Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  It took a wild stride of guesswork to exceed the reach of the senses and suppose there must be more to the world, or beyond it, than what we can eye up or finger or smell or taste. The idea that we do not have to confide in our senses alone was a master idea – a skeleton key to spiritual worlds. It opened up infinite panoramas of speculation – domains of thought that religions and philosophies subsequently colonized.

  It is tempting to try to guess how thinkers first got to a theory more subtle than materialism. Did dreams suggest it? Did hallucinogens – wild gladiolus bulbs, for instance, ‘sacred mushrooms’, mescaline, and morning glory – confirm it? For the Tikopia of the Solomon Islands, dreams are ‘intercourse with spirits’. Diviners are dreamers among the Lele of the Kasai in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.32 The disappointments to which human imaginations are victim carry us beyond the limits of what is material: a hunter, for instance, who correctly envisions a successful outcome to a hunt may recall the imagined triumph as an experience of physical reality, like glimpsing the shadow of a presence ahead of its bulk. The hunter who fails, on the other hand, knows that what was in his mind never happened outside it. He becomes alert to the possibility of purely mental events. Ice Age painters, for whom, as we have seen, imagined events jostled with those observed and recalled, surely had such experiences.

  Once the discoverers of unseen worlds began to subvert assumptions derived from sense perception and to suspect that sensed data may be illusory, they became philosophers. They broached the two supreme problems that have troubled philosophy ever since: the problems of how you tell truth from falsehood and how you tell right from wrong. Self-comparison with the animals that Ice Age artists admired may have helped, reinforcing awareness that humans have relatively feeble senses. Most of our animal competitors have hugely better organs for smelling; many of them see farther and more sharply than we do. Many can hear sounds way beyond our range. As we saw in chapter 1, we need to make up for our physical deficiencies in imaginative ways. Hence, maybe, our ancestors’ realization that their minds might take them further than their senses. To mistrust the senses in favour of reliance on imaginative gifts was dangerous but alluring. It invited disaster but unlocked great achievements.

  To judge from its ubiquity, the leap happened long ago. Anthropologists are always stumbling in unlikely places on people who reject materialism so thoroughly that they dismiss the world as an illusion. Traditional Maori, for instance, thought of the material universe as a kind of mirror that merely reflected the real world of the gods. Before Christianity influenced thinking on the North American plains, Dakota priests divined that the real sky was invisible: what we see is a blue projection of it. They evidently thought about the sky more searchingly than science textbook-writers who tell me that blue light is prevalent because it is easily refracted. When we behold earth and rock, the Dakota maintained, we see only their tonwampi, usually translated as ‘divine semblance’.33 The insight, which resembled Plato’s thinking on the same subject, may not have been right, but it was more reflective and more profound than that of materialists who complacently contemplate the same earth and the same rock and seek nothing beyond them.

  ‌Discovering the Imperceptible

  The idea of illusion freed minds to discover or guess that there are invisible, inaudible, untouchable – because immaterial – realities, inaccessible to the senses but attainable to humans by other means. A further possibility followed: that incorporeal beings animate the world or infest perceived things and make them lively.34 Despite glib dismissals of spirit-belief as the maunderings of savage minds, it was an insightful early step in the history of ideas. Once you begin to reject the world of the senses, you can begin to suspect the presence of living forces that make winds quicken, daffodils dance, flames flicker, tides turn, leaves fade. Metaphorically, we still use the language of an animated universe – it is part of early thinkers’ great legacy to us – and talk of it as if it were alive. Earth groans, fire leaps, brooks babble, stones bear witness.

  To ascribe lively actions to spirits is probably false, but not crude or ‘superstitious’: rather, it is an inference, albeit not verifiable, from the way the world is. An active property is credible as the source of the restlessness of fire, say, or wave or wind, or the persistence of stone, or the growth of a tree. Thales, the sage of Miletus who was sufficiently scientific to predict the eclipse of 585 bce, explained magnetism by crediting magnets with souls that excited attraction and provoked repulsion. ‘Everything’, he said, ‘is full of gods.’35 Thought, as well as observation, suggests the ubiquity of spirits. If some human qualities are immaterial – mind, say, or soul or personality or whatever makes us substantially ourselves – we can never be sure who or what else possesses them: other individuals, surely; people from outside the group we acknowledge as ours, perhaps; even, at a further remove of improbability, animals, plants, rocks. And, as the Brahmins ask in A Passage to India, what about ‘oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud?’ Get beyond materialism and the whole world can seem to come alive.

