Nothing is wasted.
Everything that lives is food for another. And everything that feeds is ultimately itself fed upon or in death returns its substance to the community. And in belonging to the community, each species is shaped. By belonging.
By belonging, by feeding and being fed upon, each generation of each species is shaped. Of each generation, some, better suited to survive, live to reproduce. Others, not as well suited, do not.
And so the generations are shaped. By belonging to the community that shapes them.
Nothing is exempt from the shaping.
The fishes that, four hundred million years ago, lived in the offshore shallows of the oceans were shaped. And learned to venture up onto the land. And in venturing onto the land were shaped by their contact with the community already living there. And some were shaped in such a way that, over millions of years, they became reptiles. No longer tied to the shore, the reptiles ventured inland.
Where they were shaped.
So that some of them, shaped in one way, became birds. So that others of them, shaped in other ways, became mammals. And the mammals, belonging to a community of plants, birds, amphibians, and reptiles, were shaped. Into many different forms. Into rodents and bats and anteaters and dogs and horses and deer and elephants and apes.
And all of these were shaped. By belonging to the community of life. By feeding and being fed upon.
And, over millions of years, the members of one branch of the family of apes were shaped into a manlike creature we call Australopithecus africanus. And Australopithecus africanus was shaped over millions of years until he became Australopithecus robustus—stronger and taller and more manlike, until, looking at him, we have to call him … man. Homo habilis.
Man was born belonging to the world. Being shaped.
Man was born belonging to the world. Being shaped. And, being shaped, Homo habilis became stronger and taller and more dexterous and more intelligent, until, looking at him, we have to give him a new name: Homo erectus. And Homo erectus was born being shaped, and he belonged to the community that was shaping him. His life belonged to that community. And those of each generation who were less well suited to survive in the community rendered back their lives at an early age, while the rest lived on to reproduce. And so Homo erectus was shaped, so that he became stronger, taller, more agile, more dexterous, and more intelligent, until, looking at him, we have to call him us … Homo sapiens. And Homo sapiens was born being shaped. He was born a member of the community that was shaping him. Not exempt from membership by virtue of his greater intelligence. Not isolated from the rest by virtue of his capacity to wonder and dream. Not aloof from the rest by virtue of his knowing that he was unlike the rest in these ways. He was a part of the rest.
And being a part of the rest, Homo sapiens was shaped. Shaped not by nothing. Shaped not by ignorance. Shaped by belonging to the community of life. Which was itself being shaped. The community itself was being shaped. The matter was being handled.
Not by man. The shaping of the world was not in man’s hands. It was in other hands, which had shaped it from the beginning. It was in the hands of the gods.
The gods were shaping the community of life on earth. And man belonged to that community and was being shaped with it and in it. Man was being shaped by the gods. Man was living in the hands of the gods. And the gods did not rebuke him. Or send him teachers. Or send him saviors. Because there was no need to. Because he was living in their hands.
Man had found his destiny. He had been fulfilling it from the beginning. It was his destiny to live in the hands of the gods. For the lifetime of this planet.
Because no theologian of the Abrahamic tradition had ever dared to see if God had been present in the human story from the beginning, none had ever understood what the Fall was about. What Adam threw away wasn’t heaven (heaven isn’t even mentioned in the story), it was life—life in the hands of the gods for the lifetime of this planet.
It had taken me five years to get all the pieces of the puzzle together. The knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge the gods use to rule the world, so-called because every single thing they do is good for some and evil for others. This is plainly the knowledge that the people of our culture have been exercising in the world since we began to take it over, starting some ten thousand years ago. Every morning the people of our culture shake the sleep out of their heads and reach for the fruit of that tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Every morning they roll out of bed and proclaim themselves ready and competent to rule the world in the place of the gods.
As the authors of Genesis tell the story, God said to Adam, “You may eat of any tree you find in the garden, except that one. For if you eat of that one, you’ll die.” He wasn’t speaking of the death of an individual but of Adam, the race of man itself. And that’s what we’re facing here as we celebrate ten thousand years of running the world: wholesale slaughter of the community of life, relentless destruction of our environment, and human extinction.
Because no theologian of the Abrahamic tradition had ever dared to see if God had been present in the human story from the beginning, none had ever understood what the Fall was about.
After five years, having learned to become my own teacher, I found myself in possession of a new vision of human history and a new understanding of the spiritual catastrophe identified in religious tradition as the Fall. Another seven years would pass before I found a way to bring them together in a book.
TWELVE
If tomorrow we were to wake up and learn that the night had brought forth a new, vital religion so universally acceptable to humanity that all religious disagreement had utterly vanished from the world, this would be accounted one of the greatest miracles in history and the very greatest miracle in the history of our spiritual development.
