Spirit on the Brain

Turns out I was basically spot-on in my “pre-view” of Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct. So I won’t bother covering that same ground again, with quotes from his book to demonstrate how I had generally “guessed right” about its perspective. But there’s other stuff in it that’s worth preserving … or worth debunking.

First, there’s this excellent summary of where our holidays (i.e., “holy days”) came from:

The most important religious ritual of the Christian church is Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. How surprising, therefore, that the word Easter should derive from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn. The Anglo-Saxon word for April was Eostur-monath, a month which probably then started on March 25, a date that falls close to the vernal equinox. Spring festivals are ancient rituals, probably observed in all religions that have existed since the birth of agriculture….

Several festivals of the Israelite and Jewish liturgical calendar are adaptations of Canaanite agricultural festivals. Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the onset of the fall rains, heralded in Canaanite mythology by the resurrection of the storm god Ba’al. Sukkot is the Canaanite fall harvest festival, adapted in Judaism to commemorate the wandering in the desert after the exodus from Egypt. Pesach was a Canaanite spring feast [marking the beginning of the barley harvest] at which young lambs, born the previous fall, were sacrificed; in Judaism Pesach has become Passover and historicized to mark the [fictional] exodus from Egypt, with the lambs’ blood translated for the Israelites into a rite commemorating the sparing of their first-born children from the tenth plague sent against the pharoah. Shavu’ot, 50 days after Passover, is a late spring festival that marks the conclusion of the wheat harvest. (p. 146, 149-50)

This, too, is a good summary:

In the view of nineteenth-century anthropologists such as Edward Tylor, people assumed that the figures seen in dreams were spirits. Speculating about the nature of death, they inferred that after the body was dead, its spirit essence lived on in another world. In dreams, the appearance of particular spirits known to the dreamer proved that this was so….

Our ancestors extended this idea to the natural world, imputing spirits to animals and plants, and then assuming the existence of especially powerful spirits whom they considered to be gods….

[T]he concept of regular, controllable access to the supernatural realm was perhaps suggested by trances. Trances would have been attained, accidentally at first, during the prolonged dance sessions of early ritual. (p. 53, 119)

But, trances attained accidentally, from dances that were happening anyway, as randomly-evolved memes which happened to produce social cohesion and thus helped the group survive and propagate? Uh, no.

Think about Joan of Arc. Her trances were induced by hearing (rhythmic) church bells. Similar epileptic seizures can also be induced by flickering lights—e.g., by sunlight seen through tree leaves on wind-swayed branches, or even (IIRC) by flickering firelight. (Epilepsy correlates highly with religiousness and religious feelings, both today and historically: “In the past, epilepsy was associated with religious experiences and even demonic possession. In ancient times, epilepsy was known as the ‘Sacred Disease’ because people thought that epileptic seizures were a form of attack by demons, or that the visions experienced by persons with epilepsy were sent by the gods. Among animist Hmong families, for example, epilepsy was understood as an attack by an evil spirit, but the affected person could become revered as a shaman through these otherworldly experiences.”) There are also many suggestions floating around (from people concerned more with shamanism than with the communal dancing which accompanied it) that shamans beat their drums specifically to assist with trance-induction. (Rainforest shamans, IIRC, didn’t have drums, just because everything rots in that humidity. They had/have ayahuasca instead, for their Leary-esque “tripping through the cosmos.”)

If you want to trace that causal chain, there, it’s more likely that early peoples discovered that trances can be induced by rhythmic sounds/lights. The communal dancing followed after that, possibly as a sympathetic-magical imitation of the “divine experience-inducing” rhythms, which just happens, by dumb luck and human neurology, to have the same effect. From that point onward, you could even have group selection effects; but the point is that these weren’t just memes which evolved randomly, and then propagated because they produced social cohesion, giving the tribe(s) in which they evolved an evolutionary/survival advantage over tribes which lacked them. Rather, even trances originated as spandrels—i.e., unintended by-products of our nervous system’s basic construction, shared by all members of our species. That is, they would exist and have been discovered even if no communal dancing had ever “evolved.”

