/n 3 Why We Became Religious and The Evolution of the Spirit World Marvin Harris The following selection by anthropologist Marvin Harris originally appeared as two separate essays, one entitled "Why We Became Religious," the other "The Evolution of the Spirit World." In the first essay, Harris comments on the fascinating possibility of religion among nonhuman species. He also discusses the concept of mana (an inherent force or power), noting that, although the concepts of superstition, luck, and charisma in Western cultures closely resemble mana, they are not really religious concepts. Rather, according to Harris, the basis of all religious thought is animism, the universal belief that we humans share the world with various extracorporeal, mostly invisible beings. Harris closes the first essay with some thoughts on the concept of an inner being— a soul-pointing out that in many cultures people believe a person may have more than one. In "The Evolution of the Spirit World," Harris advances the notion that spiritual beings found in modern religions are also found in the religions of prestate societies. Thus, he briefly examines religious thought and behavior pertaining to ancestor worship at varying levels of societal complex- ity, starting with band-and-village societies, the earliest of human cultures. Next, Harris notes the importance of recently deceased relatives in the religions of more complexly developed societies, such as those based on gardening and fishing. Chiefdoms represent an even higher level of devel- opment, one in which greater specialization arose, including a religious practitioner who paid special attention to the chief's ancestors. Finally, Harris observes that, with the development of early states and empires, dead ancestors assumed a place of great prominence alongside the gods. Marvin Harris (1927-2001) was a tremendous popularizer of anthropology, thanks to the accessible writing style of his works for students and the general public. He helped develop the theoretical perspective known as cultural materialism, often emphasizing the relationship between culture and ecology. Human social life cannot be understood apart from the deeply held beliefs and values that in the short Pages 397-407 from OUR KIND by Marvin Harris. Copyright 1989 by Marvin Harris. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. run, at least, motivate and mobilize our transactions with each other and the world of nature. So let me... confront certain questions concerning our kind's reli- gious beliefs and behavior. First, are there any precedents for religion in non- human species? The answer is yes, only if one accepts 25 26 THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF RELIGION a definition of religion broad enough to include "su perstitious" responses. Behavioral psychologists have long been familiar with the fact that animals can acquire responses that are falsely associated with re- wards. For example, a pigeon is placed in a cage into which food pellets are dropped by a mechanical feeder at irregular intervals. If the reward is deliv- ered by chance while the bird is scratching, it begins to scratch faster. If the reward is delivered while a bird happens to be flapping its wings, it keeps flap- ping them as if wing-flapping controls the feeder. Among humans, one can find analogous supersti- tions in the little rituals that baseball players engage in as they come up to bat, such as touching their caps, spitting, or rubbing their hands. None of this has any real connection with getting a hit, although constant repetition assures that every time batters get hits, they have performed the ritual. Some minor phobic behavior among humans also might be attributed to associations based on coincidental rather than contin- gent circumstances. I know a heart surgeon who tol- erates only popular music piped into his operating room ever since he lost a patient while classical com- positions were being played. Superstition raises the issue of causality. Just how do the activities and objects that are connected in su- perstitious beliefs influence one another? A reason- able, if evasive, answer is to say that the causal activity or object has an inherent force or power to achieve the observed effects. Abstracted and gener- alized, this inherent force or power can provide the explanation for many extraordinary events and for success or failure in life's endeavors. In Melanesia, people call it mana. Fishhooks that catch big fish, tools that make intricate carvings, canoes that sail safely through storms, or warriors who kill many en- emies, all have mana in concentrated quantities. In Western cultures, the concepts of luck and charisma closely resemble the idea of mana. A horseshoe pos- sesses a concentrated power that brings good luck. A charismatic leader is one who is suffused with great powers of persuasion. But are superstitions, mana, luck, and charisma religious concepts? I think not. Because, if we define religion as a belief in any indwelling forces and pow- ers, we shall soon find it difficult to separate religion from physics. After all, gravity and electricity are also unseen forces that are associated with observable ef- fects. While it is true that physicists know much more about gravity than about mana, they cannot claim to have a complete understanding of how gravity achieves its results. At the same time, couldn't one argue that superstitions, mana, luck, and charisma are also merely theories of causality involving physi- cal forces and powers about which we happen to have incomplete understanding as yet? True, more scientific testing has gone into the study of gravity than into the study of mana, but the degree of scientific testing to which a theory has been subjected cannot make the difference between whether it is a religious or a scientific belief. If it did. then every untested or inadequately tested theory in science would be a religious belief (as well as every scientific theory that has been shown to be false dur- ing the time when scientists believed it to be true!). Some astronomers theorize that at the center of each galaxy there is a black hole. Shall we say that this is a religious belief because other astronomers reject such a theory or regard it as inadequately tested? It is not the quality of belief that distinguishes re- ligion from science. Rather, as Sir Edward Tylor