planets requires the coordination of an enormous number of people and the continuity of generations. If humanity should someday be able to continue life beyond the Solar System, it will be possible thanks to society's ability to keep and develop accumulated experience.

And here we return to the beginning. A physically limited and mortal creature turned out to be capable of creating systems that live far longer than he does. But for this he had to learn to come to terms with himself, to cooperate, and to trust other people — limiting his own behavior.

The Law of Exchange: Information, Value, Trust

Before bringing the four systems together, let us dwell on exchange in more detail. It is here that economics meets the subject of our book.

Exchange is older than Homo sapiens. In East Africa about three hundred thousand years ago, obsidian for tools "migrated" from its deposit for hundreds of kilometers — farther than one group could roam. A hundred thousand years ago people drilled sea shells and wore them dozens of kilometers from the sea. A shell cannot be eaten and cannot cut. Its only work is to convey additional information about the one who wears it.

Any exchange — a piece of obsidian for a hide, or an apartment for money — presupposes three conditions. We have already met all three in this chapter, only not under these names.

The first condition is the transmission of information. Before an object passes from hand to hand, it must be reported to the other — shown, named or designated. The object itself does not enter another's consciousness. Only its sign does.

The pointing gesture, the word, the palm on the cave wall and the shell on the neck perform one and the same function. Even thought, if understood as inner speech, is the same work turned upon oneself: a person tells himself what he could tell another. We can formulate this as the law of exchange: the exchange of things begins with the exchange of meanings and is impossible without it.

It is appropriate here to return to Tomasello's observation. Man is the only creature that tells another what the other needs, and without any request on the other's part. Advertising, as we understand it, is precisely the transmission of information without a request from the recipient. It turns out that advertising is not an invention of trade. It is a contemporary of the "pointing gesture" and rests on the same presumption: if I am shown something, I expect to see something important to me.

The second condition is the creation of value. Value lives in people's notions about an object. A drilled shell is valuable as a message that others will understand. About 34 thousand years ago, on the territory of the present-day Vladimir Region, people buried two boys. Their bodies were covered with red ochre, their clothing decorated with thousands of mammoth-ivory beads. Beside them lay spears of mammoth bone, pendants and other objects. Today this burial is known as Sunghir — one of the most expressive monuments of Upper Paleolithic funerary practice. The mammoth ivory in these beads is the same ivory that lay around the camp. What made it valuable was the hours of working it, and the person for whom it was done.

Value is created by one and the same movement — the transfer of an experience onto an object that does not itself contain that experience. Cultic activity does this with a place or a bone. Economics does it with obsidian and gold. Advertising does it with any object defined as a target of informing.

The third condition is the creation of trust. Exchange with a stranger is the hardest case of cooperation: he has no reputation. Trust has to be built — detached from the particular person and transferred to a symbol, just as culture detached knowledge from the one who obtained it.

An identical symbol, a sign on the walls of different caves, and identical actions with the dead make it possible to recognize one's own among strangers. From someone who repeats a similar action, I know what to expect. Cultic activity turns out to be one of the first mechanisms for creating trust between strangers. A trademark is built the same way. The buyer has never seen the author or the producer and knows nothing about him. He trusts the name on the item — the brand, and this turns out to be enough (incidentally, the very word "brand" means the mark that cowboys burned on cattle to show which herd they belonged to).

So: there is no exchange without the transmission of information; information is useless if what is communicated has no value; value does not manifest itself without trust in the source. Economics interacts with the world of objects. Cultic activity, with what cannot be seen. Advertising joins objects (things) with the world of ideas.

The Four Systems of Human Existence

Psychology makes it possible to study the mechanisms of the individual's adaptation to surrounding reality. Through memory and imagination a person builds his own picture of the world and organizes his behavior.

Culture becomes a means of collective adaptation. It allows experience to be passed on within the group and to following generations, and ways of acting to be changed far faster than hereditary change occurs in genes. At the same time culture fixes the rules thanks to which stable life together becomes possible.

