 
### Religion, Language, Narrative And The Search For Meaning

Anthony Campbell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2009 Anthony Campbell

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About the author

Anthony Campbell was a consultant physician at **The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital** for over twenty years. He retired in 1998. He has long been interested in religion, to which he takes a sympathetic but sceptical approach. This book is, in a sense, a sequel to his earlier 'Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination', though it stands on its own.

Other books by Anthony Campbell

Smashword editions:

Homeopathy in Perspective <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/5122>#Chapter3

Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/5206>

Printed versions of all my books:

<http://www.acampbell.org.uk/>

**Contents**

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Reductionist Explanations

Chapter 3: Taking Religion Seriously

Chapter 4: Ancestral Voices

Chapter 5: Religion and Language

Chapter 6: Religion and Narrative

Chapter 7: Death and Beyond

Chapter 8: The Religious Temperament

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

As always, I am most grateful to my wife, who acts as a sympathetic but firm editor for what I write, even when, as in the present instance, she disagrees with the views I put forward. I should also like to thank John Floyd, who kindly read through the book in draft and made some perceptive comments which helped me to restructure it, I hope for the better.

The final acknowledgement must of course be to the innumerable people who have given us their inmost reflections about this central aspect of human thought. The Bibliography lists those on whom I have depended most critically in writing, but the list could have been far longer. There may be writers whose ideas I have absorbed so thoroughly as to have forgotten their provenance; if so, I hope I will be forgiven.

Preface

This book is in a sense a sequel to my earlier book _Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination_ , in which I provided an account of my upbringing as a Roman Catholic, my loss of belief in that faith, and my subsequent exploration of other spiritual paths, notably Transcendental Meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. At the end of that book I said that I couldn't understand how I had believed some of the things I had believed. Here I look at this question in less personal terms, attempting to explore the nature of religious belief in general and why it persists today.

The position I described myself as reaching was that of metaphysical naturalism, meaning the view that the material world is all that exists. 'Metaphysical' is an acknowledgement that the correctness of this position cannot be finally proved, so I don't claim to have reached ultimate truth. As Bertrand Russell said, we should always entertain our opinions with a certain element of doubt. I am sure that my view of religion is rational, but that does not prove it is right. And I am not setting out here to dismiss religion as based on nothing but illusion, even though I don't subscribe to it myself. This requires a few words of explanation.

I take it for granted that a naturalistic explanation of religion should be an evolutionary explanation. But that does not, in itself, imply that religion is necessarily false. All our thought processes, including our rationality, have after all been shaped by evolution, so religion is no different. There are philosophers and scientists of repute who fully accept the importance of Darwin's great idea yet find they can reconcile this with religious beliefs of various kinds. As they see it, evolution is the means God has used to shape His creation, and the fact that humans have evolved to be religious is evidence that He wanted us to be aware of His existence. So there is no necessary incompatibility between naturalistic and religious explanations for religion; both may be true simultaneously. You don't have to be daft to be religious.

You also don't have to be wilfully obtuse _not_ to be religious, as at least some believers are willing to concede. John Hick is a case in point. He is a Christian theologian who takes a very wide-angle view of religion, citing abundantly from Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Muslim sources. His opinion is that all the world's religions are 'masks' or 'faces' interposed between us and what he calls the 'Real', which can never be known directly. But he doesn't find that there are compelling reasons for anyone to believe this, because the universe is 'ambiguous'. The facts at our disposal permit belief in a transcendent realm but they also permit non-belief, so either option is reasonable. Which side of the fence you come down on depends on your own experience and on how far you are prepared to accept the assurances of others. I agree with this assessment. The springs of our belief or disbelief are usually hidden from us.

In my own case, for whatever psychological reasons, I feel no need to believe in the Real. I think it is right to state this at the outset, because in reading books about religion I generally find it irritating when the author fails to define where he or she stands. I suppose this coyness usually stems from a wish to appear objective and impartial, but of course no one is really objective in these matters, and the reader is then left to guess, from odd allusions or asides, what the author really believes.

At the same time, I don't want to come across as an anti-religious proselytiser, or to give the impression that I am strongly hostile to religion or regard it as an unmitigated evil that has to be fought at all costs, as do some militant atheists. Perhaps, in part, this is because I have had close family connections with at least two convinced Christians – my father and my wife – and this may have given me an insight into the nature of religious belief that seems sometimes to be lacking in the more aggressive critics of religion whose books I read.

My father regarded his Roman Catholicism as central to his existence. When he was recovering in hospital after a serious operation he told me that he could not imagine living without his religion, and I knew that to be true. As a young man he had seriously considered becoming a priest. Later in life he did become a member of a religious Third Order – a kind of religious-in-the-world – and later still, after my mother's death, he finally fulfilled his youthful ambition by becoming a priest and a 'monk' – more correctly, a Canon Regular – in the Order of the White Canons, founded in the twelfth century by St Norbert.

Roman Catholicism tends to be authoritarian and legalistic, with much discussion of what you may and may not do and may and may not believe, but my wife, who is Greek and therefore, like most Greeks, Orthodox, has shown me a version of Christianity that I find more sympathetic.

These personal influences have no doubt helped to shape how I see religion, but on more general grounds I think that religion is one of the most firmly built-in features of the human mind and can probably never be eradicated; at most it can be changed. We need to take it seriously, which is what I try to do here.

Robin Dunbar is among the writers whom I have found very helpful in my thinking about religion, and I shall be drawing on him quite a bit in the course of the book. He is one of those who think that religion is an intrinsic part of human consciousness, and he identifies three quite distinct questions we can raise about religious experience. 1. Why are we the only species that has this experience and believes in a spiritual world alongside the material one? 2. What function did religion have for our remote ancestors, and is it still functional today? 3. When did religion first appear on the scene? I shall look at all three questions and discuss some of the answers that have been given to them.

The emphasis is, of course, on 'some'. Inevitably, this will be a personal selection from the answers currently on offer. Whole libraries could be – have been – filled with books on the subject, so I am certainly not going to try to cover everything here, even if I were competent to do so. Someone else might have chosen to emphasise quite different aspects, but I hope that those I have selected will give a useful overview of at least the main currents of thought today.

One of the rewards of writing is that it serves to clarify one's own ideas. That has certainly happened to me. When I started the book I thought that I would find most of the explanation for religion in the ideas I discuss in Chapters 3 and 4 – namely, that religion essentially descends from a shamanic tradition that goes back as far as the Upper Palaeolithic, some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. That idea was put forward, mainly by Mircea Eliade, in the mid-twentieth century and became very influential. I suppose I absorbed it then and it became part of my mental furniture without ever being examined very closely. It began to lose ground among scholars by the end of the century, but more recently the work of the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has given it new life. I find his work fascinating and I think he has made a good case for the view that there may have been shamans in the society of that time. But I am less convinced that a continuous line of development can be traced from that remote epoch into recent times.

I now think that the shamanism theory is less useful as an explanation for religion than I once did, but it remains true that shamanic-type experiences, such as near-death experiences and alien abductions, still occur in our society today and are helping to shape religious ideas, though they are largely neglected by theologians. But the main clues to understanding religion, I believe, lie in our symbol-forming nature, in language and narrative, and in our inability to tolerate the thought of life without meaning. It is these ideas that form the main core of the book.

Chapter 1 Introduction

As I write this, at the beginning of the Year of Our Lord 2009, there are 800 buses trundling through Britain bearing the slogan: 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.' This advertisement is sponsored by the British Humanist Association, but the Methodist Church has thanked them for encouraging a continued interest in God. A spokeswoman for the Church said that the campaign would be a good thing if it got people thinking about the deep issues in life, and that Christianity was for people who were not afraid to think about life and meaning. _Theos_ , a 'theology think tank', takes a similar view. In a largely secular society like that of Britain today, the religious seem to be following the maxim that any publicity is good publicity.

Some atheists found the wording over-tentative. The 'probably' was apparently put in to keep the Advertising Standards Authority happy (though they have received a complaint anyway). Richard Dawkins said he would have preferred 'almost certainly', though he has now come round to the present wording. But whatever you may think of the first sentence, isn't the second sentence a non sequitur? If there is no God, does that mean we have nothing to worry about? If, as we are often told is the case, religion is a principal incentive to moral behaviour (God is watching you so you had better conform, or else), a widespread disbelief in God might promote lawlessness and anarchy, which would surely be something to worry about. Plenty of people think that this is just what is happening in Britain today – a general abandonment of religion leading to social breakdown. So perhaps, if disbelief in God becomes more widespread, there will be _more_ to worry about, not less.

Anyway, I question whether worry is a principal consequence of believing in God. The idea of the bus campaign came from Ariane Sherine, a comedian, who was concerned in the previous year when she found Christian sources telling people that if they didn't sign up they would go to hell. But while that is one Christian view, it is probably not the mainstream message today – I doubt if Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, would endorse it – and there are probably far more Christians who find their religion a comfort than who think it a threat to their peace of mind. 'Comfort', in fact, is too weak a word; religion is what gives their lives meaning. And if your life ceases to have meaning for you there is certainly something to worry about.

The bus advertisement is intended to nudge people gently towards atheism, but not all forms of disbelief are the same. There are at least two kinds of atheist. Some are like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Jonathan Miller. If you are in this category you either had no religious upbringing at all or, if you did, you ceased to believe in religion at an early age and never looked back. People like this are what I would call untroubled atheists. But there are also troubled atheists, who may have had a religious upbringing, and who in any case experience the reality of the questions that religion is supposed to answer.

I don't mean to say that everyone in this category regrets their atheism. Many don't, but they do think that religion raises important questions that deserve serious attention, whereas untroubled atheists simply dismiss the lot as illusion.

In this category I would include Marghanita Laski, Iris Murdoch, Taner Edis, Ursula Goodenough, and Robert Sapolsky. All these regard religion as important even though they are nonbelievers. Goodenough even participates regularly in services and sings in the choir although she is not a believer.

Laski described herself as an atheist but she wrote extensively about religion; her book _Ecstasy: A Study of some Secular and Religious Experiences_ is the best discussion of mysticism from a secular viewpoint that I know. Murdoch said: 'God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured.' And Sapolsky, who was brought up as an observing Jew before becoming an atheist, has said in an interview on YouTube that he constantly thinks about religion and even wishes he could still believe because of the comfort faith brings to those who have it. (Still, he is ambivalent, because he has also said that he might continue to believe there is no God, even if it were proved that there _is_ one!) In the interview he makes the same distinction as I do, between two types of atheist. Some, he says, never had a religious upbringing and find that there is no need to think about religious questions at all because they are self-evidently absurd, and others began from a religious position and renounced it only with pain and difficulty. That is his situation.

Why should anyone regret disbelieving something they are sure is untrue? Sapolsky points to the large number of psychological studies which apparently show that people who believe in God and go to church regularly are happier and healthier than those who don't do these things. Well, perhaps, but even if it's true – and it is still possible to pick holes in the research – what follows? Are we supposed to believe just for the sake of our health? Belief is not ours to command. It often arises from levels of mental functioning that are not accessible to consciousness, and the reasons we give for our beliefs are not always the real ones. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are often confabulations, stories we tell ourselves that have little or no relation to the real state of affairs. First we have the belief, then the reasons for the belief. As in the trial in _Alice in Wonderland_ , the verdict comes before the evidence.

Most of us inherit our religious beliefs from our parents and from the society in which we grow up. Even if we arrive at them later in life, as a result of conversion, this is seldom a primarily intellectual process. It is then more like falling in love, and indeed conversion and falling in love may have more in common than is often recognised. We can offer reasons why we love someone, perhaps, but these are arrived at after the event, and the same is generally true of religious conversion.

In any case, even if the research showing that those who attend church regularly derive benefit from doing so is correct, it does not follow that the content of their beliefs is what has that effect. It could be due to many other things – a healthier way of living or membership of a like-minded group, for example. And it could also be due to something that I shall have a lot to say about in the course of the book: _religion gives your life a sense of meaning_. If any generalisation about us humans are possible, it is, I think, that we dread any suspicion that we are cast adrift in an indifferent universe. Those who wish to do away with religion often say that science will provide this sense of meaning in the future, but though it does do this for some, they are very much in the minority. Ours is probably the first culture in which the reality of the supernatural has been openly questioned by so many. And even when people do say they are not religious, their unconscious attitudes to such questions are sometimes different from what they profess.

The content of religious beliefs seems strange to outsiders. If ever we succeed in making contact with an alien civilisation (unlikely but not totally impossible), what would most surprise them about us? Pretty high on the list, I imagine, would be the fact that that the vast majority of our species, past and present, have always believed in the existence of invisible beings who are profoundly interested in our activities and interfere with our lives in all kinds of ways. And one of the things that we would want to know about the aliens in our turn is whether they had comparable beliefs, because, either way, that would tell us something very important about our own psychology. If they did, it would suggest that beliefs about spirits were a pretty inevitable accompaniment of advanced intelligence. If they did not, it might follow that we are suffering from some kind of collective mental aberration.

Some secularists have concluded something of the sort. There seem to be few advantages and many disadvantages in holding such beliefs. The spirits are not always friendly, require often costly propitiation (sometimes even involving human sacrifice or self-mutilation), have minds of their own and intentions which may not coincide with ours, can be jealous of attention paid to other spirits, and so on. So why imagine them, if they don't exist?

Many explanations have been advanced by sceptics. Perhaps religion explains natural phenomena and the origin of the world. Perhaps it offers consolation in the face of suffering, illness, and bereavement. Perhaps it provides the promise of an afterlife. Perhaps it is a basis for morality. Perhaps it helps to bind society together and ensure its stability. Each of these suggestions seems to explain some features of religion and, taken together, they may even explain most of them. But critics complain that they do not account for the precise features of religious belief – why it takes certain forms and not others, or why anyone should have thought of such crazy-sounding ideas in the first place. There is now a popular view among some psychologists and anthropologists that the attempt to find benefits in religion, either for individuals or for society as a whole, is misconceived. Perhaps, they say, religion has no function but is simply a mistake, a by-product of the way our minds operate in everyday life. I look at this idea in the next chapter, but first I need to try to say what it is I am actually talking about. Unfortunately, this is not too easy to do.

A definition of religion?

Part of the reason that there is so much disagreement about why religion exists is that there does not appear to be much agreement about what the subject matter is. There is no generally accepted definition of religion. Attempts at one often include belief in supernatural beings with whom it is possible to communicate by prayer or in other ways, moral rules and instructions, more or less mythical accounts of the origin of the universe and human beings, ritual and ceremony, and feelings of mystery and awe (what Rudolf Otto called the sense of the numinous). There may be other components as well, such as a conviction that the world has a purpose into which human life fits, and there is also a social aspect which binds the members of the religion together. But while these things do characterise many religions, they are not always all present.

In his book on the origin of religion, _Religion Explained_ , the anthropologist Pascal Boyer does not offer any definition of religion. The nearest he comes to it is to say that 'religion is a convenient label that we use to put together all the ideas, actions, rules and objects that have to do with the existence and properties of superhuman agents like Gods'. This would exclude Theravada Buddhism, which has no belief in a creator god, though it does have rituals. Daniel Dennett is rather less evasive. In his book about religion, _Breaking the Spell_ , he acknowledges the difficulty of defining what he is talking about, but eventually he does take the plunge and defines religions as 'social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought'. Once again, this seems to exclude Buddhism.

Dennett makes a distinction between 'religion' and 'spirituality'. He explicitly parts company at this point with William James, who defined religion in his great classic _The Varieties of Religious Experience_ as 'the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, in so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine'. Dennett is prepared to allow such people to be _spiritual_ but he does not call them _religious._ But 'spirituality' is even more difficult to define than 'religion'.

A slightly eccentric Church of England vicar, who is currently presenting a television series in which he travels round the world with a film crew exploring different faiths, has commented that the USA was the most religious and least spiritual country he visited (in case you were wondering, the most spiritual was India). Here we are back with Dennett's distinction again, and I don't think it is useful. Unlike Dennett, I shall not distinguish between religion and spirituality. In so far as there is a difference, I should say that religion is extrovert, spirituality introvert. They are different faces of the same phenomenon. Which of them you attach more importance to is largely a reflection of your personality.

For Christians, critics such as Boyer who write from an anthropological perspective include a lot of things as religious which the believers would prefer were left out. Witchcraft, magic, and similar activities are usually rejected by Christians as irrelevant or positively evil. Yet new religions such as Wicca are explicitly concerned with them. Although they are not my main interest, I shall have no hesitation in citing them when necessary.

So perhaps Boyer was right not to offer a definition of religion, and I shall not do so here. We do generally think we know a religion when we see one, and that is the principle I shall follow. I shall be covering quite a lot of territory, so here is an overview of the main topics I shall write about and how I think they are inter-related.

An outline of the book

I start, in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, by looking at a number of explanations for religion, all of which provide elements of the answer though none is fully satisfactory as it stands.

Chapter 2 is about a currently fashionable approach, inspired by psychology, sociology, and anthropology, which is essentially dismissive of religion. Religion, on this view, is an unfortunate accident of the way our brains work, a kind of evolutionary mistake – inevitable, perhaps, for minds like ours, but regrettable none the less. Currently there are at least three research groups looking at religion from this perspective, according to Jesse Bering, one of the members. Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran are examples of scientists who have written extensively from this standpoint and whose ideas are attracting a lot of attention just now. The strength of this approach is that it quotes scientific research to support its views. The weakness, as an article in _The Economist_ pointed out ['Where angels fear to tread.' 19 March 2008], is that pretty well all those who do this kind of work are (untroubled) atheists and therefore broadly unsympathetic to any kind of truth claims that might be made for religion. This may limit the ways they look at the subject.

Such ideas contrast strongly with the older psychological view I discuss in Chapter 3, which regards religion as probably the most important element in human consciousness! If this ideas is right, religious experience is not an evolutionary mistake at all; on the contrary, it affords glimpses of an ultimate reality that underlies the everyday world. C.G. Jung was prominent in shaping this way of thinking though his ideas have been taken up by many others. This is what might be called an aristocratic version of religion, because it sees religious ideas as being produced by very exceptional people – mystics and visionaries.

A prominent advocate of the aristocratic view of religion was the scholar Mircea Eliade, who, largely single-handedly, popularised the notion that the key to understanding the origin of religion is shamanism. Although that idea is not much favoured by scholars today, there have been recent attempts by archaeologists to explain some of the art of the Upper Palaeolithic as evidence for the existence of shamanism at that period. If this is correct, we may be able to trace the origin of religion remarkably far back in time. It may also tell us that there are inbuilt tendencies in the mind to produce the kinds of experience that are described as shamanic – trances, visions, encounters with spirits and the like. I discuss shamanism in Chapter 4, with particular reference to the Upper Palaeolithic; I return to the subject of altered states of consciousness in Chapter 7.

All the ideas I have mentioned so far are valuable, I believe, but I don't think they really explain what is most important about religion. In the remainder of the book, therefore, I try to develop another way of thinking about the basic questions. I want to say that what lies at the heart of religion is language and narrative.

In Chapter 5 I begin by exploring the connection between religion and language. Both probably arose together at much the same time in human evolution. This has often been pointed out before, but what has not been so much emphasised is the similarity between the ways in which language and religion are acquired by children. Terrence Deacon has made a strong case for the view that languages have evolved to be easily learnt by children, and that it is legitimate to treat languages as semi-living systems analogous in many ways to parasites, or perhaps to symbionts. I take up this idea and apply it to religion, which I think can also be considered as a parasite or symbiont that is particularly adapted to be taken up by children. Perhaps, by now, religion is so deeply infused in the human brain as to be practically ineradicable.

The importance of stories for religion has been remarked on by many, but critics of religion often seem to forget this, preferring to focus on the seeming illogicality or absurdity of religious beliefs. In Chapter 6 I suggest that religion begins, not with belief, but with narrative. Human beings are story-telling animals and that is how they generally encounter religion as children. Even for adults, religion is more a matter of story than of doctrine. Belief is a secondary elaboration that arises only when religion is challenged by outsiders. It is better to think of religion as a collection of stories rather than as a system of beliefs.

Chapter 7 is about altered states of consciousness: near-death experiences and the like. The reductionists whom I discuss in Chapter 2 mostly downplay or neglect the role of such experiences in religion, but I think they are wrong to do so. Dreams, visions, and 'mystical' experiences have probably characterised our species for as long as we have been fully human, and I find it incredible that they would not have influenced our religious beliefs in all kinds of ways. In particular, they would have helped to shape our ideas of death and the afterlife. In any case, they are certainly important in how we think about religion today.

In Chapter 8 I look at the implications of these ideas for the future of religion, and conclude that attempts to argue religion out of existence on rationalist or scientific grounds are unlikely to succeed. The reason is that human beings nearly always find a lack of meaning in their lives to be intolerable. Death is the ultimate negation of meaning, and religions offer us a way of coming to terms with that and accommodating it in our consciousness. Religions exist because they tell us stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going, and the human mind will always tend to generate narratives of this kind.

Chapter 2 Reductionist Explanations

Many modern attempts to explain religion are based in one way or another on Darwinian ideas. One of the first people to attempt to provide an explanation of this kind was Sigmund Freud, who took up a suggestion of Darwin's about the structure of early human societies and gave it a psychoanalytic twist. He imagined these societies as made up of a 'harem' of females dominated by a single alpha male – the kind of arrangement that exists today in gorilla groups. Freud went on to imagine that a band of subdominant males, expelled from the group, would return later and kill the alpha male (their father), whom they both feared and respected. This scenario was taken by Freud to be the origin of the Oedipus complex that figured so largely in psychoanalytic theory. Freud also supposed that it was the root of religion, which he thought was a collective attempt to expiate the 'original sin' of patricide.

Freud's account relied on a presumed structure of early human society which is almost wholly speculative. We simply don't know what this society was like, although quite probably it was more like a chimpanzee community, with many competing males rather than only one with breeding rights. A group of this kind would be the opposite of Freud's idea, because it would be the females that left rather than the males. In any case, the theory seems to have emerged chiefly from Freud's wish to bolster psychoanalysis, in which the Oedipus complex was a central element.

A basic question at the outset

An evolutionary view of religion does not necessarily imply that it contributes to survival and reproduction, but often this is assumed and then the theory is described as adaptationist. If we want to put forward such a theory for religion we have to answer an important question at the very outset: how does religion increase the chances of reproduction for believers? If religion has evolved by natural selection it ought to be doing something to favour the propagation of the genes that give rise to it. And that idea, in turn, implies at least two things. First, there must be a genetic component in the production of religious belief. If one or both of your parents are religious, it should be slightly more likely that you too will be religious, even without any cultural input from your parents or the group you live in. Obviously, this is going to be difficult to show. Second, the inclination to religious belief must be shown to increase the chances of leaving offspring. Perhaps religious people would attract more mates, or they would be better parents so their children would be more likely to survive. This, too, is going to be difficult to show convincingly.

A popular line of argument is to say that a tribe which had a common belief system would be more cohesive than one that adhered less firmly to communal beliefs, and that the believers would support one another better in child-rearing and in inter-tribal conflicts as well as in times of adversity due to starvation or other things. While this idea sounds plausible, it suffers from the disadvantage of being based on a form of group selection. Theories of this kind are out of fashion today. Emphasis is now on the reproductive success of individuals, not groups. Most evolutionists agree that group selection is possible in theory, but they think it is unlikely to be important in practice. One reason for this view is that an individual who cheated would do better than the others in the group, at least to start with. There is beginning to be a revival of interest in group selection, though supporters are still in a minority.

There is some evidence to show that human beings are liable to psychological contagion – what has been called herd mentality. In experiments at Stanford University in California, Scott Wiltermouth and his team found that when people marched, sang, or danced together they felt increased loyalty to the group. The fondness of fascist leaders for this kind of thing is familiar from the 1930s in Germany and Italy. Most tribal societies do a lot of group chanting and dancing. A possible brain mechanism for such effects comes from work on mirror neurons. These are cells that fire both when we perform an action and also when we see another individual doing the same thing. For example, a mother feeding a child with a spoon may move her mouth in the same way as the child, miming its eating action. Mirror neurons were first discovered in monkeys; whether they exist in humans is unknown though it is likely that they do. Researchers in Holland have found that the brain releases more dopamine when we fall in line with the opinion of our group; dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of pleasure.

A rather different evolutionary scenario has been put forward by two psychiatrists, Anthony Stevens and John Price, who start from an evolutionary puzzle: why does schizophrenia exist? Most studies of the illness have found that it has a genetic element – a tendency to schizophrenia can be inherited. On the face of it, this is surprising. Being schizophrenic is hardly likely to increase your chances of finding a mate and leaving offspring, so one would expect the gene or genes responsible to have been eliminated in the course of evolution. But what if a tendency to schizophrenia, without frank development of schizophrenia, had an evolutionary advantage?

There are examples of this with other illnesses. One that is often quoted is sickle-cell disease. In its full-blown form this is crippling and, if untreated, is likely to prove fatal. The red blood cells of sufferers assume a sickle shape (hence the name) when the oxygen concentration in the tissues is reduced, and this leads to blockage of small vessels, with pain, disability, organ damage, and even death.

We all get two copies of our genes from our parents; if both your copies are for sickle haemoglobin you will be affected. But if you have one sickle-cell gene and one normal gene you will almost certainly be unaffected though you will have a certain mount of the sickle-type haemoglobin in your blood. In fact, in parts of the world where there is malaria you will be better off, because sickle-cell haemoglobin makes the red cells less hospitable to the malarial parasite, so if you have some you will have an increased resistance to that disease. This, presumably, is why the sickle-cell trait, as it is called, has not been eliminated by natural selection, and why it (along with other haemoglobin variants that have a similar effect) is more common in areas that are subject to malaria. So the gene that produces the abnormal haemoglobin continues to be transmitted, although this has bad results for those who are unlucky enough to inherit both copies.

Sickle-cell disease or trait is inherited in a simple Mendelian way. This is not true of schizophrenia, which is probably the result of the interaction of many genes, and there is still argument about how big the genetic element is in this disease. The genes do not make schizophrenia inevitable for anyone, just more probable. And the important point for the idea put forward by Stevens and Price is that someone carrying these genes might have some psychological features that were suggestive of schizophrenia but would not have the full-blown disease. This would constitute the schizoid personality.

But why would it be an evolutionary advantage to have a schizoid personality? Stevens and Price start from the idea that there is a relation between madness and genius. They look at a number of cases which they think illustrate this connection, and they are not afraid of where their conclusions lead them, for they ask whether Jesus of Nazareth was schizophrenic. They do find certain features in him that are suggestive of schizophrenia and which he shares with other religious prophets, but they say he also presents features which differentiate him clearly from a schizophrenic. A difficulty I found with their discussion at this point is that they seem to take the statements attributed to Jesus in the New Testament at face value. For example, they think that Jesus claimed to be divine and that his followers accepted this, but not all New Testament scholars are convinced that Jesus ever made such a claim or that it would have been comprehensible in a Jewish context.

A crucial feature of their hypothesis is the notion of group-splitting. They suggest that in our ancestral societies there would at times be a need for a group to split up, perhaps when the resources of the site had been exhausted or when it had exceeded its 'ideal' number of about 150 members. (There is a lot of evidence to suggest that 150 is about the number that a group can contain if its members are to know one another personally and interact efficiently.) A charismatic leader would maintain this group size by founding a new group, whose members he would lead away to pastures new, a Promised Land. Such a leader would have certain schizoid features though he (or, rarely, she) would not be frankly schizophrenic. Once again, we are beginning to run up against group selection here, although the theory can still work without it. A charismatic leader of the kind postulated by Stevens and Price would have had numerous opportunities to produce offspring – something often seen today in cults, where the (male) leader often has access to a number of mates – and so his genes would be passed on. This may explain why genes favouring schizophrenia have continued to be present in our genotype.

s

Sociobiology

Explanations of this kind are frequently labelled sociobiological, because they aim to link culture and biological evolution together. Often we are told that because for most of our prehistory we were hunter-gatherers our minds are still adapted to that situation, and this may have various bad results in modern circumstances. For example, the world-wide increase in obesity is often blamed on our evolutionary origin. For most of our existence as a species, the argument goes, we would have been short of food, so it was an advantage to gorge ourselves whenever there was plenty and to have the physiological ability conserve food energy as fat to see us through the lean times. But in a modern society, with an abundance of food, the result is that we eat more than we need and become fat.

Ideas of this kind have a long history – indeed, they go back to Darwin. Many of Freud's concepts are linked to Darwin's, and in the twentieth century writers such as Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris popularised these ways of thinking with great success. The term sociobiology was invented by E.O. Wilson in the 1970s and his ideas attracted a huge amount of argument at the time. Wilson was vilified by many and even had a glass of water poured over him at a meeting, but many people did take up his way of thinking and the result was a confusingly-named plethora of academic disciplines: human behavioural ecology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and gene-culture co-evolution, for example.

(For a good discussion of this bewildering terminology, see Laland and Brown, 2002. Probably all these ways of thinking about human beings are useful, they believe, but they complain that at the Sunday newspaper level there has ensued a fair amount of sloppy thinking, introducing 'dubious and sensationalist evolutionary arguments to the general public'.)

Theories like those of Stevens and Price assume that religion would have had an evolutionary advantage in the past, although it no longer has today. But what if this idea is mistaken? Some researchers now believe that religion has no survival value and has arisen as a by-product of mental functioning that originated for other reasons. On this view, religion is due to a kind of misfiring of our inherited brain apparatus.

In _The God Delusion_ Richard Dawkins puts forward a tentative hypothesis of this kind. He starts from the analogy of moths flying into candle flames. It is obviously not adaptational to do this: it does not increase the moths' ability to reproduce, quite the opposite. There has been a lot of argument about why moths behave in this unwise way. One suggestion is that they normally use celestial objects such as the sun and the moon to steer by. The advent of local lights such as candles is recent in evolutionary terms so moths have not had time to adapt to it. Candles, unlike the moon, are not usually at optical infinity, so if you use them to steer by you tend to fly in circles until you meet with disaster. The mishap is then a consequence of the way the moth's nervous system has evolved. Moths would be in the same situation as the people who get fat because they eat too much: they are the victims of an adaptation which worked well in the past but is disastrous today.

