The final form of communication that is part of religious behavior is one designed for dialogue not between people, but between people and gods. This special channel is the trance.
Visiting with the Gods
At the culmination of their ritual dances, primitive peoples would fall into trance states in which they communicated with their gods. The trances didn’t affect everyone, just a few of the dancers. But their experiences allowed others to witness a supernatural power inhabiting the body of the affected dancer.
The evidence for these practices comes from observations of hunter gatherer religions, as well as from remnants of the behavior visible in today’s cultures, from the spirit possessions of voodoo rituals to the crowd frenzy at rock concerts.
Trances are hard for people today to understand because like other aspects of ancient religion they were mostly suppressed long ago. With the advent of settled societies, priests appointed themselves official intermediaries with the supernatural world and had no wish to see people communicate directly with their gods.
Trances seem to have been a central feature of the ancient religion. In a survey of almost 500 small-scale societies the anthropologist Erika Bourguignon found that 90 percent had rites in which regular trance states occurred, data for the other 10 percent being insufficient to know whether or not this was the case.94 Trance is a state resembling hypnosis, in which a person has limited sensory awareness, and no memory afterward of what happened. The symptoms may also include trembling, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, paralysis, rasping breathing and a fixed stare. “Trance always manifests itself in one way or another as a transcendence of one’s normal self, as a liberation resulting from the intensification of a mental or physical disposition, in short, as an exaltation—sometimes a self-mutilating one—of the self,” writes the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget.95
It was through these trances, perhaps, that the gods were first discovered. People would have surmised the existence of a supernatural world through dreams, in which they saw relatives and acquaintances who were dead. But dreams are personal and cannot be directly shared. Through the trances induced by prolonged dancing, early people came to believe that they had acquired a means of entering the supernatural realm at will. The trances proved that the supernatural world existed. It would have been a small step from there to reconstructing the nature of the gods who might inhabit this strange, parallel world of primitive peoples’ imaginings.
Physiologists do not understand how the trance state is brought about, but music, especially drumming, and strenuous dancing are conducive. Drumming can affect the body directly with its vibrations, as well as through the ear’s perception of sound. “If one nears one of the extremely large drums the Yorubabeat at their secret oro ceremonies,” writes Rouget, “one will hear the sounds through one’s abdomen—which vibrates in sympathy—as much as through one’s ears.”
Despite the drum’s reputation as an instrument of frenzy, Rouget concludes that “there is no valid theory to justify the idea that the triggering of trance can be attributed to the neurophysiological effects of drum sounds.”96 A different view is held by Mickey Hart, a percussionist for the Grateful Dead, who has explored shamans’ use of drums to enter the trance state. “For myself,” he writes, “I know that it’s possible to ride the rhythms of a drum until you fall into a state of receptivity that can be construed as the beginnings of trance. When I’m drumming, I like to get as close to this state as I can, yet I also know that I can’t let myself go completely because if I do, my drumming will deteriorate and I will quickly lose the state. There have been many times when I’ve felt as if the drum has carried me to an open door into another world.”97
A common belief in societies that practice trance is that the person who falls into a trance is either possessed by a supernatural entity, or is traveling out of his body to meet with such agents. Different cultures have many variations on this central belief. Shamans, trance specialists first recognized among the Tungus and other peoples of Siberia, will take an out-of-body journey to meet the spirits of the underworld. Among the Azande, a people of north central Africa, witch doctors enter trance for purposes of divination. Here is a description of a witch doctors’ dance by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, one of the most careful of anthropological observers:Sometimes at these meetings the performers dance themselves into a state of fury and gash their tongues and chest with knives.... I have seen men in a state of wild excitement, drunk with the intoxicating orchestral music of drums and gong, bells and rattles, throw back their heads and gash their chests with knives, till blood poured in streams down their bodies. Others cut their tongues and blood mixed with saliva foamed at the corners of their lips and trickled down their chins where it was carried away in a flow of sweat. When they have cut their tongues they dance with them hanging out of their mouths to show their art. They put on ferocious airs, enlarge the whites of their eyes, and open their mouths into grimaces as though contortions, due to great physical tension and exhaustion, were not gruesome enough. The dance of Zande witch-doctors is ... weird and intoxicating.98
The trance state may sometimes be faked but for the most part it seems a real phenomenon, even if no precise scientific description is available as to how it is induced, maintained or recovered from. Why did trances play so central a role in the ancient religion? A plausible explanation has been developed by McNeill. He suggests that early peoples’ beliefs about the supernatural were drawn principally from dreams. But dreams are an unreliable channel of communication with the other world and are not adaptable to public ritual. Trances, on the other hand, can reliably be induced by strenuous communal dances. There is no need for everyone to enter trance; just a few susceptible individuals in trance can serve as a doorway for everyone to peer into the supernatural.
