Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

3 Getting the gods to speak to us

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

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But what good to us is the gods’ knowledge if we can’t get it from them? How could one communicate with the gods? Our ancestors (while they were alive!) stumbled on an extremely ingenious solution: divination. We all know how hard it is to make the major decisions of life: should I hang tough or admit my transgression, should I move or stay in my present position, should I go to war or not, should I follow my heart or my head? We still haven’t figured out any satisfactory systematic way of deciding these things. Anything that can relieve the burden of figuring out how to make these hard calls is bound to be an attractive idea. Consider flipping a coin, for instance. Why do we do it? To take away the burden of having to find a reason for choosing A over B. We like to have reasons for what we do, but sometimes nothing sufficiently persuasive comes to mind, and we recognize that we have to decide soon, so we concoct a little gadget, an external thing that will make the decision for us. But if the decision is about something momentous, like whether to go to war, or marry, or confess, anything like flipping a coin would just be too, well, flippant. In such a case, choosing for no good reason would be too obviously a sign of incompetence, and, besides, if the decision is really that important, once the coin has landed you’ll have to confront the further choice: should you honor your just-avowed commitment to be bound by the flip of the coin, or should you reconsider? Faced with such quandaries, we recognize the need for some treatment stronger than a coin flip. Something more ceremonial, more impressive, like divination, which not only tells you what to do, but gives you a reason (if you squint just right and use your imagination). Scholars have uncovered a comically variegated profusion of ancient ways of delegating important decisions to uncontrollable externalities. Instead of flipping a coin, you can flip arrows (belomancy) or rods (rhabdomancy) or bones or cards (sortilege), and instead of looking at tea leaves (tasseography), you can examine the livers of sacrificed animals (hepatoscopy) or other entrails (haruspicy) or melted wax poured into water (ceroscopy). Then there is moleosophy (divination by blemishes), myomancy (divination by rodent behavior), nephomancy (divination by clouds), and of course the old favorites, numerology and astrology, among dozens of others.⁴

One of the more plausible arguments made by Julian Jaynes in his brilliant but quirky and unreliable book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), was that this riotous explosion of different ways of passing the buck to an external deciding-gadget was a manifestation of human beings’ growing difficulties with self-control, as human groups became larger and more complicated (chapter 4, “A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia,” pp. 223–54). And as Palmer and Steadman have more recently noted, “The most important effect of divination is that it reduces responsibility in decision-making, and thereby reduces the acrimony that can result from bad decisions” (2004, p. 145). The free-floating rationale is obvious enough: if you’re going to pass the buck, pass it to something that can’t duck the responsibility in turn, and that can be held responsible if things don’t go well. And as usual with adaptations, you don’t have to understand the rationale to benefit from it. Divination—what Jaynes called “exopsychic methods of thought or decision-making” (p. 245)—could have risen in popularity simply because those who happened to do it liked the results enough to do it again, and again, and then others began to copy them, and it became the thing to do even though nobody really knew why.

Jaynes noted (p. 240) that the very idea of randomness or chance is of quite recent origin: in earlier times, there was no way of even suspecting that some event was utterly random; everything was presumed to mean something, if only we knew what. Deliberately opting for a meaningless choice just to get some choice or other made, so one can get on with one’s life, is probably a much later sophistication, even if that is the rationale that explains why it was actually useful to people. In the absence of that sophistication, it was important to believe that somebody somewhere who knows what’s right is telling you. Like Dumbo’s magic feather, some crutches for the soul work only if you believe that they do.⁵

But what does it mean to say that such a method works? Only that it actually helps people think about their strategic predicaments and then make timely decisions—even if the decisions themselves are not any better informed by the process. This is not nothing. In fact, it could be a tremendous boost under various circumstances. Suppose that people facing difficult decisions typically have all the information they need to make well-grounded decisions, but just don’t realize that they do, or just don’t trust their own judgment as much as they ought to. All they need to get them out of their funk and stiffen their spine for resolute action is…a little help from their friends, their imagined ancestors hovering invisibly nearby and telling them what to do. (Such a psychological asset would be jeopardized by skeptics going around pooh-poohing the integrity of divination, of course, and probably that recognition—even if subliminal and unarticulated—has always motivated hostility toward skeptics. Shh. Don’t break the spell; these people need this crutch to keep their act together.)

Even if people are not, in general, capable of making good decisions on the information that they have, it may seem to them that divination helps them think about their strategic predicaments, and this may provide the motivation to cling to the practice. For reasons they can’t fathom, divination provides relief and makes them feel good—rather like tobacco. And note that none of this is genetic transmission. We’re talking about a culturally transmitted practice of divination, not an instinct. We don’t have to settle the empirical question now of whether divination memes are mutualist memes that actually enhance the fitness of their hosts, or parasite memes that they’d be better off without. Eventually, it would be good to get an evidence-based answer to this question, but for the time being it is the questions I am interested in. Notice, too, that this leaves wide open the possibility that divination (under specific circumstances, to be discovered and confirmed) is a mutualist meme because it’s true—because there is a God who knows what is in everyone’s heart and on special occasions tells people what to do. After all, the reason why water is deemed essential to life in every human culture is that it is essential to life. For the moment, though, my point is just that divination, which appears just about everywhere in human culture (including, of course, among the astrology-seekers and numerologists who still inhabit our high-tech Western culture), could be understood as a natural phenomenon, paying for itself in the biological coin of replication, whether or not it is actually a source of reliable information, strategic or otherwise.