was the first to propose, the basis of all that is distinctly religious in human thought is animism, the belief that humans share the world with a population of extraordinary, extracorporeal, and mostly invisible beings, ranging from souls and ghosts to saints and fairies, angels and cherubim, demons, jinni, devils, and gods. Wherever people believe in the existence of one or more of these beings, that is where religion exists. Tylor claimed that animistic beliefs were to be found in every society, and a century of ethnological re- search has yet to turn up a single exception. The most problematic case is that of Buddhism, which Tylor's critics portrayed as a world religion that lacked belief in gods or souls. But ordinary believers outside of Buddhist monasteries never accepted the atheistic implications of Gautama's teachings. Main- stream Buddhism, even in the monasteries, quickly envisioned the Buddha as a supreme deity who had been successively reincarnated and who held sway over a pantheon of lower gods and demons. And it was as fully animistic creeds that the several variet- ies of Buddhism spread from India to Tibet, South- east Asia, China, and Japan. Why is animism universal? Tylor pondered the question at length. He reasoned that if a belief re- curred again and again in virtually all times and HARRIS ⚫ WHY WE BECAME RELIGIOUS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRIT WORLD 27 places, it could not be a product of mere fantasy. Rather, it must have grounding in evidence and in experiences that were equally recurrent and univer- sal. What were these experiences? Tylor pointed to dreams, trances, visions, shadows, reflections, and death. During dreams, the body stays in bed; yet an- other part of us gets up, talks to people, and travels to distant lands. Trances and drug-induced visions also bring vivid evidence of another self, distinct and separate from one's body. Shadows and mirror im- ages reflected in still water point to the same conclu- sion, even in the full light of normal wakefulness. The concept of an inner being-a soul-makes sense of all this. It is the soul that wanders off when we sleep, that lies in the shadows, and that peers back at us from the surface of the pond. Most of all, the soul explains the mystery of death: a lifeless body is a body permanently deprived of its soul. Incidentally, there is nothing in the concept of soul per se that constrains us to believe each person has only one. The ancient Egyptians had two, and so do many West African societies in which both patri- lineal and matrilineal ancestors determine an indi- vidual's identity. The Jívaro of Ecuador have three souls. The first soul-the mekas-gives life to the body. The second soul-the arutam-has to be cap- tured through a drug-induced visionary experience at a sacred waterfall. It confers bravery and immu- nity in battle to the possessor. The third soul-the musiak forms inside the head of a dying warrior and attempts to avenge his death. The Dahomey say that women have three souls; men have four. Both sexes have an ancestor soul, a personal soul, and a mawn soul. The ancestor soul gives protection dur- ing life, the personal soul is accountable for what people do with their lives, the mawn soul is a bit of the creator god, Mawn, that supplies divine guid- ance. The exclusively male fourth soul guides men to positions of leadership in their households and lin- eages. But the record for plural souls seems to belong to the Fang of Gabon. They have seven: a sound in- side the brain, a heart soul, a name soul, a life force soul, a body soul, a shadow soul, and a ghost soul. Why do Westerners have only one soul? I cannot answer that. Perhaps the question is unanswerable. I accept the possibility that many details of religious beliefs and practices may arise from historically spe- cific events and individual choices made only once and only in one culture and that have no discernible cost-benefit advantages or disadvantages. While a belief in souls does conform to the general principles of cultural selection, belief in one rather than two or more souls may not be comprehensible in terms of such principles. But let us not be too eager to declare any puzzling feature of human life forever beyond the pale of practical reason. For has it not been our experience that more research often leads to answers that were once thought unattainable? The Evolution of the Spirit World All varieties of spirit beings found in modern reli- gions have their analogues or exact prototypes in the religions of prestate societies. Changes in animistic beliefs since Neolithic times involve matters of em- phasis and elaboration. For example, band-and- village people widely believed in gods who lived on top of mountains or in the sky itself and who served as the models for later notions of supreme beings as well as other powerful sky gods. In Aboriginal Australia, the sky god created the earth and its natural features, showed humans how to hunt and make fire, gave people their social laws, and showed them how to make adults out of children by perform- ing rites of initiation. The names of their quasi- supreme beings-Baiame, Daramulum, Nurunderi- could not be uttered by the uninitiated. Similarly, the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego believed in "the one who is up there." The Yaruro of Venezuela spoke of a "great mother" who created the world. The Maidu of California believed in a great "slayer in the sky." Among the Semang of Malaysia, Kedah created ev- erything, including the god who created the earth and humankind. The Andaman Islanders had Puluga whose house is the sky, and the Winnebago had "earthmaker." Although prestate peoples occasionally prayed to these great spirits or even visited them during trances, the focus of animistic beliefs generally lay elsewhere. In fact, most of the early creator gods ab- stained from contact with human beings. Having created the universe, they withdraw from worldly affairs and let other lesser deities, animistic beings, and humans work out their own destinies. Ritually, the most important category of animistic beings was the ancestors of the band, village, and clan or other kinship groups whose members believed they were bonded by common descent. 