Most scholars of the phenomenology of religion agree that religious sentiment arises in early humanity at the same time and inseparably with the emergence of individual consciousness.
The gradual irruption of individual consciousness (in which it is possible to see the background of what some religions call “original sin”) is irretrievably accompanied by the anguish of the separate self. This anguish could represent the “fall” and the “expulsion” from paradise of unconscious fusion with the Whole, a fusion proper to the pre-egoic state of consciousness.