Cultic activity (religion), within our hypothesis, arises as the first form of cognition — a way of obtaining information about what is not given to observation and of adapting the psyche to it. The explanation of the incomprehensible helps a person withstand experiences that he does not yet know how to make sense of by customary means. Gradually such explanations and the actions connected with them become part of cultural inheritance.

Economics provides for the material existence of an increasingly complex society through the production, distribution and exchange of resources — and, as we have seen, stands on the same three conditions of exchange as cultic activity.

The four systems do not follow one another and do not divide life into separate domains. They describe one and the same thing, but from different sides. A tool laid in a grave can be explained through any of them, and each explanation will be correct. The psyche allows man to create notions of reality. Culture makes their transmission possible. Cultic activity gives some of them a special significance. Economic activity provides the material conditions of existence for the society within which all these processes take place.

Man found a way to master the idea and learned to work with abstraction. And now his behavior depends on notions that exist in the conscious and the unconscious. We are able to act for the sake of future events that do not exist in immediate reality. To be guided by rules laid down by the dead, that is, by people who no longer exist. To give special value to objects whose physical properties are practically no different from others. To accept information about the world from people we have never met.

It was precisely this ability that allowed man to overcome the limits of his body and his own experience. And at the same time it created the conditions for the emergence of complex systems of collective belief.

Man the Believer

In everyday life we constantly trust what we have not verified ourselves. A person boards an airplane relying on the work of thousands of people he does not know, and uses money expecting that others will still recognize its value. He is able to sacrifice immediate gain for the sake of a future result that he may never see. And even his notion of his own future he builds on assumptions whose reliability cannot be established in advance.

Faith in the broad sense becomes one of the constant features of human existence.

It is worth distinguishing religious faith from the human capacity to accept certain notions about reality. Religious faith has its own content and historical forms. But its existence presupposes a more fundamental capacity of man to be guided by convictions that go beyond immediate experience. This capacity is one of the most important results of human evolution.

Man lives in a world that exists thanks to the shared notions of many people. He trusts the experience of others, obeys rules, and is able to act for the sake of goals beyond the strength of one alone.

Hence the next question. For the sake of life together, a person gives up part of his freedom and ceases to do what he wants at the moment he wants it. Habit, fear, advantage and rule explain why he so often acts against his own desire. They do not explain something else: where he gets the capacity to want one thing and do another when no one is compelling him to.

If a person restricts himself for the sake of society and acts in the name of a future he will not see, how free is he in his choice? And what, in general, makes him act in this way and not another?

To answer, we will have to turn to the nature of volition.

As far as we know, we are the only ones able to grasp our own existence and ask about its causes. Perhaps near other stars there are beings who answered these questions long ago. For now we have to rely on ourselves.

A human being is made of the same matter as the stars and arose by the same laws. It follows that at some moment the Universe brought forth a creature that set about studying it. If we put aside, for the time being, the question of a higher design, this is in itself an event whose significance we have not yet appreciated.

There is a sad side to this story. The Sun will go out one day. Long before that the Earth will become unfit for life, and everything that has been happening here for billions of years will be at risk. The only way we know to extend earthly life beyond that term is to find or grow a form of life that can cross this barrier, and it is not certain that it will be us.

No one knows how to do this. The Voyagers have already left the Sun's neighborhood, but sending a living being to another star is a task of a different order. It may take thousands of generations.

Hence a supposition that seems to us worthy of attention. What if one of humanity's tasks is to preserve life and teach it to travel between the stars? Then the ability of people to pass knowledge to the next generations takes on an almost cosmic meaning. Each generation receives the world from its predecessors, changes it a little and hands it on.

For an individual, the same story is far more dramatic. Sooner or later each of us discovers that his life is finite, and usually long before the first wrinkles. A child learns about death, sees loved ones go, and gradually understands that one day the same will happen to him. We have to go on living with this discovery: make plans, go to school, do the most ordinary things.

