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How Religion Evolved: Explaining the Living Dead, Talking

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First published 2016 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Names: McVeigh, Brian J., author.

Title: How religion evolved : the living dead, talking idols, and
mesmerizing monuments / Brian J. McVeigh.
Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Transaction Publishers,
2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016020142 (print) | LCCN 2016020971 (ebook) |
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-6286-8 (hbk)

 To the memory of

JULIAN JAYNES
(1920‒97)

The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The
heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the
stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and
all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and He dwells within
our heart.
—Chandogya Upanishad
 Contents
Foreword by Marcel Kuijsten xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Prologue: Chasing Ghosts in Tokyo xv

Part I: The World According to the Gods

1 The Failure of Science to Explain Religion 3

2 Why the Gods Began to Speak 9

3 Divine Voices and Visions as Social Adaptation 17

Part II: When the Gods Spoke and Walked among Us

4 The Living Dead: Explaining Entombment

and Ancestor Worship 23

5 Towns as the Domain of the Gods 33

6 Temples as Relay Stations: Transmitting Divine

Commands 39

7 Talking Idols: Tools of Divine Control 45

8 Mortuary Monuments: How the Gods Awed

Their Followers 51

9 Heavenly Ambassadors: God–Kings and

Sacred Rulers 57

10 Ancient Civilizations as God-Governed 63

11 Mesoamerica: Theocentric Civilizations of the
New World 69

12 Trimming the Theological Tree: Monotheism

as Adaptation 77

13 Angels, Divine Messengers, and Swarms of Demons 87

Part III: When the Gods Fell Silent

14 Prayers, Possessions, and Prophecies: Conjuring

Up the Missing Gods 99

15 The Gods Depart: The Late-Bronze-Period Dark Ages 111

16 A Change of Mind in the Ancient World 119

17 The Axial Age: The World Reborn without Gods 125

18 Imagining the Transcendent: A New Cognitive Ability 133

19 Introcosm: A New World of Space and Time 139

20 The Self Replaces the Gods 149

21 From Revelation to Reasoning 157

22 When the Gods Still Whisper: Strange Behaviors

Explained 165

Epilogue: Science and Politics as Neo-Religion 171

Appendices and Supplementary Charts

A How to Chase Ghosts 177

B Explaining Religion versus Explaining Religion Away 181

C Gods on the Brain: Neurotheology 186

D The Problem with “Cultural Evolution” 188

E Six Hypotheses of Jaynesian Psychology 191

F The Limitations of Evolutionary Psychology 200

G Prehistoric and Historic Mentalities in Perspective 202

H Predictable Objections, Rebuttals, and Qualifications 207

I Verification and Applications of Jaynes’s Theories 213

J Primitive Psychopolitics and Neurocultural Adaptation 215

K A History of Mentalities 219

L Population Size of Ancient Towns and Cities 223

M Dreams: A Form of Conscious Interiority 225

N Pre-Axial and Axial Ages Compared 227

O Solving the Mystery of Hallucinations 229

P Autoscopy: Seeing One’s Double 234

Q What the Gods Can Teach Us: A New Understanding

of the Mind 239

Timelines of Mentalities 243

Explanation 243
1 Three Major Shifts in Human Mentality 244
2 Prehistoric Mentalities 246
3 Middle East 247
4 Africa 249
5 Europe 251
6 South Asia 254
7 East Asia 256
8 Southeast Asia 258
9 Oceania 259
10 North America 260
11 South America 261
12 Mesoamerica 263

