In this context, “new” is a relative term, given that so much material touching upon religion is old and often obscure. When the itch develops I can go to Google Scholar, plug in search terms related to religion, and have 50 articles in short order. Many will have been published years ago in obscure journals and have been largely forgotten — or worse, were never acknowledged because they were read only by the author’s peers, which may mean that perhaps 100 people read the article. Discovering these articles, many of which are brilliant, is an immense pleasure. Though I wish I could cover all of them, other projects like books, work, and teaching prevent this. Speaking of books, during the recent course of writing one I’ve had the pleasure of reading several articles which deserve mention. Over the next few months, I’ll be covering as many as I can. Some will have more coverage and some less. My hope is to bring attention to superb or provocative work which languishes in the archives.

For those interested in historic Native American religion, I strongly recommend “The Plains Vision Experience: A Study of Power and Privilege” (1971) by Patricia Albers and Seymour Parker. This is one of those rare or old school articles in cultural anthropology where the authors formed a hypothesis and tested it with ethnographic data. They hypothesized that the social construction and cultural import of the vision experience would vary in accord with societal type. They identified three kinds of Plains societies: peripheral hunter-gatherers (e.g., Shoshoni, Flathead, Kutenai), True Plains societies (e.g., Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow), and peripheral farming groups (e.g., Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa). Those familiar with Native American ethnohistory will recognize these as valid ecological-economic classifications. All lived on the Plains and all cultivated the vision experience to one degree or another.

Rita Joyce Copyright

As predicted, each group constructed and construed the vision experience differently. Moreover, the differences systematically varied between groups. The authors make a strong case for a regular relationship between type of society and type of vision experience. Before anyone’s eyes start to glaze thinking this is one of those dessicated research projects demanding that anthropology be a nomothetic science, it isn’t. The authors have a deft touch and deep understanding of cultural complexity. They are quite sensitive to lived experiences. I’ve read most of the material on the Plains vision complex, and this article is one of the best. It brings some order and understanding to a field content to collect cultural butterflies in the past (i.e., Ruth Benedict’s work on the vision complex).

The summation is reminiscent of Julian Steward, and worth quoting at length for those who don’t have institutional access to the article:

Given the findings of this paper with respect to the relationship between social-structural variables and the vision experience, it would seem reasonable to assume that socially recognized visions provided an ideology to “explain” and to support the existing societal opportunity structure. In hunting and gathering societies they served to explain inequalities in personal talents and achievements. In True Plains societies they no longer merely validated differences in personal attributes and achievements but represented a means for justifying existing differences in wealth. Finally, in farming societies the institutionalization of standardized visions served to validate the transfer of inherited property and to legitimize ascribed status positions. Further, these visions supported and reinforced the formalization of status inequalities.

This paper also suggests that the specific functions of visions as a form of anticipatory socialization were not uniform. While it seems clear that in all of the societies under consideration visions have an important role in motivating people to conform to existing institutions, they vary in terms of the nature of the conformity that is encouraged. In the peripheral hunting and gathering societies, as well as in the True Plains societies, most socially recognized visions can be seen to function in encouraging personal achievements, initiative, and independence. However, when the symbolism in visions becomes standardized and is associated with social groups, as in the peripheral farming societies, it appears that visions served to reinforce anchorage in and dependency upon organized collectivities. Therefore, depending on the symbolism manifested in visions, they can be seen as rein- forcing either psychological independence or dependence.

Our paper supports the position that the relative importance of purely individualistically defined religious experiences decreases as one moves to societies with greater economic surplus and social complexity. The growth of status inequality and formalized modes of status allocation are accompanied by increasing restrictions on the incidence, occasions, and participants in personal-spontaneous religious experience that are publicly sanctioned. Private religious experiences, however, do not disappear but increasingly become articulated with formal social groups and their activities. Further, when societies develop larger and more complex corporate structures, such religious phenomena no longer provide a viable or socially acceptable mechanism for status allocation and the assumption of secular power. Societal myths develop to provide a satisfactory rationale for identity with and anchorage in a more complex sociopolitical structure. There is another important factor, however, that comes into play: namely, the increasing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, power, and privileges, and the increasing stabilization of this differentiation. This influence increasingly serves to limit access to and control over supernatural powers. The ideology underlying the vision thus serves (a la Marx) to support the existing distribution of secular power.

That’s really good stuff. The implications for other societies and religions are pretty obvious.

