A northern St Francis

Once, reading a psalter by the sea, [Cuthbert] dropped his book into the water - I imagine its glittering illuminated and unchained pages fluttering as they tumbled into the murky depths, an expensive loss in an age when books were more precious than almost anything. At that moment, a seal dived down and returned with the book in its mouth. It...received a blessing for its efforts, although I suspect a little fresh fish would have been as welcome.

-- Philip Hoare.

Image (via British Library): Cuthbert (lower left) praying in the sea, and, after he has finished (lower right), otters coming to warm and dry his feet with their breath and fur, while (above), another monk watches.

See also Otter tracks.

The ritual stance

Humans are as ritualistic today as they have ever been. This is not a comment on the changing fortunes of organised religion in different parts of the world (growing and spreading in some places while undoubtedly declining in others). It is a point about the profoundly ritualistic character of all human cultures, whether in families, schools, workplaces, governments, or international relations. Rituals persist even where gods do not. Even the most secular political systems ever devised — for instance, those under the sway of historical materialism and its vision of a Communist utopia — were as devoted to ritual as any in human history.

-- Harvey Whitehouse

Lichen: bacteria, algae, fungi

In the fourth century BC, Zhuanzi wrote of an old man tossed in the tumult at the base of a tall waterfall. Terrified onlookers rushed to his aid, but the man emerged unharmed and calm. When asked how he could survive this ordeal he replied, "acquiescence...I accommodate myself to the water, not the water to me." Lichens found this wisdom four hundred million years before the Taoists. The true masters of victory through submission in Zhuangzi's allegory were the lichens clinging to the rock walls around the waterfall.

-- from The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell.

Lichen on rowan tree in Llyfnant valley

P.S. David Barash has a Buddhist take on ecology here.

Itseke

Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with them although it is not directly addressed to them...Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focused mental images are created in the minds of the performers by means of their performance...There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power.

--  Ellen Basso on the Kalapalo, quoted by Robert Bellah

(photo: Fabio Colombini)

The Myth of the Chimera

The myth of the Chimera is modern as well as ancient, writes Ugo Bardi:

At its root, there is this conflict: civilization versus wilderness. The Chimera is the trees we cut to pave the land to build a shopping center. It is the mountains we destroy to get at the coal seams below. It is the people we bomb because we think they are dangerous to us. It is everything we don't want to see, and we want to destroy, while we think we are safe inside our homes. But, in reality, we are not and we know that very well.  The environment is not really something "outside", the environment is all those things that make us live. If we destroy the environment, we destroy ourselves.

These considerations are all there, inside the myth of the Chimera, once you unpack it and you take care of some details that seem to be marginal and, instead, are fundamental. So, in the Iliad that the Chimera is explicitly referred to as "Theon", which means "divine". The Chimera is no mere monster, it is a God. And no mortal can kill a God because Gods are immortal. At most, it is possible to kill the "avatar" of a God. And killing a God - even if just its avatar -  is not something that common mortals can do lightly. It brings misfortune; not rewards. Indeed, Bellerophon ends his life blind and accursed as a punishment for what he has done. So, you see? The story of the Chimera is by no means simple; it is not black and white, not good versus evil. The story is subtle and dense and it carries a lot of meaning that we can still understand if we just spend a little time in exploring it.

Imagining gods

Alan Saunders: This is curious...the common sense assumption would be that hubris, the sin of overwhelming pride, is committed when humans believe that they are or they act like gods, not when they invent or create gods, but [Cornelius] Castoriadis wants to say that to imagine gods presiding over the universe is itself one of the most extraordinary acts of human creation.
 
Stathis Gourgouris: Yes, it’s a glorious act. I mean, that it is an act of extraordinary imagination, that human beings find immensely complex ways to create systems of ordering of their universe, to account for the way their universe is in fact created and the way it operates and so on and so forth. This comment, of course, pertains specifically to the fact that the hubris is not so much in the act of the imagination because there is something sublime about the capacity to imagine divinity. In all human societies in the history of the world have some form of that, but the hubris exists in or resides in the fact that this act of creative imagination is actually shielded, it’s occluded, and not acknowledged as such, and what is presented is the object of this act, the imagined thing, as if that is the agent of creation, and that’s what he identifies as hubris.

-- from Thinking Out Loud, The Philospher's Zone.