Glossary 265

References 269

Index 281
 Foreword
The origin and evolution of religion remains one of the great mysteries
of human civilization. Today, we know more about the human genome
than we do about our own religious history. One of the reasons for
this has been the exalted status that religion has enjoyed—despite the
Enlightenment, the origin of religion has been somewhat of a taboo
subject, considered off-limits for research or discussion.
Still, there have been occasional attempts at understanding it—Freud
thought it was madness, Marx thought it was a means to control the
masses—ideas that today seem simplistic and naïve. Yet more recent
attempts, such as viewing God-beliefs as a kind of celestial extension
of one’s parents or religion having evolved for the purpose of social
cohesion, while perhaps having elements of truth in the end, also seem
lacking. No theory seems able to account for the full complexity of
the phenomenon—taking into account its profound transformations
throughout history, its cultural ubiquity, and its neurological under-
pinnings.
That is, no theory with the exception of one. In the late 1970s, the late
Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes, a man of tremendous
intellect and originality, advanced a groundbreaking theory on the
origin of consciousness in a book titled The Origin of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. While in the process of under-
standing the origin of consciousness, Jaynes discovered perhaps the
best explanation for the origin of religion—one that takes into account
all of its mysterious complexities and transformations, from the initial
multitudes of gods that ancient peoples interacted with daily, through
the worldwide blending and merging of many gods into the concept of
“one God” during the Axial Age, to modern-day sudden hyperreligiosity
often seen in individuals suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy.
The son of a prominent Unitarian minister and trained at Yale as a
research psychologist, Julian Jaynes had a profound appreciation for

xi
 How Religion Evolved

the mystery of religion while still being firmly grounded in evolution-

ary theory and the scientific method. He had the unusual ability to see
religion in all its intricacy, his views unclouded by either unquestioning
belief on the one hand or hostile dismissiveness on the other. Jaynes’s
background and education; combined with his willingness to forgo
academic advancement in favor of developing a theory requiring famil-
iarity with a broad range of academic disciplines, made him uniquely
positioned to view the problem of the origin of religion through the
multidisciplinary lens that explaining it would require.
Yet Jaynes—a kind, sensitive man—while realizing the profound
implications of his ideas for explaining religion—chose not to empha-
size or promote this aspect of his theory. Jaynes wanted people to focus
on his primary interest, the origin of consciousness, and he minimized
the implications of his theory for the origin of religion, striking out
sections from early drafts of his book that he felt were too controversial.
He did not want people to be turned off to his ideas on consciousness
because they were offended by his ideas on the origin of religion, and,
at least initially, he seemed unwilling to upset the important role that
religion played in many people’s lives. But for those reading between
the lines, the tremendous implications of Jaynes’s ideas for our religious
history were unmistakable.
While a graduate student in anthropology at Princeton, Brian
McVeigh was a student and friend of Julian Jaynes. In this important
and long overdue book, McVeigh resurrects Jaynes’s theory on the
origin of religion by drawing upon his considerable knowledge and
experience as an anthropologist and his decades of research into the
various aspects of Jaynes’s theory to explain and expand upon Jaynes’s
ideas. McVeigh shares Jaynes’s ability to maintain an intellectual dis-
tance from the subject matter while at the same time never losing sight
of the complexity of the problem. Nearly four decades since Jaynes
first advanced his ideas, the public is now perhaps ready for McVeigh’s
explanation of how we came to believe in God.

Marcel Kuijsten
Executive Director, Julian Jaynes Society

xii
 Acknowledgments
Many of the ideas in this book were first presented as papers at confer-
ences and talks. The first time I presented my Jaynesian interpretation of
neoshamanistic practices in a Japanese religious movement was in 1995
at the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Annual Conference
(University of California, Berkeley). The paper was entitled “Spirit Pos-
session: A Variety of Sociopsychological Behavior” (McVeigh 1995a).
Scott Greer graciously invited me to speak at the 2005 Julian Jaynes
Memorial Symposium on Consciousness: “Hearing Voices Called Gods”
(University of Prince Edward Island), in which I presented “Explaining
Hypnosis, Possession, and Volition: A Jaynesian Approach to the Vari-
eties of Consciousness.” Scott Greer was also responsible for organizing
The First Annual Julian Jaynes Conference on Consciousness (2006) and
The Second Annual Julian Jaynes Conference on Consciousness (2008a)
(both conferences were held at the University of PEI) at which I pre-
sented “Overcoming Intellectual Barriers to Understanding Jaynes’s
Theory” and “Hallucinations as Adaptive Behavior: Divine Voices and
Visions as Neuropsychological Vestiges,” respectively. I would like to
thank Dr. Stuart Hammeroff for inviting me to speak at the Conscious-
ness Discussion Forum (Center for Consciousness Studies, University of
Arizona), where I presented “Elephants in the Psychology Department:
Barriers to Understanding Julian Jaynes’s Theories” (2007a). A variation
of this paper was given at the American Anthropological Association
Conference 2007b in Washington, DC (Dana Raphael kindly read my
paper in my absence).
In 2008, Marcel Kuijsten and I organized a preconference workshop
for the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference (Center for Con-
sciousness Studies, Tucson Convention Center) called “Reappraising
Julian Jaynes’s Theory of Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind:
30 Years of New Evidence” (2008a). At the same conference, I also
presented a paper entitled “The Lost Voice of God: Julian Jaynes and
Neurotheology” (2008b). Also, in 2008, I presented “Hallucinations
xiii
 How Religion Evolved