Reference:

Albers, Patricia, & Parker, Seymour. (1971). The Plains Vision Experience: A Study of Power and Privilege Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 27 (3), 203-233

In Israel’s Other Temple: Research Reveals Ancient Struggle Over Holy Land Supremacy, we learn that the Samaritans and Jews have a common and competitive history. The Samaritans at one time were the dominant Israelite tribe with a spectacular temple that was the political and religious center of the region. Jerusalem at the time was sparsely populated and a relatively inconsequential sideshow.

Geography being a form of destiny, the Samaritans had the misfortune of being in the north where they bore the harsh brunt of Assyrian invasions. Samaria was devastated and many of its people fled 30 miles south to Jerusalem, which grew in size and importance. Leaders in Jerusalem sensed and seized opportunity, finishing the job started by the Assyrians: they destroyed Samaria and the original temple.

Mount Gerizim -- Site of Samaritan/Israelite Temple

They were not able, however, to destroy all the books and several older (i.e., Samaritan) versions of the Torah survived. These older versions tell a quite different story from the newer and revised versions written by the victors from Jerusalem:

[W]hich Torah is the original? Until recently, the generally accepted school of thought was as follows: In the fourth century BC, the Samaritans split off as a radical sect. In the Bible, they appear as outsiders and idol worshipers; they are evil. The parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37) offers a rather atypical portrayal of a member of this sect.

The historian Titus Flavius Josephus, himself a Jew, mentions that the apostates erected a shrine “in all haste” in the year 330 BC, as a rather dilettantish attempt to emulate the Temple in Jerusalem.

Increasingly, though, it looks as though the Bible has handed down a distorted picture of history. Papyrus scrolls recovered from Qumran on the Dead Sea, as well as a fragment of the Bible that recently surfaced on the market for antiquities, necessitate a “complete reassessment,” says Professor Stefan Schorch.

At first — so much is clear — the Samaritans had the upper hand. Indeed, compared with Jerusalem, [the Samaritan temple on] Mount Gerizim enjoyed significantly older rights: In the great tale of the history of the chosen people, the mountain plays a key role.

Abraham, the progenitor of the Israelites — who, according to legend, roamed through the Orient as a shepherd around 1500 BC — stopped there because God had appeared to him in a wondrous vision. Later, Jacob the patriarch traveled there to build the original shrine.

In the fifth book of Moses, the mountain summit finally earns a prominent place in biblical history: After the flight from Egypt, the Israelites wandered through the Sinai desert for 40 years. At last, they reached the Jordan River from the east. Their old and weary leader gazed across the river to the promised land, where “milk and honey flow.”

Shortly before his death, Moses issued an important command: The people must first travel to Mount Gerizim. He said that six tribes should climb it and proclaim blessings, while the other six tribes should proclaim curses from the top of nearby Mount Ebal. It was a kind of ritual taking possession of the promised land.

Finally, the prophet tells the Israelites to build a shrine “made of stones” on Mount Gerizim and coat it with “plaster.” Indeed, he said, this is “the place that the Lord has chosen.”

That, in any case, is what stands in the oldest Bible texts. They are brittle papyrus scrolls that were made over 2,000 years ago in Qumran, and have only recently been examined by experts.

In the Hebrew Bible, which Jerusalem’s priests probably spent a good deal of time revising [after subjugating the Samaritans and destroying the Gerizim temple], everything suddenly sounds quite different. There is no longer any mention of a “chosen place.”

The word “Gerizim” has also been removed from the crucial passage. Instead, the text states that the Yahweh altar was erected on “Ebal.” “By naming the mountain of the curses,” says Schorch, “they wanted to cast the entire tale in a negative light, and deprive Gerizim of its biblical legitimacy.”

[Torah scholar] Stefan Schorch dates the intervention to around 150 BC. The researcher stops short of calling it fraud, though, preferring to label it an “adaptation of the Bible to their own religious view.”

There is obviously a great deal at stake here, and I expect that the scholars and archaeologists working on these issues will be attacked from all directions. Their work will upset both Jews and Christians, albeit for curiously different reasons.

As the scholarly investigation continues and attacks are made, I think it important keep cui bono in mind at all times. Who is doing the attacking and what benefit do they derive from what may be the newer, revised, and mythical (hi)story?

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the supposed exemplar of such religion came from the Australian Aborigines, and in the 1970s the south African Bushmen or San were added as exemplars. In addition to these two allegedly primordial paradigms, many viewed native American peoples as bearers of ancient supernatural traditions. Others thought that isolated Amazonian and Melanesian societies could shed light on the subject.