Whether this explanation for moth behaviour is correct (there are other possibilities) is not important; Dawkins uses it simply to illustrate his general idea, which is that religion may arise from a misfiring of the normal human nervous system. Specifically, he goes on to suggest, the brains of children have been shaped by evolution to believe what their parents tell them, because otherwise warnings about burning their fingers in a fire or avoiding snakes and scorpions would not work. Perhaps they acquire their religious beliefs in the same way. The well-known if apocryphal Jesuit maxim, 'give me a boy for the first seven years of life and he's mine for life' would fit in with this idea.

Dawkins cautions his readers that this idea is simply meant as an illustration of the kind of explanation for religion that might be constructed, so he doesn't want it to be taken too seriously. Actually, I think myself he may be partly on the right lines in linking religion with children's minds, and I shall go on later to present a rather similar idea. But though his suggestion may help to explain how children acquire their religious ideas, it doesn't tell us where these ideas came from in the first place. For this we need to extend the misfiring idea more widely, to include the normal mental mechanisms of adults as well as children. Two prominent representatives of this approach, both of them anthropologists, are Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran.

Evolutionary psychology

In his book, which has the uncompromising title _Religion Explained_ , Boyer starts from evolutionary psychology, which he admits is still very much in its infancy. According to this, evolution has given rise to many specialised systems in the brain, which he calls inference systems. He lists several such systems: an agent-detector, a memory-manager, a cheater-detector, a moral-intuition generator, a system for enjoying and creating stories, and various alarm systems, for example. This is what has been called the Swiss-army-knife model of the mind: there are supposed to be mental tools for doing different things rather than a single intelligence that does all of them. Another metaphor would be the differences between two computer operating systems, Microsoft Windows and Unix. A monolithic system like Windows seeks to provide everything itself. The Unix philosophy, in contrast, is to have a different tool for each task. If you want to do two or three different things consecutively you 'chain' the tools together to work in succession instead of having one program that does the lot.

The brain is supposed to use the Unix philosophy rather than the Windows philosophy. So our brains are made up of numerous functional elements or modules. The important thing to understand about this is that most of what goes on in the brain does not reach consciousness. The inference systems are like so many little demons working away without revealing their presence. (In fact, in the Unix world the word 'daemon' is used to describe various programs that work in the background to perform tasks needed to keep the system running properly.) The results of their work pop up in our minds as beliefs, and we may then attempt to justify them by rational arguments, but that is not how the ideas arise in the first place.

I remember an experience from my childhood which illustrates the action of the agent-detector system rather nicely. When I was aged about five I worked out that the wind was caused by the waving branches of trees. This seemed perfectly logical. I knew that I could make the air move by waving my arms; whenever it was windy the branches of trees moved about, so presumably the trees, which were larger than me, could do the same thing on the grand scale. I put this theory to the adults around me and they rejected it, but I was not convinced. I don't remember whether I supposed that trees were conscious in the way that a cat or a dog is conscious, but I may have done; at any rate, my theory would naturally have suggested such an idea to me if I had thought about it. The attribution of mind to all kinds of natural phenomena has been widespread in many human societies and experiments show that it happens spontaneously in young children. Religious beliefs arise, Boyer says, when these inbuilt automatic systems are set off inappropriately. 'Religious concepts are probably influenced by the way the brain's inference systems produce explanations without our being aware of it.'

What is important here is the _normality_ of the systems involved. For Boyer there is nothing special about religious beliefs. They arise more or less inevitably through the _normal_ functioning of the mind. It has nothing to do with exceptional kinds of experience such as those reported by mystics, nor does it require the presence of a special area in the brain ('God module') to produce it. For minds constituted as ours are, the appearance of religion is more or less guaranteed.

Atran's view is quite similar to this. He supposes that there are what he calls 'innate releasing mechanisms' in the human mind. These are roughly comparable with 'instincts' and provide a means whereby we can respond quickly to a suggestion of a threat from an animal or another human being that we think we can detect in our environment. It is better to err on the side of thinking that there is such a threat than to ignore it, so these mechanisms are set with hair-trigger sensitivity. Better run away from something that might be a leopard than hang around to make sure. This causes us to respond, not only to real threats, but also to inanimate phenomena that mimic the appearance of living agents: apparent voices in the wind or running water, faces in the clouds and so on. And eventually the response became still further removed from actual phenomena in the outer world to encompass imaginary beings derived from dreams and visions. Like Boyer, Atran rejects the idea of a God module, though he is more willing than Boyer to acknowledge the contribution of altered states of consciousness.

Boyer's view of religion has received support from a recent study of brain function in religious belief [Kapogiannis and others, 2009].

The researchers used brain imaging techniques to study how people related to three aspects of belief about God. They claim that specific components of religious belief are produced by well-known brain networks. This is the first study of its kind, but if it is correct it is evidence for the kind of brain mechanisms that Boyer's theory demands.

Assessing the reductionist view

I find the arguments of anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists such as Boyer and Atran to be attractive in many ways. They can be claimed, with some justification, to be more scientific and objective than most of their predecessors'. Much that has been written about religion in the past was speculative – theories which people thought up and which sounded plausible, and agreed with some of the facts. But they were open to the objection that those who put them forward had simply selected the features of religion, or the religions, that supported their case, while conveniently ignoring whatever might contradict it. They were also difficult or impossible to test scientifically. What the modern anthropological theorists do is to apply the same methods to religion as they do to other anthropological questions. This gives their views a degree of authority and testability which is often lacking in the older accounts.

And they can make you see the beliefs of your own culture in a new way, as if they were those of a hitherto undiscovered society. If you think of Christianity like this, as if it were the religion of a recently discovered tribe, it begins to look strange. How, you might ask, can people seriously believe in a God who is simultaneously one and three, made up of a father, a son, and a pigeon? And that, of course, is just the beginning; you would learn that people in this society also believe that the son figure had taken human form via a virgin birth, following which he was killed and then miraculously restored to life. Though no longer around, he is going to return to earth at some unspecified future time, and meanwhile the priests of the tribe symbolically eat his body and drink his blood while insisting that this is not mere symbolism but is literal fact. Sometimes he takes animal form as a lamb, and he is also represented with his heart exposed in his chest. Odder and odder. The John Frum religion on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu seems quite tame and rational in comparison. (John Frum, probably a mythic version of an American World War II serviceman, is an object of worship and is expected to return to usher in a period of prosperity and happiness for the islanders.)

But is this wholly fair? A major religion like Christianity is really a very complex system, with ramifications that extend in all kinds of directions – in philosophy and art, obviously, but perhaps even in science. Lee Smolin thinks that most of the great physicists, from Newton to Einstein, were motivated by the wish to understand the mind of God. More than one thinker has seen a connection between mediaeval Christian notions of God as the law-giver and the scientific concept of laws of nature that can be discovered by reason.

Even if the reductionist explanation of how magico-religious concepts arise is correct, its advocates still have to do a lot of work to show how such 'primitive' ideas are the source of modern religion. The reductionists point to two changes in human society which they think have interacted with each other to give rise to large-scale religions.

One was the invention of writing. Before this, religious beliefs were fragmented, with many local variants, and they were not worked out as formal systems. Daniel Dennett calls this stage that of folk religions. It changed when religious ideas were written down. Writing began mainly as a means of record-keeping and preserving accounts; the link with religion came later. Most religious texts began life in an oral form – this is true of the Vedas and the Buddhist scriptures for example. But later they were written down, and once this happened there was a tendency for the written text itself to be reverenced. This trend perhaps reaches its fullest extent in Islam, but a similar development has appeared elsewhere, for example in Sikhism, in which the text known as the Guru Granth Sahib is regarded as itself being the final guru of the Sikhs. Evangelical Christians who regard the Bible as the literal word of God treat Scripture with a comparable degree of reverence. It is still customary to swear on the Bible in British law courts.

The other change was the development of what Boyer calls guilds. These are the same as priesthoods, the more usual term, but Boyer prefers to speak of guilds because he thinks of them as practising a skill and providing a service in the same kind of way as metal workers or shoemakers. The guilds or priesthoods claim to have special knowledge of the mysteries of faith and practice. Literacy was useful to these guilds, both because writing is a good way of stabilising and preserving their beliefs, and because, at least for a time, it was only the guild members of a society who were literate, which gave them a special status. During the Middle Ages literacy, writing, and education generally were very largely in the hands of churchmen, and as late as the middle of the nineteenth century it was necessary to be in at least minor orders and to sign up to the Thirty-Nine Articles if you were to hold an academic position at Oxford (of course, this was restricted to men).

Widespread religions tend to acquire hierarchies, with a vested interest in maintaining the belief system on which they are the acknowledged experts. This stratification can assume extreme forms, as it did in the Indian caste system. The religious underpinning of class was apparent in Europe in the Middle Ages, where everyone had their God-appointed place, often marked out by the kind of clothing and footwear they were permitted.

One of the most remarkable examples of a prehistoric religion-dominated and priesthood-governed society comes from the island of Malta, in the Mediterranean, and its smaller neighbour Gozo. Dating from the third millennium BCE there were huge underground burial chambers on the islands and literally dozens of temples. Many types of sculpture have been found; the so-called Fat Ladies are the best known, though not all are female. Probably thousands of people were buried in the underground tombs, accompanied by a wealth of grave goods.

Malta today is dry and rocky but it was much more watered and fertile between 5000 and 7000 years ago. But the inhabitants exploited the country and, when environmental degradation ensued, the society became introverted and obsessed with their religious beliefs and practices. By 2500 BCE the islands had become dominated by a powerful priesthood which controlled much of the economic life of the people. There was an overwhelming preoccupation with temple-building, religious art, and ritual feasting, with comparative neglect of the building of villages or domestic dwellings. The result, predictably, was disaster. By 2000 BCE the whole culture had disappeared and been replaced by very different practices, with cremation instead of burial and abandonment of the underground tombs.

Self-appointed specialists

A hierarchical religion is aristocratic. Some of its members are holier than others. At least in the West, the last few centuries have seen a reaction against this. It would be possible to regard the Protestant reformation as a democratising movement within Christianity; one that has continued down to our own day and has taken ever more extreme forms. As I shall suggest later, the modern vogue for seeking ecstatic experience in so-called neoshamanism could probably be seen as the logical continuation of religious democratisation, allied with an emphasis on personal as opposed to collective experience.

The formation of self-perpetuating and self-serving in-groups which regard themselves as a cut above everyone else seems to be a natural human tendency. It is not confined to religion: I have seen something similar happen more than once during my own lifetime in medicine, with the generation of new specialties (guilds) that did not exist before.

What happens is that a number of doctors become interested in something – let's suppose it is iridology (the alleged ability of experts to diagnose diseases from the appearance of the coloured part of the eye – the iris). At first there are only a few who believe in this. They begin to get together, informally, to discuss their ideas. Other doctors hear about it, some are interested, the numbers attending meetings increase, and they decide to form a society, with a formal constitution and so on. At first everyone is welcome to join, because the society wants to build up membership. Other doctors start to recognise the members as experts in iridology. If a patient asks them about the possibility of consulting an iridologist they say that they know nothing about it but they do know that there are some doctors practising it, and they feel happy to refer the patients to them.

Next, the people who formed the society initially decide to award themselves a diploma in iridology. This means that they are well on the way to forming an iridology specialty. There is now an incentive for doctors to learn iridology, since there is so much popular interest in unorthodox medicine, so they want to obtain the diploma. But this is no longer as easy as it was at the beginning; newcomers are expected to pass an examination set by a board appointed by the society. This, of course, increases the prestige of the society as well as bringing in income as examination fees. At least in Britain, the society is well on its way to final recognition as the Royal College of Iridologists.

I hasten to add that there is no such medical society at the moment in Britain, nor is there likely to be one in the future. The very few scientific studies that have been done show that iridology doesn't work, and few if any doctors take it seriously. But the pattern of recognition I have sketched above has occurred in connection with more respectable medical specialties. I find it entirely credible that something similar happened in religion in earlier times.

The development of a group of doctors interested in iridology would be a form of medical heresy. Although this has not happened, there have been other medical heresies which are quite similar to religious heresies. The best-known of these is homeopathy, which arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century thanks to a medical maverick in Germany, Samuel Hahnemann. He disagreed with the theories and practice of medicine in his day and proposed instead his own doctrine, based on the idea of like curing like. His heretical form of medicine still exists today, much to the annoyance of a good many conventional doctors. Some homeopaths, including some doctors, have an attitude to the subject which has many similarities to religious belief. Established guilds, like established religions, always feel themselves to be under threat from the arising of heretics in their ranks.

Boyer describes two ways in which religious ideas are transmitted. One is the guild method, which is formalised and perhaps rather lacking in excitement, and the other is 'imagistic', with loud music, vivid imagery, and a lot of sensory stimulation. The second type is clearly dominant in Christianity today, and it is also appearing in the syncretist religions that are on the rise in many parts of the world, especially South America. These are highly dramatic and have strong effects on participants, although most would probably find it difficult to explain exactly what beliefs they have acquired as a result. Reports of miracles quite often emanate from such groups. Established religions are nearly always unhappy with phenomena such as miracles and visions, at least when they happen in the present; those that happened in the remote past are easier to accommodate, and some, such as the resurrection of Jesus, may be essential to the faith. What Boyer refers to as the 'tragedy of the theologian' is due to this. Priesthoods need the miraculous to justify their claims, but they don't want too much of it, and they prefer it to be in the past. Present-day miracles are too liable to get out of hand.

A _n explanation for religion?_

So where does this leave us? I think that the anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have done a good job in demonstrating how inbuilt mental mechanisms might shape folk religion, and they have also suggested, fairly plausibly, how folk religion might begin to be transformed into the major religions we have today. But I am less confident that it is right to say that the great religions are simply scaled-up versions of their predecessors, which seems to be the implication of much that is said by those who take this line. The gulf seems to be harder to cross than they allow. Mainly it is the complex nature of these religions, and their far-reaching ramifications in philosophy and even in science, that I find difficult to account for in reductionist terms. Even if religion did arise in the ways that Boyer, Atran and others suppose, has it not become something else today?

The analogy which comes to mind for me here is the Mandelbrot set. Although this has its origin in mathematics, it fascinates many non-mathematicians for the beauty and complexity of the images it can generate. Starting from the initial picture on your computer screen, you can zoom in, magnifying different parts of it and encountering an endless succession of patterns, which are never the same yet are all recognisably based on transformations of the original. What is remarkable about it is the richness that emerges from what the mathematicians tell us is a simple formula. Religion, likewise, if Boyer and his colleagues are right, begins from a number of basic brain mechanisms, which have worked over the centuries to generate an ever-expanding world of beliefs that, however complex and varied, still belong recognisably to the family of phenomena we call religions.

This explains why the forms that religions take, though astonishingly varied, do correspond to certain recognisable types. Boyer points out that although people believe all sorts of things, some very strange to our ears, they don't believe absolutely anything. However extraordinary a set of religious beliefs may seem to the outsider, they are always contained within certain limits. And these are mostly intuitively obvious to everyone, as he demonstrates by asking his reader to guess which of a number of beliefs are 'real' and which are invented. For example, the existence of a belief that some people have a special organ in their stomachs which comes out of their bodies at night and flies about to cause mischief among the neighbours appears credible to most of those who are told of it (and it does exist). But if we are told that people believe in a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing but who exists only on Wednesdays, we would probably say that no society would come up with this belief, and we would be right. So religions take many forms but there are certain guidelines, and these are intuitively apparent to most of us.

I certainly wish to take the evolutionary view of religion seriously. But if we do, we should remember that there is a well-recognised sequence of events whereby a structure that evolves because it serves one purpose later becomes adapted for a quite different one. The classic example is feathers, which are modified reptilian scales. They probably first evolved in dinosaurs to insulate them against the cold; fossils of feathered dinosaurs have in fact been found in China. Only later did they come to be used for flight by the ancestors of modern birds. This kind of development was first proposed by Darwin. Stephen J. Gould called it exaptation, though the term has been used in more than one way. Another example, involving multiple stages, is the change of fish fins to limbs for walking on land, then to primate hands for grasping branches, and finally to human hands for holding tools.

I think something of this sort may have happened in religion. Perhaps the brain modules Boyer describes did give rise to 'religious' beliefs in the way he described, but with the increasing complexity of society they may have taken on new forms that were only indirectly connected with what they were at the beginning. So religions such as Christianity and Islam may be different in kind as well as in scale from folk religions.

Edward O. Wilson uses 'hypertrophy' to refer to this phenomenon in human cultural evolution. He sees it as the key to the emergence of civilisation. The growth of the teeth of the baby elephant to become tusks and the sprouting of the cranial bones of the elk to produce huge antlers exemplify the process in biology, while, on the cultural level, social systems among our hunter-gatherer forebears have metamorphosed into the extremely complex institutions that exist among us today. I think this is a useful analogy. But we should remember the extinct 'Irish elk', whose antlers were so large that, in the opinion of some palaeontologists, they proved unworkable and contributed to the demise of the species.

We have to be careful here, because in the past there was a tendency to think of religions as developing from vague intimations of truth to their final flowering in our own versions today. This is the equivalent of those drawings which show a succession of figures to represent human evolution. On the left is an ape on all-fours; then comes a bent hairy figure, next a more upright one – a shambling Neanderthal with craggy brow – and finally the glorious outcome, modern man (invariably with European features). It appears to be hard to escape from this way of thinking. Even modern writers still quite often refer to 'higher' and 'lower' animals, as if they could be placed on a scale of perfection, with 'advanced' and 'primitive' forms.

Applying this scheme to religion, first we had polytheism, but later, as people's thinking developed, we acquired the truer, higher understanding of monotheism. The Jews are conventionally regarded as the first to have made this transition, although the Pharaoh Akhenaten had an intuition of the same truth when he attempted, unsuccessfully, to reform the Egyptian religion to become monotheistic. Freud thought that Akhenaten might have influenced Judaism towards monotheism, but modern Egyptologists find this unconvincing. Christians often see a further line of development in how Jews thought about God, from the tyrannical figure portrayed in the early books of the Old Testament to the loving Father spoken about by Jesus.

I don't want to accept the value judgements implied by this way of picturing religious evolution, but I do think there were probably different applications of religious ideas according to people's varying needs. (Robert Sapolsky suggests that desert religions tend towards monotheism whereas forest dwellers are more likely to be polytheistic.)

Religion and death

A frequent jibe of secularist critics is to accuse Christians of believing in 'pie in the sky'. We are often told that the reason religion exists is that it promises eternal bliss in the hereafter and consolation to the bereaved by telling them they will be united with the person they love in the next life.

Boyer, as usual, has a different take on this. He agrees that religions do talk a lot about death but he points out, correctly, that by no means all of them promise a happy afterlife. Judaism is an obvious example. For most of the Biblical period either there was no afterlife at all or there was a shadowy existence in Sheol, exactly like that believed in during the classical period in Greece. It was not a place of torment but it was definitely to be avoided as long as possible. When Saul needed the advice of Samuel, who had died, he went (contrary to his own recent law) to the Witch of Endor to ask her to summon Samuel's shade. She did so, but he was barely recognisable; only the cloak he wore showed who he was. And when the King of Babylon died and went down to Sheol he was derided by the other spirits for having become as weak as they were. Not until after the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE did a different idea emerge, and then it was the expectation of bodily resurrection rather than disembodied existence in heaven.

Boyer finds that the reason so many religions pay a lot of attention to death is nothing to do with metaphysics or ideas of an afterlife but is connected with contradictory feelings about dead bodies. Different systems in the brain regard them simultaneously as inert and as dangerous, and the contrary emotions that arise have to be dealt with and recognised. Religion serves this need.

Whether this is true or not – and Boyer argues his case well – I don't think it negates the fact that, for modern people, religion does have this consoling effect. So perhaps religion evolved for one reason but, as time went by, it came to have different or additional roles. The ability of religion to provide comfort in the fear of death would then be an exaptation, to use Gould's term. It would not have been a function of religion at the beginning but now it is.

In fact, the idea of heaven has itself evolved in Christianity and has diverged a long way from where it started out. The modern understanding current in Christianity today is very different from what the New Testament teaches or from what Jesus would have described to his followers. The majority of modern New Testament scholars find that Jesus was an apocalypticist. That is, his thinking was conditioned by a tradition which held that a figure called the Son of Man would be sent by God to transform society, starting with the Jews but not confined to them. This new state _on earth_ was what Jesus understood by the Kingdom of God. Such views were current in first-century Palestine, for a number of reasons, and were probably linked with Zoroastrian ideas of a Saviour who would appear at the end of time. Apocalyptically-minded Jews believed that God would shortly intervene to overthrow the forces of evil, personified in the first century by the Romans, after which the Kingdom of God would be instituted to usher in a new period of peace and harmony.

Jesus and his disciples expected that all this would happen, not in some remote future, but within their lifetimes. The early Christians still believed that the event was imminent, but as time went by and nothing happened some readjustments became necessary, especially as the first Christians began to die off. We find Paul tackling this difficulty in his first letter to the Thessalonians, where he says that the dead Christians will rise from their graves and then join with the living to greet the Lord in the air before returning with him to his kingdom on earth. But later, many Christians began to interpret Jesus's words in a non-literal sense. Perhaps the Kingdom referred to the community of the faithful on earth, living with one another in peace, or perhaps it meant a judgement that people faced when they died. The Kingdom was now understood as referring, not to this world, but to the next.

Initially, Christians were taught to expect physical resurrection: the Church of England funeral service talks of 'sure and certain hope of _the resurrection to eternal life'_. Christians are still told to expect a general resurrection at the end of time, but nowadays there is less interest in this and more in the expectation of immediate disembodied existence in heaven. If this is what happens, there seems to be little need for the Last Judgement which Jesus promised, since it could only apply to those who are still alive at the time; everyone else has already been judged at the moment of death. (Some attempts to reconcile the discrepancy seem to envisage the blessed in heaven, and presumably also the damned in hell, returning to earth for a sort of passing-out parade.)

So why this change? I think it is connected with the increasing emphasis in Western thought on the individual. A collective judgement into sheep and goats, saved and damned, as described in Matthew's Gospel may be all very well, but what we really care about is what happens to _us_. And we don't want to have to wait an indefinitely long time to find out. So religious ideas about death have evolved and changed very considerably over time and have adapted themselves to suit the preoccupations of those who held them.

We touch here on an important idea, which I come back to later (Chapter 5). Religions behave almost like living organisms, that evolve to suit the changing conditions in which they find themselves. For religions, the human minds in which they live are their environment, and mutations arise that can affect their chances of survival. For Christianity, the mutation of belief in a transformation of this world into a belief in heaven as another world ensured its continuation as a religion. But it is characteristic of religions that they can often accommodate inconsistent beliefs without a sense of contradiction, so the notion of a transformation of this world persists in some branches of Christianity today, particularly in the USA.

Conclusion

It would perhaps be possible to combine the account of religion I describe in this chapter with a belief in God. One could say that our evolved brain mechanisms are what God chooses to use to reveal His existence to us. There have been attempts to do show this. Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg do so in their book _The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Mystical Experience_ , where they seek to provide a neurological basis, complete with 'models' and complex diagrams, for the production of myths, the existence of ritual, and mystical experience, including the near-death experience. This leads them to postulate something they call 'neurotheology', which they think provides a basis for a near-universal theology that would be acceptable to all the great world religions. But although they claim to base their views on neurology, their book appears to me to owe more to metaphysics than to science. I get the impression that they start from a settled conviction that mystical experience provides knowledge of ultimate reality and then try to construct a neurological basis for their position.

Boyer, Atran, Dennett, and those who think like them naturally reject all this as completely wrong-headed. Their view of religion is an atheist view. Critics sometimes caricature it as 'nothing-buttery' – human beings are 'nothing but' assemblies of chemicals, consciousness is 'nothing but' the electrical activity of the brain, and belief in God is 'nothing but' the result of faulty functioning of certain brain modules.

I can see the force of this objection, but I don't think the reductionist view can be dismissed as easily as that. I find the idea that religion emerges more or less inevitably as the result of normal brain processes quite persuasive. At the same time, I don't think that the mechanisms postulated by the reductionists are anything like the whole story; we need to bring in the symbol-forming propensity of the human mind, which is one of the main themes I develop in the book.

To some extent the position one adopts on these matters is a question of temperament. William James identified two psychological types, which he called tough-minded and tender-minded. Among the polarities they exhibit are the following: materialistic/idealistic, sceptical/dogmatic, and irreligious/religious. In James's categorisation the reductionist school is clearly tough-minded. Freud would also be classified as tough-minded. But there has also been a different movement in psychology, which is much closer to the tender-minded pole. James himself had leanings in that direction, but probably the best know example of a psychologist who took religion seriously was Carl Gustav Jung. I shall look at his views in the next chapter, where I also consider the contribution to religion of Mircea Eliade, who was much influenced by Jung.

Chapter 3 Taking Religion Seriously

For people who dislike the rather dismissive view of religion I described in the last chapter, there is an alternative in the form of depth psychology. This is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of psychological theories, but what they have in common is the idea that our ordinary consciousness is just the visible tip of something much deeper. Myths, dreams, and visions arise from these deep levels and shape the way we experience the world and other people. Depth psychology provides a bridge between science and spirituality which gives it a strong appeal to those with artistic or literary interests as well as to some theologians. The first psychologist to explore these ideas in detail was William James, but today they are probably most strongly associated with Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung and religion

Jung attached great importance to religion. While Freud concentrated mainly on the early years of life, Jung came to be more interested in middle life – the 'mid-life crisis' we hear so much about today is one of Jung's contribution to psychiatry. He came to believe that the problems many people encountered in middle life – problems that might lead to difficulties with their career or with their marriage, for example – were at bottom religious. This did not, of course, mean that they could be solved by going to church or by the adoption of a particular set of religious beliefs, but rather that they were due to a failure to resolve the kinds of question that religions are supposed to answer: what is my purpose in life, how should I live, how should I think about my death? The seeking and finding of answers to such questions constitutes the process that Jung called individuation.

Jung increasingly found that the people who consulted him did not always want to stop when the problems they had come with were resolved. They wished to continue with the analysis because they felt they were learning something of wider significance for their life as a whole. Anthony Storr, a psychiatrist who was influenced by Jung, described it like this. 'Broadly speaking, individuation means coming to terms with oneself by means of reconciling the opposing factors within. It also implies the attainment of one's full human potential, and may equally well be called "self-actualisation" or "self-realization" or even the attainment of maturity.' It is not difficult to translate these ideas in religious terms.

In 1959, when he was 84, Jung was interviewed on BBC television by John Freeman. Freeman asked him whether he believed in God. After a pause, Jung replied: 'Difficult to answer. I don't need to believe; I know.' Many Christians seized on this to claim triumphantly that Jung believed in God in the same way as themselves. But it was evident to me from Jung's writings – and a friend who was a Jungian analyst and saw the interview with me concurred – that Jung's reply was more nuanced than this. What he meant was that he had had experiences of the kind that give rise to our notions of God. Whether there was really 'Someone out there' was something he never appeared willing to commit himself about. But rather as they have done with remarks by Albert Einstein, some theists have taken Jung's answer out of context to support their own views.

Jung always described himself as a scientist. It is difficult not think that he protested too much about this. Certainly his critics have preferred to see him as a mystic and an occultist, and it is easy to understand why. He accepted many of the claims for the paranormal and was prepared to look seriously at astrology, the _I Ching_ , UFOs, and alchemy. He also wrote about theology: one of his most far-reaching ventures in this direction was his _Answer to Job_ , which at least one critic, Joyce Carol Oates, sees as his most important work. In it he argues for the view that God is the author of evil as well as of good and that the great failing of Christianity is to ignore this dark side.

Probably the main way in which Jung differed from Freud was in their respective concepts of the unconscious. For Freud, this was an unpleasant cesspit of repressed ideas and longings, whereas for Jung it was an infinite realm of creativity which is the source of everything we are. This sounds very much like Paul Tillich's Ground of Being, the Tao, Brahman, or John Hick's 'Real' – it goes by many names – and is a deeply mystical notion. But Jung claimed that it emerged naturally from deep exploration of the mind.

The archetypes

It is from this hidden realm that emerge those important but mysterious mental denizens that Jung named archetypes. The term goes back to Plato, but Jung's adoption of it seems to have been planted in his mind by the realization that many similarities exist in the myths and motifs of widely separated peoples, as well as in the delusions of schizophrenics. When he was studying archaeology in 1910 he came across a recently edited Greek text about the Mithraic cult, in which a vision of a tube hanging down from the sun was recorded; a stream of wind appeared to be blowing out of the tube. This reminded him of a patient he had seen some four years earlier. The man had told him that there was a tube hanging down from the sun, which he said Jung could see if he squinted with half-shut eyes, and this tube was the source of the wind.

Jung admitted that this resemblance might mean nothing, but he was struck by the fact that in certain mediaeval paintings a tube is depicted as reaching down from heaven under the robe of the Virgin Mary. The Holy Ghost flies down the tube in the form of a dove and impregnates the Virgin. Moreover, at Pentecost the Holy Ghost is supposed to have appeared as a mighty wind, and there is a Latin text which says that the spirit descends through the disk of the sun.

This description of Mary's miraculous impregnation sounds somewhat indelicate to modern ears, but it would not have been understood in this way in the Middle Ages. At that time it was supposed that mares could become pregnant when the wind blew on their hindquarters, and this idea was applied to Mary's impregnation by the divine wind of the Holy Spirit.