as Adaptive Behavior: Divine Voices and Visions as Neuropsycho-

logical Vestiges” at The Second Annual Julian Jaynes Conference on
Consciousness, University of Prince Edward Island (2008c). In 2012, I
presented “Mental Imagery and Hallucinations as Adaptive Behavior:
Divine Voices and Visions as Neuropsychological Vestiges” at Toward a
Science of Consciousness Conference (Loews Ventana Canyon Resort
Hotel, Tucson, Arizona, April 9–12, 2012a). A version of the latter talk
was given at the Third International Conference of the Image Higher
School of the Humanities and Journalism, Poznan, Poland, September
14‒16, 2012b; (virtual presentation).
I would like to thank all the audience members, co-panelists, and
conference participants for their questions and suggestions in the
aforementioned gatherings. Many of their comments were incorporated
into this book, and for that I am greatly appreciative.
Portions of this book are borrowed from my “Mental Imagery and
Hallucinations as Adaptive Behavior: Divine Voices and Visions as Neu-
ropsychological Vestiges (first published in The International Journal
of the Image, Vol 3, 1:25–3, 2014).
I would also like to thank Howard Schneiderman for his helpful
comments. Finally, I would like to thank Marcel Kuijsten, who patiently
read and commented on chapter drafts, as well as John Hainly and
Michael Carr, who also offered helpful comments. Others who deserve
my gratitude for making this a stronger work are David Burbridge, John
Roy, Scott Greer, Jan Sleutels, John Limber, Rabbi James Cohn, Hester
Oberman, and Barbara Greene.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, who has been unwavering in
her support.

xiv
 Prologue: Chasing Ghosts
in Tokyo
After sitting on my ankles with legs folded underneath for about five
minutes, my feet began to go numb. The customary way of sitting in
reed-matted Japanese-style rooms where one removed one’s shoes—
seiza, roughly translated as “correct sitting”—could be surprisingly
painful after about ten minutes, at least for the older among us who
have lost some flexibility. Fortunately, the activity I had just begun in
a spiritual training hall (or dōjō) somewhere in Tokyo would only last
ten minutes. The training hall was a center of the Supra-Religion of
the True Light, or in Japanese, Sūkyō Mahikari. The person facing me
also sat seiza. After she closed her eyes and placed her hands as if in
prayer, I raised my right hand, palm facing her forehead, and began
chanting the Amatsunorigoto or the “Prayer of Heaven.” I was told that
a divine energy or “sacred light” would radiate from my hand and purify
the woman’s “primary soul” (located in her forehead), cleansing her of
physical illnesses and emotional disturbances. But more significantly,
tapping into the cosmic energy was a way to pacify ghosts of ancestors,
exorcise demons, or interrogate the spirits of animals that had attached
themselves to the individual and had caused disease and unhappiness.
After I finished chanting the prayer, calmness descended on the
room, which was filled with about twenty other pairs of individuals
who were either giving or receiving divine energy. The training hall in
which these exorcisms were taking place was clean and well lit, but the
hot and humid Tokyo air overpowered the air conditioning and small
whirring fans in the corners. The large number of people, sitting on
colorful cushions neatly lined up on the straw-matted floor, added to
the stuffiness.
Meanwhile, outside the building we could hear harried pedestrians
chatting, taxis and cars honking, trains rumbling by on a nearby track,
and other sounds typical of a busy Japanese urban neighborhood.
xv
 How Religion Evolved