Meanwhile the dead do not vanish from our lives. We remember their words, use things they taught us to value, and sometimes act as they would have acted. It happens that they come in a dream, talk, laugh, and for a few minutes after waking it still seems that the meeting was real.

The body is gone, yet the relationship continues. A person's ideas about the world can outlive several generations, and we often follow the advice of people who died long before we were born.

It is hard to imagine that all this leaves a person indifferent. He needs to explain what is happening and to find a place for his own life in a world that existed before him and will remain after him. And he needs someone else to share the explanation: no one lives long alone with the thought of his own finitude. People convince one another that there is meaning. This may be the very first work of religion, older than any temple.

Here, as it seems to us, lies one of the sources of the religious feeling. We are used to thinking about religion in rather concrete terms: as temples, sacred books and clergy. All of that appeared comparatively late. Behind it stands a far more ancient need — to understand why what happens happens, and where one stands in all of it.

A child asks why it rains and where the sun hides. An adult asks harder questions, but the nature of the curiosity is the same. A person needs an explanation he can go on living with, one that tells him what to expect from the world.

Before the scientific method, explanations were drawn from available experience. People noticed regularities, ascribed causes to events and tried to come to terms with the forces on which their lives depended. By and large, this is how ideas of invisible beings, of life after death and of the structure of the world took shape.

In other words, religion was the first way of knowing, and it appeared before humans learned to think in the abstract. The question "why" arises in a child long before he has the concepts to answer it; so it was with our species. Magic, fetish, totem, the spirit of an ancestor — all these are elements of attempts to explain the world somehow (and then to act on those explanations): do this and it will rain; break the taboo and trouble will come. Knowing, stripped of the inessential, is receiving information and trying to assemble what has been received into a single picture, to explain it. Long before science, and even before abstract thought, religion did this work.

Religions arose in different ways, and far from all of those paths are known to us. But the need to make sense of reality is ancient enough to count as one of the foundations of religious experience.

It is curious how little this need has changed. Every morning we switch on the light without thinking about the nature of electricity. We use money, though few could explain why a piece of paper, or an entry in a bank's database, has purchasing power. We entrust our correspondence to the internet and tasks to artificial intelligence, tasks whose solutions we ourselves would struggle to explain.

Most of his life a person spends among things whose workings he knows only approximately. He has learned to use other people's knowledge and to rely on other people's experience.

One may object that electricity is measurable and the predictions of physics are verifiable. But in daily life we measure and verify nothing. We press the switch with the same confidence with which our ancestor threw a pinch of fat into the fire for the spirits: the action will bring a result because it always has. This is not knowledge but, one might say, a very ancient reflex, and it fires in the same place where religious feeling once fired. Most likely, it is that feeling.

It is this capacity to act on the basis of ideas accepted on faith that interests us. A person constantly uses knowledge he has received from others, recognizes authorities and trusts the established order. Sometimes he is right, sometimes mistaken, but the very readiness to accept someone else's experience lets him live inside a complex society.

For this a society needs one thing: that people be able to come to agreement.

Alone, a human is weak. Physically he is inferior to most large animals, vulnerable to cold and hunger, and in the first years of life he depends entirely on others. Yet the ability to unite allowed our species to spread across the whole planet and build a civilization that now changes the climate.

But union does not come free. Everyone has to yield something: give up part of the catch, put off a desire, submit to a rule he did not choose. Culture, seen from this side, is the sum of such steps toward one another. Each gives up part of his own freedom in order to go on doing his work — hunting, raising children, surviving — but inside a group, not alone. From the beginning, religion was a way to make these concessions meaningful, to legitimize them somehow, to give them a stronger foundation: not "the chief wants it so," but "it has been so ordained from above."

The most vivid evidence of this stands on a hill in southeastern Turkey. Göbekli Tepe is a set of circles of carved pillars weighing many tons, which hunter-gatherers raised about eleven thousand years ago, before agriculture, before pottery, before cities. It used to be thought that people first learned to grow grain and then, once fed, built temples. Göbekli Tepe turns this order over: first came a shared cult that gathered hundreds of people in one place, and only then did these people need something to eat. Great religion and agriculture were born together, and it is still unknown which called the other into being.

