Some !Kung men deal with their anxiety by consulting oracle disks supposed to prophesy what direction will be most promising, and what prey they should be prepared for. Those disks are sets of five or six thin circles of antelope leather graded in diameter from two to three inches, each with its own name and with a recognizable top and bottom. Each man owns a set. A man stacks the disks on the palm of his left hand with the largest disk on top, shakes and blows on the disks, asks a question in a loud ritualized voice, then throws the disks on a garment spread on the ground. A diviner interprets the pattern of disks on the ground according to features that include whether or not they overlap, and which disks land top up or bottom up. The interpretation of the pattern seems to follow few fixed rules, except that disks 1 through 4 landing upside down predict the successful killing of a game animal.
Of course the disks don’t tell the !Kung anything that they don’t already know. !Kung men understand so much about animal behavior that their hunting plan has a good chance of proving successful, whatever the pattern of the disks. Instead, the disk pattern seems to be interpreted imaginatively like a Rorschach test, and serves to psych men up for a day of hunting. The disk ritual is useful in helping them reach agreement about pursuing one direction; choosing one direction, any direction, and sticking to it are preferable to becoming distracted by arguments.
For us today, prayer and ritual and magic are less widespread, because science and knowledge play a larger role in the success of our endeavors. But there remains much that we still can’t control, and many endeavors and dangers where science and technology don’t guarantee success. That’s where we, too, resort to prayers, offerings, and rituals. Prime examples in the recent past have been prayers for safe completion of sea voyages, bountiful harvests, success in war, and especially healing from disease. When doctors can’t predict a patient’s outcome with high probability, and especially when doctors admit that they are helpless, that’s when people are especially likely to pray.
Two specific examples illustrate for us the association between rituals or prayers on the one hand, and uncertain outcome on the other hand. Gamblers in a game of chance often follow their own personal rituals before throwing the dice, but chess-players don’t have such rituals before moving a piece. That’s because dice games are known to be games of chance, but there is no role of chance in chess: if your move costs you the game, you have no excuses, it was entirely your own fault for not foreseeing your opponent’s response. Similarly, farmers wanting to drill a well to find underground water often consult dowsers in western New Mexico, where the area’s local geological complexity results in big unpredictable variation in the depth and quantity of underground water, such that not even professional geologists can predict accurately from surface features the location and depth of underground water. In the Texas Panhandle, though, where the water table lies at a uniform depth of 125 feet, farmers merely drill a well to that depth at a site nearest to where the water is needed; no one uses dowsers, although people are familiar with the method. That is, New Mexico farmers and dice players deal with unpredictability by resorting to rituals just as do Trobriand ocean fishermen and !Kung hunters, while Texas Panhandle farmers and chess-players dispense with rituals just as do Trobriand lagoon fishermen.
In short, religious (and also non-religious) rituals are still with us to help us deal with anxiety in the face of uncertainty and danger. However, this function of religion was much more important in traditional societies facing greater uncertainty and danger than do modern Westernized societies.
Providing comfort
Let’s now turn to a function of religion that must have expanded over the last 10,000 years: to provide comfort, hope, and meaning when life is hard. A specific example is to comfort us at the prospect of our own death and at the death of a loved one. Some mammals—elephants are a striking example—appear to recognize and mourn the death of a close companion. But we have no reason to suspect that any animal except us humans understands that, one day, it too will die. We would inevitably have realized that that fate lay in store for us as we acquired self-consciousness and better reasoning power, and began to generalize from watching our fellow band members die. Almost all observed and archaeologically attested human groups demonstrate their understanding of death’s significance by not just discarding their dead but somehow providing for them by burial, cremation, wrapping, mummification, cooking, or other means.
It’s frightening to see someone who was recently warm, moving, talking, and capable of self-defense now cold, motionless, silent, and helpless. It’s frightening to imagine that happening to us, too. Most religions provide comfort by in effect denying death’s reality, and by postulating some sort of afterlife for a soul postulated as associated with the body. One’s soul together with a replica of one’s body may go to a supernatural place called heaven or some other name; or one’s soul may become transformed into a bird or another person here on Earth. Religions that proclaim an afterlife often go further and use it not just to deny death but also to hold out hope for something even better awaiting us after death, such as eternal life, reunion with one’s loved ones, freedom from care, nectar, and beautiful virgins.
In addition to our pain at the prospect of death, there are many other pains of life for which religion offers comfort in various ways. One way is to “explain” a suffering by declaring it not to be a meaningless random event but to possess some deeper meaning: e.g., it was to test you for your worthiness for the afterlife, or it was to punish you for your sins, or it was an evil done to you by some bad person whom you should hire a sorcerer to identify and kill. Another way is to promise that amends will be made to you in the afterlife for your suffering: yes, you suffered here, but never fear, you will be rewarded after your death. Still a third way is to promise not only that will your suffering be offset in a happy afterlife, but also that those who did you evil will have a miserable afterlife. While punishing your enemies on Earth gives you only finite revenge and satisfaction, the eternal exquisite tortures that they will suffer after death in Dante’s Inferno will guarantee you all the revenge and satisfaction that you could ever long for. Hell has a double function: to comfort you by smiting your enemies whom you were unable to smite yourself here on Earth; and to motivate you to obey your religion’s moral commands, by threatening to send you too there if you misbehave. Thus, the postulated afterlife resolves the paradox of theodicy (the co-existence of evil and a good God) by assuring you not to worry; all scores will be settled later.
This comforting function of religion must have emerged early in our evolutionary history, as soon as we were smart enough to realize that we’d die, and to wonder why life was often painful. Hunter-gatherers do often believe in survival after death as spirits. But this function expanded greatly later with the rise of so-called world-rejecting religions, which assert not only that there is an afterlife, but that it’s even more important and long-lasting than this earthly life, and that the overriding goal of earthly life is to obtain salvation and prepare you for the afterlife. While world rejection is strong in Christianity, Islam, and some forms of Buddhism, it also characterizes some secular (i.e., non-religious) philosophies such as Plato’s. Such beliefs can be so compelling that some religious people actually reject the worldly life. Monks and nuns in residential orders do so insofar as they live, sleep, and eat separately from the secular world, although they may go out into it daily in order to minister, teach, and preach. But there are other orders that isolate themselves as completely as possible from the secular world. Among them were the Cistercian order, whose great monasteries at Rievaulx, Fountains Abbey, and Jerveaulx in England remain England’s best-preserved monastic ruins because they were erected far from towns and hence were less subject to plunder and re-use after they were abandoned. Even more extreme was the world rejection practiced by a few Irish monks who settled as hermits in otherwise uninhabited Iceland.