Suddenly, the peaceful atmosphere was shattered when someone who

was being radiated began shouting something that, as I would later be
told, was classical Japanese. The yelling changed from a shrieking to a
low, angry growl. The radiator at first seemed in control of the situa-
tion, but as the young man began to stand up and point to the room’s
empty corner—as if someone were there—and shout, she became a bit
concerned. He then collapsed to the floor and began to crawl around,
stopping to sniff the neck of a young woman who giggled at what
appeared to be silly antics. Two or three pairs nonchalantly moved
out of the way when the possessed man came near them and sprawled
out on the floor. Then he stood up and let out a noise that can only be
described as an ear-splitting primal scream. Again he fell to the floor
as if all his life energy had been suddenly drained from him. He began
to uncontrollably sob. An elderly woman yelled “Better get the dōjō-chō
(the spiritual leader of the dōjō)!” Soon the dōjō-chō hurriedly walked
over and sat down next to the possessed and calmly but firmly inter-
rogated the spirit. The answers emitting from the young man did not
sound at all like his regular voice, and even his face looked different.
This was what made such episodes in the dōjō so eerie. It took about
twenty minutes for the dōjō-chō to calm him down. Eventually he
retreated to a corner and glumly stared at the rest of us, gently rocking
back and forth and occasionally muttering to himself.
A few days later the man in question, a young student in his late
teens named Mr. Kurimoto, would return to the center.1 As soon as he
closed his eyes to receive the True Light, a growl-like muttering turned
into ferocious screaming, apparently aimed at the person radiating
the True Light. A few members looked around, stunned. But most
members nonchalantly carried on with what they were doing. After
a few minutes of verbal fuming and threatening arm movements, the
dōjō-chō’s assistant was called in to assist in calming the angry spirit.
But the ghost could not be easily pacified and continued his shouting,
which escalated into threats. Eventually after several chants the spirit’s
temper was cooled, and he began to explain why he was possessing Mr.
Kurimoto. According to the spirit, Mr. Kurimoto was a samurai in a
previous life who had killed him in a duel over an argument. Now he
wanted revenge.
It took several more sessions, which successively became less vio-
lent, but gradually the spirit was persuaded to leave Mr. Kurimoto and
return to the spirit world. In order to do this, Mr. Kurimoto had to ask
for forgiveness while the spirit had to apologize for seeking revenge.
xvi
 Prologue

All this apologizing led to the successful resolution of his spiritual

problem. The several possession-sessions did seem to have a cathartic
effect. Mr. Kurimoto looked much better.
Regardless of the many conversations I had with him about this affair,
it never became clear to me what the symbolism of the possessing spirit
meant or how it related to his own present life. However, there was
evidence that he was under intense pressure from his family to succeed
in school. As I was told later, Mr. Kurimoto suffered from insomnia,
caused by anxiety over his studies. A close friend and Mahikari member
who knew about his sleeping problems introduced him to Mahikari.
His insomnia, while returning at times, for the most part disappeared.
My Interest in Ghosts
How to Chase GhostsFor about two and half years I conducted field-
work among members of Sūkyō Mahikari as a graduate student from
Princeton University.2 Though I was a nonbeliever, Mahikari members
were more than helpful once I told them I was interested in the group’s
practice of spirit possession. Even before I left for the field, I was frus-
trated by the lack of any comprehensive theory that accounted for this
strange phenomenon. I believed, as I still do, that possession had to be
related to other sociopsychological behaviors. Most researchers merely
labeled it (together with similar phenomena) as “trance,” a term I found
remarkably unhelpful and nonexplanatory. Then I recalled having read
an insightful analysis of anomalous psychological behavior by Julian
Jaynes. I dusted off my copy of his The Origins of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and turned to the part on spirit
possession. Here was what I was looking for: an explanation, not just
a mere description, of a fascinating but little-understood behavior.
Fortunately for me, Professor Jaynes was in the Psychology Department
at Princeton University. I asked him for an appointment to discuss my
research and he graciously invited me to his office for a chat.
When I informed my dissertation committee members in the
Department of Anthropology that I intended to employ Jaynes’s theories
to account for possession, they dismissed his ideas as bizarre. Surpris-
ingly, they criticized Jaynes as a sort of “biological reductionist.” Such
a charge was quite ironic. Note here that my dissertation committee
members proudly proclaimed themselves “cultural constructionists,”
that is, human nature is greatly influenced—indeed, built up—by
social experiences and culture, and that inborn factors (neurological
structures, physiology, genetics, and so on) play a minimal role. Never-
xvii
 How Religion Evolved

