Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Among the Zulus, when a pregnant woman is about to give birth, sometimes the “spirit-snake of an old woman” makes an angry appearance (according to the shamans), indicating that a goat or some other animal should be sacrificed to the tribe’s ancestors so that the child may be born healthy (Lawson and McCauley, 1990, p. 116).

The Jivaro of Ecuador believe that you have three souls, the true soul you have from birth (it returns to your birthplace when you die, then turns into a demon, which dies in turn, becoming a giant moth, which becomes mist when it dies); the arutam, a soul you obtain by fasting, bathing in a waterfall, and partaking of hallucinogenic juice (it makes you invincible but has the unfortunate habit 97 of leaving you when you’re in a jam); and the musiak, the avenging soul which tries to escape a victim’s head and kill the victim’s murderer. This is why you must shrink the head of your victim (Harris, 1993).

These curious beliefs and practices have not existed “forever”—no matter what their devotees may say. Marcel Gauchet begins his book on the political history of religion by noting, “As far as we know, religion has without exception existed at all times and in all places” (1997, p. 22), but this is a historian’s pinched perspective, and simply isn’t true. There was a time before religious beliefs and practices had occurred to anyone. There was a time, after all, before there were any believers on the planet, before there were any beliefs about anything. Some religious beliefs are truly ancient (by historical standards), and the advent of others can be read about in newspaper archives. How did they all arise?

Sometimes the answer seems obvious enough, especially when we have reliable historical records from the recent past. When Europeans in their magnificent sailing ships first visited the islands of the South Pacific in the eighteenth century, the Melanesians living on these islands were awestruck by these vessels, and by the remarkable gifts they were given by the white men who lived in them: steel tools and bolts of cloth and glass you could see through, and other cargo beyond their ken. They reacted much as we would probably react today if visitors from outer space showed up capable of overwhelming us at will, and bearing technologies we hadn’t even dreamt of: “We must get ourselves some of this cargo, and learn how to harness the magical powers of these visitors.” And our puny efforts to use what we did know to take control of the situation and restore our security and sense of power would probably amuse these technologically superior aliens as much as we are amused by the Melanesians’ conclusion that the Europeans must be their ancestors in disguise, coming back from the realm of the dead with untold wealth, demigods to be worshiped. When Lutheran missionaries arrived in Papua New Guinea in the late nineteenth century to try to convert the Melanesians to Christianity, they met stubborn suspicion: why were these stingy ancestors in disguise withholding the cargo and trying to make them sing hymns?

Cargo cults have sprung up again and again in the Pacific. During World War II, American forces arrived at the island of Tana to recruit a thousand men to help build an airfield and army base on neighboring Efate Island. When the workers returned with tales of white and black men who had possessions beyond the dreams of the people of Tana, the whole society was thrown into turmoil. The islanders, many of whom had earlier been converted to Christianity by British missionaries,

stopped going to church and began to build landing strips, warehouses and radio masts out of bamboo, in the belief that if it worked on Efate for the Americans, it would work for them on Tana. Carved figurines of American warplanes, helmets and rifles were made from bamboo and used as religious icons. Islanders began to march in parades with USA painted, carved or tattooed on their chests and backs. John Frum emerged as the name of their Messiah, although there are no records of an American soldier with that name.

When the last American GI left at the end of the war, the islanders predicted John Frum’s return. The movement continued to flourish and on 15 February, 1957, an American flag was raised in Sulphur Bay to declare the religion of John Frum. It is on this date every year that John Frum Day is celebrated. They believe that John Frum is waiting in the volcano Yasur with his warriors to deliver his cargo to the people of Tana. During the festivities the elders march in an imitation army, a kind of military drill mixed with traditional dancing. Some carry imitation rifles made of bamboo and wear American army memorabilia such as caps, T-shirts and coats. They believe that their annual rituals will draw the god John Frum down from the volcano and deliver the cargo of prosperity to all of the islanders. [MotDoc, 2004]

Still more recently, around 1960, on New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea, the Pomio Kivung cult was founded. It still flourishes.

Pomio Kivung doctrine holds that adherence to the Ten Laws (a modified version of the Decalogue [Ten Commandments]) and the faithful performance of an extensive set of rituals, including the payment of fines for the purpose of gaining absolution, are essential to the moral and spiritual improvement that is necessary to hasten the return of the ancestors. The most important of these rituals aims at placating the ancestors, who make up the so-called “Village Government.” Headed by God, the Village Government includes those ancestors whom God has forgiven and perfected.

The spiritual leaders of the Pomio Kivung have been its founder, Koriam, his principal assistant, Bernard, and Koriam’s successor, Kolman. Followers have regarded all three as already members of the Village Government and, hence, as divinities. All three have resided on earth physically (specifically in the Pomio region of the province), but their souls have dwelt with the ancestors all along.

Achieving sufficient collective purification is the decisive condition for inducing the return of the ancestors and inaugurating the “Period of the Companies.” The Period of the Companies will be an era of unprecedented prosperity, which will result from the transfer of knowledge and an industrial infrastructure for the production of technological wonders and material wealth like that of the Western world. [Lawson and McCauley, 2002, p. 90]

These cases may be exceptional. Your religion, you may believe, came into existence when its fundamental truth was revealed by God to somebody, who then passed it along to others. It flourishes today because you and the others of your faith know that it is the truth, and God has blessed you and encouraged you to keep the faith. It is as simple as that, for you. And why do all the other religions exist? If those people are just wrong, why don’t their creeds crumble as readily as false ideas about farming or obsolete building practices? They will crumble in due course, you may think, leaving only true religion, your religion, standing. Certainly there is some reason to believe this. In addition to the few dozen major religions in the world today—those whose adherents number in the hundreds of thousands or millions—there are thousands of less populous religions recognized. Two or three religions come into existence every day, and their typical lifespan is less than a decade.¹ There is no way of knowing how many distinct religions have flourished for a while during the last ten or fifty or a hundred thousand years, but it might even be millions, of which all traces are now lost forever.

Some religions have confirmed histories dating back for several millennia—but only if we are generous with our boundaries. The Mormon Church is less than two hundred years old, as its official name reminds us: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Protestantism is less than five hundred years old, Islam is less than fifteen hundred years old, Christianity is less than two thousand years old. Judaism is not even twice as old as that, and the Judaisms of today have evolved significantly from the earliest identifiable Judaism, though the varieties of Judaism are as nothing compared with the riotous blossoming of variations that Christianity has spawned in the last two millennia.