Such coincidences suggested to Jung that there are inherited predispositions to produce certain mental patterns and ideas, although the precise form these take will vary from place to place, time to time, and person to person. In later years he went on to extend such ideas to explain a vast amount of religious imagery and symbolism. For him, religion ceased to be a matter of dogma or belief, becoming instead the result of processes operating below the conscious level that 'irrupted' into consciousness in the form of dreams and other visions. The potential for such ideas to be interpreted in mystical terms is obvious and Jung himself appears to have done so at times. But it is also possible to put them in a biological context.

One Jungian psychiatrist who has done so is Anthony Stevens, who compares them to those inbuilt patterns of behaviour which used to be called instincts (now a slightly old-fashioned term). Stevens illustrates his idea by means of the behaviour of the male stickleback. When it meets a female who has a swollen belly charged with eggs it pirouettes in a ritual dance as part of its mating behaviour. This performance is built in; the male does not have to learn it. Other examples would be the nest-building of birds or web-spinning by spiders. We, too, may have such mechanisms, though in us they tend to appear differently from the way they do in animals. Archetypes, Stevens believes, can be understood as inbuilt mental patterns. Our tendency to fall in love when we meet a suitable member of our species is an example of such an inbuilt behaviour. And religious instincts would be yet another example. (As I mentioned in Chapter 2, Atran also links religious beliefs with instincts, but he does so in a very different way.)

So it is possible to accept the archetype theory without going down the route of occultism or mysticism, yet the appeal of archetypes for the literary or religious often lies precisely in the justification they seem to provide for esoteric ideas.

Archetypal images often appear in dreams and a Jungian analysis is largely centred on the dreams the person being analysed brings to the sessions. This in itself makes Jung's theories unacceptable to many psychologists today. Sleep researchers are inclined to dismiss dreams as irrelevant by-products of sleep, caused perhaps by the random firing of neurons while the brain is 'freewheeling'. If this view is right, dreams are more or less meaningless and it is a waste of time to try to understand them.

Pendulums swing, of course, and some scientists are now beginning to attach significance to dreams once more, although they still don't give them anything like the importance that Jung did. But at a popular level interest in dreams has never gone away. People have always talked about their dreams and tried to interpret their meaning. In the past they were often thought to be messages from the gods or God, and the Bible provides plenty of examples of this. In the Old Testament Joseph was an expert dream interpreter, and the idea persists as late as the New Testament, where another Joseph receives several instructions in dreams: he is told how to understand Mary's pregnancy, when he should take the family to Egypt to escape Herod's persecution, and when it is safe for them to return.

Still today many people think their dreams are important, and the reliance of Jung's method, which he called analytical psychology, on dreams is no doubt one reason for its continuing popularity. Those who have abandoned formal religion but retain a sense of longing for the sense of meaning which they once found in religion also often find Jung's ideas to be congenial.

A Jungian analysis, of course, is not available to everyone. Although a lot less lengthy than a typical Freudian analysis, it still takes up a good deal of time and it is not cheap. But many later forms of psychotherapy, such as art therapy, owe a lot to Jung and some of these are available more easily and cheaply.

Jung's successors

Jung's theories have had important effects on later thinkers even when their influence is not acknowledged. I have already mentioned the mid-life crisis, which has become almost a cliché to explain the behaviour of middle-aged men when they break up their marriages. The division of people into extroverts and introverts is also due to Jung, although his more elaborate fourfold typology has been less widely accepted. And while Jung did not invent the Rorschach inkblot personality test, his endorsement of it was important in its later widespread acceptance, though its value is being increasingly questioned today.

The transpersonal psychology movement that developed in the twentieth century, particularly in the USA, owed much to Jung. What is distinctive about this is that it is not thought of merely as therapy. 'Transpersonal' means beyond, or through, the personal, and expresses the idea that the individual self is connected to, or an aspect of, something wider, more meaningful, and possibly universal. Transpersonal psychology is concerned with the quest for meaning as well as the relief of symptoms – ultimately the two are probably seen as different aspects of the same thing. The form that this quest takes varies: sometimes it is mainly a matter of the relationship to other people, humankind, life, or the planet, and sometimes it is more a matter of spiritual or mystical experience (what Abraham Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology, called peak experiences).

Transpersonal psychology is not religion but it has a lot in common with religion. In this, as in many other ways, the influence of Jung is obvious. He believed that he had succeeded in uniting spirituality and science by means of psychiatry, for he wrote: 'Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.' Therein lies much of its fascination for those who wish to keep hold of the spiritual while not abandoning science.

But Jung's claim to be a scientist does present difficulties. There is no way one can disprove a Jungian insight into a symbol or a dream, no test that could be applied. Either it strikes you as true or it doesn't. This lack of objectivity does not make Jungian ideas valueless, but it does mean that they have to be judged in much the same way as one judges a poem, a novel, or a picture. They are closer to art than to science.

Another problem in going down the Jungian path is that it is easy to lose oneself in an endless maze of archetypes, symbols, images, and esotericisms. Many Jungians, and probably Jung himself, did exactly that. Once again I am reminded of the Mandelbrot set, with its literally infinite succession of pictures, always different, always the same. I have been down that road to some extent myself in the past, so I know how strong the attraction can be. But I now think that, as with the great metaphysical systems of Plato or Spinoza, to which it has a certain resemblance, it is best not to spend one's whole life in those worlds, fascinating though they are. Better to take what they offer and then move on.

Mircea Eliade

A scholar who was deeply influenced by Jung, and whose ideas were to do much to shape theories of religion in the mid-twentieth century, was Mircea Eliade. Jung and Eliade met in 1950 at the annual Eranos conference. Founded by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn in 1933, this takes place over 8 days and is attended by scholars in depth psychology, comparative religion, literary criticism, and folklore. Jung and Eliade saw each other on a number of occasions over the next few years and in in 1952 Eliade conducted a lengthy interview with Jung which was published in a French magazine. Later that year Jung read Eliade's study of shamanism and they had a long intense discussion about it.

The friendship between the two men was helpful to Eliade in another way. In the early 1950s he was awarded a special grant by the Bollingen Foundation, which had been started in 1945 to disseminate Jung's ideas. Several of Eliade's works appeared in the Bollingen Series, which published books related to Jung's thought as well as Jung's own works. In 1953 Eliade gave five two-hour lectures at the Jung Institute in Zurich.

The sympathy between Jung and Eliade is not difficult to understand. Both were deeply interested in mythology, esoteric spiritual disciplines such as alchemy, the mystical literature of the East, dreams and the unconscious, and the failings of modern society. They shared a willingness to accept the reality of the paranormal. Both, also, had encountered hostility from established specialties (the Freudians in Jung's case, the anthropologists in Eliade's). And Eliade, like Jung, was unwilling to say exactly what he thought about the existence of God. Perhaps this was because neither man wished to compromise his scientific credentials more than necessary, or perhaps it was because for both there was a certain vagueness at the centre of their thought.

Eliade wrote voluminously about religion, but particularly about one aspect of it – what he saw as its critical dependence on shamanism.

Eliade and shamanism

Eliade's erudition was amazing and intimidating. His library is said to have had over 100,000 books and they were not bought to impress visitors; he had probably read most of them. He was born in Romania in 1907 and died in Chicago in 1986. He learnt English in his youth so as to be able to read Max Müller and J.G. Frazer; later, at university, he acquired Hebrew, Persian, and Italian. As a postgraduate he studied the Kabbalah and Hermeticism. Indian thought was a major influence on him; he travelled extensively in India for more than three years, studying Sanskrit and investigating yoga and tantra. On his return to Romania he took up teaching and writing, but after the Communist takeover he went into permanent exile. In 1956 he became a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his life as Professor of the History of Religions. At that time there were very few such chairs anywhere in the world, but within 15 years there were at least 25 in the USA, nearly all of them occupied by his former students.

Eliade would have had no time at all for the reductionist views I outlined in Chapter 2. A religious phenomenon, he wrote, 'will only be recognised as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other such study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it – the element of the sacred.'

For Eliade, the roots of religion were to be found in shamanism. He wrote his monumental study of the subject in Paris, shortly after the end of the second world war. It was translated into English in 1964 and became enormously influential, setting the tone for much subsequent writing on shamanism and indeed on the academic study of comparative religion in general for the next half-century. Eliade's position was that shamanism is an ancient form of spirituality which has been of central importance in the development of religion throughout the world. He thought it underpinned Hinduism and Buddhism and indeed that it underlies most if not all religion. Towards the end of his account he said that the original belief of shamanism had centred on a Celestial Supreme Being with whom the shaman could have direct relations by ascending into the sky. The role of the shaman, in his view, was a heroic one, requiring long and arduous apprenticeship and formal initiation. The shaman was a member of an elite group whose task was defence of the 'psychic integrity' of the community against 'the powers of evil'.

Eliade based these views on detailed ethnographic reports from many parts of the world, in much the same way as Sir James Frazer had earlier done in _The Golden Bough._ Anthropologists no longer accept this as a valid method but it was still popular among scholars of comparative religion in Eliade's day. Some critics have found Eliade's approach to be flawed, saying he selected evidence that supported his case and dismissed as irrelevant whatever did not. He certainly pointed to remarkable similarities in beliefs and practices in many widely separated places, but could these not be taken as showing universal tendencies in the human mind rather than a continuity of influence? But Eliade would not allow that as a possibility.

Whether he was right or wrong about the importance of shamanism, there is no doubt that his work resulted in what might be described as a shamanism industry. Whole academic careers were to be based on it, while at a popular level the ramifications were enormous.

Shamanism and religion

Eliade's views were taken up with particular enthusiasm in the USA, especially by religious believers, because they could be seen as providing support for the widespread nature of 'spirituality'. They were less popular in Britain, where social anthropologists were reluctant to accept such ideas. But one distinguished British anthropologist, Ioan Lewis, did look at shamanism sympathetically. He was not afraid to make comparisons between Christianity and shamanism that were in favour of shamanism. Mainstream Christianity, he thought, was vulnerable to advances in science and technology, unlike shamanism. Traditional Christianity makes God all-powerful and man small and weak. Shamanism elevates humans to the level of the gods, at least for a time. Those who have lost the ability to attain ecstasy in this way can only get hints of it by studying myths or seeking for it in doctrines of salvation.

After this time shamanism began to be more widely discussed both by scholars and by popularisers. It was seen as important, global in its scope, and relevant to modern life. But a major problem remained: as Ronald Hutton points out, there is no generally accepted definition of shamanism. 'During the 1980s and 1990s more and more was published upon it, with the recurrent observation that no consensual definition was being achieved of even the main features of what was being studied with such fervour.'

The homeland of shamanism is generally taken to be Siberia, where the word is pronounced with the stress on the last syllable. But Siberia is a loosely defined area, and it contains many tribes, who use different words to describe the people we call shamans and have widely differing belief systems. To make matters still more complicated, mediums, 'witch-doctors' and others who enter altered states of consciousness have often been described as shamans, even in regions very remote from Siberia. Shamanism is thus an umbrella term to designate a wide variety of practices. The lack of any agreed definition of shamanism makes it easy cite in all kinds of contexts, but there is always the danger that by seeming to explain almost anything it may actually explain nothing. If shamanism is so vague, how can you say that any particular practice is _not_ shamanic?

Hutton, whose account of shamanism is one of the best that I have seen, remarks that writers on the subject have excluded or included whole continents as centres of shamanism according to whim. Some scholars thought there was important evidence of shamanism among native Australians, others said there was not. Several held that shamanism is absent from most of Africa, but another respected scholar found African shamanism to be of central importance. Eliade linked it mainly with hunter-gatherer societies, but most native Siberians were pastoralists, not hunters, and shamanism is found in agrarian societies, such as those of Korea and South Asia. As if all these difficulties were not enough, there was the embarrassing question of how to regard Siberia, supposedly the homeland of shamanism. The whole shamanism story had begun there, but now it was beginning to appear that Siberian shamanism was different from 'shamanism' in other parts of the world. So should Siberian shamanism still be regarded as the original, paradigmatic, form, or was it a different phenomenon?

Hutton finds that four different definitions of shamanism are current.

1. Shamanism is the practice of anyone who contacts the spirit world in an altered state of consciousness. This is a bit vague, and does not distinguish shamanism from trance mediumship and similar practices.

2. The title of shaman is restricted to specialist practitioners who contact the spirit world at the behest of others. This is still a bit vague, since trance mediums would again fit this definition.

3. Shamans are to be distinguished from 'mediums', 'witch doctors', 'spiritual healers' and the like by the use of some particular technique. This would be fine, except that there is no agreement about which technique should be used to make the distinction.

4. Shamanism describes the native religions of Siberia and neighbouring parts of Asia. Hutton find this to be the one unacceptable definition, because shamanism, no matter how you define it, is not the only component of these religions and often not even the main one.

Contemplating all this argument and uncertainty, the non-specialist onlooker might be starting to wonder whether the term 'shamanism' means anything at all. Perhaps it should be abandoned. Yet it does seem to be the only name we have to refer to a group of practices which, while they may not be easy to define, are recognisable as belonging to a certain category. In this, in fact, shamanism is much like religion. Both are difficult to define satisfactorily, but we generally think we know a religion when we see one, and the same applies to shamanism. So perhaps it is not surprising that so many people have seen it as the key to understanding religion.

The function of the shaman is to be a mediator between the society in which he or she lives and the world of the spirits. Shamanism is often a very specialised vocation though in some places many members of the society may participate to varying extents. Shamanism is always a collective phenomenon and the shaman is a performer, who does his or her act in public, for a purpose – divination, cure of disease, counteracting spells cast by enemy tribes, or whatever. These individuals therefore have an important role in maintaining the cohesion of the society and the mental stability of its members. The shaman, it has been said, combines the roles of doctor, priest, social worker, and mystic.

A shaman may be male or female, but the relative numbers of men and women involved vary in different societies. There are certain recurrent themes in shamanism, one of the most widespread being a mystic marriage between the shaman and his or her spirit spouse. These relationships are taken quite literally, to the extent that, in Haiti, legal contracts of marriage were drawn up. In fact, the unions entered into in this way were regarded as more binding and were more strongly sanctioned than those between two mortals. A shaman might have such a marriage alongside the ordinary kind, and there would then be a special night set aside for the union to take place in a separate bed. Another type of relationship between man and spirit in Brazil is based on the notion of people being children or siblings of the spirits. Lewis finds both types of relationship existing together in Christianity, where 'the shaman Jesus is the "Son" of God, direct issue of the "Virgin Mary" with God, and the traditional Church itself, incarnating the Holy Spirit, is further united to its spiritual Bridegroom, Christ'. This somewhat unexpected juxtaposition obviously provides a basis for the kind of syncretism between Christianity and native religions that is prevalent in South America today.

Shamanism was probably originally associated with hunting and began in hunter-gatherer societies even though it persisted into later times. There always seems to be the concept of a tiered cosmos: heaven above, earth below, and a subterranean world beneath our feet. But this is the merest sketch of a bewildering variety of models of the cosmos in shamanic traditions. Some peoples had a stack of nine worlds; others spoke of three, seven, or nine levels in the sky alone, with more beneath the earth. The earth was sometimes imagined as a disc supported by a giant fish (Terry Pratchett seems to have adopted a version of this for his Discworld novels, with the fish replaced by a turtle.) Alternatively, you could have a heaven with ninety-nine provinces, and a separate realm in the north for evil spirits. There was nothing airy-fairy about all these worlds; they were conceived as physical landscapes as real as our own world, the roof of each level being the floor of the one above. They were inhabited by spirits or by the dead, but spirits also lived at various locations in our own world, so the sphere of action of the shaman extended horizontally as well as vertically. The moon was also a locality in some schemes. When told that Americans had walked on the moon, a shaman expressed surprise that they needed such complicated apparatus to do so. The shamans of his society, he said, went there frequently without the need for any of that equipment.

The shaman's task was to work with the spirits to effect healing and carry out other tasks on behalf of the society. Often though not always, this would entail visiting other worlds. Interacting with the spirits could be a dangerous business: if things went wrong the shaman might go mad or die. The process of training and becoming a shaman usually took many years, and often involved a process of death and rebirth – having one's flesh stripped from the bones and then being reconstituted in a new body. A shamanic initiation was in many ways comparable to a psychological breakdown, though this is not to say that most shamans were mad. They had been through the crisis and come out safely, though transformed, on the other side. As I explain below, C.G. Jung had an experience which exemplifies this in a modern setting.

In many societies the shaman would have a relationship to a spirit of the opposite sex, but these were dangerous allies and if treated improperly they might turn and kill the shaman. In many cases the shaman's helpers had animal form and the shaman might take on some of the qualities of an animal spirit or other type of spirit himself. The shaman sometimes reminds me of a Spanish torero, who takes part in a ritualised drama requiring the co-operation of an animal which is an essential part of the performance but which has to be handled with great care and respect if disaster is to be avoided.

Shamans were respected and sometimes feared by their societies. When a shaman died he would often be buried with the tools of his trade, such as his drum (drums were supposed to possess enormous magical power). This could be for use in the afterlife but might also reflect the survivors' superstitious fear of the objects. Archaeologists have found tombs which seem to be those of shamans, some of which have large heavy stones on top. This has been thought to be a mark of respect, but another interpretation is that it indicates fear. If not adequately weighed down the shaman might emerge and be a danger to the living.

This recalls the answer supposed to have been given by an old Irish priest from a rural area who was asked what his parishioners believed about death. 'They believe three things,' he said. 'First, they believe every word that Mother Church says about it. Second, they believe that when you're dead, you're dead, and that's that. Third, they believe you should bury the buggers deep or they'll come back and get you.' While this may be apocryphal, it is interesting that older ways of thinking about the world and our place in it persisted in Ireland longer than in most parts of Europe; and Ireland is known for its megalithic burial chambers from the Neolithic period.

There may be other remnants of ancient beliefs in folklore and religion. I am particularly struck by the fact that in parts of Iberia there are stories of saints emerging from clefts in the rock. This recalls the Upper Palaeolithic, where animals were depicted as if emerging in this way in caves, while bones and other objects were sometimes implanted into clefts in cave walls, as if sending them through to the other side. All this suggests an enduring belief that the rock constitutes a membrane separating our world from the spiritual. Recall, too, that Bernadette's vision at Lourdes took place in a cave.

The role of shaman sometimes overlaps with that of the priest. I came across an interesting example of this recently in modern Greece, where there is a deep-seated folklore belief in the Evil Eye. Greece is not, of course, alone in this; fear of the Evil Eye is found elsewhere in southern Europe and in Iran. If someone suffers a number of illnesses, accidents, or other misfortunes, they are likely to suspect that someone has cast the Evil Eye on them, probably out of envy. In Iran some people are supposed to be particularly likely to have this effect; they are said to have a 'salty eye'.

An acquaintance in Greece found himself in this situation, having suffered a bad accident at work. Although he is not a religious believer he called in a priest to perform a ceremony to remove the malign influence. The priest duly did so and then fell down, having nobly absorbed the evil into himself. Removing the Evil Eye in this way has nothing to do with Christianity and is no doubt much older than Christianity. In this instance the priest was acting as a shaman, whether or not there is a direct line of succession from ancient times down to today. It is believed in Greece that certain people who are not priests also have the ability to remove the Evil Eye; they must be first-born and have been born on a Saturday. Moreover, to be able to perform this role they have to have been 'initiated' by someone else of the same sex who already has the power; this is, again, similar to shamanic initiation.

Neoshamanism

Eliade's view of religion as originally based in shamanism is out of fashion in academic circles today although it continues to be influential elsewhere. It has given rise to a movement that has been called neoshamanism or urban shamanism, which is the attempt to construct a version of shamanism for the modern world. It can be said to date from 1968, when Carlos Castaneda, a Peruvian-born American, published _The Teachings of Don Juan_.

This book purported to be a record of Castaneda's encounters with a Yaqui (Middle American) shaman, don Juan Matus. Other books followed, to a total of twelve, and are said to have sold more than 8 million copies in 17 languages. Castaneda wrote the first three in the series as if they were the log of a research project, and on this basis he was awarded his bachelor and doctoral degrees at UCLA. Later volumes became increasingly wild and improbable in what they claimed and scepticism about the veracity of Castaneda's writing grew, especially among academic critics. Castaneda himself disappeared from public view in 1973. He bought a large house in Los Angeles which he shared with a number of female followers, who were known as the Witches. Castaneda died of cancer in 1998. The Witches disappeared at this time and it is thought that some at least are dead.

There is little doubt that the whole don Juan saga is fictional. Some of the material appears to have been taken, without acknowledgement, from the writing of an anthropologist, Barbara Meyerhoff, who died in 1985 (though she is said to have endorsed the value of his original research). This has not prevented the acceptance of Castaneda's writing as authentic by large numbers of enthusiasts. Castaneda can therefore be regarded as the founder of neoshamanism.

Castaneda was also endorsed initially by another anthropologist, Michael Harner. who went on to start the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. He had conducted field work in a number of shamanic cultures in the Upper Amazon, western North America, the Canadian Arctic, and 'Lapland'. Like Castaneda, he thought psychedelic agents were important in inducing shamanic altered states of consciousness and he took ayahuasca himself in the Amazon as part of an initiation ceremony. He wrote about these experiences in his book _The Way of the Shaman_ , which has been described as a do-it-yourself guide for people outside a traditional shamanic culture who want to become shamans. The Foundation, started in 1985, has published further books of the same kind and offers week-end courses and classes for would-be shamans. For the more ambitious or adventurous there is a three-year programme, described on the Foundation website as follows: 'It involves intensive extended training in progressively higher levels of very advanced shamanism, including initiations into rare and little-known practices and principles, and is generally recognised as unparalleled in the world [www.shamanism.org].

Critics – rightly, I think – point to various problems with the attempt to provide shamanic training in this way, including the fact that the material on which it is based is largely native American (which is perhaps hardly surprising, considering that most of the teaching occurs in the USA). Lip service is paid to the (probable) Siberian origins of shamanism, but although most of the features of Siberian shamanism have parallels in North America they are not found all together in any one place or culture. So the 'shamanism' being taught is a composite affair, and claims to have isolated a 'core shamanism' are suspect. Some native Americans have reacted with anger to what they see as a take-over of their traditional ideas and practices in the name of shamanism.

The neoshamanic movement is based on the idea that began with Eliade: that shamanism is a worldwide and very ancient tradition that has shaped most if not all subsequent religious development. This theory is questionable to say the least. But it reflects a modern, and particularly an American, way of thinking about spirituality – that it is available to everyone. This constitutes a democratisation of shamanism – shamanism for the people. In the past, becoming a shaman usually entailed lengthy training, much mental and physical suffering, and often considerable danger. The shaman had a recognised and important place in society, which he defended against the powers of evil. Modern 'urban' shamans in the USA and elsewhere are mostly more concerned with inner experience and personal development, using techniques that are available to everyone and learnable by anyone who is willing to take the trouble. Their universe is generally conceived as benevolent or, at worst, morally neutral. The authenticity of this version of shamanism is surely questionable, although, given the lack of any agreed definition of shamanism, perhaps it could be defended on that score.

Some scholars sympathetic to shamanism find that the propensity to produce shamanic-type experiences is built into the human mind. In our society anyone who admits to having such experiences will usually be regarded as eccentric or worse, yet there are undoubtedly examples of people who, if they had lived in a shamanic society, would have been regarded as shamans. A short list would include Joan of Arc, Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, and Rudolf Steiner, as well as C.G. Jung. In fact, Jung's whole understanding of psychology was largely due to a remarkable series of experiences that occurred to him in the early years of the twentieth century. In the light of these it seems quite reasonable to describe Jung himself as a shaman – someone who explores the inner world of the spirits, at considerable personal risk, and brings back insights for the benefit of others.

Jung's shamanic journey

Jung's experience was precipitated by the breakdown of his intense friendship with Freud. This had begun a few years earlier, in 1906, when Jung, then a young and ambitious Zurich psychiatrist, sent his book on word association to Freud. Letter exchanges followed, and the two met in the following year. An extraordinarily close friendship developed between them. It had an obvious 'father–son' character, though there were also hints of a homosexual element that Jung himself recognised. Although Freud was the older man he was grateful for Jung's friendship. Psychoanalysis was still at an early stage of development, and Freud was encountering opposition from other doctors so Jung's support, amounting to hero worship, was welcome to him. By 1908 Freud was beginning to look on Jung as his intellectual heir and successor, although even at this early stage there were signs of disagreements to come. Freud was somewhat disconcerted by Jung's interest in the paranormal and by hints at ideas of what Jung would later call the collective unconscious, for which Freud had no sympathy. Still, for the time being the relationship between the two men remained very close.

In 1909 Freud and Jung went to America, where Freud had been invited to lecture. During the nine-day journey to New York they analysed each other's dreams, and there began to be tensions between them, though these were still below the surface. While in the USA Jung made a significant new friendship – with the psychologist William James, some of whose ideas were congenial to him. These included James's sympathy for religion and his two-fold -classification of people into tough-minded and tender-minded. This has a resemblance to Jung's more complicated typology, which he developed later. By the time he left the USA Jung declared himself to be exhausted, but his overall impression was favourable. Freud's was not; the visit, he said, had been a 'gigantic mistake' and, unlike Jung, he never went back.

Matters did not come to a crisis immediately on their return. At the next Psychoanalytic Congress, in the spring of 1910, Freud insisted that Jung be elected as head of the newly founded International Psychoanalytic Association. Not all the Freudians were happy about this, and nor was Jung himself. He lacked the diplomatic skills that the position required, and he was aware of the rebelliousness in his own nature. Disagreement between Freud and Jung soon arose over several issues, but particularly when Freud announced that he was looking into the roots of religion. It was evident to Jung, even at this early stage in his thinking, that he and Freud had very different ideas on the subject, and this led to other questionings of Freud's theories. Both men continued to protest – too loudly – their friendship and underlying agreement on fundamentals. They met for the last time in November, 1912. They had a long private discussion at which their disagreements appeared to have been resolved, though afterwards, at lunch, Freud fainted.

Soon after this meeting differences in their attitudes to religion surfaced again. Commenting on a paper Jung had written, Freud paid him a left-handed compliment on his 'great, if unintended' revelation: that mysticism was the result of 'decaying neurotic complexes'. Jung was furious at what he saw as a wilful misrepresentation of his views. He attacked Freud personally, accusing him of neurotic arrogance and of using psychoanalysis to keep his followers in a state of dependence. In his reply, Freud said, in effect, that Jung was failing to see the beam in his own eye while claiming to detect the mote of neurosis in Freud's. Soon afterwards the erstwhile friends agreed to cease their correspondence.

Jung was devastated. Although the break from Freud was partly something he wished for, he also dreaded it. When it came, it plunged him into a state of desolation that may have recalled to him the years of loneliness he had experienced in childhood. It precipitated what some have seen as a period of psychosis.

The events in question began in 1913, shortly after Jung had broken off relations with Freud. Just before this he seemed to have achieved all that he could hope for in the world. He had been Freud's closest disciple, President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and Editor of the main psychoanalytic journal; he also held a lectureship in psychoanalysis at the University of Zurich. But now he left the psychoanalytic movement and resigned his lectureship. Fortunately he still had some private practice and his wife, Emma, was well-off, so he was still able to live comfortably, though now in isolation from his former colleagues. As if all these professional difficulties were not enough, his marriage came under severe strain because of his attachment to Toni Wolff, a former patient. Toni, who later became an analyst herself, played an important part in helping Jung to come through the near-breakdown he experienced at this time.

Jung now felt the need to go back into his past to try to reconstruct his life. As a boy he had spent a lot of time playing with wooden blocks, using them to build towers, castles, and gates. Now he reverted to doing this again, and it began to unlock the unconscious for him. This would have been an extraordinary thing for a mature professional man to do at that time.

He underwent experiences that were often terrifying. In the autumn and winter of 1913 he had visions of enormous yellow waves that drowned thousands and turned into a crimson sea of blood, and of fountains of blood gushing from the earth. He had nightmares of intense cold arriving from space and turning everything to ice. In retrospect Jung interpreted these experiences as showing foreknowledge of the coming world war, but others have seen them as warning of an impending catastrophic psychosis.

At Christmas in 1913 Jung had what he later called a Great Dream – one of those that communicate important information from the unconscious. In it, he was accompanied on a hunting expedition in the mountains by a dark-skinned individual. They heard a blast from a hunting horn, and then saw, high on a ridge, Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelung legend. Jung and his companion both fired their guns. Siegfried fell, mortally wounded, and Jung's companion finished him off. Jung, horrified, could not bear to watch; he ran away, full of guilt, seeking somewhere to hide. He had to choose between descending to the valley below or going upwards. He went up, and it began to rain heavily. He knew that this would erase all traces of the murder, but as his fear of being found out diminished his sense of guilt grew stronger.

At first he could not make anything of this dream. But gradually he came to believe that Siegfried represented his own pride and wilfulness, which had to die. The dark-skinned savage, his companion, was a side of himself that had remained unconscious but which was about to burst out into consciousness. Later, Jung was to describe such 'inferior' aspects of the personality as the Shadow.

The critical point in Jung's breakdown arrived on 12th December. As he described it himself, he was sitting at his desk, thinking about his situation, when he 'let himself drop'. It was as if the ground had literally given way beneath him and he plunged down into the dark depths beneath.

The idea of entering such a state probably arose from work he had done earlier on his cousin, Helene Preiswerk, a spirit medium, whom he had studied for his doctoral thesis in 1899 and 1900. At that time he speculated that the emergence of new personalities in trance states was due to attempts of the future personality to break through. Now he himself was encountering such figures in his descent into the underworld. They appeared to him both in this altered state of consciousness, which he later was to call active imagination, and in dreams. He was able to talk to them and use them as a source of knowledge and illumination. He recorded all this in the so-called Red Book, a thick folio bound in red leather.