theless, my dissertation committee members refused to take seriously

a psychologist’s assertion that the most basic experience of being
human—subjective conscious interiority—was something learned,
not inherent. To me it only seemed natural, given how the behavior of
the possessed stretched the limits of normalcy and thereby evidenced
neuroplasticity, that Jaynes offered a persuasive explanation.
My advisors strongly attempted to dissuade me from examining what
I witnessed as a phenomenon in its own right—the “what” of possession
(“possession-in-itself”). Rather, I was advised by researchers who prided
themselves on being interdisciplinary, theoretically cutting-edge, and
open-minded to ignore any cross-cultural, “universal” implications of
what I observed and told to focus on the social uses of possession—
the “why” of possession (“possession-in-society”).3 I still have a letter
from one committee member, Professor Gananath Obeyesekere, who
described my attempts at accounting for possession-in-itself as full of
“hocus-pocus” and wrote that “I am also surprised that your conclu-
sion relies on such a dubious and ethnocentric work as Julian Jaynes.’”4
My investigation of possession, I believe, offers crucial clues to
understanding the origin of religion. Though this book’s point of embar-
kation is modern Tokyo, it will look backward to the past and across
a wide range of civilizations. Tying the different periods and places
together is a list of themes that my preceding account of Mahikari raises:

t
i
)FBSJOH
WPJDFTw
UIF
PSJHJOT
PG
SFMJHJPO
BT
CBTJDBMMZ
B
GPSN
PG
SFWFMB-
tion.

t
ͳF
TBMJFOU
SPMF
PG
IFBSJOH
WPJDFT
JO
XPSME
IJTUPSZ

t

3FMJDT
PG
BO
FBSMJFS
NFOUBMJUZ
IPX
UP
FYQMBJO
TUSBOHF
CFIBWJPS
TVDI

as spirit possession.

In addition, other themes that resonate with and are related to these
topics, such as the adaptive role of hallucinations and mental imag-
ery, will be treated. I will return to and flesh out these themes in the
following chapters.
Notes
1. Pseudonym.
2. The fieldwork lasted from 1988 until 1991. For treatments of Mahikari, see
McVeigh, Spirits, Selves, and Subjectivity in a Japanese New Religion: The Cul-
tural Psychology of Belief in Sūkyō Mahikari, 1997; “The Authorization of Ritual
and the Ritualization of Authority: The Practice of Values in a Japanese New
Religion,” 1992a; “The Master Metaphor of Purity: The Symbolism of Power and
Authority in Sūkyō Mahikari,” 1992b; “The Vitalistic Conception of Salvation
as Expressed in Sūkyō Mahikari,” 1992c; “The Body as Symbol: The Physical