28 THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF RELIGION People in band-and-village societies tend to have short memories concerning specific individu- als who have died. Rather than honor the recent dead, or seek favors from them, egalitarian cultures often place a ban on the use of the dead person's name and try to banish or evade his or her ghost. Among the Washo, a native American foraging about people who lived along the border of California and Nevada, souls of the dead were angry being deprived of their bodies. They were danger- ous and had to be avoided. So the Washo burned the dead person's hut, clothing, and other personal property and stealthily moved their camp to a place where they hoped the dead person's soul could not find them. The Dusun of North Borneo curse a dead person's soul and warn it to stay away from the village. Reluctantly, the soul gathers up belongings left at its grave site and sets off for the land of the dead. But this distrust of the recent dead does not ex- tend to the most ancient dead, not to the generality of ancestor spirits. In keeping with the ideology of descent, band-and-village people often memorial- ize and propitiate their communal ancestral spirits. Much of what is known as totemism is a form of diffuse ancestor worship. Taking the name of an animal such as kangaroo or beaver or a natural phe- nomenon such as clouds or rain in conformity with prevailing rules of descent, people express a com- munal obligation to the founders of their kinship group. Often this obligation includes rituals in- tended to nourish, protect, or assure the increase of the animal and natural totems and with it the health and well-being of their human counterparts. Ab- original Australians, for example, believed that they were descended from animal ancestors who traveled around the country during the dream-time at the beginning of the world, leaving mementos of their journey strewn about before turning into peo- ple. Annually, the descendants of a particular to- temic ancestor retraced the dream-time journey. As they walked from spot to spot, they sang, danced, and examined sacred stones, stored in secret hiding places along the path taken by the first kangaroo or the first witchetty grub. Returning to camp, they decorated themselves in the likeness of their totem and imitated its behavior. The Arunta witchetty- grub men, for instance, decorated themselves with strings, nose bones, rattails, and feathers, painted their bodies with the sacred design of the witchetty grub, and constructed a brush hut in the shape of the witchetty-grub chrysalis. They entered the hut and sang of the journey they had made. Then the head men came shuffling and gliding out, followed by all the rest, in imitation of adult witchetty grubs emerging from a chrysalis. In most village societies an undifferentiated com- munity of ancestral spirits keep a close watch on their descendants, ready to punish them if they commit incest or if they break the taboos against eat- ing certain foods. Important endeavors-hunting, gardening, pregnancy, warfare-need the blessings of a group's ancestors to be successful, and such blessings are usually obtained by holding feasts in the ancestors' honor according to the principle that a well-fed ancestor is a well-intentioned ancestor. Throughout highland New Guinea, for example, people believe that the ancestral spirits enjoy eat- ing pork as much as living persons enjoy eating it. To please the ancestors, people slaughter whole herds of pigs before going to war or when celebrat- ing important events in an individual's life such as marriage and death. But in keeping with a big-man redistributive level of political organization, no one claims that his or her ancestors merit special treatment. Under conditions of increasing population, greater wealth to be inherited, and intrasocietal com- petition between different kin groups, people tend to pay more attention to specific and recently deceased relatives in order to validate claims to the inheri- tance of land and other resources. The Dobuans, South Pacific yam gardeners and fishermen of the Admiralty Islands, have what seems to be an incipi- ent phase of a particularized ancestor religion. When the leader of a Dobuan household died, his children cleaned his skull, hung it from the rafters of their house, and provided it with food and drink. Addressing it as "Sir Ghost," they solicited protec tion against disease and misfortune, and through oracles, asked him for advice. If Sir Ghost did not cooperate, his heirs threatened to get rid of him. Ac- tually, Sir Ghost could never win. The death of his children finally proved that he was no longer of any use. So when the grandchildren took charge, they threw Sir Ghost into the lagoon, substituting their own father's skull as the symbol of the household's new spiritual patron. HARRIS WHY WE BECAME RELIGIOUS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRIT WORLD | With the development of chiefdoms, ruling elites employed specialists whose job was to memorize the names of the chief's ancestors. To make sure that the remains of these dignitaries did not get thrown away like Sir Ghost's skull, paramount chiefs built elabo- rate tombs that preserved links between generations in a tangible form. Finally, with the emergence of states and empires, as the rulers' souls rose to take their places in the firmament alongside the high gods, their mummified mortal remains, surrounded by exquisite furniture, rare jewels, gold-encrusted chariots and other preciosities, were interred in gi- gantic crypts and pyramids that only a true god could have built. Study Question What are some of the ways in which beliefs in souls, gods, and other spiritual beings vary among societies? Related Readings and Media Bellah, Robert N. 2011 Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press. Intricate coverage of the development of religious phenomena among humans, including attention to the Middle East, Greece, China, and India as well as prehistory. By a preeminent sociologist. www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2005/04/Multifaith- Round-Up-Views-Of-The-Soul.aspx?p=1 Collection of comments about the concept of soul, from leaders of various religions in the United States, from the popular website beliefnet.com. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/ chinese-afterlife/hessler-text National Geographic magazine article on ancestor wor ship in ancient China, including a gallery of photos.