There were several of these visionary figures. One was an old man called Elijah, whom Jung later identified as a personification of the archetype of the wise old man. Another, closely linked with Elijah, was Salome, a beautiful young girl, who represented what Jung later called the anima. Not long after he encountered these individuals another figure, Philemon, appeared. He first announced himself in a dream but later Jung met him repeatedly and would even have long conversations with him as he walked in the garden. Jung painted this figure, representing him with bull's horns and kingfisher wings. Shortly afterwards, while walking on the lake shore, he found a dead kingfisher. He attached a lot of significance to coincidences of this kind, which he thought reflected a correspondence between events in the inner and outer worlds. Later he was to attribute such coincidences to what he called synchronicity.

Jung learnt many things from Philemon, especially the knowledge that the inner world of the psyche is real and has a life of its own. Thoughts arise from this level and are in a sense independent of our ordinary consciousness. Many of Jung's ideas about analysis, indeed probably all the main trends in his later thinking, came from this critical period in his life.

There were also immediate practical results. The Salome figure took on flesh and blood in the shape of Toni Wolff, who represented for Jung an aspect of the anima he could not find in Emma. Toni had begun her analysis with Jung a few years earlier, and, like a number of the women who surrounded him, fell in love with him. Exactly when their relationship moved beyond the professional is uncertain, though it was probably in 1911 or 1912. It is likely, though not certain, that they were lovers by this time. Emma realized something was afoot, staged some jealous scenes, and wrote to Freud for advice, apparently without Jung's knowledge. But Toni's role became crucial for Jung in the protracted crisis that began at the end of 1913, and Emma accepted her up to a point: Toni was admitted to the family circle and her relationship with Jung was tacitly acknowledged. She would attend Sunday lunches, though Jung's children were unenthusiastic about her presence. In terms of Jungian psychology, Toni was the 'projection' of Jung's anima, and she helped him to integrate his experiences in his life as a whole.

Gradually Jung began to recover from his psychological ordeal. By early 1916 he was beginning to feel able to start coming to terms with what had happened, though initially still in a strange way. He believed that his house was haunted: his eldest daughter saw a ghostly white presence in her bedroom, his second daughter felt her blanket being snatched away from her, and his nine-year-old son had a disturbing dream. Then, on the following afternoon, the doorbell began to ring incessantly for no apparent reason and Jung knew that something was about to happen. He felt as if a crowd were present and the whole house were crammed full of spirits. The spirits 'cried out in chorus the words, "We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought"'. This cryptic utterance prompted Jung to start writing an extraordinary short book, _Septem Sermones ad Mortuous_ (Seven Sermons to the Dead). He produced this by a kind of automatic writing over three evenings. The book has clear gnostic overtones, stemming from Jung's longstanding fascination with gnosticism.

There are clear similarities between Jung's experience and shamanic initiation. Jung's exploration of the unconscious (to use his terminology) was a dangerous undertaking, even if it was forced on him, and it required much courage. He could easily have gone mad or committed suicide. The shaman, likewise, is at great risk when he explores other realms. At least one 'helper'(!) spirit is recorded as telling the shaman that if he refuses to do as she orders she will kill him. Jung speaks of the descent into the depths as a quasi-physical drop into darkness, so the lower world was utterly real to him, as it is to the shaman. Real, too, were the beings he encountered there. Although they were in a sense the product of his own mind, he saw that they had an autonomous existence. In fact, in Jung's case his anima found physical embodiment in his lover, Toni. This can be compared to the mystic marriage of the shaman I described earlier.

Jung was not in control of what was happening, so he had to engage in dialogue with the beings he encountered, just as the shaman does. For both Jung and the shaman, the exploration of these depths can be thought of as an initiation. What happened there would permanently alter Jung's perception of the world and of himself. A Jungian analysis today often includes initiatory elements.

Conclusion

The approach to religion I have outlined in this chapter could be seen as diametrically opposed to the reductionist ideas I looked at in Chapter 2. I describe it as an aristocratic view: mystical or shamanistic experiences are not available to everyone and those who have them can be thought of as an elite. We could also say that the understanding of religion held by Jung, Eliade, and those who think like them is introvertive, whereas the reductionist understanding is extrovertive. Both, perhaps, are needed; neither can provide a full picture on its own.

The interpretation of religion as based on shamanism derives ultimately from depth psychology, and especially from Jung. It depends on the view that the human mind has hidden levels that are not perceptible to ordinary waking consciousness but appear to us in dreams and visions. Certain people are supposed to have the ability to access these levels. They are like pearl divers, who descend into the depths at considerable risk to bring back supremely valuable treasures for the rest of us. This is a seductive idea, and although it is not fashionable today among scientists, there are some archaeologists who think shamanism may be an important clue to the farthest origins of religion in our prehistory. I look at these ideas in the next chapter.

Chapter 4 Ancestral Voices

How far back in prehistory we need to go to find something we would recognise as religion is one of the questions that Robin Dunbar thinks are important, although speculating about the origin of religion, like that of language, is notoriously unwise. Some have seen the 'rain dances' of chimpanzees as a primitive form of religion; chimpanzees have also been known to sit for long periods beside waterfalls, as if experiencing a kind of nature mysticism. But these are only vague foreshadowings of religion, if that, and the fact remains that we are the only species on the planet that has true religion, just as we are the only species that has true language. This is because both religion and complex language depend on the ability to use symbolic thought.

Some 24,000 years ago our ancestors were painting animals and other figures (though very few humans) on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. The artistic quality of this work is astonishing and the urge to give at least some of it a 'religious' interpretation is almost overwhelming. But we should not forget that the people who made the art were not the only human species alive at the time. They co-existed with the Neanderthals, who were very like them in most ways yet did not, as far as we know, produce any art. In my Introduction I mentioned the light that contact with an alien civilisation might shed on the almost universal presence of religion in human societies. We may have to wait a long time for the aliens to call on us, but meanwhile the Neanderthals were probably the nearest thing we have had to an alien contact. It is unfortunate that they are no longer with us, but they were around until comparatively recently, and our ancestors did encounter them.

I want to look at what we can infer about the religious activities, if any, of our own ancestors and of our cousins, the Neanderthals, but before doing so we need a bit of scene-setting to show who they were and where they came from.

In the beginning

Until quite recently there were several human-like species in existence. The earliest modern humans ( _Homo sapiens_ ) go back only about 195,000 years. They lived in Africa. It is generally believed that an ancestral species known as _Homo erectus_ came into being about 1.8 million years ago and persisted until 300,000 years ago. This is still a mere pulse-beat away from us in geological time. Indeed, it is even possible that _Homo erectus_ lived much more recently than this. The small skeleton that was recently discovered on the island of Flores, nicknamed the Hobbit, is thought by some to have been a form of _Homo erectus_ that had become dwarfed as a result of isolation, although this is controversial and another view is that this individual was simply an abnormal modern human. The question is still undecided, although if this is really a dwarf version of _Homo erectus_ it means the species was around as recently as 13,000 years ago, hunting the pygmy elephants that were also present on the island at the time. A delightful thought.

Whether _Homo erectus_ had any form of speech is uncertain, but it seems possible that the ability to speak was evolving throughout the long stretch of time that the species existed. Deacon suggests that its members communicated using fewer vowels and more consonants and oral clicks; sentences would have been shorter and supplemented with more gestures than now.

But whatever their linguistic abilities may have been, _Homo erectus_ is an important actor on the stage. Early specimens had smaller brains than ours but later models had brains close to the modern size. The members of this species were very strong and some at least, such as the 'Turkana Boy', were tall. They may also have been good walkers and runners, perhaps better than us because the pelvises of the women (I find it difficult not to think of them as human) did not need to be as broad as those of modern women because the skulls of their infants were smaller. _Homo erectus_ probably used fire and made fairly sophisticated tools. But perhaps the most significant thing of all about the species is that its members were adventurous. They did not remain confined to Africa but spread out across much of the Old World. Their fossils have been found not only in Africa but also in Asia and Europe. This is the first time that a human-like species extended its range so far from its homeland.

They were not the only early explorers, however. Dating from about 500,000 years ago there are skulls that have features of both _Homo erectus_ and modern humans. These are usually called archaic _Homo sapiens_ and presumably branched out at some point from _Homo erectus_. There are no sharp dividing lines between these individuals and _Homo erectus_ or between them and modern humans – they are a link between us and _Homo erectus_.

Archaic _Homo sapiens_ is the last common ancestor we share with the Neanderthals, who attained their characteristic form by 130,000 years ago. They lived in Europe and parts of western and central Asia until about 30,000 years ago. They were of about the same height as modern humans of the time but were more strongly built, and their average brain size was if anything larger than ours. They looked different from us, but some palaeontologists think that if a Neanderthal were dressed in modern clothes and shaved he would not attract any particular attention on the street or in the Underground, though not everyone agrees. There is much scholarly argument about what kind of consciousness they may have had and therefore about what inklings of religion, if any, may have been stirring in their minds. But things are different when we come to the Cro-Magnons.

The Cro-Magnons

The earliest modern humans in Europe are usually known as Cro-Magnons, from the place in France where their skulls were first found. They arrived 40,000–45,000 years ago. They did not evolve in Europe, but were part of an exodus from Africa that occurred between 70,000 and 90,000 years ago. As they were fully modern anatomically we can be pretty confident that they also had modern minds, and therefore presumably speech, although there are some dissenting opinions.

(Not everyone agrees . Two psychologists, Julian Jaynes and Nicholas Humphrey, have suggested independently that language and modern consciousness are much more recent developments, perhaps going back only a few thousand years. Their ideas need to be kept in mind by anyone who is bold enough to speculate about these matters, but they don't radically alter the developmental sequence I am writing about here, though they would alter the timing. Here I shall assume that the Cro-Magnons had essentially modern consciousness and complex language.)

According to Oppenheimer they reached Europe via at least two routes, both starting from the southern end of the Red Sea. One group went first north and then west, reaching southern Europe between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago. Another wave went northeast at first before turning west and reaching eastern and then northern Europe 33,000 years ago. This wave was also joined by a northward migration along the Indus valley.

The period in which the Cro-Magnons reached Europe is known as the Late Stone Age and lasted, very roughly, from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. From about 50,000 years onwards there is an apparently sudden increase in the complexity of their culture. A greater variety of tools is made and new materials are used for tools. There is also less uniformity in tool-making, with the appearance of regional styles. Probably body decorations became more elaborate and so did burials. Above all, this is the period at which a rich profusion of art appears, mainly though not exclusively in caves. (There may have been a lot of art outside caves but little of it has survived.) All this appears to be evidence for a great increase in cultural diversity and the development of new ways of thinking – the so-called Great Leap Forward.

Not everyone agrees that this timetable is entirely justified or that there really was a Great Leap Forward. Oppenheimer is one of those who argue for a less Europe-centred view of culture. He believes that these new ideas had been developing for a long time previously in Africa and their appearance in Europe was due to importation rather than an on-the-spot development. If he is right, the Great Leap Forward is something of an optical illusion.

Although these changes were not confined to Europe, it was primarily western Europe that captured the attention of early archaeologists and they applied the term 'Upper Palaeolithic' to this period. The great cave paintings that were made in France and Spain, starting about 24,000 years ago, therefore belong to the Upper Palaeolithic. Many archaeologists have seen this art as primarily religious or magical in character.

The Neanderthals – natural atheists?

If the Cro-Magnons had modern minds, they were apparently different from their neighbours, the Neanderthals, who have long seemed to me to represent one of the most intriguing and tantalising mysteries in the story of human evolution. There is a huge amount of controversy about these enigmatic people. Was their consciousness the same as ours? Could they speak, and if so, what was their speech like? Could they and the Cro-Magnons understand each other? Did they interbreed? Above all, why did they die out? There are no answers to these and other questions – or rather, there are too many answers. You can take your pick.

Language is almost certainly essential for anything we would recognise as religion, so the Neanderthals' speaking ability is bound up with the question of their religion, if any. Many palaeontologists, though not all, think they could speak but not as well as we do. Those who take this view generally have a rather poor opinion of their mental ability, crediting them with a degree of practical intelligence (which indeed they must have had to enable them to survive for so many thousands of years, often in very adverse climatic conditions) but little or no capacity for abstract thought, technological innovation, or artistry.

Doubts about their ability to speak well are largely based on anatomical evidence and it is possible for experts to reach widely divergent conclusions from this. More recently there has been an exciting development: it has been possible to sequence part of the Neanderthal DNA. This shows that they had the same version of a gene, called FOXP2, which is implicated in speech and language. By itself it does not prove that they could speak, but the fact that it is the same in us and them does make it more likely that they could. Incidentally, it also implies that both we and the Neanderthals inherited the gene in this form from our last common ancestor, who lived some 300,000 or 400,000 years ago. So perhaps speech existed even longer ago than is often thought.

In summary, then, it is at least quite possible that the Neanderthals did have a full ability to speak. As for technological innovation, why should they have wished to alter the way they were doing things if these worked well for them? Their tools may not look very elegant to us, but modern flint-knapping experiments suggest that they worked very well, perhaps even better than the Cro-Magnons' more aesthetically pleasing versions. And we have to remember that we have no knowledge of artefacts in perishable substances such as wood and leather, which would not have survived. As Terrence Deacon points out, if African Pygmies had been extinct for thousands of years and we knew of them only from their few surviving artefacts, we would probably consider them to be primitive proto-humans, but in fact we know that they are mentally and physically fully the equal of other humans alive today.

There has long been a tendency to picture the Neanderthals as nasty, brutish, and short, and as having inevitably died out in face of competition from the superior Cro-Magnons. But we do not know why they died out; one possibility, by analogy with what happened to the natives of South America when Europeans arrived, is that they succumbed to diseases brought in by the newcomers to which they had no hereditary immunity. Terrence Deacon thinks it likely that they were fully modern and our mental equals. I have to admit to a sneaking fondness for them. I like to picture groups of Neanderthals gathered round the camp fire in the evening, singing (Steven Mithen credits them with musical ability and a kind of musical speech which preceded modern speech) and reciting long epic poems to one another.

I don't mean to propose this picture too seriously, attractive though it is. The general consensus at present seems to be that the Neanderthals lacked certain features of modern consciousness, particularly abstract and religious ideas. David Lewis-Williams thinks that although they dreamt they didn't remember their dreams, so they could not reflect on any dreams or visions they might have had. Robin Dunbar thinks they lacked the fully human capacity to imagine what other people are thinking – so-called third-order and fourth-order thinking.

If a couple of trained modern anthropologists were transported back to the Middle Palaeolithic to live with a group of Neanderthals and study them, Lewis-Williams believes, they would be completely unable to make any progress, so alien would the environment be, but if they were moved on a few thousand years, into the Upper Palaeolithic, they would be as much at home as with any other human society in the world today. He describes the Neanderthals as natural atheists, and speculates that the development of something we would call religion among our own forebears was at least in part a reaction to the Neanderthals. Dunbar also finds the Neanderthals to have been irreligious.

Opinions about the Neanderthals' religion, if any, obviously have to be based on indirect evidence. The ability to think artistically is often linked with religion. If the Neanderthals were artists, their work has not survived, but conceivably it did exist. The other evidence usually cited for religion is burial practices. The assumption is that elaborate burials, often accompanied by grave goods, indicate a belief in an afterlife. Some apparently deliberate Neanderthal burials are known but these may have been merely practical solutions to the problem of what do with the dead. Much was made a few years ago of a grave found at Shanidar, in northern Iraq, in which an elderly Neanderthal (he was aged 40-45, which is old for a Neanderthal) was found in a grave containing a lot of pollen. Some believe that this shows he was buried with flowers, and analysis of the pollen finds that the species in question were mainly those that have medicinal properties. So the speculation runs that he was a shaman. But it is also possible that the pollen was introduced accidentally, by the action of burrowing animals.

Some Neanderthal skeletons have been found in a foetal position, which might imply that they were awaiting rebirth in this world or another, but we have to be cautious about making such inferences. Everett records that the Pirahãs bury some of their dead in a sitting position, and if that were all we knew about them we might deduce all kinds of metaphysical beliefs from the practice. But the Pirahãs told him that the reason they did this was simply because it meant less digging was needed to bury large individuals! Perhaps the Neanderthals thought the same.

Dunbar has an interesting discussions about the Neanderthals' religious ideas, if any. He finds that there are three possibilities. The Neanderthals had large brains, and if that is all that is needed for religion to exist, perhaps they were religious although little evidence to support the idea has survived. Another possibility is that the acquisition of religion may have depended more on software than hardware, so perhaps someone 'just thought of' religion somewhere on the African plains and the idea then spread throughout _Homo sapiens_ communities as a kind of cultural contagion; by chance, no Neanderthal happened on the same idea. The third possibility is that the Neanderthals' brains, though as large as ours, were constructed differently. We do know that their occipital lobes were larger than ours but their frontal lobes were smaller. The occipital area is concerned with vision, so perhaps the Neanderthals had exceptionally good eyesight. The frontal lobes are responsible for abstract thought. This may mean that the Neanderthals were less capable of complex symbolic thought than _Homo sapiens_ and consequently less able to invent religion. Perhaps, Dunbar suggests, this put them at a disadvantage in competing with the newcomers. But which, if any, of these ideas is correct is, he concedes, impossible to know.

Whether the Neanderthals had any religious beliefs or not, they almost certainly cared for the living. There are many findings of Neanderthal skeletons of people who had lived for a considerable time with injuries that were severe enough to make it impossible to hunt or to survive without the assistance of a community. But the evidence for any belief in an afterlife is shaky at best, and it is to the Cro-Magnons that we must look if we want to find any reasonably solid evidence for the beginnings of religion.

The Cro-Magnons as shamans

Perhaps there were no shamans among the Neanderthals, in spite of the Shanidar burial, but what about the Cro-Magnons? Here we touch on an important vein of speculation that has a long history. It goes back as far as the eighteenth century, but, as I explained in the last chapter, the scholar who is most strongly identified with these ideas in modern times is Mircea Eliade. He claimed that the cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic depicted shamanic figures, and he was quickly followed by a number of German scholars who held similar views. But others raised various objections. They pointed out that shamanism is not invariably a feature of hunter-gatherer societies, so the fact that people hunted in the Upper Palaeolithic does not automatically tell us that there were shamans at that time. Also, shamanism is very ill-defined, and this makes it difficult to say categorically that it is or isn't present. But above all, it is difficult to argue convincingly from archaeological remains to the beliefs of the people who left the remains.

Criticisms such as these led to a decline of scholarly interest in shamanism as a possible influence on Upper Palaeolithic art, and it faded away until the late 1980s, when two South African archaeologists, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson, revived it. Lewis-Williams has presented their evidence in detail in his scholarly but accessible book, _The Mind in the Cave_ , where he advocates the idea that shamanism explains at least some of the art of the Upper Palaeolithic. He offers several types of argument for his views.

His starting point is the capacity of the human mind to experience altered states of consciousness, together with the idea that there is a continuous range of consciousness, from ordinary waking consciousness at one end, through dreaming to trance states at the other end. He uses the way we perceive the colour spectrum to illustrate this. We say that the spectrum, as seen in a rainbow, has certain colours – red, yellow, green, blue and so on. But this is an arbitrary way of making divisions in what is really a continuous phenomenon. The rainbow doesn't come with labels, and other societies use different classifications for colours. The same is true for states of consciousness, and some recognise states that we do not. None of these need be seen as pathological or abnormal.

Altered states are for Lewis-Williams the key to religion. This view places him implicitly in opposition to those, like Boyer, who think that unusual experiences such as visions are irrelevant to the generation of religious beliefs. But visions are not just of one kind: there are degrees of visionary experience. The simplest are 'entoptic phenomena': visual effects that are produced internally, by the visual system. You can experience these for yourself, simply by pressing on an eyeball to produce a bright spark of light. A more elaborate example would be a migraine visual aura, in which patients usually see a pattern of coloured flashing lights that take a zigzag form. Typically, this begins with a blurring of central vision or a complete central loss (scotoma), which then expands in a semicircle around the visual field, getting wider and wider, until it finally disappears at the edges. There are many variations on this theme, including some very bizarre ones, such as alterations in the size of objects and other effects. It has been suggested that Lewis Carroll used his experiences of migraine aura as a source for Alice's bodily distortions in _Alice in Wonderland_. The visions of the mystic Hildegard of Bingen have also been attributed to this cause.

Visual hallucinations of these fairly elementary types can occur in many other situations, including the use of techniques specifically designed to produce altered states of consciousness, such as meditation. One common form is said to be a grid pattern; I have seen this myself while meditating. These and other simple visual effects seem to be wired into the human visual system. Reports of near-death experiences often (though by no means always) include descriptions of going through a tunnel, or alternatively of encountering a spiral. I can still remember seeing a garden with a spiral path under anaesthesia when I was having a tonsillectomy at the age of six or seven. This, too, is probably an artefact of the visual system.

Although most of us would probably regard all these visual effects as comparatively trivial, if intriguing, Lewis-Williams thinks that shamanic societies understood them as the portal to altered states of consciousness, because they may be experienced at the initial stages of entry into such states. He points to a variety of 'abstract' motifs on the walls of caves which can be interpreted as representing entoptic phenomena.

Another line of argument uses more recent sources. Although we cannot know what life in the Upper Palaeolithic was like, we may be able to get a clue from modern hunter-gatherer societies which practised shamanism. Although these are all but extinct today, we have fairly detailed information for two recent groups, the San of South Africa and North American native society in the far west. We know what the peoples who made this art intended it to signify, because anthropological evidence exists. Both groups made drawings, including abstract motifs like those found in the caves, which seem to point to a common ground of experiences caused by brain mechanisms found in all modern humans. And there are other similarities between the art of these modern peoples and certain features of Upper Palaeolithic cave art as well.

This is certainly fascinating stuff, but extrapolating from modern cultures to the Upper Palaeolithic is obviously always going to be risky. Still, the theory does appear to explain some otherwise puzzling features of the cave art, especially its frequent location in the deepest parts of the caves. Why would you want to put the Mona Lisa at the bottom of a coal mine?

Mona Lisa in a coal mine?

Upper Palaeolithic art is breath-taking for its sheer beauty and the skill with which it was executed, but it presents many difficulties to those who want to discern its meaning, not the least of which is the fact that some of it was placed deep in caves where it would be very difficult to reach. The answer Lewis-Williams gives for this conundrum is perhaps the most interesting part of his theory. What he proposes is that the people of the Upper Palaeolithic conceived of a multi-tiered cosmos including an underworld, similar to those found in shamanic societies in historical times. The caves were for them the physical embodiment of the shamanic cosmos. The spirit world lay literally beneath their feet and could be entered physically, in waking life, as well as in trance.

For the people of that time, going into the deep caves, which perhaps took place only rarely, just on ceremonial occasions, would be a very profound experience. Even today it produces a strong effect on one, as I know myself from having visited the cave paintings of Niaux, in the Pyrenees. There you walk along a dark passage for a kilometre before you encounter the images, seen now by torchlight rather than a smoky tallow lamp. It is almost impossible to avoid the impression that the whole experience would have been what we would now call religious, characterised by a strong sense of the numinous. We cannot, of course, enter into the minds of our remote ancestors or experience the caves and their images as they would have done, and there was almost certainly more to this than we know: sound, with chanting and drumming, was probably involved as well. The comparison of the caves to a cathedral does not seem out of place.

The shamanic hypothesis can explain other features of cave art too. For example, in many places the artists made use of natural rock features as part of the images. This may mean that they saw the rock surface as a membrane between this world and the spiritual world, and the images were perceived as emerging from that other world. Then there are the depictions of chimeras, human-animal hybrids. There are many present-day accounts of shamans fusing with animal guides, so these images could represent the same process. There are also imprints and outlines of hands, sometimes with fingers missing (mutilated?). Perhaps these tell us something about how the people responded to the caves. They seem to have seen the rock walls as more than merely a canvas to paint on. They saw them as the interface between two worlds, a boundary that was semi-permeable, almost gauzy, like the looking-glass that Alice encounters and passes through into another world.

The shamanic hypothesis is probably the best explanation that anyone has offered for some of the most intriguing features of Upper Palaeolithic art, but the fact remains that a thesis of this kind can never be proved. Some critics say it is a circular argument. First you postulate a shamanic society and then you interpret the images you find in the light of that. Also, only some of the art can be described as shamanic – about a tenth, according to one recent estimate. But Lewis-Williams does not claim to have explained _all_ the art. Rather, he thinks he has found that some of it is shamanic and that this must mean that some form of shamanism was practised at this time. This seems plausible, but it is a big step from thaReligion and languaget to claim that all subsequent religion is derived from shamanism.

Together with David Pearce, Lewis-Williams has written a sequel to _The Mind in the Cave_ ( _Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness and the Origin of Art_ ). Here the authors claim that the shamanism of the Upper Palaeolithic persisted, though in a modified form, into the Neolithic period, surviving in the Near East and also in Ireland. Neither of these localities has caves like those of France and Spain, so the other world was embodied in different ways. In the Near East it was located in burials beneath the floors of houses, while in Ireland it took the form of megalithic tombs. I found this attempt to trace a direct descent from the Upper Palaeolithic into more recent times intriguing but not wholly convincing.

Conclusion

The shamanic hypothesis for the origin of religion is seductive, and I have already said that I accepted it myself for a long time. I no longer think that it is sustainable in its full-blown form – it relies too much on indirect arguments and plausible assumptions that may be wrong – but where it scores highly is in the central role it gives to altered states of consciousness in the formation of religious ideas. I can't agree with the reductionists that these experiences have no importance for religion, and I explore the question further in Chapter 7. At the same time, I don't want to go down the metaphysical route either, which is where you are likely to end up if you become too deeply absorbed in depth psychology. What we need, I suggest, is an explanation for religion that recognises its central importance in human consciousness but does not entail the acceptance, even tacitly, of hidden metaphysical assumptions. This is what I aim to provide in the following chapters.

Chapter 5 Religion and Language

When I was at school we used periodically to experience what we called 'crazes', in which a particular idea would be taken up by almost everyone in the school for a few weeks. I once started a craze myself. During the summer holiday I began making little darts out of matchsticks. I bound a needle to one end of the matchstick with thread and glued it, and fitted paper fins to the other end. At the beginning of term I took some of these darts back to school with me, and before long everyone was making them. Some boys modified the design, gluing four matches together instead of one and weighted the nose end with Plasticine. I felt that this rather detracted from the elegance and simplicity of my original conception but I had to admit that it made the darts more effective. The high point of the craze was reached when one prefect threw a dart to stick in the bottom of another prefect at assembly.

The craze phenomenon is a good example of a meme. The meme hypothesis was first put forward by Richard Dawkins, almost as an afterthought at the end of his widely read book, _The Selfish Gene,_ where he talks about genes as replicators, which 'want' to reproduce themselves in successive generations. Genes are made of DNA. But the idea of a replicator, he suggests, can be generalised to quite an abstract level. Replicators do not have to be DNA, they can also be ideas. Those that succeed in replicating themselves by securing their transfer from one brain to another are memes. Almost any idea that catches on could be thought of as a meme. Examples often cited include catchphrases, songs you can't get out of your head, and wearing baseball caps back to front. In fact, you could use the meme idea itself as an excellent example of a meme, so widely has it spread. This is what computer programmers would call a recursive phenomenon: the meme idea illustrating itself.

Since Dawkins first suggested it the meme hypothesis has proliferated enormously, so that today we have a 'science' of memetics, textbooks of memetics, journals of memetics, websites on memetics, while references to memes constantly appear in books and articles on all kinds of subjects. But it is not without its critics. One of the most commonly raised objections is a certain vagueness. How does a meme differ from an idea? Still, the fact that it has been so widely taken up does suggest that it expresses something useful. It is probably the application of Darwinian natural selection to the contents of the mind that has made the meme hypothesis so fruitful for many. Memes can be pictured as facing a kind of survival test. They 'want' to be adopted by minds and so to propagate themselves, and those that succeed best in doing this become most widespread.

It is hardly surprising that Dawkins used the meme concept to explain the way in which religious beliefs lodge themselves in our minds and survive; in fact, this was probably the context in which he first thought of it. Other critics of religion quickly took it up. Daniel Dennett has used it extensively, and so has Susan Blackmore, in her book on memetics, _The Meme Machine_ , where she has a whole chapter on the relevance of memes to religion. The chapter is called 'Religion as memeplexes'. By 'memeplexes' she means groups of memes that go together. In this, as in other ways, memes are supposed to be analogous to genes. Genes are never found singly; they travel about in groups. So, too, do memes; they travel about in memeplexes. So Catholicism is a memeplex – inside, I suppose, the larger memeplex of Christianity. The Catholic memeplex includes the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God, the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God, the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, the infallibility of the Pope, and so on.

We can take this idea further, and critics of religion certainly want to, by thinking of religious memes as mind viruses. In biology, viruses are parasites. Religious memes are supposed to invade our brains and lodge there, very much in the way that viruses invade and lodge in our cell nuclei. It is pretty well impossible to remove viruses once they have succeeded in writing themselves into our nuclei. (Except by killing the infected cells. This was the solution adopted by the mediaeval clerics who burnt heretics to death.) Religious memes, likewise, are difficult to remove. The natural implication of this is that religions are harmful to those who harbour them.

Perhaps this is too negative. I want to put forward a more neutral view of religion that has a lot in common with the meme idea but takes it in a slightly different direction. I start from a theory put forward by the neuroscientist, Terrence Deacon. In outline, Deacon suggests that languages have evolved to be easily learned by children. I think the same is true of religion. Religion and language are alike in many ways, and especially in how they are usually acquired.

To illustrate how this works I first outline Deacon's theory of language and then apply it to religion.