xviii
 Prologue

Embodiment of Morality and Spirituality in Sūkyō Mahikari, 1993; “Ritualized

Practices of Everyday Life: Constructing Self, Status, and Social Structure
in Japan,” 1994; “Learning Morality through Sentiment and the Senses: The
Role of Emotional Experience in Sūkyō Mahikari,” 1995b; “Spirit Possession
in Sūkyō Mahikari: A Variety of Sociopsychological Experience,” 1996a; and
“Mainstream and Marginal Nationalism: The Paradox of ‘Japaneseness’ in the
Mahikari Religious Movement,” 2003.
3. Of course, a possession-in-itself approach can only reveal certain aspects
of possession. It cannot inform us about the motivating factors behind why
certain people become possessed or what this form of action means to
them. This is because possession behavior does not and cannot exist out-
side some sociocultural patterning. Nevertheless, insights obtained from
studying possession-in-itself will have cross-cultural relevance. Some of
the noted uses include self-aggrandizement; self-assertion; realignment of
marital relations; escape from an unpleasant situation; immediate control
of persons around the possessed during actual possession; self-chastisement;
attainment of intimacy through fleeting interpersonal relationships desired
by the possessed but socially prohibited in the nonpossessed state; desire
for a specific object; and the assertion of rights among the socially marginal,
especially by women. See Crapanzano and Garrison, Case Studies in Spirit
Possession, eds., 1977.
4. This coming from an anthropologist who has himself relied on perennially
criticized and discredited “Freudian” theorizing.

xix
 Part I
The World According
to the Gods
 1
The Failure of Science to
Explain Religion

This book tells a story about a relative we all know: religion. For some,
he is very much a member of our family, inevitably invited to sit at
the head of the table when celebrating important events, expected
to sanctify our weddings, say a few words at a funeral, or to speak at
other memorable events. And he never fails to say grace at dinner.
Faithful, he is there when we need him. His presence and words are
reassuring. But for some, this relative lingers in the background, a
distant, somewhat eccentric, and elderly uncle, perhaps, respected but
not taken too seriously. He is only invited to the very important family
gatherings. And there are those who, uncomfortable with this relative’s
questionable past, have disowned him, not even allowing him to say
grace. But however we may feel about him, he is kin, so it behooves us
to get to know him better.
The purpose of this book is to show why we really do not know this
relative very well, and however we may feel about him, he has valuable
lessons to teach us about our past, our future, and our very nature.
The Problem with Current Scientific Explanations of Religion
Why the strident tone in some recent atheist literature? It undoubtedly
comes from a frustrated acknowledgment that religion, after so many
centuries, shapes our beliefs. But I strongly suspect another reason:
despite many valiant attempts, secular science has not satisfactorily
accounted for the origin of religion. Though books on atheism, which
scientifically dismiss religion, have garnered much attention in the
popular imagination, they fail to explain adequately why superstitious
beliefs, irrational behavior, and far-fetched storytelling characterize
religious experience. Certainly, it is not a difficult challenge to point out
the scientific fallacies and logical inconsistencies of pre-Enlightenment,

3
 How Religion Evolved

premodern peoples. After all, these religions were formed millennia

before the discoveries of modern science. Just peruse the Bible or any
other sacred text and look for examples. Of course, it is more comfort-
ing for some of us to assume that such odd behaviors were not really
believed in wholeheartedly by their practitioners. Or we may conclude
that explaining such practices and events (e.g., conversing with Yahweh)
in neurological or cultural terms does not invalidate them as genuine
spiritual experiences. The point is that conversing with the divinities, a
practice irretrievably lost to the modern mind, had a real-world impact
and thus demands explication.
In this book, I offer an explanation that I believe is superior to previ-
ous accounts about the origins of religion. In order to lay out the basics
of this explanation, a number of concepts need to be introduced. This
is the purpose of the next two chapters.
Let us continue our discussion with a simple but underappreciated
fact: religious activities, invested with great effort and expense, were
carried on for centuries. For example, in ancient civilizations, before
about 1200 BCE, statues were not mere depositories for divine energies
or symbolic stand-ins for gods—the statues were gods. This is why these
wooden and stone carvings were awakened, fed, washed, dressed, and
perfumed by priests.
Beyond “Childhood of Humankind” Explanations
Good science is the simplest explanation with the widest applica-
bility. So rather than dismissing odd beliefs and practices as mere
superstition, we need to provide a rational account of their surprising
ubiquity and remarkable longevity. And to do this, we must approach
the archaeological and historical records with an open mind and with
the same curious attitude that welcomed Darwinism among the more
enlightened in the late-nineteenth century.
Many of us have some vague notion that religion emerged in the
“childhood of humankind.” Not yet schooled in the ways of common
sense (let alone modern science), pitiful humans could only tremble in
fear when the heavens thundered and huddle in caves when lightning
flashed. They ensouled not just creatures but plants, rocks, and moun-
tains as they populated the world with fierce and fearsome entities. Our
ancestors were simply confused. We rational moderns, more advanced
and fortunate, can forgive them in the same way we unthinkingly let
pass the endearing ignorance of a small child who believes in Santa
Claus and the Easter Bunny. As humankind graduated from early
4
 The Failure of Science to Explain Religion

