The practical domain of the goddess of the Crater Lake extends across political boundaries. Her high priest regained at least informal control over the water distribution system after the Green Revolution’s agricultural engineers came to understand the superior efficiency of the goddess’s system.
A Cycle of War
A striking instance of how religion can be applied to managing resources comes from the Maring, who live by farming in the Bismarck mountain range in east-central New Guinea. Their lives are governed by a multiyear religious cycle that serves in essence to readjust the human population, and that of its domestic pigs, to the carrying capacity of the land.
The Maring plant temporary gardens in forest clearings where they grow sweet potatoes and other crops. The sexes live somewhat separately: men reside in communal houses and the women live in individual houses with their children and pigs. Each pig has an individual stall entered from outside the house but can poke its nose through the inside to be petted or fed scraps.
The pigs do not breed very fast because all males are castrated as piglets, leaving the females to be inseminated by wild pigs. These are hard for them to encounter because the Maring live at a high altitude, above the usual range of wild pigs. But though the domestic herd grows slowly, after a while the pigs become very burdensome. A woman can grow enough sweet potatoes to feed only 5 or 6 animals and the pigs have to forage for the rest of their food. They soon take to raiding neighbors’ gardens, causing fights between their and the gardens’ owners. The women complain bitterly to their husbands. Tension in the community rises, and the men eventually agree it is time for a kaiko.
The kaiko is a series of dances that brings the Maring’s ritual cycle to its culmination. At various points during the kaiko, most of the pigs are sacrificed to the red spirits that inhabit the upper forest, and war is declared on neighbors to avenge those whom the neighbors killed in the last cycle.
These wars can evolve into deadly affairs. The Maring number about 7,000 people, divided into some 20 groups. The anthropologist Roy Rappaport studied the Tsembaga, one of these groups, which numbered about 200 people. In one battle the Tsembaga lost 18 people, 6 of whom were women or children.
The pigs fared even worse. Only 75 survived out of a herd of 169. The rest were sacrificed to the red spirits, with the Tsembaga consuming a third of the meat and the rest being given to allies who came to fight on their side.
After a series of battles, the warring parties declare a truce, which is marked by the ritual planting of a special species of tree known as a tanket, and the retirement of the sacred fighting stones which lie in a special hut during times of truce but are hung high on a pole when a battle has been agreed on.
The philosopher Giambattista Vico may have erred in saying that all history proceeds in a cycle, but his thesis applies perfectly to Maring history. After the fighting stones are retired and the tanket tree planted, the Maring cannot look forward to permanent peace, only to the renewal of the cycle. The populations of people and pigs start to grow again and after a period, which averages 10 years but ranges from 5 to 25 years, the carrying capacity of the land is eventually pushed toward its limit.
Once a surplus of pigs and people has built up, however, the Maring can afford to go to war again. They are now able to repay in pig sacrifices the debts they incur both to allies who come to their aid in the ax battle, and to the red spirits of the upper forest. The red spirits are the souls of those who die in battle.
Talk begins of renewing warfare. The Maring unwrap fighting stones from the fight ash house. The fighting stones come in pairs, which the Maring designate as male and female. Found occasionally in the ground of the Maring people’s territory, these sacred relics are in fact the mortars and pestles of a long-vanished culture. They have a different significance for the Maring: hanging them on the hut’s pole is in effect a declaration of war. “By hanging up the fighting stones, a group places itself in a position of debt to both allies and ancestors for their assistance in the forthcoming ax fight,” Rappaport writes.272
The tanket tree is uprooted, preferably by the man who planted it many years before. The men then prepare for a kaiko dance by decking themselves out in plumes and shells. The dance serves several purposes. The people from other groups who come and dance at the kaiko thereby pledge to be allies in the impending round of ax warfare. Since the Maring have no leaders, the turnout on the dance floor is the best way the hosts have of assessing their likely numerical strength in battle. All the men of the district are on display on the dancing floor and the women, who take the initiative in courtship, can judge whom they fancy. And the assembly of so many groups is also an occasion for trading.
Before battle the men spend much of the night chanting while their shamans, enjoying a tobacco high, make contact with a powerful supernatural being known as the smoke woman. They ask her which of the enemy’s men are likely to be most easily killed, and who of their own members are vulnerable. Some of the men may carry magical fight packages containing the skin or nail clippings of enemy men they hope to kill; these objects will have been sent by people in the enemy village who would like to see the owners eliminated, perhaps because they have bad personalities, or are too successful as gardeners.
The Maring fight with axes, bows and arrows, and enormous shields. They have set-piece battles, on a specially prepared fighting ground, and line up in formations several ranks deep. The opponents stand toe to toe, with no tactical maneuvering being attempted. These ritual combats may not seem too serious. Occasionally a man is felled by an arrow, and opponents rush to finish him off with axes. Casualties seem light, even after battle has been continued every day for weeks.