What many of these reconstruction projects have in common is the assumption that all such peoples were frozen in time and that their “religions,” which are not isomorphic with Western concepts and definitions of “religion,” did not change over time. We know, of course, that none of this correct — all such peoples have complex histories of migration, contact, and change. While some may have carried on in ways that more closely resembled ancient lifeways, this doesn’t mean their “religions” (a word and concept foreign to most or all of them) are static models of the Paleolithic past. At best, they can serve as rough analogues that may have more in common with ancient ideas than do modern or “world religions.” At worst, they are considered to be pristine exemplars of original religion.

While it might seem that anthropologists are aware of these issues, duly cautious, and provide the requisite qualifications, reminders are occasionally needed. One such reminder came in 1989 with the publication of Edwin Wilmsen’s Land of the Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari, which ignited a major and acrimonious debate about the history of south African Bushmen. Wilmsen argued, with some ideological zeal, that the San were not pristine hunter-gatherers but instead were marginalized peoples who became foragers only recently and as a result of larger economic processes. For all the book’s faults, Wilmsen demonstrated that the Bushmen had a more complex history than was supposed and were not pristine exemplars of the ancient past.

Similar kinds of debates have surrounded Australian Aborigines, whose “religion” known as “the Dreaming” has long been the darling of scholars. Durkheim’s famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) relied on a sketchy construction of Aboriginal supernaturalism. While this construction was brought up to date by Mircea Eliade’s studies on “Australian Religions,” Eliade’s phenomenological commitments were distorting. Knowing this, several scholars have continued with the reconstruction or recovery process. While I haven’t followed the details, in 2009 whatever was happening prompted Max Charlesworth to issue some reminders:

Again, the radically ahistorical approach that Radcliffe-Brown introduced into anthropology de-emphasized cultural and religious change and development, and made it appear that Aboriginal societies and their religions were wholly static, conservative and ‘timeless’. However, in actual fact there is continual change and innovation in Aboriginal religions with sacred songs and rituals being exchanged and bartered between regional groups within the bounds of the foundation charters of the Dreamings of particular groups. Indeed, the various Dreamings have themselves often undergone change and innovation.

[I]n actual fact the Dreaming myths of many Aboriginal peoples have creatively assimilated elements from other groups. The most striking example of this is the influence of Muslim fishermen in Macassar in Indonesia on the Yolngu people of Elcho Island in northeast Arnhem Land. The Macassans were engaged in the collection of trepang and they came down with the trade winds each year from the early 1700s until 1907, establishing close economic and social relations with the Aboriginal people. As a result of this contact, an important Yolngu ritual about a Dreaming figure Walitha ‘walitha (in other words, Allah) was developed.

Here we have history impinging on our idealistic notions about what Aboriginal “religion” represents. In addition, there are problems of secrecy and translation:

Finally, a note about the role of secrecy in Aboriginal religions. For Western anthropologists observing the canons of scientific rationalism, there can be no ‘secrets’ since anthropologists are committed to public disclosure of their findings. However, for Aboriginal groups there are secrets not only between men and women but also between old and young, the initiated and non-initiated, and insiders and outsiders. Religious knowledge is ‘dangerous’ if it is divulged to the wrong people at the wrong time. [F]rom this point of view, the very attempt to investigate Aboriginal religion necessarily puts a public construction upon something that is essentially non-public.

The same is true of translating Aboriginal religious concepts into Western European terms. For example, the Ancestor Spirits are neither gods nor moral exemplars and one cannot use monotheistic language about them. In fact, the specific terrains, lands or ‘countries’ of the various Aboriginal groups are the crucial religious phenomena. As it has been put, Aboriginal religions are ‘geosophical’ and not theosophical.

To make a long, partial, and always changing story short, we must take our constructions of other traditions with several grains of cautionary salt.

References:

Charlesworth, Max. (2009). Anthropological Approaches to “Primitive” Religions Sophia, 48 (2), 119-125 DOI: 10.1007/s11841-009-0096-5

Eliade, Mircea. (1966). Australian Religions: An Introduction. Part I History of Religions, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1086/462538

By “what pertains to human beings by nature,” I mean what is essential and universal for human beings, at least since the Axial Age beginning circa 800 b.c. and probably since the Neolithic era beginning circa 9500 b.c. I make claims about anthropological universals, which should apply to human beings in all other cultures, not just Christendom or the West.

