The origins of the transcendental vocation and its civilizing force
by Rev. Jose E. Lopez
v1.0 : 2025-09-03
The origin of the vocation to gather others is very ancient. It has its beginning in the annals of history. It belongs to that moment when human beings went from being hunter-gatherers to cultivating the land and building monumental buildings. A period usually called the Paleolithic Revolution. A revolution that closely united with the figure of the shaman, the proto-priest, proto-poet, proto-scientist. The one who first sought to understand and access the phenomenon of transcendence, Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. This person, recognizing the universal order, provides him/herself with a spell that convinces others to follow the vision that comes to him/her from the depths and the heavens. This vision indicates that the sacred is accessible and seeks to satisfy human needs. The shaman looks to the sky, from it, it is revealed the movement of the seasons and the rains that fertilize the earth and give way to plant life. This domination of the growth of plants is no small thing because it allows human beings to sustain themselves on Earth indefinitely. Agriculture is sacred because it constitutes the domain of life itself. Thus, discovering the secrets of the abysses and the heights, “Melchizedek” offers the bread and wine from above to those who seek to persevere in life. This catalyst helps overcome the biological barrier of large human groups that became civilized together.
After this step, this technology is archived, and the division of labor expands, seeking production effectiveness. This division of labor, which at the beginning is alternating, eventually becomes occupations, offices, and stable activities, to which certain people dedicate themselves. It is important to note that one of the occupations that appears is the occupation of the warrior in charge of protection and war. This gives way to the official coordinating them, the chieftain or the proto-king who was always present to a certain extent from the beginning as the leader of the hunt.
As the different occupations and the number of people grow, the need for officials who dedicate themselves to maintaining control and organizing the different social organisms begins to appear. This is the birth of bureaucracy, which is organized at its beginning around the temples. However, the shaman’s success is also his/her downfall. The growth of the number of people who gather near him/her and the climatic changes that he or she does not control generate scarcity in the very land that gave way to his/her city. Now, against the shaman’s most fundamental instincts, an organized and perpetual militia is needed and created to protect or obtain by force the resources necessary to maintain the nascent society. This need is the origin of the king, who becomes a perpetual leader. This king, due to his capacity to protect society as well as his capacity for coercion, values that become fundamental in the era of the great cities, monopolizes the administrative bureaucracy around him. This movement of survival deprives the proto-priest and his temple of an effective means to continue their civilizing activity. With this began the era of kings, which encompassed most of the written history. However, the temple does not disappear because the king needs an archetypal story to justify his power, and the temple provides this archetypal story. In other words, the temple and its civilizing capacity is deprived of adequate power to implement its vision. Why? Is it because its means for establishing its social order are not naturally cohesive? Eventually, the Athenian experiment will separate the civilizing function of both the temple and the king and will begin the project of democracy. To a certain extent, it serves the temple’s function but lacks a proper cult. In may be better to say that, the temple gets dedicated first and foremost to a new god, the majority. However, given the disintegrating forces, both internal and external, these societies tend to be challenging to sustain, with the figure of the king appearing once again. Does the temple emerge again? Does the vocation to transcendence resurface? What happened to our humanity, to our poetry and science, and large gatherings in the absence of a clear transcendental vocation?
#transcendence #consciousness #origins
© 2025. This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0.