(Image: Nawarla Gabarnmang)

A miraculous camel

Camel Country on BBC Radio 4 begins at a shrine that commemorates this story:

The people of Thamud gathered on a certain day at their meeting place, and the prophet Salih (peace and blessing be upon him) came and addressed them to believe in Allah, reminding them of the favors Allah had granted them. Then pointing at a rock, they demanded: "Ask your Lord to make a she camel, which must be 10 months pregnant, tall and attractive, issue from the rock for us." Salih replied: "Look now! If Allah sends you what you have requested, just as you have described, will you believe in that which I have come to you with and have faith in the message I have been sent with?" They answered: "Yes." So he took a vow from them on this, then prayed to Allah the Almighty to grant their request. Allah ordered the distant rock to split asunder, to bringing forth a great ten month pregnant she camel. When their eyes set on it, they were amazed. They saw a great thing, a wonderful sight, a dazzling power and clear evidence!

Demon-haunted

The ritual murder and dismemberment of children, and the mutiliation of living ones, is said to be on the rise in [northern?] Uganda. Practitioners believe that in doing so they will please the spirits and gain wealth and power in Uganda's relatively stable and growing economy.

James Nsaba Buturo, Minister of Ethics and Integrity in the government of Uganda, talked to Tim Whewell of the BBC:

Baturo: I believe that [the witch doctors] are directed by spirits, but remember we've got two types of spirits, the good spirits and the evil ones. It is the evil spirits which demand for human blood.

Whewell: Just to be clear then those evil spirits do exist?

Baturo: They do, my God, they do indeed! We accept they do in every society mind you, but we don't have to listen to them.

Whewell: ...shouldn't the government simply be saying there are no evil spirits full stop?

Baturo: If we were to do that, that would be false because they are there anyway. And people see it. They know, they see, and it's as well that we speak the truth about these matters. There is no merit at all you can attach to these spirits, but they are there.

More at Crossing Continents and Newsnight.

Last year Tom Holland recalled:

Tlaloc, [Aztec] god of the rains, the most primordial god of all...whose favour could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to cry.

A mangled bank

Pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now.

-- from an interesting piece by Ross Douthat on Avatar and film culture. But he misses the point that although human life is often tragic there is not necessarily something tragic in vesting concern in the health of a whole ecosystem.

For example, Greg Carr's attempt to restore Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique (as reported by Philip Gourevitch) may fail but the tragedy would be not to try.

P.S. 13 Jan: Carlo Artieri on the Biology of Avatar, Ben Schott on the Na’vi language and George Monbiot on invisible genocides.

P.P.S 14 Jan: Tetrapod Zoology guide here.

Beyond ignorance

In his opening remarks for the first conference in Egypt on the work of Charles Darwin, Ismail Sergaldin, the director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, cited the words of the 13th-century physician Ibn al-Nafis:

When hearing something unusual, do not pre-emptively reject it, for that would be folly. Indeed, horrible things may be true, and familiar and praised things may prove to be lies. Truth is truth unto itself, not because people say it is. [1]

It was an astute choice, perhaps, but al-Nafis's wisdom seems to have escaped this young man:

“I am not against the idea of evolution completely,” said Amr Zeydah, 23, a zoology major at Alexandria University. “I accept the idea partially.”

Despite his major, Mr. Zeydah has never studied Darwin, and before the conference knew little about the theory of evolution. He accepted the Islamic account of creation, that God formed Adam from dirt and infused him with a soul.

But after taking in the discussion, he said he had worked out a way to reconcile the two: that God created life, which then evolved to suit its environment. “God created Adam at 15 meters tall,” he said, quoting what he said was a Hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammad. “So evolution comes in because we are obviously not that height now.”

Footnote

[1] An early version of nullus in verba, perhaps. Evolutionary theory, properly understood, is extremely beautiful. The ugliness resides in the minds of those who fail to understand.

'The goddess must have blood'

In the main event, 250 appointed residents with traditional kukri knives began their task of decapitating more than 10,000 buffalo in a dusty enclosure guarded by high walls and armed police.

Frightened calves galloped around in vain as the men, wearing red bandanas and armbands, pursued them and chopped off their heads.

Vatican suggests limits to corporate expansion strategy

If other intelligent beings exist, it's not certain that they need redemption.

-- Father Jose Gabriel Funes, the chief papal astronomer.

(see also Just wondering and Whereof can one not speak)

La vida es sueño

Dreams are not meaningless, and they are certainly not useless. For a start, they are crucial for processing emotions. "Dreams modulate the emotions - they keep them within a certain range," says Patrick McNamara of Boston University. New research has found that naps consolidate emotional memories - and the greater the amount of rapid-eye-movement (REM) dream sleep, the greater the processing of these memories.