The trance state, with its strange tremblings and altered breathing, naturally suggested that the person was possessed by a good or evil spirit, or that their spirit had gone wandering in the supernatural realm. This interpretation made trances a compelling public confirmation of a supernatural world, existing in parallel with the real one. “Important new meanings were attached to the extreme trance state that dancing can induce. This, indeed, became one of the important growth points for the enormously influential complex of rituals and beliefs that we call religion,” McNeill writes.99 Trance dancing became the most reliable way of entering into communication with the spirit world. Believing they had opened a channel between the realms of the natural and supernatural, early people devised an elaborate array of rites and ceremonies for manipulating the gods of the supernatural world into bringing about desired ends in the real world.
Dancing for hours on end was an arduous way to gain access to the supernatural. Early peoples discovered a variety of other ways to alter brain chemistry and lightly distort the sensory gates of the conscious mind. In appropriate contexts, these transcendental experiences could be interpreted as communications with the supernatural. Some species of plant contain mind-altering drugs which were taken by shamans to help their travels into the spirit world. The Aztecs used the hallucinogen found in the peyote cactus, and made ritual use of the family of mushrooms that generate psilocybin. Soma, the sacred brew mentioned in the Rig Vedas of ancient India, may have been the psychoactive mushroom known as fly agaric. The Eleusinian mysteries, held at Athens for some 2,000 years starting in 1700 B.C., involved drinking potions that may have contained hallucinogens of some sort.
The oracle at Delphi, on the other hand, was based on the inhalations by the prophetess of a subterranean gas, recently identified as probably ethylene. The Pythia, as she was known, fell into a gas-induced trance and her mind was possessed by the god Apollo. Her utterances, generally not very comprehensible, were interpreted by priests, and carried considerable political influence in the ancient Greek world.100
The Pythia may have been the first to experiment with anesthetic gases but she was not the last. “Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide
, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree,” wrote the psychologist William James. “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.” That person may have been himself; James tried nitrous oxide and was persuaded that there exist other forms of consciousness that may provide different and valuable insights.
Naturally occurring mystical religious experiences often include such feelings as stepping outside oneself, transcending space and time, a sense of knowing ultimate truths, a sensation of sacredness and a deeply felt positive mood. In an experiment of 1962, later known as the Good Friday experiment, Walter Pahnke gave psilocybin, a hallucinogenic drug, to 10 Protestant divinity students, and a placebo to 10 others, with neither himself nor his subjects knowing who had received which. He sat all 20 in the basement chapel beneath Boston University’s Marsh Chapel while they listened to the Good Friday church service being held above them. His goal was to see if psychedelic drugs could facilitate a mystical experience in religiously inclined volunteers who took the drug in a religious setting.
Pahnke scored his subjects on nine elements of mystical religious experience, including the 5 listed above. He found the subjects who received psilocybin scored significantly higher than those who didn’t. In a follow-up 25 years later, most of the subjects who could be reached reported largely positive memories of the experience.101
Are natural mystical experiences and those induced by drugs the same? “The two experiences appear to be very similar or identical,” conclude the neuropharmacologists David Nichols and Benjamin Chemel. They suggest that the normal flow of sensory information to the brain’s outer cortex, the seat of consciousness, is somehow reduced or cut off. But instead of shutting down, as a computer might, the cortex “will fill in or extrapolate missing information, creating sensory constructs where none exist,” they write. Alternatively, as the usual torrent of sensory information from the outside world is shut down, the cortex may become unusually sensitive to interior information of a more introspective kind.102
Consciousness itself is so little understood that it is impossible to interpret the abnormal state of it from which subjects report mystical experiences. People using hallucinogens sometimes report frightening sensations, not the mystical experiences felt by Pahnke’s subjects. This suggests that subjects are to some extent cued by their surroundings as to how to interpret the experience. Is there some module in the brain that is attuned to communication with the supernatural and which comes to the fore in mystical experiences, whether natural or drug-induced? What seems more likely is that all the methods of achieving the trance state distort the usual data processing system of the conscious brain, and that these distortions are experienced as unusual, sometimes deeply affecting, states of mind. When suitably primed, the subjects, or those who observe them, view their experiences as communications with the supernatural realm, and interpret them in the context of their particular religious tradition.
It’s easy to see how a society might manipulate its rites and ceremonies, even at an entirely unconscious level, so as to secure desired social goals, such as observing agreed moral standards, punishing cheaters, and preparing people to sacrifice their lives in the community’s defense. If everyone believed that a supernatural agency would punish theft, for example, high standards of honesty would prevail. Religion emerged as an effective means for an egalitarian community to govern itself. The rituals and ceremonies established agreed rules of desirable behavior, and the supernatural agencies secured compliance with them. It was a remarkable solution to the problem of getting highly intelligent primates to put an abstract goal—the good of society—ahead of the self-interest they could all now calculate so finely.