This simply won’t do.

Let’s start with the fact that if we are searching for human “nature,” we can’t start at the end. This is what Smith does when he concatenates history and begins his story with the Axial Age or perhaps even the Neolithic transition. For anthropologists, the Axial Age is like yesterday and the Neolithic the day before.

Fully modern humans had been roaming the earth for several tens of thousands of years before some settled into the domestic and religious routines of Neolithic or agricultural life. If we are seeking human “nature,” doesn’t it make sense to look for it among those people? Don’t they have “natural” history? Doesn’t that history tell us something fundamental about what humans are (or can alternatively be) absent the powerful social patterning of modern societies?

It’s not surprising that Smith would start his search for anthropological “universals” and human “nature” with the Axial Age. The very (contested) notion of “essences” derives from the Axial strand that began with Plato and culminated in Christianity. There is an apt genealogical basis for Nietzsche’s comment that Christianity is “Platonism for the people.”

There were of course other Axial strands and places in the world where Axial movements had little or no impact. In those places, usually out of the main commercial way and relatively untouched by post-Neolithic modernity, life carried on in ways that resembled the deep past which Smith has chosen to ignore. In these places too we might find something important about the possibilities and idiosyncracies of human “nature.”

With such an inauspicious beginning to his essay, it’s not surprising to find that Smith’s conception of human “nature” is parochial. His view of human “essence” is not a timeless universal but is a situated and timely view from somewhere. That somewhere happens to be Notre Dame, a place where the concerns and prejudices of the post-Enlightenment Christian West are often projected onto the world and others as “universal human nature.” These concerns and prejudices are neither universal nor natural.

While I can agree with Smith that humans naturally generate supernatural ideas, this default is due to ordinary operations of the brain-mind. Humans aren’t, as Smith claims, naturally religious because we need to make truth claims, problem solve, create meaning, or act morally. These needs, which Smith calls strong tendencies, are precisely those which arose after (and in conjunction with) the Neolithic. They are not, therefore, universal in either time or space.

If you are quixotically seeking “anthropological universals,” the first place to look is in the deep or prehistoric past. The next would be in those societies that were relatively untouched by Neolithic modernity and Axial movements. Had Smith done this, he would have found that his supposed universals aren’t universal.

Smith’s error here is a common one which I recently wrote about while gently criticizing Czech moral economist Thomas Sedlacek’s argument that humans are naturally greedy. This is an historically challenged fallacy of the post hoc ergo propter hoc variety:

If we are talking about the human condition since the advent of agriculture, Sedlacek’s story has a great deal of validity. Sedlacek errs, however, in asserting that greed — always wanting more — is an “innate natural phenomenon” that marks the “beginning of our history.” This is a common error whether we are talking about economic history or religious history.

It arises from the illusion that everything essentially began with the Neolithic transition and “civilization.” As this myth goes, there was no history or society for the people who hunted and gathered for tens of thousands of years before settlements and cities. But these people, and some of their descendants who continued foraging until recently, had history. This history suggests that greed — always wanting more — is not an “innate natural phenomenon.”

While there are pan-human tendencies based in common neurobiology, classifying these as “natural” or “universal” or “essential” is an enterprise fraught with agendas and difficulties.

• They are always derivative of the speakers’ native language. In other words, the phonemes, vowels/consonants, and syllables are those of the speaker’s native tongue.
• They often contain isolated words or phrases from known human languages which are different from the speaker’s native tongue. These foreign language words or phrases are inserted at various points in the glossa.
• There is a systematic clipping of syllabics and parsing of phonology (i.e., a shortening and simplification) that derives from the speaker’s native tongue. These clippings-parsings are so regular that experts in the field can predict them before hearing a new “tongue.”
• This shortening and simplification leads to a high incidence of repetition. The same non-semantic words and phrases repeat themselves often, though the ordering of these words-phrases is systematically switched during the course of the utterance.

It seems odd that a supposed celestial or “angelic” language would always be related to, or derivative of, the speaker’s native tongue. Other studies have confirmed this oddness and link “tongues” with dissociative trance states. If this is the case, then we should not be surprised to find glossolalia in non-Christian cultures. This is indeed the case.