-- from 10 Mysteries of you: dreams.

Julia Whitty notes that the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche advises us to look at our experience of sleep to discover whether we are truly awake. [1] She quotes this:

...every day ends the same. We shut our eyes and dissolve into darkness. We do so fearlessly, even as everything we know as "me" disappears. After a brief period, images arise and our sense of self arises with them. We exist again in the apparently limitless world of dream. Every night we participate in these most profound mysteries, moving from one dimension of experience to another, losing our sense of self and finding it again, and yet we take it all for granted. We wake in the morning and continue in "real" life, but in a sense we are still asleep and dreaming. The teachings tell us that we can continue in this deluded, dreamy state, day and night, or wake up to the truth

The Bon tradition, Whitty writes [2]:

teaches a yoga of dreams and sleep wherein, among other things, practioners learn to consciously dismantle the scaffolding. This work is done in the course of lucid dreaming, which students learn to cultivate at will. Since dreams are free of the rational mind, they reveal our true level of awareness and can provide an alternate and possibly speedier pathway to a clearer life. Although Western psychology believes dreams should not be tampered with, since they carry messages from the subconscious, Buddhists think differently. According to Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "it is better for the aware dreamer to control the dream than for the dreamer to be dreamed".

As W.B. Yeats put it, "in dreams begins responsibility."



Footnotes

[1] The Fragile Edge, page 213

[2] ibid page 226

Spirits with Legs

The idea that gods and spirits got their start as a supernatural version of people encounters one obvious objection: In hunter-gatherer societies, aren’t some supernatural beings thought of as animals, not humans? And aren’t some supernatural beings—especially the ones anthropologists call “spirits”—too vague a life form to qualify as either human or animal? Why should we, along with [Edward] Tylor, talk of personified causes when Tylor’s own terminology—animated causes—would fit better?

For starters, however unlike a human a “spirit” may sound, when anthropologists ask people to draw pictures of spirits, the pictures usually look more or less like humans: two arms, two legs, a head. Similarly, a great god of the ancient Chinese was called Tian, or “heaven,” which sounds quite unlike a person—yet the earliest written symbol for that god is a stick figure: two arms, two legs, a head.

Even when a supernatural being looks like an animal — as those snowmaking birds of the Klamath presumably did — it doesn’t act like an animal. It may have wings or fur or scales, and it may lack various parts of a normal human being, but it won’t lack the part that explains why human beings do the things they do. As the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has observed, “the only feature of humans that is always projected onto supernatural beings is the mind.”

-- from an appendix to The Evolution of God by Robert Wright.

Towards the 'Ecozoic'

We have indeed become strange beings so completely are we at odds with the planet that brought us into being. We dedicate enormous talent and knowledge and research to developing a human order disengaged from and even predatory on the very sources whence we came and upon which we depend at every moment of our existence. We initiate our children into an economic order based on exploitation of the natural life systems of the planet. To achieve this perspective we must first make them autistic in their relation with the natural world about them. This disconnection occurs quite simply since we ourselves have become insensitive toward the natural world and do not realize just what we are doing. Yet, if we observe our children closely in their early years and see how they are instinctively attracted to the experiences of the natural world about them, we will see how disorientated they become in the mechanistic and even toxic environment that we provide for them.

-- from The Meadow Across the Creek by Thomas Berry.


In a biographical note, Mary Evelyn Tucker links Berry to Teilhard de Chardin:

to have become conscious of evolution means something very different from and much more than having discovered one further fact… It means (as happens with a child when he acquires the sense of perspective) that we have become alive to a new dimension. The idea of evolution is not, as sometimes said, a mere hypothesis, but a condition of all experience.

For Teilhard and for Berry, writes Tucker

the perspective of evolution provides the most comprehensive context for understanding the human phenomenon in relation to other life forms. This implies for Berry that we are one species among others and as self reflective beings we need to understand our particular responsibility for the continuation of the evolutionary process. We have reached a juncture where we are realizing that we will determine which life forms survive and which will become extinct. We have become co-creators as we have become conscious of our role in this extraordinary, irreversible developmental sequence of the emergence of life forms.

(The photo of shipping container houses is from Poverty in America. The lily is in Glacier National Park, Montana. The boy swims in water at Cilincing, Jakarta.)