Learning to speak

All normal humans learn to speak a language. So universal is this that we easily overlook how extraordinary a fact it is. No other species on the planet does it, even in an elementary fashion. There are no primitive languages; all the varieties studied by linguistic anthropologists are of great complexity and sophistication. Laboratory attempts to teach the rudiments of language to chimpanzees have achieved only minimal success in a few of the most apt pupils. They can learn the meaning of words, and can even string words together into 'sentences', but their grasp of syntax is vestigial or non-existent. And the subject of their 'conversations' is nearly always food; they show no interest in abstract philosophical discussions.

It is only in the laboratory that chimpanzees have acquired any ability to understand language. No chimpanzees in the wild have developed language. It is therefore very surprising that young children, who may otherwise show no great evidence of intellectual ability, should be able to learn complicated grammatical rules within a short time, without formal instruction. They have to infer these rules with little feedback from the adults around to guide them, so how do they manage it? The structure of grammar is so complex and difficult that it needs professors of linguistics to describe it, and even then the experts disagree. Most parents have little formal understanding of grammar, so how do they teach it to their children?

So remarkable is this ability that some have apparently supposed that language itself is innate. King James IV of Scotland is said to have conducted a bizarre experiment in 1493 in the hope of discovering the original language of mankind. He had a deaf and dumb woman transported, with two infant children, to the deserted island of Inchkeith, hoping that they would later begin to speak in this original language. The experiment failed, of course; the children did not speak at all. There is some doubt about the authenticity of this account – a similar story is told about the Emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth century – but if it was carried out, we can be sure that it would have shown that language is not innate but has to be learned.

A much more sophisticated version of what is essentially the same idea emerged in the twentieth century with Noam Chomksy's theory of language acquisition. Unlike (possibly) King James, Chomsky did not propose that language itself is innate, but he did suggest that the ability to learn rules of grammar is in some sense built into the brain. In essence, the theory postulated that there is a 'language organ' in the brain. This idea apparently came to him as a result of reading the work of Panini, an ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian. Chomsky's theory implies that young children have an innate knowledge of the way that all human languages work, which in turn implies that there is a 'Universal Grammar' underlying all languages. It is not any particular language that is innate, but rather the ability to learn languages and the expectation that they will follow certain patterns which are common to all languages

One version or another of Chomsky's theory is now scientific orthodoxy in many quarters, though it is beginning to come under attack from some linguists. Daniel Everett, for example, finds that the structure of the Pirahã language probably disproves it.

Deacon, too, points out serious flaws in Chomsky's theory. In short, he does not think the theory makes evolutionary sense. He has several reasons for this opinion, one being that, if such an organ had evolved because it was useful, there should be simple languages in other species, but there are none. Another is that genetic changes take a long time to happen but linguistic change is often rapid, which would make it impossible for brain development to catch up with language changes. So he rejects the Universal Grammar idea and provides instead a hypothesis of his own. This is quite similar in some respects to Dawkins's meme theory, which Deacon does mention in passing, but it is applied on a larger scale – not just to ideas or groups of ideas but to whole languages.

rhaps the same is true of religion: we could think of religious fundamentalism as a parasite on religion. At present two religions, Christianity and Islam, are dominant in much of the world and are beginning to give rise, if not to a monoculture, at least to a duocultuMost theorising about how language evolved, Deacon says, has focused exclusively on the brain. Researchers have asked what structures are needed to make language possible. Deacon himself has a lot to say about this, but he maintains that the brain changes are only half the story. We should also think about what has happened to languages, and these, too, evolve.

Deacon pictures languages as semi-living organisms, which have evolved through natural selection to be easily learned by children. This means that they are similar to parasites, which are organisms that have evolved to live on, or in, other organisms. Languages live in us. They parasitise human brains and use them to reproduce. In this way they are like viruses, which have no independent life and can only reproduce by parasitising cells. 'Languages are inanimate artefacts, patterns of sounds and scribblings on clay or paper, that happen to get insinuated into the activities of human brains which replicate their parts, assemble them into systems, and pass them on.'

As Deacon goes on to acknowledge, however, the virus analogy is inappropriate in one way. Infection with viruses is something we normally want to avoid, but languages are useful to us. So a better analogy is with symbionts – parasites that provide a service to their hosts while deriving benefit themselves from the association. The example he gives is the bacteria in the gut of termites which are needed to allow them to break down cellulose and digest it. They are essential to termite life and the insects have evolved ways to make sure they always have them: when a growing termite sheds its skin the infected shell is immediately eaten, either by the owner or by other members of the colony. This ensures that the bacteria are passed on. Languages, similarly, have acquired the means to ensure their propagation, and people in turn rely on language to seek for mates and so ensure their own reproduction.

Another example, I suppose, would be the Babel fish, which Douglas Adams invented for his science fiction novel _The_ _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy._ When inserted into the ear its nutritional processes convert sound into brain waves and simultaneously translate from one language to another. This is perhaps useful to the people who have the Babel fish in their ears and presumably it helps the fish to survive as well.

Although Deacon provides one of the fullest treatments of the co-evolution of brains and language, the idea has a long history, going back at least as far as Darwin. It is also being taken up by others today. While I was writing this chapter I came across a paper by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, who find the same difficulties with the Chomsky model. They cite the disparity in rate of change between brains and language, and they provide some detailed linguistic analyses to show how co-evolution of brain and language could work. A computer study carried out in the previous year by Pierre-Yves Oudier and Frederic Kaplan reached similar conclusions.

Is there a 'religion organ'?

Deacon wants to refute the idea of a 'language organ' in the brain. Well, what about a 'religion organ'? We often hear claims today that there is a 'God module' in the brain ' – an inbuilt tendency to acquire theological beliefs. But I think that Deacon's objections to Chomsky's theory apply with equal force to claims of this kind. Theories that propose the human brain has evolved to produce religious experiences encounter the same difficulties as do those for a 'language organ'. There are no primitive religions in other species. Religious change, like linguistic change, is much more rapid than genetic change. And there are interesting similarities in the ways that children acquire both language and religion. If language can be thought of as an parasite, so, too, can religion.

As I understand it, Deacon's description of how children learn language is not intended merely as a metaphor: languages really can be thought of in this evolutionary way. Whether or not his theory is right is a question I must leave to the linguists to decide, but I find that it is extremely helpful in thinking about how religions are passed on and how they acquire their characteristic differences from one another. Most of what he says about language could be applied with little change to religion. _I want to say that religions, like languages, are parasites or symbionts which have evolved to be easily learned by children._

Both language and religion are usually learned literally at our mother's knee. We speak of our mother tongue, meaning the first language we learn. This has a different quality from languages learned later in life. For me, this is English, but my mother was French-speaking Swiss, and when I was small I had a succession of French nannies. I am told that when I was about four I spoke French more readily than English. My father put a stop to the French nannies, fearing that I would grow up to speak English with a French accent. I quickly forgot French and had to relearn it when I went to school. Even so, French has for me a sense of familiarity which none of the languages I learnt subsequently has. Languages learnt early in life are 'sticky'. Even if you are practically bilingual, you will probably always carry out mental arithmetic in the language in which you first learnt your numerals. The same is true of religion: a faith acquired in childhood generally has a different 'feel' from one we convert to in later life. Some converts over-compensate, by becoming more fundamentalist in their new religion than are most of those who were born and brought up in it.

In view of the similarity in how they are acquired, it is not surprising that there are other deep connections between language and religion. There are special kinds of religious language. Quakers used thee/thou address forms long after these had died out in ordinary English, and some evangelical Christians speak of 'believing _on_ Jesus' instead of the vernacular 'believing _in_ '. These are just minor variations on contemporary spoken English, but many religions have a sacred or liturgical language which is used on formal occasions and which may be partly or even wholly unintelligible to many of the laity. Thus we have Hebrew for Judaism, classical Arabic for Islam, Sanskrit for Hinduism, Pali for Theravada Buddhism, Latin for the Catholic Church, while the Anglican Church preserved older, outdated, forms of English in its prayers and services until quite recently. The Ethiopian Coptic Church has an ancient sacerdotal language which is used in its liturgy. Most religions are ancient and preserve the language in which they began life.

Modernisers often want to abandon the old language and substitute the vernacular, but the results are not always what was hoped. Such attempts at updating a religion seem often to coincide with an incipient loss of religious faith, though it is difficult to say which is cause and which effect. Some Roman Catholics still lament the abandonment of the Tridentine (Latin) Mass, which indeed is now showing signs of a limited revival, and disuse of the older forms of service by the Church of England has not prompted an influx of young worshippers into the pews. Muslims generally say that translations of the Qur'an can never capture the full meaning and beauty of the Arabic original.

There may be an intuitive recognition of the connection between religion and childhood in Christianity, where God is customarily referred to as the Father, though feminists these days often transform God the Father into God the Mother. The paternal usage goes back to Jesus, who is noted for the importance he attached to children – very unexpected for that time – and for his saying (Matthew 18,3) that taking on childlike qualities was necessary for entry into the Kingdom of God.

In many shamanic societies becoming initiated as a shaman requires the learning of a secret language that will be used in the performances to communicate with the spirits. Each shaman has his particular song. There is often a suggestion that the secret language is also the language of animals. Even when there is no formal instruction in a secret language some shamans utter incomprehensible speech during their performances; this is very much like Christian Pentecostal 'speaking in tongues', which perhaps can best be understood as a spontaneous manifestation of a shamanic state.

The paper by Christiansen and Chater which I cited just now explicitly notes the relevance of the co-evolution of brain and language for cultural processes in general, including religion. 'We speculate that, in each case, the apparent fit between culture and the brain arises primarily because culture has been shaped to fit with our prior cognitive biases.'

In summary, then, what I am suggesting is that languages and religions are similar kinds of 'organism'. But exactly what sort of organism? Languages, as we have seen, are better thought of as symbionts than as parasites; is that also true of religions? Are religions good for us or bad?

Religion: parasite or symbiont?

The question is not a simple one. In biology it can be difficult to decide whether an alien invader is a parasite or a symbiont – whether, on balance, its presence is good for the host, bad for it, or neutral. The same is true of religion.

Even those organisms that we would unequivocally regard as parasites may offer unexpected advantages to their host. There is a theory, admittedly not accepted by everyone, that the remarkable increase in allergic diseases in many industrialised countries is related to our excessive hygiene, which reduces our childhood exposure to parasites (including bacteria and viruses). Young children who encounter a lot of viruses as a result of contact with other children are less likely to develop allergies later. Throughout most of our evolutionary prehistory we would have been infested with parasites, and our immune systems evolved to keep them under control though not to eliminate them. Perhaps, now that our immune systems find themselves with time on their hands, they start to misbehave, reacting excessively against things that they would normally have ignored, such as dead dust mites.

Some bold experimenters have tested such ideas on themselves. By deliberately infecting themselves with intestinal worms they have reduced the severity of their asthma. And there is currently a proposal to infect patients suffering from multiple sclerosis with hookworm, since this appears to reduce the tendency to relapse in this disease.

If it is true that exposure to parasites – in moderation – in one's youth is protective against some diseases later in life, can we apply the same idea to religion? Perhaps it is good for us to be exposed to religion as children – always provided, of course, that it is not in too virulent a form. So fanatical religions may be bad for you, but less extreme varieties may be beneficial. There is a lot of evidence which seems to show that having a religion tends towards psychological and even physical health. This would be expected if we had evolved a symbiotic relation with religion.

Is fundamentalism parasitic on religion?

In biology there can be parasites of parasites. Perhaps the same is true of religion: we could think of religious fundamentalism as a parasite on religion. At present two religions, Christianity and Islam, are dominant in much of the world and are beginning to give rise, if not to a monoculture, at least to a duocultuMost theorising about how language evolved, Deacon says, has focused exclusively on the brain. Researchers have asked what structures are needed to make language possible. Deacon himself has a lot to say about this, but he maintains that the brain changes are only half the story. We should also think about what has happened to languages, and these, too, evolve.

re. Such lack of diversity is dangerous in agriculre. Such lack of diversity is dangerous in agriculture because it makes crops liable to devastation by parasites, as happened in the Irish potato famine in the nineteenth century. In medicine, patients given broad-spectrum antibiotics (antibiotics that kill a wide variety of bacteria) may suffer a serious disease called pseudomembranous colitis, with severe diarrhoea, abdominal pain, and fever. It is due to the overgrowth of bacteria resistant to the antibiotic that has been used; often, though not always, _Clostridium difficile_ is responsible. Treatment may be difficult and the infection may be fatal. (I thank John Floyd for suggesting this analogy to me.)

Monoculture may be dangerous in religion because it makes it liable to fundamentalism. If this idea is correct we should probably welcome the increase in religious diversity that is occurring in some places today, because it will tend to favour religions that are more resistant to infection.

Another dimension to the story?

I have suggested that to think of religion as a mind parasite may be more than a metaphor. But what if there is an even closer connection between parasites - _biological_ parasites - and religion? Can biological parasites alter the way we think and feel? That may be difficult to accept, yet we know that they can certainly alter behaviour in quite startling ways, at least in non-human animals.

In her book, _Riddled with Life_ , Marlene Zuk provides numerous examples of how this works. Here is just one among many. There is a tiny parasitic wasp in the forests of Costa Rica which uses a certain type of spider as a host for its larva and alters the spider's behaviour to serve its own purpose. The spider normally spins an orb-type web like the kind you can see in your garden in Britain. The wasp stings the spider, paralysing it temporarily, while it lays an egg on its abdomen. After about half an hour the spider recovers and carries on with its life as if nothing had happened. But during the next two weeks the wasp larva hatches out and sucks the spider's blood, until it is ready for the next stage in its career. The night before the larva is ready to form a pupa, the spider's behaviour changes. Instead of spinning its usual spiral web it produces something like the top of a circus tent. In this the wasp pupa hangs upside down, preparing to hatch out and continue its life cycle by infecting another unfortunate spider.

This is too bad for the spider, but you may think that _you_ have nothing to worry about. You are a long way removed from arachnids in evolutionary terms, after all. But wait: what about mammals? May these, too, may have their behaviour modified by parasites? Almost certainly, yes. There is a well-known single-cell parasite called toxoplasma which infects predators, such as your cat. Cats get it by eating infected rats and mice, who have in turn acquired it from the soil, where it arrived via cat faeces. Rats have an innate fear of cats, for obvious reasons; it has been selected for in evolution. When exposed to the smell of cat urine, uninfected rats show a sensible aversion to it. Not so rats infected with toxoplasma. Describing the experiments in which this altered behaviour was demonstrated, Zuk says she found that watching a video of the infected rats as they wandered into an area sprayed with cat urine 'was like seeing the heroine in a horror movie open the door to the deserted barn while the maniac with the ax lurks behind it'.

So the toxoplasma parasite appears to be able to alter the rats' brains so as to make them behave in a foolhardy way, which is bad for the rats but good for the parasite. But now comes the really worrying bit. Human infection rates with toxoplasmosis range from 22 to 84 per cent in different countries. The parasite is acquired by eating undercooked infected meat or by close contact with cats. As a rule it does not seem to cause obvious harm in humans, though it can produce foetal abnormalities in pregnant women. But are there any effects on human behaviour?

It seems there may be. Infected people are more accident-prone. Men who are infected are more reserved, less trusting, and more likely to break rules. Women, in contrast, are more out-going, trusting, and self-assured – one researcher describes them as more warm-hearted. It is still not clear whether these differences are due to the toxoplasmosis or are personality features that make certain people more liable to infection. If toxoplamosis is indeed responsible it suggests that humans, though not the 'intended' target, can show the same personality changes as do infected rats.

Zuk remarks that such ideas have profound implications for how we understand our own nature. We normally think of ourselves as shaped by our genetic inheritance and our upbringing, which interact in all kinds of complicated ways. No one has any difficulty in supposing that our early experiences help to determine the kind of people we are. A serious disease in childhood may have effects on personality in later life. So why should we be so surprised if infection with a parasite also has an effect?

It is no doubt surprising, and potentially disturbing, to think that our personality may be in part the result of our parasites. But should it be? As Zuk points out, if there were a parasite – toxoplasma or anything else – that made someone warm-hearted, would they be any less so than someone who is warm-hearted without the benefit of a parasite? 'Who are we, really, but the sum of our own cells and those of our parasites, intertwined in a relationship that will never end?' And another question arises: if someone were known to be kinder and therefore 'better' as a result of infection with a parasite, would we wish to cure them by eliminating the parasite? There are profound ethical and philosophical questions here.

A tendency to kindness as a result of infection is one thing, but here is another thought that will be even more disturbing to many. What if a tendency to religious belief is influenced by infection with a parasite, either toxoplasma or something else? It would be interesting to carry out a study to see if there is a connection between religiosity and infection with toxoplasma. If there is, the religion-as-parasite theory would be shown to be more literally correct than anyone had supposed. Religious believers would be horrified at the thought, but if Zuk is right about the parasite–kindliness association, it doesn't seem out of the question that toxoplasma infection could increase someone's tendency to religiosity. It may appear to be far-fetched, and it probably is, but I don't think it can be totally excluded.

Why the religion parasite survives

One obvious reason that the religion parasite survives is that it often takes measures to ensure that it does. In many societies religious people tend to have more children than others – the Catholic ban on artificial methods of contraception obviously has this effect in so far as Catholic couples still obey the injunction. Where this happens, religions are using their hosts to secure their own reproduction, which makes their evolutionary credentials as parasites very respectable.

There are also psychological benefits for the hosts which would favour survival of the parasites. At the end of his book Deacon points out that mystical experience and mythical and religious traditions appear to be present in all societies, and he links this with our awareness of mortality. Our brains, he finds, have not evolved a satisfactory way of coping with the knowledge of our coming death, and he thinks this is the most maladaptive aspect of our acquisition of complex brains. I believe he is right about this. I have little doubt that helping us to cope with the awareness of our mortality is one reason why the religion parasite continues to dwell in our brains, and I would like illustrate it with the following analogy.

The mitochondria in our cells are structures – organelles, as they are rather poetically known, meaning tiny organs – that were almost certainly once free-living bacteria. At some time in the distant past they became permanent denizens of 'advanced' (eukaryotic) cells. They produce the energy which our cells need in order to function; we could not exist without them. But this was a later development. Originally they had a different job to do: detoxifying oxygen.

Today we think of oxygen as essential to life, but it was not always so. When oxygen first appeared on the planet it was a poison, a toxic by-product of life that began to accumulate in the atmosphere owing to photosynthesis. But certain bacteria acquired the ability to process it and make it harmless. Later, some of these bacteria were incorporated into other kinds of cells, where they eventually became, not merely useful, but essential – not just as detoxifiers but as producers of energy. That is where our mitochondria came from and why we still have them today. Now we cannot do without either mitochondria or oxygen. We would die without them, and there are diseases caused by malfunction of the mitochondria.

Have religions become our psychological mitochondria? Have they evolved to detoxify our awareness of death? If that analogy is correct, religion is a symbiont rather than a parasite.

But there is a third alternative. Perhaps religions have hitched a ride in our minds but are neither helpful nor hurtful. This would make religion like so-called junk DNA. One of the most surprising discoveries in modern genetics is that the function, if any, of most of our genes is unknown. Only about 5 per cent of the human genome (the whole collection of genes that we inherit from our parents) makes proteins that are used by the organism. The other 95 per cent has no known function and has been called junk DNA, although this is no longer a very respectable scientific term, because perhaps it does have functions which we have not yet discovered. Some of these 'junk DNA' genes do make proteins, but these don't seem to do anything useful, and the great majority of our DNA is designated non-coding, which means that it apparently does nothing – it is just a passenger. If religion is like this, that would fit in quite well with the reductionist view of religion which I described in Chapter 2. Religion would be hitching a ride in our brains but not contributing much, either good or bad. It is not essential to find a function for religion to explain its existence.

Languages and religion in an evolutionary perspective

If Deacon and others are right about how languages evolve, and if I am right to apply the same ideas to religion, there should be similarities between religion and language in the ways they change over time. I think there are.

Linguists have been tracing the evolutionary patterns of languages and detecting family resemblances among them since the eighteenth century, when it was first noticed that there are resemblances among Latin, Greek, and most of the European languages that make it certain that they have all descended from a common ancestor. It is possible to draw up evolutionary trees for many of the languages of the world to show how they are interrelated, just as we do for biological species, and there are rules which predict how changes are likely to occur.

This view of language has other implications. It predicts that languages will evolve. When a species is isolated geographically it often begins to break up into many different new species, according to the environment in which it now finds itself. The classic example is the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi, which descend from a single progenitor that arrived about 2 million years ago and has since produced about 600 different species of fish, each with its own appearance and habits: a beautiful example of evolution in action. Another celebrated example is that of the finches in the Galápagos ('Darwin's finches'), which have evolved into a number of species with different beaks to cope with the various food sources found in the islands.

The same happens with languages: two communities separated by barriers of sea or mountain may at first be speaking the same language but after some centuries their dialects may no longer be mutually comprehensible, at which point two 'species' that can no longer interbreed have arisen. Even within a species there can be subspecies, such as British and American English; there are differences between them but they still interbreed, with the formation of new idioms due to shared linguistic usages.

Religions, like languages, evolve. They have phylogenetic trees, just like species of organisms, and can be grouped into families. The test for deciding whether two biological variants are different species is often taken to be whether they can interbreed, and this can be applied to religions. For example, Buddhism and Jainism both arose within Hinduism but are now separate religions that can no longer interbreed with the parent religion or with each other. Islam and Christianity are both descended from Judaism and still have certain features in common with it, such as monotheism, but conversion from one of these religions to another is fairly rare – they cannot easily interbreed. The different Christian denominations, in contrast, are more like subspecies; it should be easier to convert, say, from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism than it is from either of these to Islam, because the 'genetic difference' is smaller. Even so, conversions are fairly rare, which suggests that some branches of Christianity, at least, are beginning to be different species.

Religions can also become extinct – for example, the religions of classical Greece and Rome or of ancient Egypt. These exist only in fossilised forms, as texts or inscriptions. In fact, there must be many more extinct religions of which we know nothing.

The landscape metaphor

A metaphor I find helpful in thinking about how religions evolve is that of a landscape. This derives from biology and was first put forward by C.H. Waddington in the 1930s. He asked us to imagine a model of a landscape, on which marbles could be placed. They would roll down slopes in different directions until they reached the lowest point in that part of the landscape. Once there, they had no way back, no possibility of climbing back up the slope. This was a metaphor to describe the way he thought the environment could shape the course of cell development (epigenesis), but it can also be applied to the way religions develop.

One of the most characteristic features of this landscape is its tendency to give rise to two forms of religion. Consider these pairs: Protestantism/Catholicism (Christianity); Theravada/Mahayana (Buddhism); Sunnism/Shiism (Islam). Although Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam differ from one another in many ways, all three have formed the same kind of internal divisions. Protestantism, Theravada, and Sunnism belong recognisably to one type, Catholicism, Mahayana, and Shiism to the other. Even though the starting points of these religions were very different, and their historical development even more so, the characteristic divisions appeared.

Catholicism is characterised by elaborate rituals, reverence bordering on worship of the saints and especially the Virgin Mary, the existence of a celibate class of priests with special powers reserved to them, and, until quite recently, the use of an esoteric language, Latin, for use in church. The Vatican still uses Latin for many purposes. The clergy wear special ceremonial robes and churches are filled with images. The Protestant reformation was in part a reaction against all this. Latin was replaced with the vernacular and the laity was encouraged to read the Bible instead of learning about it from priests. Worship of saints and the Virgin Mary was done away with, as were their images in churches. Priests no longer mediated between lay people and God, and the notion of an earthly hierarchy was replaced by a more democratic arrangement, in which all the members of the Church were equal before God.

Theravada Buddhism is the religion 'of the elders'. (Presbyterianism, similarly, literally refers to a religion guided by elders.) Theravada is practised today in Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka. It is somewhat austere and unemotional. The Buddha is revered as the founder and as one who attained Nirvana by his own efforts, but he is not a god and is not worshipped in the Christian sense of the word. Mahayana Buddhism is most closely associated with Tibet. It goes in for elaborate rituals, complex visualisations of deities, and semi-magical practices which were almost certainly introduced from non-Buddhist sources, probably including shamanism. One of the most characteristic features of the Mahayana is devotion to Bodhisattvas, who are Buddhas-in-waiting. That is, they are beings who are close to Nirvana but who have voluntarily delayed entering that state because they wish to return to the world to help suffering beings. They are often represented in art and in many ways they correspond to Roman Catholic and Orthodox saints.

If you go to a Shiite Islamic country such as Iran you will see images of revered figures, especially Ali and his martyred son Husayn, in taxis and elsewhere. These are remarkably similar to the images of saints you would find in equivalent places in a Catholic or Orthodox country and their presence is one of the most striking differences between Shiite and Sunni Islam. Images of persons are forbidden in Sunni Islam, and there are other differences as well. For example there is a clerical hierarchy in Shiism which is absent in Sunnism. But the most important difference is the near-worship of the figure of the Imam in Shiism and the accompanying apocalyptic belief in the Imam's future return to bring about world transformation. These, again, will feel familiar to people with a Catholic background.

The symbolism of religion

The title of Deacon's book is _The Symbolic Species_. As I understand his central argument, the ability to use symbols is both necessary for language and is made possible by language. I should say that religion is similarly interlocked with the ability to think symbolically. Religion, language and symbolic thinking are very closely bound up with one another; in fact, they are probably best thought of as different aspects of the same thing.

Another way of putting this is to say that we think in metaphors. There is a view, to which I subscribe, that all language is metaphorical. It is a great mistake to suppose that metaphor is a kind of decoration added to plain old literal language. I came across this idea many years ago in an essay by Owen Barfield, and it comes up again in Guy Deutscher's book, _The Unfolding of Language,_ where he has a whole chapter on metaphor in which he says, using yet another metaphor, that language is made up of 'a reef of dead metaphors'.

The word 'metaphor' is itself a metaphor, the literal meaning of which is to 'carry across'. There are no non-metaphorical words; those that don't appear to be metaphors are simply the ones that have been in use for so long that their metaphorical nature has been lost sight of. Mixed metaphors happen when a writer fails to recognise the truth of this. Actually, because all language is metaphorical, it is impossible to avoid mixed metaphors, but only when it becomes obvious does it offend the ear. Insensitive writers can be caught out when a seemingly dead metaphor comes to life and rears up to bite them.

Religion can be seen in the same way – as made up of symbols or metaphors, some of which are so old that we don't recognise their nature. Religions are stuffed with symbols. In Christianity the cross is an obvious example. For any Christian it carries innumerable associations that sum up the whole of the faith.

A Roman instrument of torture and execution hardly seems a likely symbol for a religion to adopt. Death on the cross was considered shameful, an end reserved for the lowest class of criminal and rebel, and Christians did not dwell on it in the early years. But later it became transformed from a gibbet into a symbol of huge complexity.

(In fact, conventional representations of the crucifixion are misleading: Jesus was probably crucified on something that looked like a T rather than a cross. The Romans used a permanently sited upright, and the victim was crucified by being nailed or tied to a beam that slotted in on top of the upright. Jesus would have carried a beam of this kind to the place of execution.)

The cross even acquired cosmic associations. There are Celtic Christian crosses with the cross surrounded by a circle, and these recall the sun cross – a cross inside a circle – which comes from sun worship and is found as far back as the Neolithic or even earlier. Some later Christians apparently wished to signify the cosmic importance of the crucifixion by using this design. Jung interpreted such images as mandalas, symbols of unity of the opposites.

Another Christian symbol of great importance is the Virgin Mary. The mother of Jesus figures little in the canonical gospels but she became of ever-greater importance to later Christians. This was pretty well universally true until the Protestant reformation. Since then she has continued to be the object of devotion for Roman Catholics and has never ceased to be so in the Orthodox Church. She symbolises, paradoxically, both motherhood and perpetual virginity, and in the view of many, especially Jungians, she partially compensates for the exclusively male character of the Christian god. Indeed, the reason that Protestants are suspicious of her cult is that they fear, not without reason, that she is liable to become a goddess in the eyes of some of her devotees. The majority of religious visions today are of her. In earlier times she might have appeared as Diana or Aphrodite.

Conclusion

The evolutionary view of religion I have looked at in this chapter can be contrasted with the reductionist approach I outlined in Chapter 2. Both take religion to be something that arises more or less automatically and inevitably in the human mind. But whereas the reductionist view perhaps hprovides quite a plausible explanation for what Christians would call superstition and belief in magic, it requires a good deal of tweaking to extend it to cover the more complicated and 'hypertrophied forms of religion we encounter in the modern world. But if we regard religion as arising from our intrinsic tendency to see the world in symbolic terms we have a basis for understanding why religion has become so deeply interfused in our consciousness. This understanding provides a much richer explanation for religion that is not open to the charge of 'nothing-buttery' – one that might perhaps be acceptable even to some religious believers.

Chapter 6 Religion and Narrative

Is belief what matters most about religion or is it narrative?

In a recent radio broadcast a sociologist said that when she asked a vicar for permission to interview his parishioners he gave it willingly but stipulated that she should not ask them what they believed because that would confuse them! This may surprise those secular critics of religion who have so much fun with what they perceive as the absurdities of religious belief. But that is an outsider's view, shaped by preconceptions arising from a Christian heritage. There has indeed been great stress on the importance of correct belief among Christians in the past. Huge numbers of people have been tortured and burnt to death by fellow-Christians over just this question, but this is not a universal feature of religions – indeed, it may be an exception. So why has Christianity attached so much importance to questions of belief? The answer is in its history.

When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire it comprised many sects with different ideas about the nature of Christ and other obscure matters. The early Christian emperors, starting with Constantine, called a number of Church Councils (meetings of bishops) at which the precise formulation of beliefs was thrashed out, often amid bitter dissent and not without a good deal of imperial arm-twisting. Constantine did this in order to secure uniformity of belief throughout the Empire. His motives were probably more political than theological, but the result was that Christians acquired a firm view that there is something called orthodox belief: one version of Christianity is right and all the rest wrong. Naturally, not everyone agreed about which was the right version, and in subsequent centuries numerous persecutions of 'heretics' ensued. This emphasis on right belief is not found to the same extent in other religions – not even in Judaism or Islam, the closest relatives of Christianity.