Early people had many needs, for fertility, health, good hunting, success in warfare, all of which were assumed to lie in the ancestors’ power to grant…. Special forms of respect—prayer and worship—were developed for the ancestors’ benefit. (p. 75-6)

Well, Alison Gopnik suggests, in one of her books about “theory theory”—i.e., about babies being little scientists—that belief in telepathy is an entirely natural thing, not even based in magical thinking as such:

As scientists we think that everything is mediated by physical causality of some sort, including our interactions with other people. There are, in fact, light and sound waves that go from one person to another even if we can’t see them with the naked eye. But from our everyday point of view, it appears we are able to influence people without any direct physical contact at all. (It’s probably that fact that makes telepathy seem plausible to so many people.) After all, just looking at someone across a crowded room can set quite a drmatic chain of events in motion. We influence people psychologically by communicating, talking, gesturing, and making faces—we don’t have to touch them…. Psychological causality is often our most powerful tool.

Prayer is just “telepathy with God,” rather than with another human being receiving our thoughts directly. As such, it didn’t need to be specifically “developed for the ancestors’ benefit”—rather, it is (or at least appears to be) a natural activity of the human mind. Plus, if you can communicate with dead ancestors in dreams, then why not also in imagination/visualization/prayer?

Little by little, the ancestral religion was suppressed in the settled societies that began to emerge 15,000 years ago and has survived only among the handful of hunter gatherer tribes that endured into the modern era. The new settled societies adopted a structured form of religious practice, one in which priests controlled the ritual and monopolized interaction with the supernatural. The communal dances ceased. The songs were silence. The shamans were marginalized as witch doctors or sorcerers. (p. 79)

Are you sure about that? The shamans were the existing religious specialists in those societies. If you were trying to consolidate religious power into an early agrarian government, would you be better off marginalizing them, or co-opting them? Wade’s own book gives a good hint, for that:

In bringing heathen tribes into the fold, the early church found it expedient to co-opt their temples and festivals rather than force them to embrace an alien faith outright. An explicit statement of this policy occurs in a letter written by Pope Gregory the Great in 601 to the Abbot Mallitus who was en route to visit Bishop Augustine in Canterbury. (p. 146-7)

And this next thing is surprisingly related, if you just know how to look at it:

In coronation rites, whether by anointment or the placement of a crown or diadem on his head, a man becomes a king. Religions are powerful creators of social fact. (p. 11)

Of course, Wade doesn’t make the connection, there. But the fact is that the very symbolism of coronation by the placing of a crown on the new king’s head—i.e., over the fontanelle, cf. crown chakra (the doorway to transcendence in the human body, by analogy with the North Star as the “door in the sky” to other worlds)—strongly suggests a spiritual and shamanic basis for kingship. So don’t be surprised if it turns out that early kings and priests were the (Chopra-esque) shamans who wanted power or at least could be bought, as tribes were consolidated under early agrarian governments.

When egalitarian societies stratify into hierarchical ones, who are the people most likely to wind up in positions of leadership? Why, the ones who were already widely respected, not merely for having exhibited political/warrior abilities within the tribe but also for their “spiritual abilities.” Who would make a better king, in societies which had depended on shamans for their very health, than the best shaman in the region?

Compare not merely the “divine right of kings” but also the “healing touch of kings.” Do you really think it’s just coincidence that kings shared those characteristics with shamans? Do you really think that early agrarian societies could have fabricated such things out of whole cloth, without a history and continuity for the ideas? Do you really think that, when they were consolidating tribes, they would have dared to marginalize the only source of healing of their new citizens, and their only source of protection against the curses placed on them by other tribes (which warriors were powerless against), etc.?

Shamans have always had a “divine right” and a “healing touch.” And as Pope Gregory knew, rather than creating a parallel institution to that, the easier thing to do would be to simply co-opt the existing “institutions,” i.e., give their tribal-leading members high places in the new government-religion. It never required any cunning, political manipulations to join religion and government at the hip: they were born that way.