The long view

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

-- Paul Saffo, quoted in The Coming Superbrain.

Hypercosmic, dude

So what is it, really, that is veiled? At times d'Espagnat calls it a Being or Independent Reality or even "a great, hypercosmic God". It is a holistic, non-material realm that lies outside of space and time, but upon which we impose the categories of space and time and localisation via the mysterious Kantian categories of our minds.

"Independent Reality plays, in a way, the role of God – or 'Substance' – of Spinoza," d'Espagnat writes. Einstein believed in Spinoza's God, which he equated with nature itself, but he always held this "God" to be entirely knowable. D'Espagnat's veiled God, on the other hand, is partially – but still fundamentally – unknowable. And for precisely this reason, it would be nonsensical to paint it with the figure of a personal God or attribute to it specific concerns or commandments.

-- from a commentary Amanda Gefter on the award of the Templeton Prize to Bernard d'Espagnat.

For enlightenment see a concise interpretation of Hume on religion by Julian Baggini.

Jumping brains and scary monsters

It's long been observed that, as Michael Brooks puts it [1],

human brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world.

And Brooks does a good job in summarizing and contrasting analysis from Scott Atran, Justin Barrett and others doing useful research into this phenomenon.

This post touches briefly on just one point: the theory mentioned by Paul Bloom at Yale that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things on the one hand and inanimate objects on the other ("common-sense dualism"). It is argued, further, that strange things can happen when activity jumps between the two. I have made no proper study of this, but earlier today experienced the following.

Walking in the snow and slush through the local park, I half-noticed a dark blob smaller than a tennis ball on the path a few paces in front of me. Just as I was walking by I felt, as quickly as the involuntary reflex that withdraws a hand from a burning stove, a sudden shock of fear. In what seemed like the quarter or half second that followed, I attended to the object and saw it to be a stuffed cloth toy printed on the side with a picture of a blue tit or other small bird. It was a crude representation, obviously not alive and clearly harmless. [2] It had, however, been enough to spook me. [3]

My intuition is that as I approached the object (and I am aware that I had glanced at it few paces ahead) a system in my brain categorised it as inanimate, but that as I passed by the assessment changed: the object was registered as just possibly alive. The change was sudden and a sharp warning ran through my brain before closer inspection -- yup, it's just a dirty toy in the slush -- shut the warning down.

An evolutionary psychologist would say (I guess) that my ancestral 'wiring' was tripped for potential harm from, say, a snake or poison spider. There may be something to that. What struck me at the time, however, was a sense of flipping rapidly between two different mental states. Anyway, the experience seems to not contradict the idea that there are separate cognitive systems in the brain for living and non-living things.



Footnotes

[1] Born believers - how your brain creates god. See also A natural history of belief

[2] Unless, of course, Al Qaeda's Oxford franchise is planting IEDs inside wee cuddly animals toys.

[3] I think experiences like this are quite common.  P.S.: A friend writes with a simple explanation: "you are not getting enough sleep".

One in the eye

They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.

-- David Attenborough on the hate mail he receives from Christianists.

P.S. 28 Jan: I was puzzled as to which organism Attenborough might be referring, and asked a medical friend. He wrote:

Onchocerciasis or river blindness does fit the bill although it's West African and not East. Plus it’s a systemic disorder as you say [i.e. the worm can travel through almost any part of the body]. Humans are the intended host. There is an East African entity known as Dicofilaria conjunctiva- it’s a parasitic worm of the Filaridae family, which usually lives in dogs intestines and accidentally infects humans.

It looks as if Attenborough is overstating the case when he says the worm "cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs". But his point that much is ugly and horrible in nature stands.

My medical friend (who is not a specialist in tropical parasites so concedes he could have missed something) sent a link to photos of Thelazia, the oriental eye worm.

The natural history of belief

An earlier post noted that religion appears to be one of six traits unique to humans. Among the contributing factors, suggests Pascal Boyer in a well balanced essay are that:

Humans are unique among animals in maintaining large, stable coalitions of unrelated individuals, strongly bonded by mutual trust.

and:

Unlike other social animals, humans are very good at establishing and maintaining relations with agents beyond their physical presence; social hierarchies and coalitions, for instance, include temporarily absent members.

I guess some primatologists will say Boyer underestimates the ability of some apes to maintain complex webs of relationship, and I'd add work by Scott Atran to his reading list.

P.S. Other comments on Boyer include this, this and this.