We tend to forget that the whole idea of a religion arises only in contrast to other religions. Richard Gombrich suggests that Buddhism in Sri Lanka became defined as a religion only in reaction to attacks by Christian missionaries, which led Buddhists to think of themselves as practising a total religious system on a par with Christianity and Islam. Before people know about other societies, with different ideas from their own, they simply take the beliefs and practices they are used to as the norm and do not think of themselves as practising 'a religion'. It seems likely that in many societies some of their 'beliefs' have become articulated only in response to the questioning of anthropologists and Christian missionaries.

Before the rise of Islam, western Christians had little awareness of any religion apart from their own. When, at the time of the Crusades, they encountered Orthodox Christians, they hardly recognised them as members of the same faith. These people who called themselves Christians wore funny vestments, worshipped in Greek, and crossed themselves the 'wrong' way. Even today, Orthodox Christianity can feel oddly alien to someone brought up in western Christianity.

Western Christians knew that the ancient world had had other religious ideas but these had now been superseded by the coming of Christ. As for remote cultures in distant lands, they hardly knew of their existence and, even if they had heard of them, assumed they were scarcely human. They might have no separate head, enormous ears in which they wrapped themselves to keep warm, only one leg, or an eye in the middle of their forehead; how could you take the ideas of such bizarre creatures seriously as a religion? The centre of the earth was Jerusalem (and was so shown on maps) and nothing of any significance existed outside the boundaries of Christendom. When Western Christians encountered Islam in the Crusades they often assumed that Muslims worshipped Muhammad as divine. Even now, many Christians regard Allah as different from the Christian God, not realizing that Muslims, Jews and Christians all worship the same God.

We (by which I mean Westerners) still tend to judge religion in terms that are derived from Christianity, and we assume that there will always be a common core of belief in any religion. Hence we construct a religion called Hinduism from a vast and heterogeneous mixture of practices and beliefs (and Indians, in turn, now think of themselves as Hindus), and we identify a religion called Buddhism from what was originally a monastic movement within 'Hinduism'. Most characteristically of all, we attach great importance to questions of belief; the first thing we ask about a religion is generally 'what do they believe?'.

Belief used to be a particularly hot topic in the Orthodox Church. In Constantinople during the Middle Ages it was common for everyone, even street traders, to engage in animated discussion of extremely abstruse points of Christian dogma.

Becoming a Christian now does not usually require assent to a lot of intellectual propositions; the days when to attain an academic position at Oxford required signature to the Thirty-Nine Articles, as it did for much of the nineteenth century, are long gone. Often, all that is needed now to be a Christian is to accept Jesus as your saviour. (Have you been born again?) It is mainly various forms of Pentecostal Christianity, in which emotion is more important than intellect, that are increasing in popularity today.

Nowadays it is possible for people to declare themselves Christians and even to continue as Christian clergy while disavowing belief in what most people would say were the pillars of the faith: the divinity of Christ, his resurrection, even the existence of God. Don Cupitt was one of the first to take this position but many of his readers have followed him in rejecting any sort of literalist interpretation of Christianity. The Sea of Faith network provides a good insight into such ideas [www.sofn.org.uk].

So, if belief isn't the main issue, what is? The answer is story.

Religion tells a story

In accepting Jesus as your saviour you are signalling your participation in a narrative – the Christian story (The Greatest Story Ever Told). This has a complex origin. It originates, not with Jesus himself, who founded no religion, but with Paul of Tarsus, without whom there would have been no Christianity. Another important shaper of the narrative, particularly for Western Christianity, was Augustine of Hippo, for whom the story begins with the loss of innocence by Adam and Eve in Eden, when they disobeyed God and bequeathed Original Sin to their descendants. The human race therefore stood in need of redemption, so God sent his son to earth to die as a sacrifice. This theological interpretation of the story is a later elaboration of what is in the Gospel narratives.

It can be seen as a version of the hero myth. This has a number of basic elements, though not all of them are present in every case.

1. The hero is usually special in some way, perhaps because of his birth or his lineage.

2. He becomes dissatisfied with his circumstances, or these change in some way, and he sets forth on his travels.

3. On his way he meets someone who gives him a gift.

4. He has to undergo trials of various kinds, but finally he wins through and is rewarded, often by attaining royal rank.

The life of Jesus, as recorded in the New Testament, conforms quite closely to this scheme. He is special at birth, either because he comes from the royal house of David or because he is the Son of God (the birth narrative in the texts provides both origins, admittedly inconsistently). He is recognised as special at his circumcision, and again when, as boy, he is said to have stayed behind and impressed the elders in the Temple with his precocious wisdom. Apart from these vignettes we have only scanty information about his early years, but there is a popular image of him assisting Joseph in his carpentry workshop.

When he is about thirty, for reasons that are not made clear, he leaves home and embarks on a wandering existence. He receives a gift (recognition at his baptism by John), undergoes an initial trial (his period of fasting in the wilderness, with temptation by Satan), which is followed by a few years (perhaps one, perhaps three) of preaching to the people. Then comes the centrepiece of the drama, his crucifixion. But that is not the end, because God revives him miraculously, and he ascends to heaven. As Julian Barnes says, Christianity is the story that Hollywood is always looking for – a tragedy with a happy ending.

A similar theme is found in many folk tales, and in many Greek myths the hero dies but then is immortalised by Zeus, sometimes in the form of a constellation. Christians later added other mythic elements, including the promise of the hero's reappearance at a future date. This idea, which probably derives from Zorastrianism, is found in the legend of King Arthur and many other heroes.

The hero myth figures in other religions too. For example, the Buddha is said to have been born in privileged circumstances (in later versions he is a king's son, though this is anachronistic) and passes his youth in luxury. But then he learns of the universality of disease, suffering, and death, and he abandons his home to set forth on a life of ascetic wandering. He undergoes many trials, almost starving himself to death at one point, and – like Jesus – encountering a diabolical tempter, before ultimately gaining the prize of enlightenment.

There are plenty of hero narratives in the Hebrew Bible. The story of David, who starts life as a simple shepherd lad and ends as King of Israel, is a good example. His special status is indicated when he is anointed by the prophet Samuel, who selects him from among Jesse's other sons although he is the youngest and has been sent out to tend the sheep. At Samuel's urging he is appointed armour-bearer to Saul, the king. His trial comes when he confronts and kills Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, in single combat. David then becomes a great general, but Saul is jealous of his fame and fears he will want to supplant him as king. Saul seeks to kill David, but fails, because David has become the bosom pal of Saul's son Jonathan, who warns him of his father's plans, so he flees abroad. (This 'twinning' of the hero is a common theme in myths: for example, Gilgamesh and Enkidu among many others.} When Saul and Jonathan are both killed, fighting the Philistines, David triumphs by becoming king.

Incidentally, David's story illustrates another feature found in many hero myths: the hero is flawed, and this catches up with him in the end. David has Uriah, the Hittite, killed treacherously in battle so that he can marry his wife, Bathsheba, but God punishes him by giving their son a fatal illness. Later, another of David's sons, Absalom, rebels against David but is killed in battle; David is broken-hearted and wishes that he could have died in his stead.

The whole story of Israel could be seen as a large-scale version of the hero myth. The Hebrews are special, the chosen people of God. They undergo a period of trial, first as slaves of the Egyptians and then while wandering in the desert. They are given a gift – the tablets of the law that Moses (another hero figure) receives from God. Finally they triumph when they conquer the land promised to them by God. But they are a flawed people, continually forgetting their allegiance to God and needing to repent to earn His forgiveness.

Islam might at first glance seem to be an exception to the rule that narrative is central to religion, because the Qur'an does not consist primarily of narrative (though it does include some narratives). However, the origin of Islam is based on a narrative (the story of the Prophet's reception of the Qur'an and his recognition as the last of the prophets), and Islam accepts the divine inspiration of the Old Testament, which is, as I have said, largely made up of narratives. And though mainstream Islam (Sunni Islam) may not have an obviously large narrative element, the smaller but important Shia branch certainly does.

Shiism begins with Ali, the last of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs who succeeded Muhammad. Ali is the First Imam of the Shia. After his murder in 661 he was succeeded by his younger son, Husayn, but he too was killed. The martyrdom of Husayn is still commemorated annually in passion plays in Iran that are very reminiscent of Christian mediaeval passion plays.

The Imam is a central figure in Shiite Islam who has no counterpart in Sunni Islam. He is sinless and inerrant, and guides the faithful, but that is only part of his significance. For some Shiites, in fact, he takes on quasi-divine status. There must always be an Imam in the world, though at present his identity is unknown. (For the Sunnis the imam is simply the leader at prayer; he is a local authority on religious questions but no more than that.)

The majority of the Shia recognise twelve Imams. A smaller but still important branch, the Ismailis, recognise only seven. There are thus two main divisions in Shiism, Twelvers and Seveners (Ismailis).

Al-Mahdi, the last known Twelver Imam, is said to be Hidden. He disappeared at Samarra in 873/4. He will return at the end of time to bring about a world transformation. Once again there seems to be an echo here of Zoroastrianism, and many of the early Shiites were Persians (though the shift to Shiism as the official religion of Iran occurred later, in the sixteenth century under Shah Abbas). In Shiism there is a blending of the historical and the mythological, with the incorporation of legendary material that is foreign to the original understanding of Islam.

The Shiite version of Islam, then, is very much based on narrative, and incorporates numerous legendary elements that are much older than Islam.

Daniel Everett says that the Pirahãs have no religion, because they have no creation myths. It might be possible to disagree with this judgement, because they do believe in spirits and they have a tiered cosmos, which may derive from shamanism. Still, it is a pretty vestigial form of religion, if it is a religion at all. What I find very significant about the Pirahãs is that they also have no fiction, because that would require them to accept the possibility of something that no one has experienced, and this they reject. So they have no creation stories. If they had fiction, perhaps they would also have religion. I am sure you can't have religion without fiction; I suspect the converse is also true. Probably, once you start telling fiction, you pretty well inevitably end up with a religion.

The narrative basis of human consciousness

There is nothing surprising in the near-universality of story-telling in religion, because this is how our minds work. Humans are story-telling animals. We can hardly think at all without narrative. Our dreams almost always take the form of narratives; when we tell someone what we dreamt last night, this is how we present things. Dreams typically take dramatic form: we talk, we run, we fight, we make love. They are, in fact, a form of entertainment, in which a drama is presented to our dreaming eyes. Advertisers often describe their wares as dreams (dream homes, the holiday of your dreams), and advertisements on television are often framed as mini-dramas, in which we see a man or a woman confronted by a problem, often one with an erotic content, which is then solved by invoking a magic spell in the form of the product the advertiser wants us to buy.

Walter Burkert suggests that the hero myth (or quest myth, as he calls it) may have biological roots. A rat has to find food every day, and this requires it to leave home to satisfy a need, find the right place to get food, meet and confront numerous dangers and competition from rivals, and return home with the prize. The reward is individual salvation for the successful rat.

We generally find it easier to take in ideas when they are expressed in narrative form. If we are presented with a number of abstract ideas they may be difficult to follow or to relate to, but if they are formulated as a story they may at once make sense to us. Even science is often cast in narrative form, though this is not always immediately apparent. It is particularly true of descriptions of human evolution, because it is our own story and we are the actors in it.

This has been brought out brilliantly by Misia Landau in his book _Narratives of Human Evolution_ , where he shows that evolutionists from the time of Darwin onwards have described human evolution in terms of the hero myth. As well as Darwin, other nineteenth-century evolutionists such as Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Haeckel used this formula, and so did the twentieth-century anatomists Arthur Keith and Grafton Elliott. Landau demonstrates this with abundant citations from the authors concerned.

All the elements in the hero myth which I identified in the religious context reappear now in a scientific one. The story of human evolution begins with the hero, who is still an ape, living a relatively safe and carefree life in the trees. Though he is not yet human there is something special about him – often he is smaller or weaker than other animals. For some reason he is dislodged from his home (comes down from the trees) and sets out on a journey or adventure. He now finds himself in a strange place – the ground – where he has to survive a series of tests, posed perhaps by climate change or predators. These experiences will transform him from ape to human.

A gift is needed to assist his progress. Here the benefactor may be natural selection or inherent developmental tendencies in evolution, for example, and the gift may be increased intelligence, tools, or a moral sense. The hero now becomes a primitive human being, but further testing is needed to complete his transformation. Perhaps the challenge is provided by the advent of an Ice Age or by competition from other humans. The hero surmounts this threat and acquires civilisation. This is a triumphant end to the story but, especially these days, there is generally a sting in the tail, as there was in David's case. Will he be able to cope with the results of his own success and cleverness and with the latent flaws in himself? Nowadays accounts of our evolution usually conclude with a sermon on the need to protect the environment.

(The 'out of Africa' theory of human origins provides a wonderful example of the hero myth. A small group of people, probably only a few hundred strong, crossed the Red Sea to Arabia and thence spread out to populate the whole of the rest of the world. What a story!)

Although Landau treats all this with pleasant irony, he does not conclude that we should try to remove story-telling from science. He recognises how natural it is for us to think in this way. But perhaps, he gently suggests, we should be telling better stories.

(I entirely agree with this emphasis on the importance of story-telling, but I don't want to give the impression that I am arguing in support of cultural relativism. I am emphatically not saying that science is just another myth, with no better claim to be true than previous mythologies. This is manifest nonsense. Culture and the structure of our minds do shape the theories we construct, even the scientific ones, but this does not mean they have no external validity.)

The ability to tell stories, and to understand them, is central to human existence. Whether the Neanderthals could do these things is unknown, but modern humans have almost certainly had the capacity since before the Upper Palaeolithic. It seems to depend on two other capacities which are also largely if not wholly confined to humans: awareness of time and the ability to imagine what other people of thinking – theory of mind, as it is often called. I need to say a little about both of them.

Awareness of time

By this I mean what psychologists refer to as mental time travel – the ability to recall the past and to imagine the future. It is customary to distinguish two types of memory. Procedural memory is remembering how to do things, such as threading a needle or riding a bicycle. You do not need to recall any earlier occasion on which you did these things in order to repeat the performance. The memory is encoded in the brain and is produced whenever necessary as a series of actions. Animals obviously have this: a chimpanzee can learn to ride a bicycle, for instance.

Episodic memory, in contrast, may be exclusively human. This is the recall of specific events or scenes in the mind. Try to remember what you were doing this time yesterday or what you had today for breakfast; the ability to do these things depends on episodic memory. There is a little experimental evidence for episodic memory in animals, but it is always possible to interpret the results in other ways.

Memory relates to the past, of course, but the ability to envisage the future and to make plans for it seems to be closely bound up with the ability to recall the past. Imagining an event in the remote future is more difficult than imagining an event closer at hand, just as remembering the remote past is more difficult than remembering something recent. Some kinds of memory loss – those that prevent the formation of new memories – also affect imagining the future.

Imagination is clearly needed for the contemplation of possible future events, but it may be less obvious that it is also needed for memory. We tend to assume that our memories are somehow stored in the brain, like photographs in an album, waiting to be recalled whenever the need arises. But there is a lot of experimental evidence to show that this natural assumption is mistaken. Remembering the past is an active process, and memories are always a reconstruction. Often the details of the recollection are wrong, and it is possible to cause people to remember vividly things that never happened – the so-called false-memory syndrome.

What both anticipation and episodic memory have in common is awareness of time and the ability to move imaginatively in the time dimension. These would certainly have had survival advantage for a community depending for its livelihood on hunting and gathering. The tribal elders would remember the season in which animals migrated and when different fruit and roots could be gathered, and mental time travel is needed for these things to be possible. The ability to imagine the future and to picture different courses of events that might stem from a decision we take in the present are also essential parts of being human. A sense of time is so much part of our consciousness that we no longer notice it. When memory is lost, as it is, for example, in the later stages of dementia, we feel we have lost contact with the person we used to know. The body is there, we say, but no one is at home. The fear that this will happen to us is probably what we most dread about old age: 'second childishness and mere oblivion'.

Story-telling is obviously critically dependent on a sense of time. First this happened, then that. When children first begin to write they usually are unable to escape from strictly sequential narration, with too much use of 'then' (then we did this, then we did that...). But religion, too, is time-dependent, or at least the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are. All three claim to be based on events that really happened. If you had a time machine you could go back and see them for yourself.

The earliest religions of which we have historical records are those of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Vedic India. According to Norman Cohn, the principal difference between how people at those remote periods thought about the world and how later civilisations conceived of it was in the way they thought of time. Until about 1500 BCE all these peoples, together with others including Canaanites and pre-exilic Israelites, held that in the beginning the world had been organised and set in order by one or more gods and that it was now essentially immutable. However, this order was not guaranteed; it was always under threat from the forces of disorder, and a young hero god, or divine warrior, was charged with keeping the forces of chaos at bay. In return he was rewarded with kingship over the world. (The Indian idea of cyclical time, with which most of us are probably more familiar, arose later.)

This essentially static view was challenged by Zoroaster (Zarathustra), the Iranian reformer, at some time between 1500 and 1200 BCE. Zoroaster replaced the traditional account with the idea that the conflict between order and disorder would eventually come to a culmination, with the possibility that the world would enter a state of perfect peace and harmony, although this happy ending was not guaranteed and human beings needed to co-operate with the supreme god to bring it about. This idea had a decisive influence on post-exilic Judaism and later, on Christianity, in which it is still present today.

In all these religions we have the idea of a goal, a final consummation, to which we are progressing. The story of the world therefore has a shape. There will come a point when God will take up his pen and write, in large letters at the bottom, THE END. For this to work we have to have awareness of time.

Theory of mind

A sense of time is needed for narrative but it is not enough. We also need what psychologists call theory of mind. This is the ability to put oneself in someone else's place and to imagine what they are thinking. It is a distinctively human capacity. Quite young children have the ability to read the minds of those around them, and they also play with dolls and other toys as if they were conscious. 'Let's pretend' is something that very young children instinctively understand – unless, that is, they suffer from autism or its minor form, Asperger's syndrome. The most characteristic feature of those disorders is that the people affected have no, or only very limited, ability to put themselves in another's place. They lack theory of mind.

(It would be interesting to know whether autism is associated with reduced interest in religion. See Berger, Jesse M., 'The Existential Theory of Mind' ( _Review of General Psychology_ 2002;6(1):3-24).)

One way of describing this is to talk about 'intentionality'. ('Intentionality' in this context is a technical term, which refers to mental states such as hoping that, fearing that, wanting that. All these are 'about' something.)

There are different orders of intentionality. First-order intentionality is possessed by most creatures with a brain: your cat or dog, for example, certainly has it. Animals know when they are hungry or want to go for a walk, and you will know too, because they will indicate it to you in ways they have learned. But do they know what _you_ are thinking? That would require second-order intentionality. Most pet owners will probably tell you that their pride and joy does have this ability, but psychologists, being more hard-hearted or mechanistic in their views, generally resist such claims, at least for cats and dogs and even monkeys. There is however a certain amount of evidence, both from watching them in the wild and from laboratory experiments, to suggest that chimpanzees and bonobos, at any rate, can sometimes achieve this. That is, they can behave in ways that make it at least appear likely that they know what another ape or human is thinking, although such claims are still disputed and it is often possible to explain their behaviour without postulating this.

Robin Dunbar quotes the case of a female hamadryas baboon which illustrates the problems that arise with interpretation. These animals live in troops of eighty or more, with subgroups made up of a dominant male and two or three females plus their offspring – a harem, in fact. On one occasion the Swiss ethologist Hans Kummer saw one of these females edge away cautiously from the group towards a large rock, behind which was a young male. She began to groom him – flirt with him, one might say – but being careful all the time to keep her head above the rock so that her mate could see her. From a human point of view one could imagine that she was saying to herself: 'As long he can see me he won't think I'm up to anything'. This would imply a theory of mind – second order intentionality. But perhaps she had simply learnt that the male punished any wandering off so the best way to avoid being attacked was always to remain in view, or she may even merely have wanted to keep an eye on him herself so as to be ready to escape if he attacked her.

When it comes to humans, Dunbar finds, from his experiments, that four orders of intentionality are the norm. Some people, though not everyone, can manage five or even six orders, but that seems to be the limit. Once this capacity exists, we can construct narratives of considerable complexity. Dunbar illustrates how this works in practice by analysing the plot of _Othello_ , but I would like to use a television programme broadcast recently which makes the point rather nicely. This concerns a young woman called Amanda who is obsessed with Jane Austen's novels, especially _Pride and Prejudice._

One day a door in the wall of her Hammersmith flat opens and in walks Elizabeth Bennett, the heroine in _Pride and Prejudice._ Amanda goes through the door herself in the opposite direction and finds herself in a house with the remaining characters in the Bennett family, leaving Elizabeth in Hammersmith. Amanda expects that events will now unfold as they do in the novel, but her presence disrupts the plot. In the absence of Elizabeth, the hero, Darcy, falls in love with Amanda (and she with him), while Elizabeth's sister, Jane, marries the obnoxious Mr Collins instead of Mr Bingley, whom she loves. Other plot lines go awry as well and the result is a considerable mess.

Any normal human being who saw this drama could follow it without difficulty. But if we break it down into its components the description can sound quite complicated. First, there is Jane Austen's novel. You don't need to have read this yourself if you are to understand the play, though it certainly helps and you lose some of the jokes if you haven't. But you do need to know what a novel is; you need to understand that it is a made-up story about people who (usually) never existed outside the author's imagination – people who have wishes, fears, and hopes and who scheme to make things turn out in the way they would like, just as people in real life do. In fact, we know more about the fictional people than we generally do about real people. In the case of _Pride and Prejudice,_ for example, we know what Elizabeth thinks about the other characters, especially Darcy, and we know that Darcy knows that Elizabeth has formed a wrong opinion of his character for mistaken reasons, though it is impossible for him to set her right. Theory of mind is required to understand all this.

Jane Austen's plot is assumed in the television drama, but there is a major additional layer to take into account, namely Amanda's obsession with the novel. We have to know that the world she has entered is fictional, therefore unreal, but we must also accept, for the sake of the play, that she thinks for the moment that it _is_ real. She is a twenty-first century woman who is now living in the early nineteenth century, so she has to borrow and wear strange clothes, clean her teeth with twigs, and so on, as well as allow for the different outlook on life of the people she finds herself among. This is quite a sophisticated idea, which critically depends on our ability to play with several layers of theory of mind at once. Because Amanda finds herself living inside a fictional plot, she has an awareness of how the characters _ought_ to behave, but they turn out to have minds of their own and refuse to do what they are supposed to, so she tries to make them conform.

Yet another layer of complexity arises from our knowledge that none of this is really happening and Amanda is herself a fictional character played by an actress. And, finally, the author of the play has to know all this and also calculate how her presentation of the fictitious events will be understood by the audience (us) and what effects it will have on us.

For another illustration of the same kind of complexity we could take Flann O'Brien's comic novel, _At Swim-Two-Birds._ This is supposedly being written by a Dublin student who drinks and smokes too much. A recurrent theme in the book is that of fiction within fiction. For example, one of the characters is Trellis, the proprietor of a Dublin pub, who is himself writing a novel about several characters whose actions and conversations are related at length. But Trellis is asleep much of the time and this gives his characters the chance to rebel against him and plot his downfall. In this case, therefore, there are at least five levels of intentionality. We have the student (1) who imagines Trellis (2) who imagines his characters (3) who in turn imagine Trellis (4). O'Brien, of course, has to imagine all this (5).

I chose these two examples, not exactly at random, but because they are good illustrations of the point I want to make. But I could have used almost any novel or play I liked, because the nature of fiction is that it depends on multiple levels of theory of mind. In this respect it differs from allegory, in which that element is almost entirely lacking. This is the distinction between plot and story that E.M. Forster made when he said that 'the king died and then the queen died' is a story, but 'the king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot.

Novels obviously vary a lot in complexity so far as orders of intentionality are concerned. A picaresque novel like _Tom Jones_ is simpler in this respect, and probably simpler psychologically, than a Jane Austen novel. Modern novels, in particular, are often complicated in this way and then they provide plenty for literary theorists to get their teeth into, with much talk of unreliable narrators and the like. Critical analyses of 'literary' novels can be involved and difficult to follow, as indeed can the novels themselves, but that is generally because the authors wished to make them so. The two examples I gave above are easy for any normal human being to understand, even though an analytic description of them may sound far-fetched.

Theory of mind and religion

If theory of mind is needed for narrative, it is equally necessary for religion. At least fourth-order intentionality is needed for religion, according to Dunbar, while for someone to actually construct a religion for others would probably require fifth-order intentionality. For this reason religion is likely to have arisen fairly late in human prehistory. This is also, he thinks, the reason that only humans have religion, and modern humans at that; Dunbar, like Lewis-Williams, regards the Neanderthals as natural atheists.

If you want to contact a spirit or a god, probably to ask them to do something for you or to intervene in your life or someone else's, you must be able to imagine, at least to a limited extent, what it is like to be a spirit or a god and to suppose that these beings are conscious of you. You could not conceive of spirits or other invisible beings who were interested in us unless you imputed minds to them. Even God is nearly always thought of by analogy with humans; he is supposed to be angry, merciful, loving, and so on – all human qualities. When the attempt is made to avoid imputing such qualities to him, as it is by some modern theologians, the result is usually a loss of focus and the eventual disappearance of God into a 'Ground of Being' or something equally vague (and uninteresting to most practising Christians).

It seems to be impossible for religion to escape from narrative, and indeed from fiction. Probably many Christians who read the New Testament account of Jesus's last hours as a straightforward narrative fail to notice that the author of Matthew's Gospel has used a novelistic device at this (literally) crucial point in the story to heighten his effect. We are told that Jesus prayed in the garden on the Mount of Olives, asking that he be spared the painful death that was coming to him. How do we know this? The disciples are explicitly said to have been asleep. So either Jesus himself told them what he had prayed, which seems unlikely, or this is a dramatic reconstruction by the Gospel writer, who here takes on the role of omniscient narrator. We are given privileged access to Jesus's mind and private thoughts.

Explanation-seeking as a reason for religion

One of the proferred reasons for the existence of religion is sometimes said to be the need to explain natural phenomena, usually by means of a story. Why are there wind, rain, drought, earthquakes? Because God, or the gods, decree these things should be. On this view, humans naturally tend to seek causes for events, and when no obvious cause exists they postulate supernatural explanations to fill the void. Hence we get creation myths. Anthropologists generally dismiss this explanation for religion today, probably for good reasons. Not all societies have creation myths; the Pirahãs don't, for example. Besides, the desire to find explanations for things may not be as universal as many suppose. Boyer discounts this idea in some detail. There is no general explanation-seeking tendency in human minds, he thinks; the idea that there is comes from an intellectualising tendency in our own minds.

Boyer may be right about this, but there does seem to be something in the mind that is quite similar to explanation-seeking: a desire for meaning. One of the examples that Boyer himself uses illustrates this. He cites the classic research of Evans-Pritchard among the Zande people of the Sudan. When the roof of a house collapsed the villagers attributed this to witchcraft. Evans-Pritchard pointed out to them that the house was infested with termites, so there was nothing supernatural in the collapse. The villagers were quite familiar with termites and fully accepted that their gnawing away at the pillars would cause a collapse, but the question remained: why did the collapse occur just then, when a certain person was sitting underneath? This was where the witchcraft came in. There had to be a story to account for the accident – a story about the malevolence of the witch responsible.

This way of thinking persists, with only minor changes, in our own society. It quite often emerges in relation to disease. When people become ill they often ask 'Why me?'. The doctor may give an answer in terms of heredity, diet, smoking and other factors, but often this is not what the patient is after. At bottom, this is as much a metaphysical as a medical question. In earlier times disease was often seen as divine retribution for some past misdemeanour: God was punishing the sinner by means of the disease. This idea is out of fashion now even among believers, having gone the way of belief in hell. At the same time, there is a persisting feeling in many people's minds that the world _ought_ to be fair. If you eat all the right things, exercise regularly, and obey all the fashionable precepts about health you don't deserve to get ill, and if you do _it isn't fair_. This is probably why explanations for cancer in terms of the patient's personality are so compelling for many people. If you believe your illness is because you have thought the wrong things or felt the wrong emotions you have an explanation, but unfortunately it probably makes you feel guilty. You should have had different emotions or have acted differently. This is the modern secular equivalent of feeling guilty because you have sinned and God is punishing you. In other words, we find a metaphysical justification for disease masquerading as a scientific explanation.

One of the best-known literary expressions of this search for meaning is Thornton Wilder's 1927 novel, _The Bridge of San Luis Rey._ It tells the story of the collapse of an Inca rope-fibre bridge in Peru, which kills several people, all of whom are involved with one another in some way. A friar witnesses the tragedy, and researches the lives of the victims to find out some kind of cosmic answer to why they had to die. To many people – probably to all religious people – there has to be a justificatory answer of this kind. As Jesus said, not the fall of a sparrow takes place without God's knowledge, so how can there not be meaning to the death of a human being? To think our lives are without meaning is what is intolerable. The meaning you get in different religions may vary, but the assumption of its existence is universal.

For some the doctrine of karma fills this need. You are suffering because of bad actions you performed in the past, perhaps in a previous life. Of course, this really just displaces the question back into the past: why did you act wrongly at the very beginning and set off the whole chain of cause and effect? Karma doesn't really work as a justification of suffering.

The human acquisition of symbolic thinking has given us immense power, but it has its price, as Deacon notes when he says that the symbolic universe has ensnared us in an 'inescapable web'. This reminds me of a line in a poem by Robert Graves: 'There's a cool web of language winds us in.' Like Midas turning everything he touches, even food, to gold, we have an irresistible urge to turn everything and everyone into symbols. 'It is clear that we feel more comfortable in a world that is meaningful, living a life that is meaningful. The alternative is somehow too frightening.' This is spot on.