Unlike our view of it today (e.g., in California), primitive shamanism was never a “personal spiritual development” path. Rather, it was done as the only source of healing, for the good of the members of the community. The early priesthood, for all the ways in which it’s vilified, was simply taking over the responsibility for the most important activities of the community: the rituals which had to be performed absolutely correctly in order for the land to produce food. And since any increase in the productivity of the land meant a comparable increase in the population, these early agrarian communities were always on the verge of starvation—an excellent recipe for invoking runaway superstitions/rituals in the people.

Elsewhere, I’ve seen the suggestion made that it was exactly the formation of settled villages and larger towns that caused shamans to stop disturbing their close neighbors with drumming, and internalize their formerly acted-out-in-public shamanic journeys into techniques of content/kundalini meditation. Could very well be true.

Primitive religions have no priests or ecclesiastical hierarchy. They are practiced by the community as a whole, with no distinctions of rank….

In the ancestral religion people communed directly with the supernatural world through dreams and trances, not through the mediation of priests. They asked their gods for practical help, such as good hunting, children, or health. (p. 101, 126-7)

Yeeaaaah, but again, not everyone bangs the shaman’s drum, or climbs the pole to the hole in the sky. Much less is everyone a shamanic healer, tasked with either healing by sucking invading spirits out of others’ bodies into “spirit darts,” or traveling in trance to retrieve the wandering souls whose absence is causing the illness. Wade doesn’t even mention those specifics, and consistently downplays the role of individual shamans in primitive societies. After all, doing so serves his thesis wonderfully, so therefore….

Many of the depictions [on Oaxaca Valley pottery] show people dancing in circles, a practice Garfinkel believes held great symbolism for early agriculturalists struggling to march to the rhythm of the seasons and, on pain of starvation, to plant and harvest their crops at the right time. (p. 132)

Such rituals originated as sympathetic-magical, voodoo-like imitations of natural processes. They were performed not to generate social cohesion (even if they had that side-effect) but rather because, at the very least, imitating such cycles brought the people into harmony with the cosmos—and at the most, because without the rituals being performed properly, down to the letter, the world literally wouldn’t keep turning:

“The imperial cosmology held that the Mexica must relentlessly take captives in warfare and sacrifice them,” write the anthropologists Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest. “The spiritual strength of the sacrificed enemy warriors would strengthen the sun and stave off its inevitable by the forces of darkness. Thus, it was specifically the Mexicas’ sacred duty to preserve the universe from the daily threat of annihilation.” (p.242)

When you have no pre-scientific idea how planetary rotation works, there’s really no reason to feel confident that the sun will keeping rising. Especially if (via excessive agency-detection) that golden orb is seen as a living being. Best to “keep it happy,” then.

A symbol of royalty throughout the Mayan lowlands was the water lily, a plant that grows only in clean, still water and affirmed by its presence that the rulers were keeping the stored water drinkable. (p. 225)

They also look very similar to (chakra-symbol) lotuses. Coincidence? You know, with Om being the “sound of rushing waters,” and all. Flowers have also long been symbols of transition—that being the reason why we associate them with funerals (and probably with weddings, too). So “conscious death in samadhi,” etc.

There is some (yet-undiscovered) esoteric meaning, there, where Wade is just doing a one-dimension, sociological reading.

It was presumably in order to control population numbers that societies chose to extend the iron discipline of religion into reproductive behavior. (p. 214)

Uh, no. Fertility was always the #1 concern (cf. muelos) of even hunter-gatherer societies, as of agrarian ones. Warriors going off to war have observed sexual taboos since the dawn of human culture. The idea that any of that began to limit population numbers, even as an unintended by-product, is beyond ignorant.

If you want to summarize what’s wrong with Wade’s over-reaching book in a single quote, this is it:

Few human bonds are stronger than those of family, but the prophet’s [i.e., Warren Jeffs'] dictates induced parents to abandon and exile their teenage children. Once the innate susceptibility to fear supernatural justice is triggered, people will go to almost any lengths to obey what priests or rulers tell them is the gods’ will. (p. 219)

There, we’re into religious cults. And the principles by which religious cults form are, without question, exactly the same as those which cause political and psychological cults to form, even down to Zimbardo’s prison study. It’s not necessary to have a “priest or ruler” convey god’s will; it’s enough to have a fraudulent pandit expounding a four-quadrant view of the Kosmos, or even just a psychologist who is the sole source of validation for your self-worth.

