Bestial Adoration & Scentology

Archaeological discoveries of prehistoric human remains leave little doubt: for millennia, humans died by the bite. Felines and canines tore through flesh; entire villages must have lived under the permanent terror of predation.

To early humans, their own bodies must have seemed the most demanded commodity on the planet. What kind of existence was that—hunted, mauled, devoured alive?

Prehistoric man was hardly the integrated and capable creature we sometimes imagine. Judging from the evidence he appears, rather, as a misaligned species—one that survived almost miraculously and only later secured its dominant position. One could even dare to say that he was more intelligent and less ecologically “fit” than we assume: a kind of alien within his own environment. And yet, in such catastrophic conditions—where nothing was easy and abundant except danger—none of us would likely have done better.

Then, at some point, a stroke of intelligence.

Long observation of predators may have revealed a simple pattern: however ferocious the beast, it is soon satiated. It feeds once and then withdraws. The tribe survives—if only one member is taken.

From this observation—if we allow ourselves the hypothesis—there may have emerged an embryonic hierarchy in which the predator occupied a position almost divine. What God and beast share, is in fact after all, this: with neither can man speak and negotiate.

If this intuition holds, then the first “god” experienced by humanity was not evil. It was just hungry. Naturally cruel, yet finally predictable. And therefore—perhaps—manageable.

The earliest divinities to appease were likely the very predators circling the camps. Survival required the elimination of surprise from the equation "life = death". Roles had to be inverted: "death = life" seemed much more sustainable. A desperate stratagem emerged: instead of the beast choosing arbitrarily, the group would designate the victim...

Here we may glimpse the first spark of desperate intelligence—the first true mathematical operation in human history. A calculation entered the species: one life given now for the life of many in the future: the sacrifice of the part for the survival of the whole.

Thus perhaps began the first ritual sacrifice—not yet symbolic, but ecological. A collective renunciation imposed by brutal environmental laws. To save the tribe, man had to commit a bestial act: surrender one of his own.

In becoming beast-like, man assimilated the beast-god. Eventually he surpassed it. The predator killed from hunger; man would learn to kill from calculation—sacrificing one life in the present to preserve the group in the future.

The archetype of the carnivorous beast has remained sealed within the deep architecture of our societies. Even today monarchies, states, and corporations adorn themselves with eagles, lions, tigers, serpents. Predation survives as emblem.

Even the biblical God displays carnivorous preference: Abel’s animal offerings are favored over Cain’s vegetables, and the first murder—fratricide—is born from that preference.

As history advances, sacrifice grows more elaborate and symbolic. The element of renunciation becomes increasingly central. Perhaps because, as requests to the divine multiplied—no longer merely survival, but prosperity, victory, legitimacy—the offering had to escalate accordingly.

Scentology

If the early animal predators were guided toward humans by scent—their science—then the sacred predator of organized religion became more refined: he began to “smell” con-science, intention, desire, fear. The demanded offering grew subtler, more costly, more abstract. Sacrifice a-scended—literally and figuratively.

We have no reliable record of God speaking directly to men. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that what has been said and written about God may also be the imaginative manifesto of a priestly imagination skilled in shaping symbols.

If such a God never literally existed, and if we resist attributing everything to some superhuman clergy, then what remains is perhaps the most powerful collective olfactory hallucination in history: a redirection of human enthusiasm—to inhale the divine—into its opposite: to emit, to burn, to send upward carefully curated scents toward an absent sky.

It is no accident that bodily odors are taboo in modern societies, masked beneath artificial fragrances. Personal colognes and collective in-cense are sanctioned smokes—totemic substitutions—harmless, neutralized, deodorized. Nothing is more potent, for mating or for predation, than natural scent.

Within “olfaction”—that which ascend—within sensing, knowing the tasting and the smelling of the world, lies one of the most mysterious connections between human intelligence and imagination.

The casual proximity between odor and adoration may be etymologically uncertain, yet symbolically irresistible: perhaps human devotion is rooted in a misdirected instinct of scent, and words occasionally echo instincts older than rules.

The prehistoric trauma of being devoured may have carved itself permanently into our species. Yet from that trauma emerged calculation, projection, statistical thinking, symbolic abstraction. Fear catalyzed intellect.

Science (of scents), then, may be the oldest scent-ific religion—the one in which man secretly adores odors and himself.