With the beginnings of gods probably came the beginnings of a desire to communicate with them, to reach them at will, not just during sleep. Like their ancient Greek descendants, if our ancestors wanted to deliberately commune with that dream world, rather than rely on chance encounters in sleep, they had to build their own “royal road.” So it’s very possible that they learned, as closely as possible, to create trance, a waking, deliberate dream state, through dance, drumming, and singing for hours or days on end. Much like certain Native American cultures, they might have isolated themselves and experienced sensory deprivation causing them to sense the presence of another, feeling at one with everything. Fasting can disturb perceptions and even cause hallucinations. Most religions embrace fasting, perhaps for its vision-enhancing effects. And as our ancestors created these rituals over time, they learned to boost those neurotransmitters and create the biotechnology of group cohesion.
It is also likely that our hyperactive agency detection device, mentioned earlier, which tends to ascribe human agency to abstract sights or sounds, was turbocharged by neurochemicals during ritual, predisposing our ancestors to believe not only in invisible ancestors but also in other humanlike entities.
Early rituals centered on activities or things that we now know can alter brain chemistry: music, song, intense rhythmic activity, and strong emotion, combined with sleep deprivation. Many rituals were literally exhaustive, with people dancing and singing all night or longer. Such intense, prolonged activity brought brain chemicals to peak activity.
Our ancestors likely found that dance (and possibly that certain substances) induced trance and that ritual allowed for what seemed to be deliberate access to the unseen beings. It also was a public validation of the existence of another world, and the invisible spirits within it. Consider how the word “enthusiasm” derives from the Greek “enthousiasmos,” which means “possessed by God.”
During ritual, focus was on the community, not the individual, and the rituals could create and convey morals or lessons important to the group’s survival. The rituals accomplished what individuals could not: they could evoke a world of unseen dangers, especially from deceased ancestors, for tribe members who stepped out of line.
These early religious rituals generally marked rites of passage: birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Anthropologist Rodney Needham has noted that in today’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies, percussion plays a strong role in marking life transitions. Rituals centering on transitions, marked by percussion, remain prominent in every culture to this day. Remnants survive in college fraternities, where hazing represents this tradition of terrifying, painful, and sometimes deadly initiation rites. Even a mosh pit resembles ritualistic frenzy.
All three of the surviving tribes that provide us with windows into deep time use rituals to induct men into the secrets of the tribe. Initiation rituals can be painful and terrifying, thus releasing relevant neurochemicals, and the resultant bonding strengthens the tribe. Such rituals energize men for war, make them loyal, and instill courage and attachment to conventions of the tribe.
Today’s Australian aborigines call the time before history “the Dreamtime,” when mythical beings roamed the country, fighting, hunting, and creating the natural world. Even today, specific rituals are generally kept secret from outsiders, continuing to create a powerful group bond. We do know that aboriginal ceremonies are long, often consisting of chanting or singing the Dreamtime myths, contemplating sacred objects, and introducing the myths and objects to initiates. The rituals include dancing and miming the actions of totemic animals, hand clapping, beating sticks or stones, and, in some parts of Australia, playing didgeridoos.
Ritual as Survival Mechanism
Our ancestors’ religious rituals solved several problems at once. A group could evoke punishment for wrongdoers, resolve conflict, identify free riders, settle feuds, wipe the slate clean, and create an arena in which hard-to-fake, costly, honest signals could be received and scrutinized. Rituals may have even solved a very simple survival problem by frightening away predators.
These early religions had probably no priests or ecclesiastical hierarchy. There may have been alpha males or elders who created quasi-leadership positions, which later led to shamanism, but corporeal messengers from the unseen, separate priestly “professions” resembling modern-day clergy, likely did not exist.
As Nicholas Wade notes in his book The Faith Instinct, the rituals generate an intense sense of togetherness and awe, and a desire to put the group’s interest above the personal, “it ties a clever knot.” We lose our sense of self and become deeply bonded to those we touch and with whom we sing and dance throughout a long night.
The archaeological and anthropological record supports the conclusion that our hunter-gatherer ancestors maintained these rituals wherever they migrated. Their portable, enduring rituals continued to center on song, dance, and trance.
Settled societies emerged 15,000 years ago; 10,000 years ago marked the invention of agriculture. Though today there are few if any true hunter-gatherers, the religion created by our hunter-gatherer ancestors had become too powerful to be discarded, so as we adapted, so did religion.
Humanity became essentially agrarian. Religion took on the rhythm of the seasons, so important to agriculture, and we see that legacy to this day. Paganism and pantheism created Oestra, the spring festival. In Judaism, Sukkoth marks the end of the food harvest. Passover is the beginning of the barley festival. Shavu’ot marks the end of the wheat harvest. Christianity incorporated these rituals into Easter and other holidays.
With the emergence of literate societies approximately 5,000 years ago, access to the supernatural was no longer a democratic undertaking. Priestly castes, allied with political power, put on constraints. And the priests or shamans learned that they had power without responsibility—that they could blame failures on deities already firmly entrenched, for which they claimed to be the mere messenger.
