Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

A text inked on papyrus or parchment is like the hard spore of a plant that may lie undamaged in the sand for centuries before finding itself in suitable conditions to shed its armor and sprout. In oral traditions, in contrast, the vehicle—a spoken verse or sung refrain—lasts for only a few seconds, and must enter some ears—as many as possible—and imprint itself firmly in as many brains as possible, if it is to escape oblivion. Getting registered in a brain—getting heard and noticed above the competition—is less than half the battle. Getting rehearsed and rehearsed, either in the privacy of a single brain or in unison public repetition, is a life-or-death matter for an orally transmitted meme.¹¹

If you want to brush up your memory of the order of worship in your church’s Sunday service, or check to see whether one should stand or sit down during the closing benediction, there is almost certainly a text you can consult. The details are printed in the back of every hymnal, perhaps, or in the Book of Common Prayer, or, if not there, at least in texts that are readily available to the priest or minister or rabbi or imam. Nobody has to memorize every line of every invocation, every prayer, every detail of the costumes, music, manipulation of sacred objects, and so forth, since they are all written down in one official record or another. But rituals are not by any means restricted to literate cultures. In fact, the religious rituals of nonliterate societies are often more detailed, typically much more demanding physically, and just plain longer in duration than the rituals of organized religions. Moreover, the shamans don’t go to official shaman-seminaries, and there is no Council of Bishops or Ayatollahs to maintain quality control. How do the members of these religions keep all the details in memory over the generations?

A simple answer is: They don’t! They can’t! And it is surprisingly hard to prove otherwise. Whereas members of a nonliterate culture may be well-nigh unanimous in their conviction that their rituals and creeds have been perfectly preserved by them over “hundreds” or “thousands” of generations (a thousand years is only about fifty generations), why should we believe them? Is there any evidence that supports their traditional conviction? There is a little.

Much of the excitement that accompanied scholars’ discovery of the Nambudiri ritual tradition turned on the fact that although texts delineating Vedic rituals exist, the Nambudiri have not used them. Exclusively by non-literate means, they have sustained this elaborate ritual tradition with astonishing fidelity (as gauged by the centuries-old śrauta śutras). [Lawson and McCauley, 2002, p. 153]

So at first it appears that the Nambudiri are perhaps a uniquely lucky oral culture, having some evidence in support of their conviction that they have preserved their rituals intact. If it were not for the Vedic texts, presumably unknown to them and never consulted over the years, there would be no fixed yardstick against which to measure their confidence in the antiquity of their traditions. But, alas, the story is too good to be entirely true. The Nambudiri tradition may be oral, but they are not illiterate (some of their priests teach engineering, for instance), and it is hard to believe they have kept themselves entirely isolated from the Vedic texts. “It is known that during their six-month initiation period of the training, preparation and rehearsals leading up to the actual event, use is made of notebooks, prepared by the senior AcAryas who have already taken part in previous rituals….”¹² So the Nambudiri are not really an independent benchmark of how accurate oral transmission can be.

Compare the problem here with the ongoing research on the evolution of languages. Using complex and sophisticated probabilistic analyses, linguists can deduce features of extinct oral languages whose last speakers have been dead for millennia! How can this be done with no tape recordings to consult and no texts in the language they are extrapolating? The linguists make heavy use of the enormous corpus of textual data in other, later languages, tracing linguistic shifts from Attic Greek to Hellenistic Greek, and from Latin to the Romance languages, and so forth. Finding common patterns in these shifts, they have been able to extrapolate back with some confidence to what languages must have been like before writing came along to fossilize some of them for later ages to study. They have been able to extract regularities of pronunciation shift and grammatical shift, and juxtapose them on patterns of stability, to arrive at highly educated and cross-confirmed guesses about how, say, Indo-European words were pronounced long before there were written languages to preserve the clues like fossil insects in amber.¹³

If we tried to do the same extrapolation trick with religious beliefs, we would first have to establish benchmarks for stability and shift in them, and so far this has not proved feasible. What little we know about early religions is almost entirely dependent on surviving texts. Pagels (1979) offers a fascinating perspective on the Gnostic Gospels, for instance, early competitors for inclusion in the canon of Christian texts, thanks to the fortuitous survival of written texts that have been passed on as translations of copies of copies…of the originals.

We cannot, then, just take it on faith that nonliterate religious traditions still extant in the world are as ancient as advertised. And we already know that in some such religions there is not a tradition of obsessive preservation of ancient creed. Fredrik Barth, for instance, found lots of evidence of innovation among the Baktamans, and as Lawson and McCauley (2002, p. 83) dryly note, “Perfect fidelity to past practice is not an unwavering ideal for the Baktamans.” So, whereas we can be quite sure that people in oral traditions have had religion of one sort or another for thousands of years, we shouldn’t ignore the possibility that the religion we see (and record) today may consist of elements that have been invented or reinvented quite recently.

People run and jump and throw stones pretty much the same way everywhere, and this regularity is explained by the physical properties of human limbs and musculature and the uniformity of wind resistance around the globe, not a tradition somehow passed down from generation to generation. On the other hand, where no such constraints ensure reinvention, items of culture will be able to wander swiftly, widely, and unrecognizably in the absence of mechanisms of copying fidelity. Different strokes for different folks.¹⁴ And wherever this wandering transmission occurs, there will automatically be selection for mechanisms that enhance copying fidelity whenever they arise, whether or not people care, since any such mechanisms will tend to persist longer in the cultural medium than alternative (and no less costly) mechanisms that get themselves copied indifferently.