Cooperation requires the transmission of information. One must tell others one's intentions, explain the rules and keep agreements. This, we suppose, is how shared ideas arise, thanks to which people act together even if they have never met.

One of the oldest mechanisms of such action is exchange. People shared the catch, handed one another things they had made, traded the results of their labor. In time these relations acquired rules and grew into what we call the economy.

Exchange presumes that its participants know of each other and understand the value of what is offered. And value is a strange thing. It is neither in the axe nor in the sack of grain; it appears only at the moment when two people agree that one is worth the other. Marx called this commodity fetishism, and he chose the word deliberately: fetish is a term from the study of religion, the name for an object to which a power is ascribed that it does not have (on such questions Pavel, as a professional scholar of religion, always keeps a neutral position). Faith in value is perhaps the most widespread experience of our time, and we will return to it separately, because in many respects it is indistinguishable from religious experience. Or perhaps it is that experience?

For a deal to take place, one must tell people about the goods, explain their properties and persuade the other to accept the terms. As long as people lived in small communities, a personal meeting was enough. With the growth of cities and trade, the seller had to address people he had never seen.

This is how advertising appears. Let us define it at once, so as not to get confused later: advertising is the transmission of information that the recipient did not ask for. Everything else — media, genres, budgets, degrees of talent — is detail. A hawker's cry at the market, a signboard over a shop, a newspaper notice and a message that appears on a phone screen in a fraction of a second all reach a person who asked nothing. The means and the organization of trade changed, but behind it all stood one need — to tell others about one's offer and nudge them to act.

Here lies the first likeness, the one from which everything began. Religion is a way of obtaining information about the world and explaining it; advertising is a way of passing it between people. Both answer the same, perhaps most ancient, demand of humans: they need to know and they need to tell. The other likenesses we will speak of grow out of this one.

At first glance religion and advertising are far apart. It seems odd to look for a likeness between a prayer and an ad for shoes: these acts have different purposes, and the people who perform them want entirely different things.

And yet, let us look closer.

Religious ideas help a person make sense of the world and decide how to behave toward others. For these ideas to survive until the grandchildren, a society develops ways of passing them on: shared symbols, traditions, institutions that sustain a certain order of life.

Advertising is occupied with something else, but it faces a familiar task. It has to convey an idea of the value of something so that a person takes it into account and does something. For this it takes images the audience understands, existing beliefs and the society's accepted ways of expressing meaning.

In both cases everything comes down to trust. The message alone guarantees nothing. A person must notice it, understand it and find it convincing. Sometimes this takes years, sometimes a few seconds. Much depends on what is already in his head, whom he is used to trusting and what he expects from his own life.

On this likeness we settled — the likeness of two systems whose history occupies most of the history of civilization.

Religion can be pictured as the circulatory system of a society. It carried shared ideas about the world, maintained the link between generations and gave people reasons to live together. Where religious institutions stood at the center, a considerable part of knowledge and social relations passed through them. They legitimized power, one or another, created literature and art, offered common values, and regulated and ritualized people's lives, often down to the smallest details.

Advertising is the circulatory system of the economy. Thanks to it, word of the possibility of exchange reaches people far from one another. It takes economic relations beyond personal acquaintance and takes part in creating the demand without which many markets would look different.

Every metaphor has its limits. A society rests on many institutions, and the place of religion among them has changed from era to era. The economy needs production, trade and a whole system of relations within which advertising does its own particular work.

What interests us is the cause of the likeness. Why do the ways of transmitting religious ideas sometimes resemble the methods of modern advertising? Where do the familiar mechanisms of persuasion, the shared symbols and the promises of future well-being come from? Why are people ready to follow ideas received from complete strangers?