The earliest rituals of song, dance, and trance were social levelers, bringing a community together and overriding whatever hierarchy existed. The move toward settled societies and civilization created greater social stratification. In some religions, dancing, with its social equality creating effects, was ultimately banished—but rhythmic movement has been maintained. Look no further than the coordinated prayers in Islam, masses of men, lined up symmetrically, kneeling and prostrating themselves in unison, a kind of floor dance. Or go to a Roman Catholic mass and watch the genuflection before the altar, the alternating of kneeling, sitting, and standing during a mass, and consider the role of Gregorian chant in the church’s Latin rituals as recently as the 1960s. Look at the power of Gospel music in traditionally African-American churches, with roots in African dance and ritual.
In other religions, we see the power of rituals primarily because they are so feared. Some Southern Baptists never make love standing up so that God does not think they are dancing. Pews in Christian churches did not start out as seating; that was an afterthought. Pews were originally placed in European churches in the sixteenth century to prevent dancing. They remain but often fail to constrain worshippers in some of the more demonstrative congregations.
For our ancestors, singing and dancing, music and movement, were all one.
Music’s origins are still debated. Is it a by-product of other mechanisms, hard vowels and consonants originally put to the rhythm of a beating heart? Or is music an actual stand-alone adaptation? Darwin thought that music was one of the best examples of his idea of sexual selection.
“I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. The musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling.” Darwin noted that many of the emotions induced by music have to do with love.
This points to another aspect of the original religious rituals. Consider them an early version of the Saturday ni
ght square dance, a place to look for and assess potential mates. What better way to gauge strength, coordination, character, commitment to the group, and others’ view of an individual you fancied? Singing, dancing, and trancing are hard-to-fake, honest signals of “mate-worthiness.”
Precaution
You certainly have seen a Catholic athlete step to the line to start a race and cross himself. It is an appeal to a god and an ease to anxiety. The basketball star, Lebron James, goes through a ritual before the start of every game. He pours talcum powder on his hands, claps them, with powder spraying everywhere, and then throws the remainder in the air toward cheering fans, a nice boost of reassurance and anxiety reduction. Such repetitive obsessional actions serve as a means of allaying fear.
Sigmund Freud thought that religion was society’s obsessive-compulsive disorder and that obsessive-compulsive disorder was an individual’s private religion. He saw the link but did not have the tools to fully understand it. We now know that the brain has precautionary vigilance systems that can be triggered to take repetitive or stereotyped action to allay anxiety. These same mechanisms are used in religious ritual and help allay the anxiety generated by uncertainty or risk, both inherent to life, but especially so in the harsh, dangerous world of our ancestors.
Synchrony and Union
Religious rituals utilize our mirror neurons, which will be discussed more fully in chapter 9
. The original purpose of these mirror neurons probably was to help prepare an organism to learn and make new movements. Religious rituals take advantage of this. It is hard not to dance when people around you are dancing, and the mirror neurons make it easier to do so in coordinated synchrony. Research at Stanford Business School has shown that merely engaging in a synchronous activity, even without heavy muscle involvement, will enhance cooperation and the feelings that accompany it. There is a difference in how you feel about others when you are strolling as a group or walking, still relaxed, in lock step with them.
Throw in heavy muscle activity and it rises to another level. If the synchronous movement involves vigorous muscle activity, pain thresholds actually rise. A novel experiment at Oxford University compared rowers working together and alone on rowing machines. When the experiment was controlled for the amount of work output, it became clear that an individual rowing with others at the same output level had a higher pain threshold than when the individual worked equally hard alone. Endorphins rise with group activity. And we know that endorphins enhance social bonds.
Consider Woodstock, a defining moment not just for the people who were there but for an entire generation. That event is noteworthy for its lack of violence and conflict, for its masses of people united under adverse conditions, working together, celebrating youth with music, dance, sex, camaraderie, and, yes, mind-altering drugs, mere supplements to the brain chemistry that the atmosphere and synchrony would have themselves triggered.
We even see the bonding power of ritual in something as simple, all-American, and ubiquitous as the high school pep rally, designed to unite the entire student population to oppose the rival.
The Magic of Touch
Primates spend a seemingly inordinate amount of time grooming each other, probably for reasons beyond health or parasite removal. The evidence suggests that touch stimulates oxytocin to initiate social bonding, and then endorphins to strengthen it.
If you show a woman a threat scenario when she is not holding someone’s hand, her amygdala, the part of the brain that controls fear, will really light up. She is afraid. If she is holding a stranger’s hand, the fear is somewhat eased. If she is holding her partner’s hand, it is eased even more. What is more remarkable is that the degree to which a partner’s hand calms fear is directly proportional to how the woman rates the quality of the relationship. A good partnership calms fear better than a less good one.