The point being that while fear of supernatural justice is indeed probably the strongest way of binding people into a closed community (cult, tribe, etc.), “totalitarian justice” (whether secular/communist, integral, or anything in between) is close behind: In all cases, basic human psychology is enough to ensure that many people who have joined will not be (psychologically) able to leave the group.

All of that is based in simple in-group/out-grouping, with varying group-entrance and group-exit costs. None of it—even when applied to religion itself—has anything inherently to do with “religion” as such, much less with a genetic, evolved “religion module” in the brain. Rather, in/out-grouping is a basic capacity even of animal minds; and the ability to evaluate entrance- and exit-costs from the group must also exist in every animal which depends on its herd for survival.

There’s also some semi-interesting stuff on p. 218 about monasticism as an inadvertent means of population control; and on p. 165-71, regarding the early days of Christianity. This is the best part of the latter:

Not only was the culture of early Christianity Greek but several of its central beliefs have little or no counterpart in Jewish thought. They were, however, perfectly familiar in the Greco-Roman world of the first two centuries A.D. One is the worship of a mother and child, as in the ancient cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. She is often shown as suckling her infant son Horus, who was conceived by a virgin birth. The Isis cult was popular throughout the empire, particularly in Rome during the first century B.C. The church in Egypt co-opted the cult, plagiarizing its iconography to depict mother and child in the now familiar image of the virgin and Jesus….

The figure of Isis and Horus “is so like that of the Madonna and child that it has sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians,” noted the anthropologist James Frazer.

A prominent feature of several popular mystery cults of the time was the theme of a god who dies and is later resurrected, as in the cults of Dionysus or of Attis and Cybele. The common idea, presumably inherited from the dawn of agriculture, was of a vegetation god who dies in autumn and must be resurrected in the spring with appropriate ritual. Followers of Dionysus, the god of wine, would tear apart a live bull—or occasionally a person—and eat the flesh raw, in commemoration of the killing and resurrection of the god. As for Attis, he was born of a virgin—his mother conceived by placing a ripe pomegranate in her bosom—and his death and resurrection were celebrated at a spring festival at which his followers shed copious amounts of blood through self-mutilation.

Mithraism, a religion with a large following among Roman army officers, included among its rites “sacred meals not unlike the Christian eucharist and offers souls a way through the seven planetary spirits which bar the ascent to the Milky Way after death,” writes Chadwick.

A follower of any of these mystery cults, whether of Adonis, Isis, Mithras, Dionysis or Attis, would have recognized many familiar elements in Christianity, such as the virgin birth, the death of the god, the springtime resurrection festival, and the symbolism of the eucharist in which celebrants consumed bread and wine that were taken as representing the body and blood of the sacrificial god. [Bread and wine are both products of the action of yeast, on grains and fruits, respectively; that is, they are living foods, produced from non-living ones.]

Given that Jews are strictly forbidden to taste blood, which must be drained away before an animal can be eaten, it would have been strange indeed for Jesus, an observant Jew, to recommend that his disciples should drink his blood, even symbolically. Indeed in a very early description of the eucharist, that of the Didache, also known as “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” no such symbolism is indicated nor is any conneciton made with Passover or the resurrection…

Sunday is a day of rest in Christian countries because in 321 the emperor Constantine himself declared it should be so—in honor of Sol Invictus…. The Christian Holy Week and Easter resembled the Attis cult’s Day of Blood and the Hilaria, days marking the death and the resurrection of Attis. Both festivals had an all-night vigil with lights and were so similar that pagan critics of the fourth century accused the church of plagiarism.

The book’s worth reading, even just for stuff like that; it’s just that Wade way overplays the sociological aspects of religion. So like most books in this field, he really only accounts for around 5% of religion, completely overlooking its esoteric aspects and the origins of its symbols.

There are some other reviews of Wade’s book floating around out there, FYI. Predictably, they’re woefully uninsightful; but what did you expect? Wade’s in far over his head on this subject … but so are one-dimensional, know-it-all pretenders like Razib and Derbyshire.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Chakras, Civilization Dev, Milky Way, Shamanism, Sympathetic Magic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.