When people say, as they often do, 'I don't follow any particular religion, but I think of myself as a spiritual person', they usually seem to mean that they perceive the universe as meaningful. The need to find explanations emerges in the way that many of us think of our lives. Some of the most important things that happen to us – meetings that shape our lives, deciding our choice of partner or life's work, for example – are s Death and beyondeemingly due to chance. But that feels difficult to accept. The tendency to see faces in the clouds or hear voices in running water leads us also to discern patterns in our lives, and it is only a small step beyond that to think that we are guided by a divinely appointed plan. And if we pray regularly this idea becomes all the stronger. Not many are willing to say, with Richard Feynman: 'I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell.' Feynman was no stranger to suffering: his first wife died of tuberculosis and he himself died of cancer, in full awareness of what was happening to him, but he did not feel the need to seek for a religious answer.

The notion of a plan is often smuggled into popular understanding of evolution. Many people in the USA do accept evolution in the sense that they believe that all living forms have descended from a common ancestor (though they may make an exception for humans), but this does not entail a belief in natural selection. The changes are supposed to have happened under divine guidance, so this is still the creation of species, even if it is happening in slow motion. Evolution is the means by which God implements His plan. The scientific understanding of evolution, in contrast, is that there is no plan: variations are thrown up by chance and the environment decides which of them will be successful. In other words, evolution has no foresight.

This seems to make religion irrelevant, although some sophisticated theists are able to accommodate even the apparent absence of plan. There are religious believers who fully accept the Darwinian revolution, but they say that natural selection can be the means God has chosen to bring about our world. That could be true, but it requires the believer to import the idea of purpose from outside, presumably by revelation, since it isn't there in the theory. It also implies that God has been willing to allow an incalculable amount of animal suffering to bring his scheme about – something that a number of would-be theists have been unable to accept.

Conclusion

In this chapter and the preceding one I have described what I think are the main requirements for religion to arise. There must be brains of sufficient complexity to allow sophisticated language and at least fourth-order thinking, together with the capacity for mental time travel. Once these are in place the scene is set for the construction of complex narratives – fiction. Fiction is essential for religion. In fact, if you have fiction, you will probably also necessarily have religion, because religion is concerned with telling stories that explain the things that most concern us. In trying to understand the religious ideas of a newly encountered society we should ask, not what they believe, but what stories they tell.

Some of the most important stories that religion has to tell us relate to death. In the next chapter I look at some aspects of this.

Chapter 7 Death and Beyond

Belief in life after death is usually said to be a matter of faith. But what if it could be scientifically verified? That was the question that preoccupied the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in the late nineteenth century, among whose members were some of the foremost intellects of Victorian England, including Arthur Balfour – later Prime Minister – and three famous physicists (Lord Rayleigh, J.J. Thompson, and Oliver Lodge). The American philosopher and psychologist William James was also associated. Three of the founders of the Society were particularly active: Henry Sidgwick, Oliver Gurney, and Frederick Myers, who had been conducting psychical research (as parapsychology was known at the time) for several years previously.

For all three men, the main reason they were interested in the paranormal was the wish to find a way of stilling their religious doubts. By the late nineteenth century the advance of scientific knowledge had made the religious ideas of earlier times appear less certain than they had been, and Sidgwick, in particular, felt it was essential to enlist science itself in an attempt to discover a firm empirical foundation for belief. Earlier in the century the rise of Spiritualism in the USA had stimulated a corresponding wave of interest in alleged paranormal phenomena in other countries, including England, from about 1852, and it was against this background that the three friends began their investigations. Sidgwick married Arthur Balfour's sister, Eleanor; she was a formidable intellect in her own right and became deeply involved in the group's researches.

This research was on a massive scale and dealt with a variety of phenomena. A huge survey was carried out of phantasms of the living, especially so-called crisis apparitions, in which someone who is experiencing an illness or accident is reported to have appeared to a distant friend or relative. Much of this was done by Edmund Gurney, evidently a man of great ability and also charm, who unfortunately died at a young age, possibly by suicide. Though severely affected by this tragedy his friends continued the work, and carried out a further similar study of phantasms of the dead. The later part of the nineteenth century is notable for the large number of mediums who lived at that time, and several of these were investigated. Some produced physical phenomena, notably Eusapia Palladino, while others were mental mediums. Fraud was of course an ever-present question in these cases and the group were fully aware of this, doing as much as they could to eliminate the possibility.

The group did not achieve a consensus about the central question: did their investigations yield firm proof of post-mortem survival? Sidgwick had doubts and so did Gurney. Myers was finally convinced and so too was another prominent investigator, Richard Hodgson, who had initially been sceptical. Mrs Sidgwick also moved cautiously towards belief. Myers, indeed, went on to elaborate a theory of the 'subliminal self' to explain how survival worked, linking this with full-blown cosmological speculations.

Near-death experiences

There is little doubt that, if they were alive today, the founders of the SPR would have been paying a lot of attention to reports of near-death experiences (NDEs). To many people these offer practically incontrovertible proof of survival, but they were less talked about in the nineteenth century, when mediumistic communications were the main interest. Although reports of NDEs go back a long time in history – Plato provides a semi-fictional account – the modern interest in the subject dates from Raymond Moody's book, _Life after Life,_ published in 1975. It has since sold some fourteen million copies. Raymond was initially a philosopher who, while lecturing on Plato, received reports of NDEs from his students. This prompted him to train in medicine, and after qualifying he continued to collect cases, working as a psychiatrist. Other researchers followed in his steps, one of the first being Kenneth Ring, with _Life at Death._ Soon afterwards, in 1982, another physician, Michael Sabom, produced a third study, _Recollections of Death_. These researchers were in turn succeeded by others and there is now a lot written on the subject.

As a result of the accounts of NDEs provided by Moody, Ring, Sabom and others there has developed a kind of standard model or accepted description of the NDE. Not all NDEs conform fully to the model, and few or none illustrate all the features that have been listed as typical. There is argument about which of these should figure in the standard description. The list might include leaving the body and seeing it from above, travelling away through a region of darkness (sometimes said to be a tunnel), encountering a light (sometimes described as a Being of Light), a non-judgemental life review, encounters with dead relatives, and finally return to the body. The person who experiences the NDE is usually reluctant to return but is often told that it is not yet time to die.

Although this description fits many of the modern reports of the experience, things were different in the past. As Carol Zaleski has pointed out, in the Middle Ages the visionary usually had to pass through various ordeals, sometimes a fire, often a bridge. As a result he or she underwent a transformation and returned to life charged with a message for the living. But it seems that the descriptions we have are seldom of the unadulterated experience; they are more of a collective effort, with much cultural overlay. As one would expect, the whole experience is set within a religious framework and the general aim seems to be instruction and edification. It is likely that the same is true of modern accounts.

One important difference between then and now is that in the Middle Ages everyone assumed as a matter of course that they would be _somewhere_ after they died. The only question was where. Hell was very real to people in the Middle Ages; one can't imagine them enjoying a radio programme like _Old Harry's Game_ , currently in its seventh series on BBC radio, in which hell is a subject for comedy. Few of us now are worried about eternal torment but many are seeking reassurance about the reality of postmortem existence. The quality of the experience – whether it is blissful or hellish – is obviously important, but it is usually not the first question that is asked.

Much of the argument about NDEs has centred on the question of whether they show that the mind is capable of detaching itself from the physical body. Unless it can do this, the possibility of survival of death (an oxymoron, if ever there was one) is hardly worth talking about. Many of the reports collected by Moody, Ring, Sabom and others do appear to show that such a separation is possible, and some commentators, such as Peter Fenwick (himself a physician and neurologist), are prepared to accept that it can happen. But, as Fenwick has acknowledged, this comes with a high price intellectually. It requires us to throw out a vast amount of modern philosophy and neurology which seems to show unequivocally that the mind is wholly dependent on the physical brain. Everything therefore turns on how good the evidence for mind–body separation really is.

Mark Fox has produced one of the best studies of NDEs. He lectures in philosophy and religious studies at Chamberlain College in Birmingham, and is an active member of the Religious Experience Research Unit at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He therefore cannot be accused of having an anti-religious bias. Nevertheless, he does not think that study of NDEs has yet provided conclusive evidence of separation: _'twenty-five years after the coining of the actual phrase "near-death experience", it remains to be established beyond doubt that during such an experience anything actually leaves the body_ ' [emphasis his]. Naturally, the position of sceptics is more critical still: for a good online discussion from this point of view, see Keith Augustine's 'Hallucinatory Near Death Experiences'.

Fox's book is particularly interesting because he has had access to a lot of material that has not previously been published: the records of the Religious Experience Research Unit. One thing which emerges from this is that there is no sharp line dividing NDEs from other types of altered states of consciousness. This was recognised previously but it is made clearer than ever by these reports. Out-of-body experiences, episodes of darkness, meetings with deceased relatives, and encounters with benign and comforting lights are reported by people who were near death but also by others who were not in any danger at all – they were doing all sorts of other things: walking, resting, meditating, sleeping, As Fox remarks, this tells against explanations based on oxygen lack in the brain, temporal lobe epilepsy, and similar emergencies often cited as explanations for NDEs. But it also tells against claims that they provide a unique insight into what happens when we die.

And it raises a question about the usefulness of the label NDE. If exactly similar experiences can occur in people who are in no danger of death, what is distinctive about the NDE? In fact, Fox suggests that it may be better to abandon the term in future studies. Perhaps, he suggests, we should think instead about a continuum of experiences of unusual states of consciousness, which includes visions seen near death but which are not confined to that condition.

This brings us close to Lewis-Williams's suggestion of a consciousness spectrum, which I cited in Chapter 4 in connection with shamanism. And, in fact, Fox remarks on the similarity of some NDEs to those often labelled shamanic. He is cautious about this, because of the difficulty of defining shamanism, but he thinks that the resemblance is significant: the NDE may represent a contemporary resurgence of a democratised form of shamanism and this is is a possible direction that twenty-first- century spirituality may take. I agree entirely with this view.

There is a another set of experiences which Fox does not mention but which, I think, should be seen as belonging to the same broad category as NDEs: alien abductions. Both shamans and the people who submitted reports to the Religious Experience Research Unit sometimes describe journeys away from the earth and into space.

A hypothesis

The early accounts of alien abduction were linked with sightings of UFOs, often when the abductees were driving along lonely roads at night. Nowadays the preliminaries of sighting the UFO are often omitted and the only reason for invoking aliens seems to be that this is a culturally sanctioned explanation for a strange experience. The huge number of such reports, especially though not exclusively from the USA, is certainly surprising, and this does demand an explanation. Abductions often happen when people are in bed, and this has suggested to many psychologists that sleep paralysis may be partly responsible. Susan A. Clancy takes this view in her brilliant study of the abduction phenomenon.

Sleep paralysis is a normal though unusual state, which is thought to occur when someone wakes from a dream but does not fully return to normal consciousness. Most dreams occur during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, when the voluntary muscles (apart from the eye muscles) are paralysed, presumably to prevent the dreamer's acting out his or her dreams. Occasionally the paralysis is not turned off in time on waking and then the person affected finds it impossible to move even though he or she is now otherwise awake. Many people will have one or two such episodes in the course of their lives, and some have them more frequently. There is often an accompanying hallucination of figures in the room and of pressure. In earlier times these things were often attributed to a succubus – a demon who attacked the sleeper, usually with sexual molestation in mind. Today they may be interpreted as the beginning of an alien abduction. The phenomena remain the same but the interpretation changes.

But there is more to alien abduction than this. Accounts of abductions often have features in common with NDEs. For example, in one of Fox's cases a woman fell asleep after going to bed late but then woke up feeling very alert. 'The next moment I was aware of strange reeling sensations in my head like two separate forces one on each side of my head and there was also a vibrating buzzing in my ears.' She was terrified, and tried to lift her head from the pillow but could not. She felt herself being pressed back. The start of this woman's experience, with her inability to move and the sense of overwhelming fear, has many parallels in the alien abduction literature. She heard a buzzing sound, and noises of various kinds occur at the beginning of many abduction experiences.

If this description were the whole story it would be indistinguishable from many accounts of the beginning of an alien abduction. But I don't want to say that NDEs and UFO abductions are identical. Obviously they are not. In the NDE cited by Fox, for example, the woman went on to have a blissful ecstatic experience quite similar to those reported by people labelled as mystics. Yet NDEs and UFO abductions are similar in many ways, and they are probably best be regarded as belonging to the same broad class of altered states of consciousness.

One reason why some might wish to exclude alien abductions is their frequently frightening nature. NDEs, in contrast, are usually cast in overwhelmingly positive terms, at least today. People come back to their bodies reluctantly, so wonderfully happy was the experience. Yet this is not always true; some people have found themselves in what they were convinced was hell. This was apparently more common in the Middle Ages. So we cannot say that NDEs are different from UFO abductions on these grounds. The beings who allegedly abduct sleepers and subject them to horrifying and painful 'medical' or sexual examinations would undoubtedly have been interpreted as demons in the Middle Ages, but today they don space suits and appear as aliens. Plus ça change...

There is one rather surprising feature of the alien abduction experience that seems to me to make its connection with NDEs and with mystical experiences unmistakable. Clancy brings this out in her concluding pages and I think it is the most important part of her book. Here she asks, and answers, a question that surely must have occurred to many puzzled readers. The aliens don't exist. The alien abduction experience is a hallucination. So why should so many thousands (some say millions) of sane USA citizens have produced hallucinations of this kind, if they are so frightening and unpleasant?

To be abducted by aliens is obviously deeply traumatic, and that is how the abductees describe it. Yet some of them also describe it as the most _positive_ experience of their lives. Clancy quotes one abductee as saying: that 'it included a journey into the core of source-consciousness, a realm of infinite light', where she experienced the purest form of love that made her see life as a wonderful gift. Such descriptions are not merely similar in tone to many of the accounts cited by Fox, they are completely indistinguishable.

The abductees who provides these descriptions are not exceptional – quite the contrary. During the course of her five-year investigation Clancy asked all the abductees she interviewed whether they would prefer not to have been abducted. Not one said they would. People told her that the experience had enlarged their world view, given them wisdom to share, made them care about the spiritual path of mankind, or expanded their reality. These are word for word the same as what people say they have obtained from their NDEs. Clancy writes: 'It's clear that people get from their abduction beliefs the same thing that millions of people the world over derive from their religions: meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality, transformation.' She sees the aliens as 'technological angels' and thinks that being abducted by them 'may be a baptism into the new religion of our technological age.'

Clancy quotes an extraordinary account from an earlier investigator, Betty Andreasson, in which a woman described the agonising experience of having a large needle inserted into her navel. But the abductee also speculated that the aliens are angels; one of them told her she had been specially chosen, and she asked him if he was her Lord Jesus. Clancy compares this woman's experience to that of the Spanish mystic, St Teresa of Ávila, who encountered an angel who plunged a great golden spear several times into her heart, causing intense pain which was yet intensely sweet. The religious character of these alien encounters is difficult to deny.

C.G. Jung came to much the same conclusion over 50 years ago in his book _Flying Saucers: the myth of things seen in the sky_. He was writing before abduction reports became as widespread as they are today, though he does look at one case in detail; but his main interest is in the sightings of alien craft. He interprets these as 'projections from the unconscious' – archetypal manifestations. For the most part he regards them as hallucinations, though as usual he is ambivalent about the boundary between reality and the subjective, and he hints that at times they may not be entirely hallucinatory. His view on this, as on other matters, is not entirely clear. But the religious element in many UFO sightings was clear to him, and he was right.

The widespread occurrence of strange experiences such as NDEs and alien abductions is enormously puzzling. All the evidence shows that the people who have them are no more unstable mentally than the rest of the population. But there may be variations in how liable people are to have such experiences. William Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Rudolf Steiner are examples of individuals who, though apparently perfectly sane, saw visions or encountered spirits over long periods. Both Swedenborg and Steiner drew on these experiences to construct cosmologies that have been accepted as authentic by numbers of others. For Blake they were a major influence on his poetry and on his art.

To some extent, the ability (or liability?) to access this realm may be cultural. The anthropological linguist Daniel Everett starts his book about the thirty years he spent with the Pirahãs, a tribe who live in the central Amazon, by describing a strange experience. One morning he found the people he was staying with were on the bank of the river, looking across to a sandbank on the other side where, they said, a spirit was standing. It was warning them not to go into the forest that day. They could all see it, but neither Everett nor his young daughter could. As Everett remarks, he does not believe in spirits because they do not form part of his world view; the Pirahãs do believe in them and see them regularly.

Cultural relativists would tell us that the Pirahãs were just as right as Everett. They claim that all views of reality are culturally determined and equally valid. I don't accept this. A hallucination is just that – an experience of something that doesn't exist. There are no real alien abductions. Was Everett literally blinded by his Western preconceptions of what is and isn't possible, so that he failed to see what his companions could? I don't think so. I'm not willing to throw out several centuries of rationality hard won by thinkers since the Enlightenment, so I need another hypothesis. Very tentatively, I offer the following explanation. I don't want to claim too much for it; it may be entirely wrong, but it serves, I find, as a prop to my thinking until something better comes along.

As a starting point, consider the hypnagogic state. People at the border of sleep, either going to sleep or waking, may have hallucinations. These are similar to dreams but not identical. They are usually visual or auditory. The visual hallucinations may be quite simple – circles or parts of objects – but are sometimes more complex, consisting of animals, people, or whole scenes. The auditory hallucinations again range from simple to complex, sometimes with music or voices that may be threatening or criticising. Physical hallucinations can also occur and may include an sensation of floating above the bed. The potential for such experiences to give rise to the impression of alien abduction is obvious. Though they are more common in people with sleep disturbance or various sorts of mental disorder, they also occur in those without such problems. Hypnagogic hallucinations can probably best be thought of as occurring in an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. This, I suggest, provides a clue to help us understand what happens in visions, NDEs, and the like.

Suppose Everett's encounter (or non-encounter) with the spirit on the river bank had been a dream. Then there would be no problem in accounting for it; we all know that dreams are often bizarre and there would be nothing improbable in his dreaming that his Pirahã companions were showing him a spirit that he couldn't see. He wasn't dreaming, of course. _But suppose that the dreaming level of awareness is not confined to sleep but is there all the time beneath the surface._ Suppose a level of brain activity that gives rise to dreams is ticking away but usually not making it to consciousness when we are awake.

What I am suggesting is that at least some hallucinations are like a different version of the hypnagogic state. In that state dreaming, or something like it, breaks through into almost-waking consciousness. Extend that into fully waking consciousness and you have a hallucination. Presumably there are explanations based on brain physiology for this. Dolphins are known to sleep in alternate halves of their brains so that they can go on swimming and breathing without drowning. Perhaps our brains do something similar, though to a lesser extent.

Some neuroscientists are now suggesting that sleep is not all-or-nothing. Sleep may start in assemblies of neurons that are thought to be basic elements in the way the brain works. Only when these get together and act in unison do we get a full-blown sleep state. This mechanism could explain sleep-walking and why we are often 'half-asleep' for a time after waking up. Kreuger and his colleagues, who are putting these ideas forward, think that parts of our brains may be asleep even while we are apparently awake. These ideas are not widely accepted yet but they would fit very well with what I am suggesting here.

On this hypothesis, some hallucinations occur because we dream while we are awake. As a rule this doesn't happen, because the light of our normal waking consciousness obliterates the awareness of the dreaming level. An analogy for this would be seeing the stars, which we can normally do only at night because by day their light is obliterated by the brightness of the sun. During a total eclipse the stars do become visible. A hallucination is like an eclipse – a temporary dimming of the ordinary consciousness. Total eclipses are rare, and so are visions, though perhaps they are commoner than eclipses. And perhaps they are partly culturally determined; this would explain why certain types of hallucination occur in some societies but not in others.

Visions nearer home

It is not necessary to go as far as Brazil to find records of people who have seen spirits and conversed with them. In 1858 a young French shepherdess, Bernadette Soubirous, had the first of eighteen visions that were to make her and the small Pyreneean town of Lourdes famous throughout the world. On the first occasion she was alone, but when she told her sister what had happened the news spread and on the next occasion she was accompanied by a number of other girls, although (much as happened to Everett) none apart from Bernadette saw the vision.

The apparition had the form of a young girl. Bernadette referred to her as 'Aquéro', a patois word meaning simply a paranormal being of some kind, but towards the end of the cycle of manifestations the vision announced herself, somewhat unexpectedly, as the Immaculate Conception – a theological term that was new at the time and which Bernadette had apparently never heard. By now the Church, which had been initially suspicious or downright hostile, had taken over the show for itself, and today Lourdes is one of the greatest centres of pilgrimage in Christendom. As for Bernadette, after the appearances were over she entered a convent hundreds of miles away at Nevers. She had always been in poor health and she died of tuberculosis in 1879.

The apparition seen by Bernadette did not correspond exactly with usual Marian conventions. For one thing, she was younger than would be expected – a child, in fact. For another, she had features in common with mythical creatures of Pyreneean folklore, such as fairies. These were often seen as enchanting little women, only a little bigger than dwarfs, and were linked with cosmic forces. They were dressed in white and had yellow roses on their feet, as did Aquéro, although she differed from a fairy in having a blue belt and carrying a rosary. Still, the resemblances are evident and not only in appearance. Like the fairies, Aquéro could be harsh and demanding if her requests were not complied with. The same is true of the patron spirits of shamans.

Half a century after the apparitions at Lourdes another vision was seen at Fatima, in Portugal. Three young girls (shepherdesses again, it is interesting to note) saw a female figure who announced that she was 'Our Lady of the Rosary'. She communicated three secrets to the girls and promised a miracle. On the appointed day, 13th October, a crowd estimated at 70,000 reportedly saw the sun change colour and perform extraordinary gyrations. Since no astronomers noted anything out of the ordinary this must be described as a collective hallucination. (It is not clear that everyone present saw the phenomenon.)

At Garabandal, in northern Spain in the 1960s, four young girls reputedly saw visions of the Virgin and also exhibited all kinds of paranormal phenomena. John Cornwell visited Garabandal and was shown a video in which the girls leant backwards until their heads almost touched their waists, and in these astonishing postures they rushed about the village and over rocks and ditches at enormous speed, so that they seemed to be flying. The leading visionary was a girl of remarkable beauty called Conchita González, who appeared to be fully aware of the impact she was making on the camera.

Cornwell was able to interview Conchita's eldest brother in Garabandal (Conchita herself now lived in the USA, where she had married). He confirmed the reality of the phenomena shown on the video and allowed Cornwell to read his sister's diary of the events leading up to the visions. Another man, a brigadier in the Guardia Civil, talked about the investigations he had carried out and concluded by describing an episode he had witnessed in which Conchita had levitated. Cornwell was deeply impressed by what he heard and was convinced that the children had not been hoaxers, yet the phenomena, he thought, lacked any obvious sense of spirituality. He resolved to visit Conchita in America if at all possible.

When he did finally meet Conchita he found her somewhat uncertain about her visions. She had been told by numerous Church dignitaries that she was a liar and a fake; nevertheless, she insisted, over a four-year period she had seen a beautiful lady who told her she was the Blessed Mother; if this wasn't true, nothing was. Cornwell questioned her about the lady's prophecy of a miracle that would occur; Cornwell thought that Conchita was beginning to be afraid that the miracle would not happen, in which case her whole faith in religion would be called into question. One gets the impression of a deeply unhappy woman. As Cornwell was leaving, Conchita asked him to pray for her.

An even more recent series of Marian visions – indeed, it is still going on – has occurred at Medjugorje, in Croatia, since 1981. Cornwell went there too and witnessed the three girls apparently seeing the vision. He was simultaneously baffled and impressed, being particularly struck by the way in which the three young people synchronised their movements. He also had an interview with one of them, a girl called Marija, who neatly turned the tables on him by asking if he had any particular request he wanted her to transmit to the Virgin. He avoided answering this question.

The visions I have mentioned are just some of the best known. But there is currently an astonishing flow of visions, mostly of the Virgin but some, although fewer, of other saints and of Christ. The article on them in the _Encyclopedia of New Religions_ lists 29 recorded since 1937 in all parts of the world, though this is not said to be complete. The Church has always been wary of accepting such claims at face value, and has recently issued new guidelines for recognition of visions as genuine. Anyone who courts publicity for their vision is definitely out, and any messages will have to be checked to make sure they do not contravene Church teaching. Other than that, visionaries will have to satisfy a team of psychiatrists, who may be either atheists or Catholics, that they are sane. Finally, demonologists and exorcists will need to certify that the visions are not of diabolical origin. This suggests that the Church is becoming rattled by the profusion of visions, but the phenomenon is threatening to escape official control.

In fact, there is now an informal vision network in which people exchange experiences and messages received. There are groups comprising literally millions of devotees all over the world who create their own centres of spirituality, distributing prints, folders, and images. What is particularly interesting about this is that, whereas in the past the visionaries were usually young, the modern visionaries are often adults, who interpret their visions in ways that often conflict with official church teaching. They frequently form prayer groups which are sometimes linked either to the person who saw the vision or to a shrine. One such shrine is at the site of the Rosa Mystica statue in Montichiari, Italy, and another, also in Italy, is at Schio ('The Queen of Love'). Prayer groups based in Amsterdam disseminate copies of the painting of 'The Lady of All Nations' to other countries to increase devotion to her.

One might suppose that it is unsophisticated people with limited critical abilities who are most likely to see visions, but there is plenty of evidence that anyone can do so, given the right circumstances. Physical stress or extreme hardship are often factors, something that the desert fathers in early Christianity deliberately sought out. But even today we find the same thing happening – for example to mountaineers.

There are many reports of people alone on high mountains who found themselves in the presence of a mysterious companion. Jeremy S. Windsor, a doctor, encountered a figure, whom he called Jimmy, on a cold windswept snow shelf high up on the south-east ridge of Mount Everest. This was at 8,200 metres so oxygen lack was presumably a factor, as well as exhaustion. He saw Jimmy quite clearly at times and they had conversations in which Jimmy gave him good advice about how to proceed. He stood so close that Windsor could hear his breathing. He also heard the scratching of his crampons on the ice and felt him tugging on the rope gently from above. Once they had arrived at a point where Windsor was sure he could reach the summit, Jimmy whispered a final 'cheerio' and disappeared.

Windsor seems at least half-prepared to believe that Jimmy was real. 'As a doctor I want to believe that Jimmy's appearance was linked to the physical and psychological stresses that I felt that day... But as a superstitious mountaineer I'm swayed by an alternative explanation.' He refers to the tradition that mountaineers who have died on Everest wander forever after their death, and guide living mountaineers as they near the summit. And he goes on: 'Today, my memories of Jimmy are so clear and vivid that it sometimes makes it impossible to embrace the scientific explanations that I should wholeheartedly accept. But whatever the explanation for Jimmy's appearance, I know now that I wouldn't have reached the summit without him.' [BMJ, 20–27 December, 2008].

If a doctor in the twenty-first century can think in this way, what wonder is it if people in cultures in which the existence of spirits is taken for granted do the same?

The Christos Experience

That it is surprisingly easy for most of us to enter altered states of consciousness is something I know at first hand. Many years ago a group of us were trying out a technique called the Christos Experience, which had been described in a book by G.M. Glaskin. According to the account he gives there, he came across the description of the technique in a New Age magazine. It was supposed to afford experience of past lives. Glaskin provides no further details about the magazine, the author of the article, or the origin of the name Christos. I have sometimes wondered if perhaps he invented the technique himself and made up the magazine story as a cover. At the beginning of his book he implies that he is fairly sceptical about the past lives idea, saying merely that the technique is a means of allowing one to dream while one is awake. As he goes on describing his own experiences and those of others, however, he seems to slip more and more into an acceptance that past life regression may really occur. He also seems to believe that some experimenters have seen the future, though the examples he gives are unconvincing, and he hedges his bets by saying that people get visions of 'possible' future events, which seems to cover just about anything.

Glaskin provides a detailed account of how to induce the Christos Experience, though he warns the reader not to undertake it lightly. Unpleasant or nightmarish experiences may occur, but they are rare, and because the subject is always awake the experience can be terminated at any time without difficulty.

In outline, the procedure is as follows. At least three people are required: one to undergo the experience and two assistants, one of whom acts as a guide. In the following description I will assume a female subject and a male guide, to avoid confusion and having to write 'his or her' repeatedly.

_Stage 1._ The subject lies flat on the floor, with her head on a cushion. Shoes are removed but socks or stockings may be left on. One assistant massages the subject's ankles, the other massages her forehead with the edge of his hand. Once the subject feels relaxed, with her head 'buzzing' (note the reference to noise, often reported in NDEs and alien abductions), it is time to continue to the second stage.

_Stage 2._ The guide now asks the subject to do a succession of imaginative exercises. First, she feels herself growing longer through her feet by two inches (5 cm). After several repetitions of this, she is asked to do the same thing through her head. Then the whole sequence is again repeated, but this time she grows in both directions by 12 inches (20 cm) and then by 24 inches (40 cm). She now feels she is a total of 48 inches (80 cm) longer. This all sounds pretty bizarre and difficult to do, but in practice most people manage it without undue problems, and quite quickly. Finally, she is asked to expand like a balloon in all directions.

_Stage 3._ The subject is asked to visualise herself standing outside her front door and to describe it in as much detail as possible. Once this is achieved, she is asked to move up to the roof of her house and describe the scene from there. Having done this, she moves about 1,500 feet (500 metres) into the air and surveys the world from there. At this point an important part of the process is to ask the subject to change day into night and vice versa, to show her that she has control over what is happening.

_Stage 4._ This is the real part of the experience. The subject is asked what her feet look like; what she is standing on; what she can see when she looks around her. The guide keeps asking her questions to make the experience become more and more vivid. This, of course, is the 'past life' phase, in which the subject usually finds herself in another place and at another time.