  Science expelled spirits from what we call ‘inanimate’ matter: the epithet literally means ‘non-spirited’. In the meantime, however, disembodied spirits or ‘sprites’, familiar in Western thought as fairies and demons, or less familiar as willies and kelpies, have proliferated. Even in scientifically sophisticated societies they still roam in some mind-sets. Spirits, when first divined, were subtly and surprisingly conceived. They represented a breakthrough in the prospects of life for those who were able to imagine them. Creatures previously submissive to the constraints of life in a material world could bask in the freedom of an infinitely protean, infinitely unpredictable future. A living environment is more stimulating than the humdrum universe materialists inhabit. It inspires poetry and invites reverence. It resists extinction and raises presumptions of immortality. You can quench fire, break waves, fell trees, smash rocks, but spirit lives. Spirit-belief makes people hesitate to intervene in nature: animists typically ask the victim’s leave before they uproot a tree or kill a creature.

  Ice Age thinkers knew, or thought they knew, the reality of creatures imperceptible to the senses when they painted and carved them. We can confirm this by calling again on the evidence of anthropologists’ data. Analogy with rock- and cave-painters of later periods helps us understand that Ice Age art was a means of accessing worlds beyond the world, spirit beyond matter. It depicted an imagined realm, accessed in mystical trances, and inhabited by the spirits of the animals people needed and admired.36 On the cave walls, we meet, in effigy, people set apart as special from the rest of the group. Animal masks – antlered or lion-like – transformed the wearers. Normally, in historically documented cases, masked shamans engage in efforts to communicate with the dead or with the gods. In the throes of psychotropic self-transformation, or with consciousness altered by dancing or drumming, they travel in spirit to extra-bodily encounters. When shamans disguise themselves as animals they hope to appropriate an alien species’ speed or strength or else to identify with a totemic ‘ancestor’. In any case, non-human animals are plausibly intelligible as closer than men to the gods: that would, for instance, account for their superior prowess or agility or sensory gifts. In states of extreme exaltation shamans become the mediums through which the spirits talk to this world. Their rites are those Virgil described so vividly in the sixth book of the Æneid in his account of the transports of the Sybil of Cumae, ‘swell-seeming, sounding weird, somehow inhuman, as the god’s breath blew within her … Suddenly the tone of her rantings changed – her face, her colour, the kemptness of her hair. Her breast billowed. Wildly inside it spun her raving heart.’37 Shamanic performances continue today in the same tradition in the grasslands of Eurasia, Japanese temples, dervish madrassas, and the boreal tundra, where the Chukchi of northern Siberia observe a way of life similar to that of Ice Age artists in an even colder climate. They are among the many societies in which shamans still experience visions as imagined journ
eys.

  By combining clues such as these, we can build a picture of the world’s first documented religion: the job of shamans, who still dance on cave walls, untired by the passage of time, was to be in touch with gods and ancestors who lodged deep in the rocks. From there the spirits emerged, leaving traces on cave walls, where painters enlivened their outlines and trapped their energy. Visitors pressed ochre-stained hands against nearby spots, perhaps because the ochre that adorned burials can be understood as ‘blood for the ghosts’ (such as Odysseus offered the dead at the gates of Hades). Clues to what may be another dimension of religion come from Ice Age sculpture, with stylized, steatopygous swaggerers, like the Venuses of Willendorf and Laussel: for many thousands of years, over widely spread locations, as far east as Siberia, sculptors imitated their bulbous bellies and spreading hips. Somewhere in the mental cosmos of the Ice Age, there were women of power or, perhaps, a goddess cult, represented in the big-hipped carvings.