But this stability is deceiving. Each side depends on its allies turning up every day in order to maintain its battlefield strength. Sooner or later, the allies on one side or the other get tired of the fight and fail to show. As soon as the larger group realizes it has a numerical advantage, it charges, and the side that is routed will suffer many casualties.
The Tsembaga, Rappaport reports, do not necessarily understand the function of their ritual cycle. Presumably they see it as an essential interaction between the living and the dead. But in the anthropologist’s analysis, the ritual cycle accomplishes many essential ecological tasks. It brings back into balance the relationship between pigs, people and their gardens. It allows fields to revert to fallow. It helps conserve wild fauna, many of which are placed under taboo during the cycle and cannot be eaten. It redistributes land among the various groups. And although the cycle culminates in a large battle, it reduces the overall severity of fighting by restricting it to a single period of a long cycle.273
If the Maring people do not understand the ecological implications of their religion, as Rappaport says is the case, they presumably did not design it for its observed functions. The design could have emerged because groups with religions that failed to bring their pig population and their own numbers into balance with the environment eventually perished, while the Maring, with a more effective ritual, survived.
The religion of the Maring may seem a long way from that of modern societies. But it is very relevant to understanding the role that religion played for thousands of years until the modern era. It is evident from the case of the Maring, and indeed of many other primitive societies, that the role of religion was pervasive. Almost every aspect of Maring life is governed by ritual, from which foods are taboo to when to go to war.
Durkheim argued that religion separates the sacred from the profane but it is only modern societies that may make such a distinction. Elsewhere Durkheim called religion “a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members,” and this is the description that seems more appropriate to the Maring.
Their ritual practices may seem strange and arbitrary—pigs to be sacrificed to the red spirits of the upper forest must be cooked in ovens above ground but pigs for another category of spirits, the fertility spi
rits who dwell in the lower parts of the territory, must be cooked below ground. But the arbitrariness is irrelevant. So too, no doubt, is the existence or otherwise of the red spirits and the fertility spirits. What is relevant is that in performing these rituals participants maintain or strengthen their emotional commitment to each other and to the belief system invoked by the rituals. In so doing, they bind themselves to behave in the ways their religion requires.
With the Maring, as with other primitive societies, religion has become a comprehensive guide to life, presumably because all socially required actions have been integrated into ritual practice over the course of time. The Maring, who have no chiefs or other source of authority, have successfully devised a ritual that keeps everyone marching to the same drum and placing society’s needs above their own interests.
In modern economies, the state now performs, with varying degrees of success, many social functions that used to be the province of the church, such as educating the young, ministering to the sick, and looking after the poor. Pigs are killed without sacrificial ceremony, and according to market demand, not the blood thirst of spirits. For the most part, people no longer look to supernatural explanations for earthquakes, hurricanes or epidemics, since all now have generally more consistent scientific explanations. Religion is no longer a comprehensive guide to daily life. People in modern societies make the distinction noted by Durkheim between the sacred and the secular. Time and place are now predominantly secular, with the sacred often pushed into a tiny corner of both.
Yet religion continues to play many of its former roles, even if less obtrusively than in the past. None is more important than in preparing people for an especially difficult behavior that is vital to survival, the waging of war.
10
RELIGION AND WARFARE
Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate: “To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his Gods?”
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY274
‘Ω παιδες ’Eλληνων ỉτε ‘Eλληνων ỉτε Go, sons of Hellenes ἐλευθερoυτε πατριδ’, ἐλευθερoυτε δε Free your fatherland, free παιδας, γυναικας, θεων τε πατρῳων ἐδη Your families, the altars of ancestral gods θηκας τε πρoγoνων: And the graves of your fathers νυν ὑπερ παντων ἀγων. Now is the fight for everything The paean sung by Greek warriors as they sailed to meet the Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis in 480 a.c.
Religion evolved as a response to warfare. It enabled groups to commit themselves to a common goal with such intensity that men would unhesitatingly sacrifice their lives in the group’s defense. Because this remarkable behavior has become engraved in human nature, people throughout history have died in defense of their religion and their fellow believers, putting their own and their family’s interests second to what they considered a higher cause.
But though religious behavior has been deeply shaped by warfare, it is not inseparably linked to it. Religion provides a social cohesion, militant if necessary, which a society or its leaders may use to support an aggressive or pacific policy. The adaptable nature of religion is evident from a consideration of how each of the three monotheisms has resorted to warfare over the centuries.