Usually the preliminary part of the procedure takes about twenty minutes, while the experience itself lasts from half an hour to an hour or more, though subjects usually say that it seems to have taken much less time. Not everyone goes through all the prescribed stages; sometimes one or more may be truncated or omitted altogether.

When three of us tried this out, some time in the early 1970s, we found it worked surprisingly well. When it was my turn I did indeed find myself in another time and place, though there was nothing glamorous about it. I was an old man, living as a beachcomber in a shack on the Pacific coast of North America at the end of the nineteenth century. In my youth I had been a prospector in the gold rush, but now I was reduced to penury. My only entertainment was that, once a week, a woman would come by in her buggy with a couple of children and take me to the nearest town, where she gave me enough money to buy a few drinks at the bar.

What was most interesting about this experience is that it took place on two different levels. I knew perfectly well that I was lying on the floor at home, but I also felt the full visual and tactile impact of my life on the beach. At one point I began to feel very cold, although it was warm in the room, and I shivered so violently that the people with me had to cover me up with a blanket. This seems to be quite common; a number of the subjects described by Glaskin had a similar experience. In some ways it was like lucid dreaming, in which you know that you are dreaming although you are still asleep. But it differed from this in two ways: I knew that I was not asleep, and I could not direct the way in which the experience developed, whereas in lucid dreaming one typically can do this.

We then tried the experiment with someone else as the subject, and he had a vivid illusion of being a sea captain in the Levant, negotiating with people for the transport of goods in his sailing vessel. In this state he was a rough character, quite unlike his present rather refined personality. A third person who tried the experiment had no unusual experience at all, probably because he was unwilling to let himself go fully.

What was really going on here? The preliminary massage and visualisation exercises probably have the effect of distorting the body image. (Susan Blackmore suggests that NDEs are caused by distortions of body image.) This serves as a basis for the mental exercises, which reinforce the effect. Whatever the exact mechanism, the experience is certainly vivid and involves at least three sensory modalities (vision, hearing, and touch). It has some similarities to hypnosis, although I am not a particularly good hypnotic subject: I was once hypnotised by someone who claimed to be able to induce past-life regressions, and this was far less effective than the Christos method for me.

I can easily see how the experience could be interpreted as evidence of reincarnation by anyone who was prepared to believe in it. If we leave that aside, it still seems extraordinary that in most people it is possible to induce an altered state of consciousness, involving several senses simultaneously, without the need for drugs and with a fairly simple means of induction. This suggests to me that our waking consciousness – what we think of as normal consciousness – is a pretty fragile construct, that can be disrupted far more easily than we care to suppose. Glaskin's description of the experience as dreaming while one is awake chimes with my own hypothesis about visions.

Conclusion

In the 1950s the philosopher C.D. Broad remarked that the unwillingness of theologians to take note of parapsychology was surprising, given that if this branch of research were neglected the evidence in favour of survival of death amounted to little more than 'philosophical fluff'. Matters have not much changed today, according to Mark Fox. Few theologians appear to be interested. In fact, one gets the impression that many of them are rather uncomfortable with the subject. Like Broad, I find this surprising. I suppose it arises from a feeling that to subject the claims of religion to verification by science is somehow wrong, evidence of doubt about faith and of putting God to the test. (May it also sometimes arise from a fear that the research will not give the answer that is hoped for?)

A lot of people seem not to realise that postmortem survival is not necessarily a religious question. It is possible for an atheist to believe in the persistence of consciousness after death and some atheistic philosophers have, in fact, done so. There isn't much evidence for survival but it is not inconceivable that there could be. Suppose that the parapsychological evidence became much more compelling than it is at present, so that it was practically impossible to dispute its validity. It would then be difficult to deny that at least some people's consciousness persists after death, and psychology would then have to come up with an an expanded framework to explain this. I don't of course, seriously suppose that this will happen, but it is logically possible. But that would not, in itself, prove the truth of religion. Rather, it would secularise survival.

It has been pointed out that there are two types of religious question. One is, in principle, open to verification. The virgin birth of Jesus and his resurrection are examples of claims of this kind. If bones were discovered that could be convincingly shown to be those of Jesus (perhaps by yielding DNA that was also found on the Shroud of Turin) that would falsify certain core Christian claims. I am not suggesting that this will ever be possible but it is a valid thought experiment. Some Christian claims are falsifiable. In so far as the survival question is a matter for religion, it is a claim of this kind. It can be investigated scientifically.

But there is no thought experiment that could verify the claim that Jesus was divine. Even a time machine wouldn't help here. Claims for the divinity of Jesus, like claims for the existence of God, are in principle incapable of proof or disproof. For some, this is precisely where their value lies. As Tertullian said, Christianity is true because it is incredible. There is no religious merit in believing something that is capable of being verified experimentally.

The ability to take what has been called 'the leap of faith' appears to be something you are born with. People vary in their susceptibility to religious belief, which brings me to the subject of my final chapter – the religious temperament.

Chapter 8 The Religious Temperament

There is a constant theme underlying all the explanations for religion that I have looked at in this book, which is that they all bear, in one way or another, on the human need to find meaning in the world. This is not the same as looking for pseudo-scientific explanations for natural phenomena. Religion is not primitive science; it results from trying to find reasons why we suffer and are unhappy and seeking ways of coping with such painful experiences – in a word, salvation.

Rationalists often speak of religion as due to faulty thinking. If only people would look critically at their beliefs, they suppose, they would see them for the nonsense they are. Science is the 'universal acid' that will, in the end, dissolve religion away. Twenty years ago the philosopher Derek Parfit wrote: 'Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a very recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage.' But this view ignores the fact that most people find the alternative pretty bleak.

The reason that religion won't go away is that science does not provide certainties, but it is certainties that most people want. Scientific knowledge is always provisional, always subject to revision. Religious truth is timeless and eternal. Religious believers often tell you they have doubts, but they usually have them only within certain limits. Their doubts seldom extend to questioning the fundamentals of their faith, but only to how they are to understand them.

One way religions cater for our need for meaning is by constructing cosmologies. Nearly every religion has a cosmology, which provides an explanation of how the world came into being and why we are in it. These narratives should not be thought of as primitive science. They are mythologies that serve to locate human life within a context. Often they tell of gods who made the world, or of heroes who fought monsters and so created the world. In them, human life always has a purpose, even if, as in ancient Mesopotamia, it is only to be servants of the gods. Biblical fundamentalism comes from a mistaken belief that the myth is supposed to be a literal description of what happened.

All religious cosmologies are fictions. We may be the first society to try to construct a scientific cosmological narrative without fiction. Religiously inclined people sometimes acknowledge this implicitly by talking about the mythic element in Christianity. Myth sounds better than fiction, although we should not, of course, dismiss fiction as trivial: _War and Peace_ and _King Lear_ are fiction, but we generally say that they tell us truths about ourselves that could not be expressed in another form. Many religious ceremonies enact mythological themes in dramatic form: the Roman Catholic Mass, for example, is supposed to be a symbolic enactment of the central Christian drama of Christ's Passion.

The important word here is drama. Drama has always been important in religion. In the Middle Ages passion plays were staged to commemorate Christ's death and resurrection. Today in Iran passion plays are performed in memory of the martyred Husayn, son of Ali, the founder of the Shia sect in Islam. In ancient Greece plays were performed (literally, 'taught') in honour of the god Dionysus and, unless revived, were staged only once. Although there was plenty of excitement in the performances the audience was always aware of their religious character. The plays dealt with the relations of the human to the divine and of the human to the material world. But perhaps the best example of fiction (myth, if you prefer) being used dramatically as a form of initiation in the ancient world occurred in the annual celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries. These took dramatic form, but, unlike in the theatre, the audience participated actively in what happened.

The Mysteries were probably a development of much older cults, especially those called the Thesmophoria, which may go back to Mycenean times, about 1600 BCE. The Thesmophoria, which were celebrated widely in Greece, were connected with agriculture and female fertility. They were based on the myth of Demeter and her daughter Kore (Persephone), who was abducted to the underworld by her uncle Pluto (Hades). After many adventures and much suffering Demeter secured her daughter's return to the upper world, but only for six months of the year because, while in the underworld, she had eaten six pomegranate seeds. The Thesmophoria were open only to women, but any Greek could participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

We don't know much about what went on in the Mysteries – they were mysteries, after all! To reveal the secrets of the teachings was punishable by death and no initiates did so, but fortunately we have some clues, because this prohibition doesn't seem to have extended to pictorial representations on pottery and in sculpture. There are also accounts by early Christian writers though these may not be wholly reliable. The purpose of the Mysteries seems to have been to provide initiates with a promise of a happy afterlife, unlike the shadowy existence which awaited the ordinary run of mortals.

The Mysteries exemplify several of the springs of religion that I wrote about in earlier chapters: in their antiquity, for example, and also in their connection with language – recall that they were open to all Greeks, and the criterion of Greekness was speaking the language. But the most important thing about them is that they were an elaborately staged _drama_ which was supposed to free participants from the fear of death. Religion, theatre, music, and dance came together to create an experience that was explicitly focused on death and the afterlife. Those who had been initiated believed that they had been transformed and were sure of a happy and fulfilled existence in the hereafter. This, of course, is what Christianity would later claim to provide, and some discern an influence on Christianity from the Mysteries. Whether this is correct or not, the ancient notion of Hades has survived into Christianity in a surprising way.

In one version of the Creed, believers recite the words 'And he descended into hell' to describe Jesus's actions between the crucifixion and the resurrection. I remember being puzzled by this as a boy, and the Benedictine monks who taught us couldn't (or more probably wouldn't) explain the line. The hell in question is the Sheol of Judaism, which is another version of the Hades of the Greek and Roman world – the underworld where Kore was imprisoned. The drama of Christ's death and resurrection is at the heart of Christianity, as the drama of Demeter and Kore was at the heart of the Mysteries.

In Catholic iconography there are many representations of Mary sorrowing over her crucified son. Is there perhaps an echo here of the sorrowing Demeter, and are Catholics who follow the Stations of the Cross, several of which depict Mary's pain as she witnesses her son's death, in some measure repeating the experience of the initiates in the Mysteries?

Religion today and tomorrow

The Mysteries lasted a long time but in the end they disappeared. Will that be the fate of all religion in the future, and would it matter? The classicist E.R. Dodds was a lifelong atheist, but wrote in his autobiography: 'At 17 I saw [the decline of religious belief] as a liberation. At 83 I am more often inclined to see it as an impoverishment, the inevitable drying-up of one of the deeper springs from which the human imagination has in time past been nourished.'

That the decline of religion entails cultural loss is certain. Even Richard Dawkins regrets modern ignorance of the Bible as a literary source, and university lecturers lament the fact that knowledge of Christianity is accompanying familiarity with the classics into oblivion, so that students are unable to appreciate many of the allusions in English literature. But the loss of a sense of meaning is a still bigger problem. I doubt if many people will endure it, and religion will therefore persist. The older forms may fade away but they will always be replaced.

There is often said to have been a major development in religious understanding between about 800 and 200 BCE, though the exact time boundaries chosen are variable. Those were the centuries in which the great civilisations and religions of China, India, Persia, Israel, and Greece arose and famous religious texts, such as the Upanishads, the _Tao Te Ching,_ and the Hebrew Bible were compiled. In 1949 the German philosopher and historian Karl Jaspers proposed the term 'axial age' to describe this period. ('Axial' here means 'pivotal'.) Others have taken it up and it is quite widely used today. Some want to extend the axial age to the first century CE, to include the birth of Christianity, and then it seems illogical not to go further to bring in Muhammad and the foundation of Islam in the seventh century.

Are we living in a new axial age today? Quite a few people think so. The belief that humanity is undergoing a great transformation is still with us today. Talk of the 'Aquarian Age' linked this idea with astrology (something that C.G. Jung endorsed). Peter Russell's web site, 'The Spirit of Now', provides a good source for material of this kind [www.peterrussell.com].

The basic premise of the site is this: 'The crisis facing humanity today is, at its root, a crisis of consciousness. We are being called to put into practice the perennial wisdom of the ages. This site is offered as a stepping stone in that direction.' The principal themes of the site are described as Science and Consciousness, Earth and Environment, and Spiritual Awakening.

We live in complex societies and we are aware of global dangers that did not exist before. We know that we could wipe out most of the human race with the weapons at our disposal, and we are afraid that we may already have passed the point of no return in our degradation of the environment. It seems inevitable that the old religious certainties will be found wanting by many today, but it is equally certain that the age-old questions (Where did we come from? Where are we going? How should we live? What, if any, is the purpose of life?) are still there waiting to be answered. Science gives no answer to them, or, at best, it gives answers that we don't like and won't accept (We are the product of mindless evolution. We cease to exist when we die. There are no absolute values. There is no purpose to life apart from what we give it ourselves.). Faced with this, some try to retreat to the old certainties, while others seek to reinterpret them in a new way. The great appeal of millenarian beliefs is that they provide the best of both worlds, old and new. They promise a glorious future which has been foretold by the most ancient wisdom traditions in the world.

If we are living in a new axial age it is going to be difficult for us to discern the important features of the change while we are in the midst of it. The sociologist Yves Lambert uses the nice metaphor of a cinematic fade to describe this: the old ideas persist for a time while the new are still taking shape. We can identify a number of trends in present-day religion or spirituality which illustrate this.

1. This-worldliness

The older 'pie-in-the-sky' type of religion seems to be in decline. Many religious movements today are less interested in assuring their members of a place in heaven, and more concerned with promising them health and wealth in this life. Especially in the USA there are numerous preachers with large followings who emphasise the material blessings that can be expected by those who follow the Christian gospel. All this emphasis on the support of the Almighty for the righteous is reminiscent of classical Judaism, which fits in with the fondness of many Americans for quoting from the Old Testament. Little is said about any afterlife; it is reward here on earth that is being sought.

When I was in the TM movement we were constantly being told that, as meditators, we could expect 'the support of nature'. This meant that, on the mundane level, our lives would go better and we would achieve our aims more easily. But there was always a let-out clause, because if things didn't work out as expected that could be ascribed to the influence of past karma, which meditation would not eliminate.

For Christians, God is supposed to answer their prayers; Jesus promised his followers this. So what happens when prayers are apparently not answered? The let-out clause here is that God, in his inscrutable wisdom, chooses to answer them in a different way that may not be immediately obvious.

2. Reliance on personal experience

There is a widespread tendency to seek for inner truth and salvation rather than to rely external religious forms. I see it as a continuation and accentuation of the values of the Protestant reformation. At the centre of that movement was a rejection of the authority of the priesthood and an emphasis on the right of individuals to study the Bible and understand it for themselves. Today the role of Scripture is often seen as less important, the emphasis being now on the inner light. Whereas Christians traditionally thought of human nature as fallen and therefore intrinsically inclined to sin, many modern people who call themselves spiritual think that our nature is intrinsically good. Inspiration can be sought anywhere, including but not confined to Scripture. The texts of other religions are often cited and even art or popular music may be seen in this way. I heard of a young practitioner of TM who expressed this attitude perfectly. When a clergyman exhorted him to be like Christ, he replied: 'I don't want to be _like_ Christ, I want to _be_ Christ!' Attendance in church is often thought to be unnecessary or even disadvantageous for those seeking spirituality.

Another result of the Protestant reformation was the elimination of the need for intermediaries between man and God. In Catholicism, God is a remote figure, seldom prayed to directly, more often approached through intermediaries. Jesus should, of course, be the main intermediary, but Catholics often don't pray to him directly either, preferring to come to him via the Virgin Mary or a favourite saint. The Protestant reformation did away with intermediaries: Protestants could pray to God directly.

This trend continues today among the vaguely spiritual. Even outside formal religion many say they feel a personal closeness to God. Eastern-derived movements such as TM, the Divine Light Mission, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness teach that divinity lies within us – an idea that fits in well with the Protestant do-it-yourself view of religion. People in the TM movement repeatedly quoted the New Testament saying of Jesus: 'The Kingdom of God is within you.'

3. Parascience

I have borrowed this useful term from Lambert, who uses it to describe belief in astrology, the paranormal, cosmic forces, healing crystals and the like. The keyword here is 'energy', which functions as a universal 'explanation' for how such things work. The common feature of all these ideas and beliefs is that they use vocabulary taken from science and claim to be scientific. In fact, they say that their ideas are a more genuine kind of science, but they don't do any of the hard work that real science requires and there is usually no kind of test that could be applied to their theories. This is often not apparent to the large number of people in western cultures who have no real understanding of scientific method..

The examples of parascience I have cited are not religions, but people who describe themselves as spiritual often believe in them and there are belief systems that claim to be religions but are also parascientific, such as Scientology and Christian Science. Nor are the established religions immune to the impulse to seek scientific endorsement for their claims. There have been quite a number of studies intended to demonstrate the effects of prayer on health. These take the form of clinical trials to see whether being prayed for has measurable benefits for groups of patients compared to others who are not prayed for.

The trials have mostly been of poor quality, but in any case it seems self-evident to me that the whole enterprise is completely misconceived, even – or especially – if you think there is a God out there who intervenes in the world. They could be seen as 'testing God', which is strongly disapproved of in Christianity. Are we seriously meant to imagine God saying to himself: 'Oh, look, there are those nice doctors asking me to give them a hand to prove I exist. I'd better do so or people will stop believing in me.'? Surely he could find an easier way to demonstrate his existence if he wanted to (perhaps rearrange the stars to spell out a message)? It is difficult to know if these trials are meant to summon up faith in the minds of waverers or to bolster the flagging faith of those who design them.

4. Religious pluralism

This is probably the most important development of all. It has a precedent. The late classical period of the fifth century BCE saw the great flowering of Greek rationality, in which the beliefs of earlier times were called into question and examined. But this rationality did not endure; it was succeeded in the Hellenistic period by an outbreak of enthusiasm for astrology, magical medicine, and alchemy. The Roman Empire, shortly before the adoption of Christianity as its official religion, had been full of different religions, many of them new or imported from the east. The parallels with our present situation are obvious. Christianity may be waning, at least in Europe (though not in Africa, which is now sending missionaries to Britain!) but other religions are flourishing more than ever.

Until quite recently the only non-Christian religion familiar to most British Christians was Judaism. Nowadays things are very different. There is a large Muslim population, many of whose members distinguish themselves by their dress and appearance, and there are mosques in all the large cities. But these are just the most obvious changes in the religious landscape. Anyone who wants to explore Hinduism, Buddhism, the Baha'i faith, or any of dozens of others no longer has to travel abroad to do so; they are all on offer here.

A popular British radio soap opera, _The Archers,_ currently has a story line about the village vicar marrying a Hindu and setting up a statue of the god Shiva in his home, much to the dismay of one of his more conservative parishioners. Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, has said that he doesn't want to be called 'Defender of the Faith' but 'Defender of [all kinds of] faiths'. The Archbishop of Canterbury has argued for the recognition of some elements of Muslim religious law, sharia, although admittedly the terms in which he expressed himself were so abstrusely intellectual and nuanced that no one seems to be entirely clear exactly what it was that he had said.

Eternal life?

Throughout almost the whole of the Christian era belief in an afterlife was all but universal. Weakening or loss of this belief has thrown many back on this-worldliness, which is not always enough for them. The main reason that the NDE research attracts so much interest is that it appears to offer scientific evidence that our consciousness continues after death. Yet although belief in an afterlife appears to be declining, even among those who describe themselves as Christian, people's conscious beliefs are sometimes contradicted at an unconscious or intuitive level. Jesse Bering, a psychologist, has shown this in a study he carried out on his students; he reports it in _Scientific American Mind_ _[22 October 2008]._

Bering presented the students with a scenario in which 'Richard' was driving along when his car hit a pole and he died instantly. Bering described the man's state of mind just before the accident and asked the students whether, now he was dead, Richard could still experience mental states. Would he be thinking about his wife? Would he still be able to taste the mint sweet he was sucking just before the accident? Would he want to be alive?

Most of the students gave answers which implied that Richard's consciousness would continue after death. This was not surprising, because the majority had previously identified themselves as believing in some form of afterlife. But what was surprising was that 32 per cent of those who had said they thought that consciousness ceases at death also gave answers of this kind. One of this group seemed to regard Bering as a fool for even posing the question, yet he said that of course Richard knows he is dead because there is no afterlife and Richard sees that now! The confusion in the mind of this student reminds me of a rather similar one that appeared in the responses to a survey conducted by _Theos_ in 2008 [www.theosthinktank.co.uk].

Forty per cent of the group questioned thought that Jesus was the Son of God, and this included 7 per cent of the 250 atheists interviewed! Consistency is apparently no higher a priority for sceptics than it is for religious believers.

Bering's explanation for his findings is that we are psychologically unable to imagine non-existence, because we can never experience it. Even though we pass through a state of dreamless sleep each night, this is not the same as non-existence. After all, when we wake up we have a sense of time having passed, so some kind of mental activity was presumably going on.

Another reason why we believe in postmortem consciousness, he suggests, is that at a very early stage in our life we learn that when someone goes out of the room they don't cease to exist just because we can no longer see them. As a rule they come back. We take this idea on into adult life: we can imagine our friends and acquaintances carrying on their lives and maintaining their personal characteristics when they are living in a different town or a different continent, so when someone dies there is a natural tendency to apply the same kind of reasoning to them and to think that they are still living somewhere, even though we may know we attended their cremation and saw the box containing the body disappear through a curtain to be reduced to carbon and a small residue of mineral ash.

There is probably something in this. I find it difficult to feel that my parents and others who were close to me no longer exist, even though I know, intellectually, that this is the case. There is a well-known tendency for the bereaved to hallucinate the voices and presence of loved ones who have died, which probably occurs for similar reasons. But I think there are other causes for this besides the ones offered by Bering. The explanation, I suggest, is that we are unable to avoid thinking of our life as a narrative.

Our inner consciousness takes the form of an ongoing story. It must do this, otherwise we would have no means of ordering our episodic memories. We imagine our life as a development from our earliest memories through to the present. The story is being constantly updated in a sort of mental blog. There are other characters in the blog: our partners, our relatives, our friends and acquaintances, and we imagine that these people, too, have their own blogs. It is difficult and unnatural for us to think of all these blogs, and particularly of our own blog, as having a termination. Will we one day find ourselves writing THE END on the last page? If we did, of course, it would not really be THE END.

Belief in an afterlife extends our personal narrative indefinitely. Human life is short, and though we don't often realize this when we are near the beginning of it the fact becomes increasingly apparent as we near its end. As this happens we grow ever more conscious of the things we intended to do and didn't, and of the people we will lose contact with when we die. If the message that NDEs bring us is true, the situation is less bleak. Perhaps we embark after death on a never-ending voyage of discovery and spiritual exploration.

It would be nice to believe this – I wish I did. (But not reincarnation, thank you very much. If even half the prognostications for life by about the mid-twenty-first century are correct, I should not wish to come back.)

For some who don't believe it, the resulting loss of meaning is hard to bear. Probably few people before the modern era experienced this with any vividness, and it may be one of the reasons why so many today who don't belong to any particular religious tradition continue to say they are spiritual. What they mean by this is often unclear but one way of understanding it is to say that they feel there is another realm beyond the material and that it is this which provides human life with meaning. They may or may not describe this other realm in religious terms.

As a boy I attended a school run by Benedictine monks. The headmaster used to tell us that people often asked 'What is the meaning of life?', but we didn't need to wonder about this, because we knew. In the words of the Catechism, the little grey book containing the essentials of the faith which we were required to know by heart, the purpose of life was to know God and love Him in this life and to be happy with Him for ever in the next. I found this rather restrictive; I was quite attracted by the romantic notion of searching for the meaning of life and I was rather disappointed to be told I already knew the answer.

Christians believe they have bit parts in a cosmic drama, in which the central figures are God the Father, Jesus, Mary and the saints. If you don't believe that, what is left? Most non-believers think the question no longer makes sense, but a few don't find it possible to stop asking, even though they may not expect or want a religious answer. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has described such people as having the 'religious temperament'.

He is one of these himself. He says that he does not believe in God and would not wish there to be a God, because he doesn't want the sort of world that would entail. Yet he cannot help thinking about fundamental questions. The ultimate such question is: 'How can we find a relation to the universe at the deepest level?'

As Nagel remarks himself, it is rather unusual to find an atheist asking questions of this kind. Most are content to believe that the only answers to fundamental questions we can hope for will be provided by science. Religious people are fond of telling us that science answers 'how' questions but religion answers 'why' questions, and Nagel seems to agree up to a point, though he does not accept any of the answers that religions provide. But he complains that the scientists' view of the universe, beautiful and awe-inspiring though it is, does not give it any meaning.

A principal problem from this point of view is the origin of life. Evolution theory gives a good explanation of how species develop and change, but it presupposes the existence of life in the first place. Evolution depends on DNA, but at present there is no satisfactory theory to account for DNA. One eminent philosopher, Antony Flew, has announced his abandonment of lifelong atheism over exactly this question. This does not make him a Christian but it does make him a deist – someone who accepts the need for a Designer to start things off. You don't pray to Flew's God or worship him, he is simply the solution to a puzzle. Of course, if a secular explanation of the origin of life were found, as seems perfectly possible, the need for Flew's God would disappear.

Nagel has not gone down Flew's route; he still insists he is an atheist. But he argues for the need to expand our horizons to include the notion that purpose is in some sense built into the universe. He discerns a 'fear of religion' in many scientists which leads them to postulate multiple universes and similar extravagances in a desperate attempt to get away from the notion of purpose. He finds it would be more reasonable to admit to ignorance, and to acknowledge that at present we are unable to construct a comprehensive theory of reality.

Another way of describing the religious temperament would be to say that it arises from a sense that there has to be 'something more'. But more than what? More, I suppose, than the material world. Many of us probably have this feeling of dissatisfaction with our world at times, and this may prompt us to seek for an alternative, as expressed in the hippy slogan 'Stop the world, I want to get off'. Perhaps it existed in the past, in the Garden of Eden, or perhaps it will exist in the future, when Jesus returns at the Second Coming. Perhaps it will happen when we die and find ourselves in heaven. Perhaps it will come about, as some Eastern religions promise, by means of an interior realisation of truth and the attainment of Enlightenment.

This quest for 'something more' has echoes in science, in the search for an Absolute outside material existence, a vantage point from which we, or God, can survey the world. In Western philosophy it starts with Plato. The physicist Lee Smolin finds that it motivated a number of his most eminent predecessors, including Newton, Copernicus, Descartes and even Einstein. But he wants to get away from this way of thinking and to liberate us from the idea that there is a Platonic realm of truth. This world is all we have and there is nothing beyond, no Absolute vantage point from which our existence could be surveyed.

I think we could see this quest for the Absolute in cosmology as a large-scale version of the quest for the human soul. There is an ancient notion, found, for example, in the western alchemical tradition and also in Chinese thought, which holds that the human body (the microcosm) is a miniature version of the universe (the macrocosm). If you take this idea seriously it leads rather naturally to the notion of a World Soul or Universal Mind as a counterpart to the individual mind. We have a mind that governs our movements, so why should the universe not have its own Mind? The World Soul (God) is pictured as watching how the universe develops, in much the same way as the soul watches the world through the senses. And the World Soul controls the universe just as the soul controls the body. But modern neuroscience finds no evidence of any central area in the brain which co-ordinates all the other neural activity, let alone any evidence for a detachable soul. The same applies to the notion of a World Soul. It may be a natural assumption to make but that does not mean it is true.

Those who yearn for an Absolute are often referred to as Platonists. For much of my life I was a Platonist. The Godin whom I believed during my Catholic upbringing was an Absolute being, distinct from His creation. Later I became a follower of the Indian Vedantic tradition, in which there is also a belief in an Absolute. Brahman, God, the Real, and the Tao are just some of the names that have been given to it. There is undoubtedly a fascination in pursuing ideas of this kind down endless avenues of speculation, losing oneself in huge metaphysical edifices: cloud-capp'd towers and gorgeous palaces. But in the end, at least for me, they dissolved, leaving not a wrack behind. And I find, rather to my own surprise, that there is an immense sense of relief in simply letting it all go.

I sometimes wonder if I have the religious temperament. I suppose I must do to some extent, otherwise I would not have spent so long exploring different religious traditions and metaphysical systems. Even now I can still feel remnants of the desire for 'something more', but I no longer expect that it will be found in adopting any kind of metaphysical belief. All the systems I have looked at have the same basic flaw at their root: they are all human constructions. They therefore are in a sense self-contradictory: they claim to provide knowledge of the very thing that their assertion of a transcendental realm insists is beyond the reach of human reason.

Some do acknowledge this. The Jewish tradition refuses to name God, because God is beyond all naming. Joseph Needham reports visiting a Taoist temple in China, which had many floors, each with different images of divinities; at the top was a room that was completely empty except for a rock with a plaque bearing the inscription: Nature, the Mother of All. But the great metaphysical traditions are never content to leave matters there; they always go on to describe, at enormous length, what they say is beyond all description.

Richard Dawkins has said that what he objects to in supernatural beliefs is not their extravagance but, on the contrary, their inadequacy. They fail to do justice to the extraordinary richness and sublimity of the real, the natural, world. I agree. I find the knowledge that I am descended from an ancestral tree going back into the remotest regions of time, and am related by my DNA to every other organism on the planet that exists today or has ever existed, literally awe-inspiring. I don't know if this is evidence of the religious temperament, but, if it is, no religious teaching comes even close to recreating the feeling in me.

It is true that we don't know where it all comes from. When I was aged about six I was sometimes overwhelmed by a sense of terror at the thought of nothingness. Why should there be anything at all rather than nothing? It made me almost physically dizzy to contemplate this. Perhaps that is what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant when he wrote 'Not _how_ the world is, is the mystical, but _that_ it is'. Like much of what he wrote, this utterance is enigmatic. But that, of course, is just the point.

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