Well, there once was such a religion on this planet. Everyone is more or less aware of this fact, but no one—no one at all—has ever suggested that this was miraculous or even remarkable. No one has ever suggested that this universal religion might have even the slightest claim to validity. Needless to say, this was not one of our religions. It was (and is) the religion of the Leavers,* and for this reason it is judged not to count as a religion at all, is judged to be merely a pre-religion, a crude evolutionary stage that people had to pass through in order to arrive at the enlightened and advanced religions that evoke such murderous fervor among the Takers.†
I don’t imagine you know the name of this once-universal religion. It’s animism, the only world religion whose name you needn’t bother to capitalize. It isn’t a name coined by any adherent of this religion. Who would bother to ask a savage to supply a name? Derived from the Latin word for soul or spirit, in the 1860s and 1870s it came to be applied to the religious notions of primitive peoples. An early definition was supplied by Sir Edward Tyler in his book Primitive Culture:
Animism is the doctrine which places the sources of mental and even physical life in an energy independent of, or at least distinct from, the body. From the point of view of the history of religions, the term is taken, in the wider sense, to denote the belief in the existence of spiritual beings, some attached to bodies of which they constitute the real personality (souls), others without necessary connection with a determinate body (spirits).
Simply put, as it’s understood by Taker scholars, animism represents spirit worship as opposed to the presumably more advanced worship of gods or God. In other words (as it is imagined), these poor, benighted savages have the silly idea that every tree and bush and rock “has a spirit in it.” This is what makes it a “pre-religion”; true religions are concerned with gods, not spirits. Considering the unbridled anthropocentrism of the Taker mentality, it isn’t hard to figure out why this should be so: Gods are like us (which makes them preeminently deserving of worship).
A spirit in a tree is a what? It doesn’t have a name, you can’t talk to it or expect it to talk back to you. It’s just there. Gods have p
ersonality, just like us. Gods have personal lives, just like us. Gods have gender, sex lives, and even babies, just like us. They visit the earth and talk to people (who else would they talk to?), get involved in our lives. They listen to our troubles, take sides in our quarrels, look after us on our journeys, see that our enterprises get a little help, and so on. I speak here of the Olympian gods, the gods of pagan Greece and Rome.
The only universal religion the world has ever known is judged to be merely a pre-religion, a crude evolutionary stage that people had to get past.
Of course, having just a single god is considered to be even more advanced. The bad part about having just one god, however, is that it can only be one sex or the other, which puts it in the middle of the war of the sexes. If it’s a he, it tends to see things from the male point of view, and if it’s a she it tends to see things from the female point of view. The current controversy over God’s sex doesn’t strike anyone as being the least bit primitive. If God is going to be like us, then there must be sexual equipment of one kind or the other, even though it presumably doesn’t get much use.
In his own way, the god of the Abrahamic tradition is even more anthropomorphic than the Olympian gods. He loves us, talks to us, listens to us, gives us gifts, takes them back, frames laws for our conduct, gets angry when we fail to obey them, punishes us, forgives us, keeps track of our every thought throughout our lives, and at death rewards us with everlasting bliss or damnation. (He isn’t as big on damnation as he used to be; in some of the more advanced religions, he has quietly closed down hell and boarded it up like a decrepit amusement park.) All these things are clear indicators that one is dealing with an advanced religion, a religion worthy of the name. It is not thought to be the least superstitious to believe that God has an especially keen interest in what people get up to in their bedrooms.
As I say, the religion of the Leavers is “pre” because it doesn’t involve the worship of anthropomorphic gods like these. You’ll find plenty of gods in their mythologies, of course, but these are only local deities—not objects of universal worship or even of local worship, as we use the term. For example, the Amazulu of Africa say that Unkulunkulu made all things, but they don’t worship this creator the way Jews worship Yahweh or the way Christians worship Jesus. And if the Amazulu were to run across a band of Ashanti, they wouldn’t expect them to acknowledge the primacy of Unkulunkulu over their Onyankopon. You see what I mean; this is a sign of their religious backwardness. If the Amazulu were instead to fall upon the Ashanti and slaughter them for refusing to acknowledge the primacy of Unkulunkulu, this would represent a clear step forward on the path of spiritual development, and we’d be forced to acknowledge that the Amazulu now had a true religion.
While on (or near) the subject of anthropomorphism, I should point out that, when I say that a god spoke to me that day in Kentucky, I use these words in a completely metaphorical way. Nothing spoke—and certainly no one spoke. I didn’t experience the presence of a person at all. The world was ablaze with a divine fire. That’s what I experienced, and the rest is just my struggle to find some words that will help you understand what I experienced and what I later understood from the experience.
If the Amazulu were to fall upon the Ashanti and slaughter them, then we’d acknowledge that the Amazulu had a true religion.