In a cross cultural survey of glossolalia and related forms of dissociative speaking, Harvard anthropologist L. Carlyle May concluded that the Christian tradition of speaking in tongues “probably had its roots in the ancient religions of Asia Minor.” Similar sorts of speaking were widely known in the Greco-Roman world and were generally considered, by polytheist and philosophical elites, to be “primitive” or “barbaric” practices. These speech acts were, in other words, associated with shamanist societies and what May calls “religiomedical practitioners.” While we today tend to think of such societies as small-scale foragers or horticulturalists, in classical times there were several large and powerful groups (such as the Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals) that were still suffused with shamanic ideas and practices.

During the course of his study, May was able to parse and categorize dissociative speech-phenomena into six categories:

Language of Spirits: This is the speaking of an alleged “language,” considered to be glossolalic gibberish by linguists, known only to supernatural beings. It usually occurs while in a state of trance or excitability, and was often used during divinatory or curing ceremonies. This type of “language” was widespread in shamanic societies and is the kind of speech that charismatics call “angelic tongues.”

Sacerdotal Language: In contrast to the preceding linguistic nonsense, sacerdotal speech is an actual archaic language learned by shamans or priests and passed down faithfully from one generation to another. Over sufficient time the vernacular would change, making sacerdotal language intelligible only to specialists and cognoscenti. A modern analogy would be Latin speaking Catholic priests.

Language of Animals: This “language of nature,” often used by shamans and found worldwide, simply and expertly mimics animal sounds. Shamans would claim they were talking to animals in this manner, and also claim that such “speech” was a sign he could transform himself into a nonhuman embodiment and move freely between the under world, earth world, and sky world.

Phonations Frustes: These incoherent speech acts include ventriloquism, whistling, groaning, shrieking, crying, and mumbling, frequently interspersed with actual but strangely altered speech. At times, shamans will change and project their voices as if carrying on a conversation with spirits.

Xenoglossia: This is actual speech in a real language. It is uttered by someone who claims that s/he never learned the language, that the language is not consciously accessible, and that it arose spontaneously. The language is spoken only in a trance or dissociative state. This is well known from alleged cases of glossolalia among Christians but is also known among shamans. When cases of xenoglossia are investigated, it is nearly always the case that the person has had substantial exposure to the foreign language, and there are mundane explanations for its use. Unsurprisingly, xenoglossia is most common in Africa where people are often raised in polyglot environments. Among some Buddhists, xenoglossia is explained by transmigration of souls. Thus, if a Korean is able to speak German without supposedly having learned the language, it is explained by saying that in a past life, the person must have been German.

Ermeneglossia (Interpretation of Tongues): This is normal speech which follows one of the previous speech displays. It supposedly interprets what was previously uttered. This too is well known in some Christian circles but is also widespread in shamanic societies. Because this nearly always involves two people, implicit or explicit cooperation is essential. Glossolalia and ermeneglossia often appear together, so that “the gibberish is explained and put to use.”

As is true of all scholars who have studied these speech phenomena, May concludes they have cultural origins, conventions, and constraints:

Religious mores determine to a great extent how the practitioner may act when he is entranced and whether or not he may become entranced at all while curing, divining, or convoking the spirits. Even if frenzied behavior is countenanced in a given society, the speaker is not given absolute freedom of behavior: he must follow within certain bounds the customs of other speakers. Consequently, there seems to be considerable truth in the assertion that people do not speak in tongues unless they have heard about speaking-in-tongues, and to this should be added that on the whole they become glossolalists only if their customs permit them to.

Glossolalia in one form or another is found in religions that are tolerant of highly emotional, individualistic behavior on the part of medicine men and their assistants. The priest may seize upon exotic utterances to demonstrate the realness and variety of his powers and to maintain about himself an air of mysticism and otherworldliness. Laymen are inclined to accept his odd sounds as proof of his spiritual prowess.

This survey has shown that speaking-in-tongues is widespread and very ancient. Indeed, it is probable that as long as man has had divination, curing, sorcery, and propitiation of spirits he has had glossolalia. Other forms of speech-phenomena that have been discussed would also seem to be very old.

As far as May is concerned, all these speech acts are learned either explicitly through teaching or implicitly through mimicry. There is no evidence to the contrary.

If you are interested in these kinds of speech acts, head over to your local Penetecostal church on Sunday to marvel at Babel for yourself.