In a state of constant warfare, such as prevailed through much of the hunter gatherer era, societies that used religion to best advantage would have prevailed over others. Probably through the mechanism of group selection, the essentials of religious behavior became engraved in the human genetic repertoire. These would have included a propensity to commit to the religious practices of one’s society, starting around the age of puberty; a liking for group rituals and the sense of community they generated; and a tendency to believe in punitive supernatural agents.
The genes that shape religious behavior provide merely an inclination to such behaviors. Each society specifies its own religious culture, shaping its religious tradition so as to fit its political and ecological circumstances. It is now time to trace the steps by which the earliest forms of religion, brought into being by the evolutionary forces described above, were transformed over the last 50,000 years into the very different religions that are familiar today.
5
ANCESTRAL RELIGION
Let us realize that in primitive conditions tradition is of supreme value for the community and nothing matters as much as the conformity and conservatism of its members. Order and civilization can be maintained only by strict adhesion to the lore and knowledge received from previous generations. Any laxity in this weakens the cohesion of the group and imperils its cultural outfit to the point of threatening its very existence.
BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI103
Cathedrals, sacred music, the aroma of incense, theological treatises, matins and compline—the religions of today are enriched with the cultural accretions of many centuries. None of these adornments seems a plausible advantage in the struggle for survival. But run the clock back to the earliest forms of religion from which today’s are derived, and the survival value of religion becomes much clearer.
The earliest religion seems to have taken the form of sustained communal dancing that invoked supernatural powers and promoted emotional bonding among members of the group.
All known human societies have some form of religion and so too, almost certainly, did the ancestral population of modern humans which evolved in northeast Africa and was confined in its ancestral homeland there until some 50,000 years ago.
It would be of the greatest interest to know the religious practices followed by these ancestral people. But the ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago has left no direct trace of its existence, and there is no good archaeological evidence of whatever religion may have been practiced by its forebears. Only later, in the Upper Paleolithic age that began in Europe around 45,000 years ago, does the first copious evidence appear of art and of burials, both of which imply ritual process.
The nearest one can get to the religious practices of the people who lived 50,000 years ago is through studying the rites of living hunter gatherer peoples, or at least those whose way of life was recorded before the encroachment of more powerful cultures. The hunting and gathering way of life has remained essentially unchanged for 50,000 years and, assuming that religions are shaped to the societies they serve, their religion may have retained the same general form.
Of course culture can change quite significantly between generations—witness the change in the English language since Chaucer’s day—and some 2,000 generations separate people today from the ancestral population. Still, there are two reasons why some hunter gatherer religions may still reflect the ancient forms.
One is that many preliterate or primitive peoples place great importance on carrying out rites exactly as their forebears did. The justification of their rituals is that this is how they have always been performed. So religious practice is handed on with as much fidelity as possible. Among the Klamath and Modoc Indians of the northwest coast of America, certain myths may be recited only in the presence of three people who know the story and can check the rendition for accuracy, and the myths may not be told by children lest they garble them. These rules are
reported to keep the myths intact over many generations104
A second reason is that new genetic evidence has established surprisingly direct lines of descent between the ancestral population and certain long-isolated groups, such as Australian Aborigines. Anthropologists long assumed that several waves of migration had reached Australia at various times since its original founding. But a new genetic analysis has shown that, until modern times, no one but the original founders reached the continent. Having traveled from Africa to the Arabian peninsula and along the coastlines of southeast Asia, they were established in Australia by 45,000 years ago, and presumably managed to fight off any later visitors.
This finding, if confirmed, means that Australian aboriginal culture is home grown, without significant outside influences. So aboriginal religious practices probably reflect a very ancient tradition, one that derives from the ancestral population without intervening influences.
Another long-isolated people with a possible claim to a very ancient religious tradition are the Andaman Islanders studied by Radcliffe-Brown. The Andaman Islands lie in the Bay of Bengal, some 120 miles off the coast of Burma. Their inhabitants have dark skins, suggesting that they are descendants of the original migration from Africa to Australia. Their genetics, too, fit with the idea of an ancient origin. Since at least A.D. 871, the Andaman Islands have had a fearsome reputation among sailors. The Islanders routinely killed the survivors of the many ships that shipwrecked on their islands, and burned the victims’ bodies so that their spirits would not return to haunt them. The practice suggests they did not particularly welcome outside influences on their culture.
The Faith Instinct Page 11