The answer, most likely, lies in the human being. Our brain took shape long before modern religions, states and markets. From our ancestors we inherited the ability to learn from others' experience, the wish to belong to a group and the habit of looking for the causes of what happens. All this still governs our decisions, although the world around has changed beyond recognition. And it governs them in the same way, regardless of the nation, the era and the civilization in which a person happened to be born.

A person may consider himself a rational being, but his actions are often determined by what he himself scarcely notices. He imitates those around him, listens to authorities and accepts as true what he has been used to since childhood. He can explain his decision in detail, yet the real reasons for it may be hidden even from him.

That is why in religious experience we find devices we meet today in advertising, and in advertising we recognize images and moves long familiar to religious traditions. Some of these devices came into modern communication directly from religious practice. Others may have arisen independently, because they appeal to the same features of perception. Where the line runs between inheritance and coincidence, we have yet to work out.

The comparison lets us pose the question for the sake of which we took up this book: how well do we understand the causes of our own behavior? Why do some ideas unite millions of people while others go unnoticed? How do convictions arise for which a person is ready to change his usual life? What makes him trust a stranger and agree to rules set long before his birth?

There are two of us, and we came to these questions from different sides.

In the late nineties we studied in the same year in the Department of Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University. Pavel Kostylev stayed on at the faculty: he completed postgraduate study, taught religious studies and the history and theory of religion for many years, gave a course on new religious movements, worked on Islam and Sufism, and edited the journal "Religious Studies Research." I, Vlad Sitnikov, left in 1999 to draw the first online supermarket in Russia, became a partner of the creative agency GRAPE in 2004, then built Hungry Boys and Possible, spent two and a half years as brand director of Skillbox, and in 2023 launched безтендера.рф. The campaigns in which I took part as author of the idea or creative director have won several hundred awards, including Cannes Lions. In 2018 I seriously tried to put an advertising medium into orbit — a screen made of satellites that would be visible from Earth with the naked eye. Reuters and Wired wrote about it, astronomers were against it, and I still think it was a good idea.

But all those years a question from the student lecture hall would not let me go: where did the religious come from in the first place? I looked for the first point — the moment when humans acquired what later became faith. The traces led further and further back. To the paintings of Chauvet and Lascaux, where horses and bison are drawn so that a modern artist's hands fall. To the Paleolithic Venuses: the figurine from Hohle Fels was carved from a mammoth tusk forty thousand years ago. And finally to the Neanderthal. He buried his dead and laid the bodies in dug pits, and in Bruniquel Cave, a hundred and seventy thousand years before us, he built rings out of broken-off stalagmites, whose purpose no one has yet explained. The religious is older than our species. This became the starting point of the book.

That is how we divided the work. Pavel is responsible for philosophy and the history of religions; I am responsible for the person to whom all this is sold, and for examples from advertising practice. The logic of the book fits into a single chain: desire — cognition — faith — image — myth — collective conviction — social action. Where possible, we will look for confirmation in research and historical evidence. Where we have only suppositions, we will call them that.

This book has a practical aim, and we will not downplay it. Understanding how these two systems work gives a chance to see the first causes of people's actions — our own, our colleagues', our friends', a whole society's. Where first causes are visible, one can forecast, negotiate and avoid needless conflicts, and different economic, social and religious models cease to seem irreconcilable: they have a common root. We want the reader to come away with not only observations but working constructs that can be applied as early as tomorrow — in advertising, in business, in a conversation with one's own child. And one more thing: knowing the mechanisms of persuasion lets you notice them at work on yourself.

In the end, religion and advertising interest us as two great historical experiences of working with human convictions. Placed side by side, they let us see the familiar from an unfamiliar side and gather into one system what we had previously met only piecemeal.

We have to begin with the human being — a creature who once thought about his own death, asked where the world came from, and managed to persuade others to act together with him.

Much has changed since then. We build spacecraft, talk to machines and send a message to the other end of the planet in a second. But we still need an explanation of what is happening, we believe other people's words and look for our place among other people.