"Glossolalia" by James Roper

References:

May, L. Carlyle (1956). A Survey of Glossolalia and Related Phenomena in Non-Christian Religions. American Anthropologist, 58 (1), 75-96 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1956.58.1.02a00060

Goodman, Felicitas (1969). Phonetic Analysis of Glossolalia in Four Cultural Settings. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 8 (2) DOI: 10.2307/1384336

Samarin, William (1968). The Linguisticality of Glossolalia. Hartford Quarterly, 8 (4), 49-75

But before Kadri gets to these issues, he takes us on colorful ride through the mystical backwaters of Sufi-inspired syncretic Islam. In doing so, he clearly destabilizes the notion that Islam is singular and there is some essential form of it. Here he sets the stage:

The North Indian city of Badaun is barely known beyond the subcontinent, but among the Muslims of India it has a great reputation. Seven ancient Islamic shrines encircle the town, collectively drawing visitors from miles around, and one spiritual specialty has always brought them immense local renown: they are said to facilitate the exorcism of jinns. That is a weighty claim among the poor, the credulous, and the desperate. Genies of the region are not popularly imagined to be the bountiful servants of lamp-rubbing legend. They are mercurial creatures, capable of wreaking havoc, who routinely seize control of people’s lives. Victims are suddenly plunged into depression or discontent, possessed of unusual ideas, and urged to speak, to lash out, even sometimes to kill. Entire families suffer as a consequence, and dozens are therefore to be found at the largest of the shrines, where they camp out in a shanty-filled cemetery pending miraculous interventions on behalf of their afflicted relatives. The scene is permanently alive, serviced by a nearby market, and it swells into something of a carnival as day-trippers arrive by the hundreds on the eve of Friday prayers. The spectacle had horrified and fascinated me in roughly equal measure ever since I first visited Badaun—my father’s birthplace—in 1979, at the age of fifteen. Elderly relations had warned me then to steer well clear of the place after dark on a Thursday night. In the spring of 2009, I finally got round to disobeying them.

I reached the shrine long after dusk, and its neem tree glades were pulsating to the drums and accordions of an ululating troupe of musicians. Picking my way through knots of pilgrims, past shadowy gures who babbled in the darkness or lunged from wooden posts to which they had been chained, I eventually reached the marble courtyard at the mausoleum’s center. The everyday bedlam of India looked to have merged with a scene from The Crucible. In a moonlight that was fluorescent, bright-eyed girls were whipping their hair into propellers while
 older folk, senile or despondent, chattered to tombstones. As I fidgeted with my camera settings, a teenage girl next to me stepped forward, assisted by anxious relatives, to quiver and collapse into the waiting arms of two shrine employees. Others strode forward to swoon in their turn, and were expertly scooped aside to make way for fresh fainters. Whooping children, barely able to believe their luck, cartwheeled around the hysterics and their helpers throughout. It was hours before the chaos gave way to chirrups and a semblance of peace returned to the sepulchers.

This is quite a picture, much at odds with those in the Western media which depict “Islam” through the minimalist lenses of militants and mosques. It is also a strange segue towards a discussion of sharia that somehow works. When Kadri finally gets round to sharia, there is delicious irony. After noting that conservatives have imagined Islamic law as foundational and eternal, Kadri compares this (false) vision with a similar conservative vision:

That claim raises issues similar to those I once encountered in a very different part of the world—the United States. As a law student at Harvard in the late 1980s, I had learned that many American conservatives consider the Founding Fathers of the United States to be possessed of incontestable wisdom. Some went further, arguing that God had manifested His will through their deeds. According to certain lawyers, that could oblige judges to interpret the federal Constitution according to its eighteenth-century meaning, or even require that they consider the Founders’ views when resolving contemporary legal controversies: limits to the death penalty, for example, or governmental restrictions on free speech.

Back then, I had felt that the deference to ancient vocabularies and dead people’s thoughts had the whiff of a séance about it. Pinning down a person’s meaning and motives is hard enough when he or she is alive. The collective intention of a large and diverse group of the deceased is difficult to conceptualize, let alone know. The traditionalist approach toward interpreting the shari‘a does not, on its face, look very different. It seems more akin to ancestor worship than any grave-venerating ritual could be—simply because holy wisdom does not automatically pass down through the generations.

There is indeed more than a bit of ancestor worship and civil religion in American constitutional originalism. It is no accident that most of those who worship at originalism’s altar also worship at other altars.

I’ll be getting Kadri’s book, which has been reviewed here (Guardian) and here (Telegraph), and reporting back on it.

Henry Steel Olcott Statue in Sri Lanka

It’s a longish article from which I have excised the following for comment:

When Henry Steel Olcott came to Sri Lanka in the late 19th century, his goal was simply to learn more about the Eastern religions he so admired. But somehow, this Presbyterian-born Spiritualist ended up becoming a Buddhist himself and initiating a revival that would sweep throughout Sri Lanka and the entire Buddhist world. Little by little, Henry Steel Olcott became the voice of a religion that had been silenced by colonialism.

