Hi CA-
There are a lot of books written on primitive belief systems. They differ somewhat, but most of them begin with the notion of "mana" - a subtle infusion of life force that lies within every rock and tree, cloud or raindrop. And there is usually some kind of division between orders, such as earth and sky, yesterday and tomorrow.  The main examples of mana are typically the lightening thrust out of thundering clouds through which the mana of the sky interacts with the earth, and the mana of fire as it eats trees and anything else stuck into its mouth. From here it is only a short leap to total paganism in which everything is viewed as living.

The 12 gods of Rome or Greece were the archetypal images of the pagan world, initially each bringing a sense of a type of mana, such as Vulcan, upon whose forge the lightening was hammered, or Venus, personification of sensuality. We can build them crudely from the four states of matter (ether - empty of form and volume; air - form and volume infinitely divided; water - volume but no form; earth - form and volume fixed) and the three modalities of cause (dynamic and fiery; mediating and mutable; and obdurate and fixed) - terms that still can be found as descriptions of astrological seasons etc. Add a few centuries of interpretation and we have personafications.

By collapsing those together we arrive at pantheism, one God in numerous expressions, rather like Baruch de Spinoza's view of the world. (Marcus Aurelius and a few others had begun this type of thinking in Rome about the time of the Christian overthrow of the old ideas.) And by adding the requirement that scientific and physical knowledge must be equal and complementary to subjective personal experiences we come to the cutting edge of "New Thought" as expressed in Theosophy, Science of Mind and related faith healing ideas, in which individuality is seen as empowered. And ultimately, as we analyze these ideas we approach the deep mysticism brought by prophetic teachers such as Jesus and the enlightened yogis and rishis of the modern day like Nisargadatta Maharaj or Ramana Maharshi, in which we find ourselves suspended as points of awareness within a mesh of essentially unreal beliefs and hangups, but in a cyclic course that leads back to Godhead.

Looking at the type of experiences reported by early belief systems, we find that an OBE in which a person was suddenly aware of a different kind of existence was viewed as becoming united with a totem animal or other object. For example, I awoke in Big Sur one day and realized that I was looking down on the world as I soared above it. Then a few seconds later I returned to myself and realized that I had been seeing through the eyes of a soaring hawk high above. This would have been interpreted as a "sign from the gods" in the days of paganism, and probably associated with Diana and her owl. Earlier, it would have been associated with my acquisition of a totem, and thus a tendency toward lifestyle. (I later did acquire a pilot's license.)

In regressions I occasionally work with a person whose prior lives were from an early belief system. One case was an African woman who "went into the ground", and then watched her funeral procession etc from underneath - and had some commentary about the way it had been done. In another case, a young woman who was a nomad in the Siberian or Manchurian steppes died, and then remarked, "I went into a field of flowers."  Often people report that they pass through intermediate animals as they bump around the spirit world, although this usually seems to be through attachment as an entity, rather than actually becoming the animals.

The most primitive ideas I personally have encountered were probably a woman who recalled being an amoeba, and who was being dissected under a microscope for some kind of science group, probably not of this planet. She was incensed that after they finished poking at her they simply flushed her down the sink. Another man recalled being the awareness of a flow of lava as it gushed here and there, eventually emerging on the surface of the planet. (That's a great example of the mana of the lava. I can imagine that this could lead to the tales of Pele in Hawaii.) Most people recall existence as some kind of animal, and often this is at the near fringes of recall, which probably explains the idea of a "totem animal". (I don't personally recall being a bird, so this is not universal.)

While Rousseau tried to sell us on the idea of a simpler natural life, as was experience by the "noble savage", it seems that today's world is both more comfortable, since we have flush toilets and central heating, and also philosophically more available, as we can discuss these ideas across the thousands of kilometers of physical separation amongst us, and we are also better equipped to understand how the material and immaterial aspects fit together. For example, near the time of his death, the noted physicist Archibald Wheeler said that as far as he could see, it looked like reality could be reduced to nothing but information.

dave