education of times past and dark, it marched toward the illuminating

light of Enlightenment science.
A Failure in Astonishment: Appreciating the Ruptures of History
Religion is still around, of course, but as I noted above, for many it
loiters around like a distant relative. But the view that humanity has
witnessed an incremental, gradual progression from childish knowledge
to the adult level of enlightened maturity is a nonexplanation. Indeed,
such an unsatisfactory perspective goes against the historical record.
This should be evident to anyone with even a dilettantish interest in
ancient civilizations. The truth is that the timeline of religion, rather
than a smooth, slow-but-sure advance, is one of ruptures and major
shifts in mentality. The history of human spirituality is a fascinating
story, but it is in terrible need of a plot, a grand narrative that explains
its breaks and its accompanying psychological transformations. By
appreciating these changes, we can better understand the larger context
of our evolutionary saga.
Part of the problem—in fact, a very big part of the problem—is that
in a certain sense we are too accustomed to religion, that old, quirky
relative of ours who makes a polite appearance on holidays and other
important rites of passage, reminding us that quaint customs once had
more significance. To be sure, the original intent of these practices
has not been completely forgotten, and they still convey a solemn
and serious message. But their primal meaning has, for the most part,
been layered over with rationalist explanations and comfortable rou-
tinization. The more spiritually minded among us have heard religious
tales so many times that we take them for granted. Our unreflective
absorption of so many religious images and icons—the Egyptian
pyramids, well-known Biblical quotes, Charlton Heston as Moses
in The Ten Commandments, the ruins of ziggurats, the silhouette of
the Vatican, solemn Shang bronzes, the tranquil face of Buddha, the
dancing, multilimbed Hindu gods—has desensitized us from realizing
the utter strangeness and extraordinary grandeur of ancient religiosity.
However, in order to remind us of the ubiquity of a long-forgotten but
hardly understood religious mindset, we should peruse the works of
Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the great Scottish scholar of
comparative religion and mythology. Especially relevant for our pur-
poses is his 1300-page The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the
Dead.1 Today, a book like this is theoretically dated, but its impressive
detail and wide-ranging topics should alert us to how much we truly
5
 How Religion Evolved

do not appreciate about that relative of ours, whose past still shapes
our present times.

Scope of This Work

In this book, I cast my net wide to make the point that everywhere,
despite local variation, significant patterns do exist. What this book
loses in detailed treatment (depth) of one particular place or period,
it makes up in breadth in order to demonstrate common historical
trajectories. Though my focus is on China, classical-period Greece,
India, Israel, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and Mesopotamia, I also look
at Anatolia (Hittite kingdom), Persia, Minoan, Mycenaean Greece,
North America, South America, and Syria–Canaan for examples. This
book covers much ground, then, both temporally and geographically.
However, my intention is not to treat exhaustively all eras and areas.
That would be impossible. I do not offer a detailed account of world
religious history, so the reader will forgive me if he or she comes up
with a topic not dealt with.
My plan is to put most of the pieces of a puzzle in place, especially
those that frame the picture, as it were, since these form the theoretical
parameters of my arguments. Given this project’s tasks, some pieces of
place and period will be missing. However, the careful reader should be
able to perceive roughly what the completed puzzle looks like. Some
may want to argue about which piece of the puzzle goes where, but
my task is to convince the reader of the metapatterns of the human
story and offer answers to certain historical enigmas. Some readers
might wonder why I did not mention a certain people or place. But if
the reader thinks of examples that fit into this puzzle, then I will know
I have accomplished my goal.
A Caveat about Terminology
Before proceeding, a caveat is in order. The concept of religion, like
science or politics, is an abstraction that condenses multifaceted and
complex sociohistorical developments. It is also a product of modern
intellectual debate, that is, emerging as a reaction to the growth of
science. A word was needed to distinguish an increasingly secularized
and rationalized worldview from an outdated and superstitious mind-
set. Like “society” and “science,” religion is a very modern notion, and
we mistakenly assume that it exists as an isolated entity from other
human endeavors. Whatever use they may have, concepts such as
religion, society, and science are methodological artifacts developed in
6
 The Failure of Science to Explain Religion