By the time Olcott died in 1907, it was clear he had played a crucial role as just such a leader. In Sri Lanka, Henry Steel Olcott would create scores of Buddhist schools, and many more would be built in his name. It was Henry Steel Olcott who initiated the design of the international Buddhist flag, and you see it everywhere in Sri Lanka, from temples to trishaws. His Buddhist Catechism has been translated into more than 20 languages and is still used in Buddhist education all over the world.

The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere calls Olcott’s Buddhism “Protestant Buddhism.” It’s not clear just how much present-day Buddhism in Sri Lanka — or Thailand or Cambodia or Laos or Vietnam or Japan or Burma or the United States, where Olcott’s influence was also profound — is “real” Buddhism, as Olcott claimed, or Olcott’s pragmatist interpretation.

Olcott tapped into the most optimistic and motivational aspects of Buddhism, became the white face of a nascent Buddhist movement already stirring in the country. He made a link between a personal independence that could be achieved through Buddhism and a national independence that could be achieved by all Sri Lankans. He promoted this message with an American talent for advertising, and went about the country performing good deeds. It was a magic mix that was destined to light a fire under the Sinhalese.

And today, there is another, more controversial aspect to Olcott’s legacy in the form of a Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist movement that expounds Buddhism as the country’s one true religion. This idea has proved to be less enthralling to Sri Lanka’s non-Buddhists — notably the Tamils, Sri Lanka’s majority minority, who are primarily Hindu. The connection between Buddhism and Sinhalese nationalism was a major factor in Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war that ended in 2009.

Olcott went to Sri Lanka to learn about Buddhism. Not able to find it, or at least not finding what he expected or wanted, he constructed his own syncretic version. Olcott’s vision was then appropriated by Sri Lankans (and others) for their needs and purposes. This dialectic is not unique to Sinhalese Buddhism or Olcott’s Buddhism.

All religions are constantly being appropriated, revised, imagined, and constructed. Religions are never static and there are no “pure” or “authentic” forms.

These answers aren’t surprising given our embeddedness in a culture whose dominant form of religion claims that life and death acquire meaning only within its milieu. Aside from the obvious objection that religion can intensify the fear of death for those who worry about hell and predestination, there is another: religions focused on meaning in life and purpose in death (i.e., some kind of afterlife) are relative newcomers to the supernatural world. They are post-Neolithic.

The domestication of plants and animals had profound consequences which can be summed with a series: sedentism, surplus, specialization, stratification, slavery, and sickness. Life in agricultural societies is fundamentally different from life in foraging societies. It is only in the former that people spend inordinate amounts of time wondering about the meaning or purpose of life and death. The previously summed series can have this existential effect.

None of this is to say that foraging or nomadic lifeways don’t present their own sets of challenges, because they do. These concerns, however, typically aren’t existential. Life among kin, however harsh, doesn’t present as absurd, dislocated, or senseless. There is a reason why hunter-gatherer ethnohistories don’t record people contemplating or despairing over “the meaning of it all.” This reason has nothing to do with intellectual abilities or the progress of thought. It has everything to do with the lifeways and conditions which spawn these kinds of questions.

Having said all this, there is little doubt that such questions arose after agriculture and became acute with industrialization. For many, such as Leo Tolstoy, even the consolations of religion were not enough to quell the twin fears of meaning and mortality. In this riveting piece on Tolstoy’s masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Jordan Smith discusses Tolstoy’s novella and its influence:

The story’s literary merits were never in doubt, but its status as thanatology took some time to develop. It failed to register with European and American psychologists for most of the 20^th century, probably because Freud’s brand of psychoanalysis emphasized dreams, sex and childhood, relegating death largely to the background.

But in 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. In it, Becker argued that the fear of death “haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Man’s subconscious fear of death and desire to transcend its inevitability leads him to create or achieve something “heroic”, so that the immortality of that creation or act might redeem the mortality of its maker. Fear of death is universal, and denial of it is equally cross-cultural.