With touch, those prefrontal areas of our brain that regulate emotion relax and allow us to focus on problem solving. The brain processes a supportive touch as a signal another person will share the load. Humans are the most cooperative primate species, and touch helps build those problem-solving relationships across the brains of our allies.
Another piece of research shows that basketball teams that touch the most do the best. All those high fives, chest bumps, butt slaps, and contact after a successful shot or between foul shots translates into boosts of neurotransmitters that enhance cooperative feelings, solidarity, and group cohesion.
Once our ancestors, however inadvertently, learned to create the chemistry that augments trust, love, cooperation, and selflessness, there was no turning back. Inevitably, those incredibly powerful chemical reactions supercharged the cognitive mechanisms that permit supernatural belief, and religion was launched.
A Little Experiment
Take a moment. Think of someone you like or love, and consider your feelings for that person. Now do a brief assessment of your own emotional state at this instant. Then pinch some skin on your hand until it hurts.
Once you have made those three measurements, stand and belt out a song while you sway back and forth and move in rhythm to your voice. If there is someone with you, put your arms around each other’s shoulders and sway as the two of you sing. When you finish, after any awkward feeling has cleared, repeat the measurements. See where your pain threshold is when you pinch your skin. How are you feeling about that someone? How are you feeling about yourself? (You may ignore how the neighbor who just saw you doing this through your window may be perceiving you.)
When I do this with audiences, almost everyone reports positive changes in several of the parameters. (Imagine atheist audiences belting out four stanzas of “Amazing Grace.”) In this short exercise, you will get a little taste of the neurochemical changes triggered by song, touch, and rhythmic movement. And that is only after a few moments. Imagine doing it all night on the savannahs of Africa or in the outback of Australia.
If you have ever gone to a rock concert, where fans stand, sway, sing along, and hold up lighters, or, more recently, cell phones, and left the concert feeling exhilarated and renewed, you have felt the power of ritual and touch.
Rituals serve as displays of “mate-worthiness,” and this touches on two other aspects of our humanity utilized by religion.
Romantic Love
Our romantic relationships are served by specific adaptations in our brain. Sexual desire puts us on the playing field; romantic love solves the problem of committing strongly to one person. Religion often taps into this and creates a love relationship. It is reflected in the promise to Muslim martyrs that in heaven they shall be married. The late Sheikh Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual adviser, said that it was okay for women to be suicide bombers, particularly if they were single, because they become “even more beautiful than the seventy-two virgins. . . . they are guaranteed a pure husband in Paradise.” The promise of seventy-two virgins to male suicide martyrs probably is more lasciviousness than romance, capitalizing on males’ endless libido focused on young fertile women.
Capacities for romantic love are extensively utilized in religion. Consider Mother Teresa’s recently published letters, in which she speaks of being married to Christ. In fact, in medieval times, nuns’ consecration ceremonies were, essentially, weddings—complete with dowries for the church. Even today, many orders of nuns call themselves “brides of Christ,” and some take their final vows in wedding dresses, and receive and wear wedding rings.
In a delightful one-woman show called Letting Go of God, the one-time Saturday Night Live comedian Julia Sweeney reveals that, in her youth, a painting of Jesus helped her relieve her sexual longings.
The attachment system, discussed in chapter 3
, is deeply involved in our romantic relationships. We go from desire to intense romantic infatuation to companionate love, with the last stage based on the attachment system.
Parental Investment
The primary behavior difference between the sexes is not entirely determined by
the genetic sex. Instead, it is determined by behavior called parental investment, which reflects which sex has the biggest physiological stake in the offspring, and thus the biggest emotional investment.
In most sexual species, the female has the greatest parental investment. In ours, for instance, the woman has to produce a viable nutrient-rich egg, for which her uterus prepares every nonpregnant month of her reproductive life, gestate a fetus for nine months, go through the potentially fatal process of childbirth, and lactate for months if not years. The basic physiologic cost is enormous. In the males of our species the minimum cost is sperm and five minutes.
That is a considerable discrepancy in parental investment at just the physiological level. After a child is born, even in “progressive” Western cultures the greatest responsibility for physical and emotional care falls on the woman. Fathers might change diapers now and again, but it is still most likely to be the mother’s domain.
Behaviorally, the sex with the greatest parental investment is choosy about whom she, and it is usually a she, mates with. She is the rate-limiting step in reproduction. The sex with the least parental investment, usually the male, must compete fiercely with other members of his sex to gain access to the female and to ensure survival of his DNA.
In humans, this biologically based female importance and choosiness seems to have acted as an affront to males, who constantly devise ways to control female reproduction. Tactics include everything from polygamy to insisting that women wear head-to-toe black covering, and even to more brutal practices like clitoridectomies and infibulations. In some civil wars, which may be religion-or sect-based, men show triumph over enemies by raping their foes’ women while the vanquished are forced to watch mute and helpless. This is considered more of an affront to the men than to “their” women, who nonetheless may bear a lifetime stigma, even among their own people. The same stigmatized fate may befall any resulting offspring.
Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book Page 7