For most of human history, the intangible, the unseen, the metaphysical, has reigned supreme. Faith-based

conceptions were dominant in terms of how we set up our societies, divvied up power and

resources, determined how best to spend our time, our lives, and figured out what it all

means, the purpose of it all, if there is indeed a purpose. These were all considered

to be the wheelhouse

of soothsayers, shamans, prophets, and priests. It's impossible to know just how uniformly

ancient humans adhered to this template, that of deciding that there was an unseen force,

a hand or an eye, watching and guiding the events on earth from somewhere else, some

other plane of existence or from up in the clouds, from under the waves, ancient humans by

definition lived before writing, and thus we only have untranslatable, roughly interpretable

artifacts to guide us in our attempts to understand how things worked back then.

And so we look at cave paintings of animals and we wonder, are these religious symbols?

Were they attempting to spiritually coerce the animals into plentitude?

Were they trying to establish some kind of power over this natural force that they didn't fully understand, but knew that they needed to survive?

Or were they maybe creating the equivalent of cave-painted textbooks, showing their young or folks from other families, other tribes, how best to round up the local elk, the giant sloth, the mammoth, and the tiger, so they could be

most efficiently killed and eaten, turned into clothing and weapons and keepsakes that are

maybe spiritual totems, but which are maybe non-religious pieces of artwork. We do know, though,

that one of the earliest examples of recorded secularism, that is, making judgments about the world that are materialist in nature based on tangible reality, rather than an inferred spiritual reality, attempting to measure physical laws and make observations so that predictions can be tested.

One of the earliest examples of writing about that way of seeing the world

emerged in what is today, India, within a philosophical school called Charvaca.

This school of thought is interesting, in part because much of what we know about it

comes to us through comparison-based writings

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