Tolstoy’s story also imprinted on Irvin Yalom, the Stanford psychiatrist whose therapy seeks to ameliorate isolation and meaninglessness:

Yalom relies on The Death of Ivan Ilych in two important books. In Existential Psychotherapy (1980), Yalom writes, “No one has ever described the deep irrational belief in our own specialness more powerfully or poignantly than Tolstoy . . . through the lips of Ivan Ilych.” According to Yalom, humans develop a false sense of specialness as a defense against the certainty of death. “[D]eep, deep down, each of us believes, as does Ivan Ilych, that the rule of mortality applies to others but certainly not to ourselves.”

Nearly thirty years later, Yalom again turned to Tolstoy and Becker in Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008). There he argues that death anxiety is lessened by the sense that one has lived a full, meaningful life. Ilych “is dying so badly because he has lived so badly,” he writes (emphasis in original).

It would be churlish to argue that existential angst isn’t real or that death isn’t cause for doubt. Since the Neolithic, religions (especially the Axial movements) have been grappling with meaning and mortality. This doesn’t mean, however, that humans have always been haunted by these questions or that religions originated to address them.

Post Postscript

In this piece on death and fear, Stephen Cave states: “This struggle to project ourselves into an unending future is the foundation of human achievement: the wellspring of religion, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts. That religions are very much a product of our yearning for immortality is perhaps obvious.” Taking this as a universal and ahistorical given, Cave then discusses how Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam deal with death.

This illustrates my historical point perfectly well. These Axial traditions are, in their own ways, much concerned with death and continuing life or immortality. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that these relatively modern religions speak to the evolution of supernatural beliefs or that these faiths somehow account for the origins of supernaturalism. They don’t.

The death terror and death responses are unique to certain kinds of societies and religions which grow out of these are not human universals. These religions grew from societies in which death was occurring in frequencies and ways never before seen in human history. It makes sense that they would respond to these vastly increased scales of death.

In keeping with a persistent Pagels theme, she laments the fact that steely-cold (Nicene) Christianity won out over mystical-warm (Gnostic) Christianity. While sympathetic, Gopnik has a sharp eye for realpolitik:

You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues.

The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

For it to become the Religion of (Roman) Empire, early Christianity had to be tamed and institutionalized. Its fate was domestication for purposes of power and consumption.

Baptism of Emperor Constantine

This new perspective owes much to the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He has been at the forefront of research into moral decision-making, which is grounded in evolutionary theory. Because people have been living in groups for hundreds of thousands of years, it really isn’t surprising that prosocial or “moral” behaviors are often the result of intuition or snap judgments that are later explained by recourse to reason. Humans are the most prosocial of primates and it would be surprising if this ability were not highly developed.

In recent years Haidt has extended these basic insights to politics and other domains (such as religion), where the terrain is much more uneven and confounded by modern culture. The ideas, in other words, have been extended and applied in ways that are questionable. In this recent article on Haidt from The Chronicle, the overextension is apparent.

After being asked how people came together to build cooperative societies beyond kinship, Haidt asserts that “morality” was the key:

A big part of Haidt’s moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the “psychology of sacredness,” the notion that “some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure.” If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.

If we take ethnohistoric hunter-gatherers for our model of how people formed larger and more cohesive groups in the ancient past, Haidt’s “morality” answer is patently wrong. These groups were held together by kinship ties first and by extended or fictive kinship second. Their “religions” (i.e., shamanisms) weren’t grounded in morals and weren’t much concerned with morals. While such groups had moral norms and ethical rules, these weren’t twined with supernaturalism and had an independent, non-spiritual basis.

Large communities held together by religion-faith-morals are a recent development in human history, no more than a few thousand years old. The kind of community that Haidt describes is a post-Neolithic formation that has its origins in the Axial Age. So does the idea that religion is a matter of “faith.” These are not ancient or evolutionary ideas. Moralizing gods and religions are relative newcomers to the supernatural world.

Haidt’s mistake here is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations:  “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

Todd Schorr's "Hunter Gatherer"

I’ve spent several years immersed in the ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record and can’t recall much or any concern with liberty-oppression. This is the kind of concern that arises when you have centralized authority and government, which were absent for most of human history. Nor can I recall much concern for authority-subversion. Again, these kinds of concerns are related to centralized authority and government which didn’t exist in our hunting-gathering past. While hunting-gathering societies are concerned with ritual purity, translating this as sanctity-degradation has a distinctly Axial feel to it. Degradation, in particular, smacks of the Christian fall from grace.

Haidt’s “foundational morals” aren’t innate or universal. The list is provincial, limited in both time and space. Had Haidt tested his list against history or made cross-cultural comparisons, this would have been evident.