Primal Religions Questions

1. Different religions are called to be primal, because they existed before the formal religions. Primal religions have all of the basic features that all the other religions have. They are traditionally for non-literate people and are used with small amounts of people.

2. The Ancestors made forms of life and created the first humans, placing them into tribes and giving them certain languages and rules.

3. The spiritual essence of Ancestors is found within symbols that they left after they were gone.

4. A totem can symbolize a group and gives special significance to the religious group or an individual. Taboo is the prohibition of behaviors for fear of contact with spiritual powers in a dangerous manner.

5. The Aborigines rituals are essential in life, because its only through certain rituals where dreaming can be seen.

6. Rituals come from the Ancestors that created and formed the world while dreaming. Each ritual is a display of a myth of certain actions that happened during dreaming

7. Initiation rituals awaken the youth to spiritual things and give more identity to the tribe.

8. Two acts that come along with Dieri initiation ritual death are the two lower middle teeth are knocked out of the mouth and later buried in the ground and then they are circumcised.

9. The Yoruba live in western regions of Africa.

10. The Yoruba religion believe in the center of life, because they believe that the god first began in order to create the world in life.

11. Yoruba cosmological view of the world shows life being separated into two different worlds which is known as heaven and earth. Humans come from the gods.

12. Olorun is the ultimate god of Yoruba religion and is the original place where all power comes from.

13. Orishas are lower than the supreme Olorun but they can harm and help people depending on how a ritual is seen. Orishas are seen as a facilitator between Olorun and humans.

14. An Orisha and Yoruba believed that he created the earth. Another is Ogun who is the god of war.

15. A trickster figure is a supernatural being who tends to disrupt the normal course set of life.

16. Family ancestors gained supernatural recognition by earning a good reputation and living to an old age. Ancestors were usually worshipped by their own family.

17. Ritual practitioners are to mediate between the gods and ancestors in heaven and humans on earth.

18. Divination is the use of techniques for gaining knowledge about ones future or about the problem. Divination is important because knowing ones future is used to know how to go on with life.

19. Humans came from North America 20,000 years ago by migration from Asia to the Bering Strait.

20. Religions of the Indians is interest with native people, because religion represents Native American religion.

21. Wakan Tanka is the name for reality and is another word for sacred.

22. Inktomi is a spider. The Lakota trickster figure taught first people customs and ways of life.

23. The Lakota people believed strongly that when one person would die, one of the four souls goes on a journey along the Milky Way. The soul is then judged and it tells whether it will be an ancestor or a ghost on earth.

24. The goal of a vision journey is for a human to get spiritual power to get hunting and warfare success.

25. A sweat lodge is a hut made of saplings and it represents the universe and the sweat gives purification.

26. Vision comes in the form of an animal, object, or a force nature. During these visions come a message which is told to a medicine man.

27. In the Blackfeet tribe, females would do the Sun Dance, but only if they had good moral character.

28. An axis mundi is a tree or mountain that can attach the heavens and the earth.

29. People who do the Sun Dance believe that their own bodies are the only thing that is true and they do body mutilation.

30. Aztec Traditions show the description of primal religion because they are high in a developed sense. The Aztecs like other religions have emphasize on relationships between rituals and myths.

31. The geographical area of Mesopotamia is made up of Mexico and extends to Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

32. The Aztec god who made the world was Quetzalcoatl.

33. Quetzalcoatl is the god's earthly devoted one, who ruled as a priest-king. Questzalcoatl is important to Aztecs because they believed that he ruled over the golden age of Aztec brilliance.

34. The Aztecs called their time period Age of the Fifth Sun and they knew that their sun would soon be destroyed like the other prior.

35. The Aztecs understood the world as having four quadrants that led out from the center of the universe and it connected the earth worlds with the underworld.

36.  Aztecs regard to humans as a axis mundi, because the head and the heart are used as nourishment towards the sun and cosmos.

37. The "Knower of Things" could talk with the certain gods and made offerings through language which was another way of doing sacrifice.

38. The coincidence that led to the fall of Tenochtitlan was in 1519 when the Aztec king Quetzalcoatl was in need to return. The general of the Spanish came at the same time and the people thought he was a return of Quetzcoatl.

39. The day of the dead showed the surviving of Aztec religious culture because during the celebration the Aztecs would use time to perform similar rituals.

40. Three themes that are shared by the primal religions are boundaries with supernatural and human worlds, religion is encompassing, and primal religions are continuously changing.