the nineteenth century to account for the massive transformations the

industrializing world witnessed as new understandings of the human
condition emerged.
The problem with the aforementioned terms is that they end up con-
cealing more than they reveal, steering us down a road of assumptions
and misconceptions. For example, consider how they encourage us to
assume that social reality comes prepackaged into discrete bits and
pieces that can be described as social, religious, psychological, neuro-
biological, and so forth. But we all know that this is not how reality is
experienced; it is seamless, a nexus of interrelated processes that we
vainly try to pin down with names and labels. With this problem in
mind, I combine terms into single words—theopolitical, neurotheo-
logical, neurocultural, and so forth—in order to alert the reader to how
arbitrary modern categories of thought are and how they distort our
view of the world.
A related issue deserves comment. For ancient peoples, politics
simply did not exist separately from the natural world or the abode
of the gods. In order to translate this alien sentiment, for the sake of
convenience, I will use “theopolity” to designate the realm of gods and
humans and “cosmopolity” for the more inclusive realm of nature and
gods and everything in between.
How presumptuous of me to condense millennia of the world’s
religions, with all their rich diversity, sublime splendor, and ancient
wisdom, into twenty some chapters.2 But this is the task this book
has undertaken. The organizing thread tying the chapters together is
a psychological interpretation inspired by the work of Julian Jaynes
about the origins of religion. Using such an approach illuminates why
the ancients believed that the gods once regularly visited and spoke
with us, why they departed, and why over the centuries humankind
has witnessed a general trend toward having the self replace the gods
(i.e., the psychological interiorization of spiritual experience).
Admittedly, Jaynes’s theories would sound bizarre to me if I did not
take up his advice to expose myself to the texts of ancient civilizations
and religions. Before anyone accepts or rejects the ideas presented,
they should adopt an inquisitive and scientific attitude by actually
examining the evidence and ask: Why did so many people report hear-
ing the voices of gods in ancient times? Certainly, more than poetic
device was at work. In any case, none of my arguments make sense
unless one has at least a passing familiarity with ancient civilizations,
particularly their religions. The greatest failing of mainstream research
7
 How Religion Evolved

psychology is how it ignores our relatively recent history (relative to

our Paleolithic past).
In chapter 2, we will interrogate that relative of ours, asking him
about some unsolved puzzles. In chapter 3, we introduce some con-
ceptual tools to help us better understand the origins of religion. The
second part of this book deals with the early years of our relative,
recounting his adventures, exploits, and quests. The third part explores
his later years. At the end of the book are appended supplementary,
more in-depth materials for those who are interested in the off-the-
record, secretive stories of that intriguing relative of ours.
Notes
1. In three volumes: Vol I: The Belief among the Aborigines of Australia, the
Torres Straits Islands, New Guinea and Melanesia, 1913; Vol. II: The Belief
among the Polynesians, 1922; Vol. III: The Belief among the Micronesians,
1924. I have relied on the 1968 edition.
2. For general information about prehistory, we have relied on Patrick K.
O’Brien, Oxford Atlas of World History, 2005; Chris Scarre, Smithsonian
Timelines of the Ancient World: A Visual Chronology from the Origins of
Life to AD 1500, 1993 and his Past Worlds: Collins Atlas of Archaeology,
2003; and Robert J. Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind’s First Three
Million Years, 1999. Also, Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation:
The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions, 2006, has greatly aided me in
seeing the resonances between the “Axial Age” and Jaynes’s discussion of
the consequences of conscious interiority.

8
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