  Further evidence, which takes us beyond religion, strictly understood, into what we might call early philosophy, comes from anthropological fieldwork about how traditional peoples account for the nature and properties of things. The question ‘What makes the objects of perception real?’ sounds like a trap for an examinee in philosophy. So do the related questions of how you can change and still be yourself, or how an object can change and yet retain its identity, or how events can unfold without rupturing the continuity of the milieu in which they happen. But early humans asked all these questions, delving into the difference between what something is and the properties it has, appreciating that what it ‘is’ – its essence or ‘substance’ in philosophical jargon – is not the same as its ‘accidence’ or what it is ‘like’. To explore the relationship between the two requires perseverant thinking. A distinction in Spanish makes the point: between the verbs ser, which denotes the essence of what is referred to, and estar, which is also translatable as ‘to be’ but which refers only to the mutable state of an object, or its transient characteristics. Yet even Spanish-speakers rarely grasp the importance of the distinction, which ought to make you aware, for instance, that your beauty (ser) can outlast your pretty appearance (estar) or coexist with your ugliness. Similarly, in principle, for instance, your mind might be separable from your brain, even though both are united in you.

  So two questions arise: what makes a thing what it is? And what makes it what it is like? For the devisers of early animism, ‘spirits’ could be the answer to both. If such things exist, they may be everywhere – but to be everywhere is not quite the same as being universal. Spirits are peculiar to the objects they inhabit, but an idea of at least equal antiquity, well and widely attested in anthropological literature, is that one invisible presence infuses everything.

  The notion arises rationally from asking, for instance, ‘What makes sky blue, or water wet?’ Blueness does not seem essential to sky, which does not cease to be sky when it changes colour. But what about the wetness of water? That seems different – a property that is essential because dry water would not be water. Maybe a single substance, which underlies all properties, can resolve the apparent tension. If you craft a spear or a fishing rod, you know it works. But if you go on to ask why it works, you are asking a deeply philosophical question about the nature of the object concerned. If anthropological evidence is anything to go by, one of the earliest answers was that the same single, invisible, universal force accounts for the nature of everything and makes all operations effective. To name this idea, anthropologists have borrowed the word ‘mana’ from South Sea languages.38 The net’s mana makes the catch. Fishes’ mana makes fish catchable. The sword’s mana inflicts wounds. The herb’s makes them heal. A similar or identical concept is reported in other parts of the world, as a subject of stories and rituals, under various names, such as arungquiltha in parts of Australia or wakan, orenda, and manitou in parts of Native America.

  If we are right about inferring antiquity from the scale of dispersal, the idea of mana is likely to be old. It would be mere guesswork, however, to try to date its first appearance. Archaeology cannot detect it; only traditions unrecorded until the fairly recent past can do so. Partisanship warps the debate because of the ferocity of controversy over whether spirits or mana came first. If the latter, animism seems a relatively ‘developed’ attitude to the world and looks more than merely ‘primitive’: later than magic and therefore more mature. Such questions can be left pending: spirit and mana could have been first imagined in any order, or simultaneously.

  ‌Magic and Witchcraft

  A question commonly asked and effectively unanswerable is, ‘Can you tweak, influence, or command mana?’ Was it the starting point of magic, which originated in attempts to cajole or control it? Bronislaw Malinowski, the first occupant of the world’s first chair of social anthropology, thought so. ‘While science’, he wrote, more than a hundred years ago, ‘is based on the conception of natural forces, magic springs from the idea of a certain mystic, impersonal power … called mana by some Melanesians … a well-nigh universal idea wherever magic flourishes.’39 Early humans knew nature so intimately that they could see how it is all interconnected. Whatever is systematic can be levered by controlling any of its parts. In the effort to manipulate nature in this way, magic was one of the earliest and most enduring methods people devised. ‘The earliest scientists’, according to two of the leading figures of early-twentieth-century anthropology, ‘were magicians … Magic issues by a thousand fissures from the mystical life … It tends to the concrete, while religion tends to the abstract. Magic was essentially an art of doing things.’40 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss were right: magic and science belong in a single continuum. Both set out to master nature intellectually so as to subject it to human control.41

  The idea of magic comprises two distinct thoughts. First, effects can ensue from causes which senses cannot perceive but which minds can envision; second, the mind can invoke and apply such causes. You achieve power over the palpable by accessing the invisible. Magic is genuinely powerful – over humans, though not over the rest of nature; it recurs in every society. No amount of disappointment can shift it. It does not work; at least not so far. Yet despite their failures magicians have sparked hopes, fired fears, and drawn deference and rewards.

