The Original Prayer

[Lord_GYJ]

Hello, all!

I’ve spent many years studying and dabbling in various religions and spiritual and philosophical paths.  What I’ve learned, once I took a step back and boiled it all down, is that people have always had a spiritual leaving, for one reason or another.  But I’ve always wondered about the very first person to pray (in other words, the first human to attribute a spiritual significance to whatever phenomenon they attributed said spirituality to).  What caused it; this sudden shift in human thinking towards the divine?  Was it an effort to explain natural phenomena?  A result of experimentation with psychoactive plants?

I’ve been wondering about this ‘original prayer’.  What was it?  What god, goddess, or other divine being was it directed to?

Before people made religions too complex and complicated, before any rituals or dogma were written down, these first prayers were created in someone’s mind and spoken freely.  I’ve always looked at the rituals and complicated incantations associated with many systems and wondered about the people before them, and how they could have possibly benefited from those rituals that they couldn’t possibly have known about.  So, in my mind, the most powerful and useful prayers were any that were available to the first people to imagine them.

I’d like to hear them; those ‘Original Prayers’.

[Brotherd]

Hmm, fucking interesting, man. I guess the first to “pray”, were correlating natural weather phenomena and disasters with misfortune, so some dude took it upon himself to devise some kind of appeasement, whether it be sacrifice, prayer or other ritual.

As for the words, well dude we just dont know. But something involving “O (insert deity), bless me/us with mercy/good fortune…..”

[RevMask]

People who study this sort of thing believe the first religions were based on natural occurrences and that the deities were things like wind, thunder, etc.

So I think the first prayer would be something along the lines of “Please don’t kill me.”

[Janholtz]

I think the original true prayer, not as a direct entreaty (e.g. please don’t kill me) but as a request for a future outcome, would be Shephards prayer: “Dear Lord, please don’t let me fuck up”

[mr nerb]

I imagine the first original true prayer was to the self.

A desperate act of trying to create a reality that didn’t or couldn’t exist.

“I just want….” or “Why can’t I…” or “Pleeeeeeease!!!!”

Calling to the infinite distance of the sky was the only other target that wouldn’t offer instant denial maybe, the opposite of where the prayer came from. The infinite inside.

Without that immediate or possible denial affords hope perhaps.

Hope is momentum and potential. The essence of life itself.

[OatSoda]

You know I had not thought of that. I think that to hear those first prayers you have to reach a state where everything is new. Limber mided as that may sound it could be something that is very powerful in your bean.

Say, for instance you love the water, I do myself but not so much toilet water, & think of this: there were no religions & I am the first one saying this. Sort of an improvised state of being first inline.

[Author]

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