Consider Judaism, a religion first shaped as an aggressive advocacy of a promised land for a chosen people. “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them,” advise the writers of the book of Deuteronomy, “for the Lord thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.... But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give to thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee....”275
The divine directive for a thorough ethnic cleansing could scarcely have been clearer. With a sacred text designed to support an expansionist political agenda of the seventh century B.C., the Israelite religion proved all too effective at mobilizing the population for war, which it did time and again despite one sanguinary defeat after another. The early Israelites fought unremitting battles with the large Egyptian and Assyrian empires that were their neighbors. Jews mounted at least three serious revolts against Roman rule—the Romans lost a whole legion during Bar Kokhba’s revolt of A.D. 132—135—but the outcome was always disastrous for the Jews.
When the Jews’ territorial ambitions were at last abandoned, Judaism turned inward and underwent a remarkable transformation, demonstrating how effectively a religion can be shaped to new circumstances. The focus shifted away from sacrificing hecatombs of domestic animals at the Jerusalem temple and toward the reading of the Torah. Judaism proved as potent at generating internal cohesion as it had previously been at energizing people for offense. Far-flung communities of the Jewish diaspora, from Spain to India, preserved their ethnic and cultural identity for generations. Lacking a country of their own, Jews defined themselves by their religion, to which they clung tenaciously. Without their religion, the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean would surely have been absorbed into the general population of the Roman empire, and would have quietly disappeared from history like so many other peoples of the ancient world.
Jews’ survival thus depended on the adaptability of Judaism, on its abrupt switch from aggressive defiance to the entirely pacific religion of defenseless populations who had to get along with unpredictable hosts. Judaism has remained a nonviolent religion, with the exception of its practice in the state of Israel, founded in 1948, which quickly developed and maintains one of the world’s best professional armies.
Unlike Judaism, Christianity began as a religion of nonviolence, as befitted a small sect subject to intermittent persecution by Roman authorities. “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” Jesus had told a supporter who drew a weapon in his defense. Citing this directive, the early church at first forbade Christians to join the Roman army. But this prohibition changed after the emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion of the Roman empire, no longer subject to persecution. The night before the battle of the Milvian bridge in A.D. 312, Constantine is reported to have seen a cross in the sky with the Greek words “’εν τoυτω νικα—In this [sign], conquer.” Thereafter Byzantine soldiers carried on their shields the labarum, an emblem combining the Greek letters chi and rho, indicating an abbreviation for Christ.
Around 350 Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria, decreed that though it was wrong to kill, it was lawful for a soldier to kill the enemy. As it began to share in the responsibilities of empire, the once peaceful church became habituated to the use of force in the state’s interest.
The church long insisted that at least its bishops and priests should not shed blood, a prohibition that lasted until the Middle Ages when bishops, who ran many European cities, became military leaders as well. In the early sixteenth century, Pope Julius II twice led armies in attacks in northern Italy. Nonetheless, sects like the Anabaptists and the Quakers kept alive the ancient concept that Christians should not kill.
Even the official church did not entirely forget its early renunciation of force. The Lateran Council of 1139 condemned a deadly new weapon—the crossbow—as immoral, and forbade its use, at least against Christians. It could, however, be used against Saracens.
Before it foreswore pursuit of temporal power, the Catholic church was no stranger to the use of force in statecraft. It was a pope, Urban II, who launched the first crusade in 1095, and his successors continued the tradition. The fourth crusade, managed by the doge of Venice, was diverted into an attack on Constantinople and the Orthodox church.
With the crusades abandoned, Christian violence turned inward and a long series of wars within Europ
e took place between Catholic and Protestant powers. Christian states then gradually learned an important lesson, that wars fought in the name of absolute beliefs are hard to settle by negotiation. From this experience emerged the solution of separating the powers of church and state, beginning with the Peace of Augsburg of 1555; under the formula cuius regio, eius religio, each ruler was allowed to choose the religion for his region. With another treaty, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the European wars of religion came at last to an end.
Religious commands not being easily subject to debate, whoever got to speak in the religion’s name wielded considerable influence in the decision to go to war. In a secular state the ruler had to make the case for war on more rational grounds. Separating religious and secular powers in a state was thus a significant stride toward loosening the potent union between religion and warfare.
Turning to the third monotheism, Islam has generally proved somewhat less adaptable than Christianity. Far from beginning as a persecuted sect, Islam was shaped as a religion of empire, with Muslim Arabs as the rulers and conquered peoples subjected to various forms of discrimination. Jews and Christians were allowed to practice their religions but accorded a second-rank “protected” status which, though it conferred certain rights, still left them subject to a poll tax and other burdens; many eventually converted to Islam.
Qur’anic discussions of fighting “made it clear that religious rewards, that is the joys of paradise, were more important than material success,” writes the historian Hugh Kennedy. “In these ways, the Koran provided the ideological justification for the wars of the Muslim conquests.”276
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