  The prehistory of magic probably antedates the early evidence, in a slow process of mutual nourishment between observation and imagination, deep in the hominid past. When we look for evidence, we have to focus on what magicians aspire to: transformative processes that change one substance into another. Accidents can provoke apparently magical transformations. Tough, apparently inedible matter, for instance, turns digestible under the influence of benign bacteria. Fire colours food, caramelizes and crisps it. Wet clay becomes hard in heat. You may unreflectively seize a stick or bone, and it turns into a tool or weapon. Accidental transformations can be imitated. For other kinds, however, only radical acts of imagination will get them started. Take weaving, a miracle-working technology that combines fibres to achieve strength and breadth unattainable by a single strand. Chimpanzees do it in a rudimentary way when they twist branches or stalks and combine them into nests – evidence of a long, cumulative history that goes back to pre-human origins. In analogous cases, practical measures, extemporized to meet material needs, might stimulate magical thinking: those mammoth houses of the Ice Age steppes, for instance, seem magical in the way they transform bones into buildings grand enough to be temples. Though the time and context in which magic arose are irretrievably distant, Ice Age evidence is full of signs of it. Red ochre, the earliest substance (it seems) with a role in ritual, was perhaps the first magician’s aid, to judge from finds adorned with criss-cross scorings, more than seventy thousand years old, in Blombos Cave (see here). Ochre’s vivid colour, which imitates blood, accompanied the dead perhaps as an offering from the living, perhaps to reinfuse cadavers with life.

  In principle magic can be ‘white’ – good or morally indifferent �
�� or black. But to someone who thinks that cause and effect are invisibly linked and magically manipulable a further idea is possible: that malign magic may cause ruin and ravage. If people can harness and change nature, they can do evil with it as well as good. They can – that is to say – be or try to be witches. Witchcraft is one of the world’s most pervasive ideas. In some cultures it is everyone’s first-choice explanation for every ill.42 Pioneering anthropological fieldwork by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the 1920s focused academic efforts to understand witchcraft on the Azande of the Sudan, whose practices and beliefs, however, are highly unusual.43 For them, witchcraft is an inherited physical condition: literally, a hairy ball in the gut, which is the source of the witchcraft, not just a sign of it. No witch need consciously invoke its power: it is just there. Autopsy reveals its presence. ‘Poison oracles’ reveal its action: when a victim or third party denounces a witch for some malignant act, the truth or falsehood of the accusation is tested by poison, forced down a chicken’s throat. If the bird is spared, the presumed witch is absolved (and vice versa). In other cultures, common ways of detecting witches include physical peculiarities or deformities – Roald Dahl’s toeless witches allude to such traditions – or ugliness, which some peoples see as the cause of a witch’s propensity for evil.

  New ideas about witchery have surfaced in every age.44 In the world’s earliest imaginative literature, from Mesopotamia in the second millennium bce, incantations against it frequently invoke gods or fire or magical chemicals, such as salt and mercury; and only people and animals can be witches’ victims, whereas Earth and heaven are exempt.45 Ancient Roman witches, as surviving literature represents them, specialized in thwarting and emasculating males.46 In fifteenth-century Europe, a diabolic compact supplied witches’ supposed power. Modern scholarship shifts attention away from explaining witchcraft to explaining why people believe in it: as a survival of paganism, according to one theory, or as a means of social control,47 or as a mere mental delusion.48 The first theory is almost certainly false: though persecutors of witchcraft and paganism in the past often denounced both as ‘devil worship’, there is no evidence of any real connexion or overlap. The second theory was advanced by the innovative and egotistical physician, Paracelsus, in the sixteenth century. In the 1560s and 1570s the Dutch physician Johann Weyer published case histories of mentally aberrant patients who thought they were witches. In 1610 the Inquisitor Salazar confirmed the theory: working among alleged witches in the Basque country, he found that they were victims of their own fantasies. He came to doubt whether any such thing as witchcraft existed.49 Yet in seventeenth-century Europe and America excessively zealous persecutors mistook many cases of crazed, hysterical, or overstimulated imagination.