Animism is the only world religion that has never been named or defined by its own adherents. It’s the only world religion that has never generated a sacred foundation text; it’s hard to imagine how it could have done, since it was never the religion of a single nation or people. It’s probably just as well. When you have a text, you almost inevitably have schisms and heretics, divisions by interpretations and divisions by degrees of orthodoxy. All the same, it makes it difficult to answer people’s questions.
———
A few weeks ago an Ishmael reader by the name of Judith phoned me. Conversations with Judith can be disconcerting, because she has the unique knack of asking questions that knock me off my center of balance, so that I topple in some new and unexpected direction. She wasn’t even aware of having this ability until I pointed it out and is as puzzled by it as I am. On this occasion she said, “Daniel, I’m calling to see if you have any tapes of the meetings you’ve had with groups about Ishmael.”
I said, “Well, I haven’t made any as yet, though I know I should have. What are you looking for in particular?”
“I’ve given Ishmael to several people at my church, including the minister, and they feel rather at sea. They have questions they’d like to ask, but you’re four hundred miles away. I thought maybe if you had a tape I could give them …”
“This is too bad. A couple weeks ago I had a six-hour conference with about twenty-five priests, ministers, rabbis, and other assorted clergy in California. I should definitely have taped that.”
“You certainly should have. What was it about?”
“That’s a good question. The rabbi who organized the event said everyone in the group had read the book and felt very ‘challenged’ by it. But what they wanted to talk to me about I didn’t know until I got there.”
“You went to California without knowing what you were going there for?”
I thought about that for a bit, then asked: “If I flew up to Oklahoma to talk to the people at your church, would I know what I was going there for?”
“No, I suppose not. I see what you mean. So what did they want?”
“It was really quite astonishing. They wanted to know how to reconcile their faiths with what they’d read in Ishmael.”
“It wasn’t the other way around?”
“No, it wasn’t. They weren’t challenging me to defend Ishmael. On the contrary, they were saying, ‘It seems to us that in writing Ishmael you have undermined our beliefs. If this isn’t the case, please show us why.’ ”
“Wow. What did you say?”
I want people to look at their old ethnocentric and anthropocentric beliefs and say, “Good lord, this is gibberish.”
“I’m afraid I waffled shamelessly. It gives me no joy to be responsible for people losing their faith. No, that’s not quite accurate. I very much want to be responsible for people looking at their old ethnocentric and anthropocentric beliefs and saying, ‘Good lord, this is gibberish. I see that now.’ Two very different things are involved here. Many people have written to me to say, ‘You’ve shattered my beliefs—and I thank you for it!’ That’s very gratifying. But I don’t like hearing from people who say, ‘You’ve shattered my beliefs. Does that mean I have to give them up?’ It’s profoundly alien to my nature to decide what people should believe. That’s something Takers consider themselves divinely qualified to do, but I don’t.”
“Even so,” Judith said, “don’t you feel an obligation of some kind to your readers?”
“What kind of obligation do you mean?”
“I mean, how can you shatter people’s beliefs and just walk away?”
“I haven’t walked away, I’m right here. What do you want from me?”
“I want some guidance. These people here that I told you about—they also want some guidance.”
“What kind of guidance?”
“You could start by telling us what you replaced your own shattered beliefs with. After reading Ishmael half a dozen times, I just can’t believe you’re the sort of person who can go through life without a spiritual vision of the universe.”
“You’re right, of course. I never tried to pretend otherwise.”
“Well, why won’t you share that vision with us? Why are you keeping it to yourself?”
“Well, Judith, to tell you the plain, dumb truth, it never occurred to me to share it. I wasn’t being selfish, I was just being discreet. I don’t like pushing my views on other people.”
“You don’t have to push them. Just give us access to them.”
I promised I’d try to find a way to do that. I hope I’ve made at least a beginning at it here.
It’s
true I’m uneasy in the role of prophet, not from any sense of modesty or unworthiness. A teacher, yes: One who says, “Take a look at this and this and this and this. Now, having done so, don’t you find the following conclusion to be irresistible?” I’m less comfortable in the posture of one who says, “Here, take my word for this. Don’t listen to others, listen only to me.”
Another great supporter of Ishmael sent me a book called Disappointment with God and asked me what I thought of it. As the title suggests, it’s a study of people’s disappointment with God: Why did God let this terrible thing happen? Why didn’t God respond to my prayers? And so on. I found it puzzling that he’d want my opinion of it, but by the time I was finished I realized that the book had given me an insight into my own relationship to the universe: I am never disappointed with God (or as I prefer to say, the gods). This is because I never expect the gods to take my side against others. If I come down with the flu, I don’t expect the gods to take my side against the virus that is pursuing its life in my body. If I travel to Africa, I don’t expect the gods to strike dead a mosquito that is about to have lunch on my neck (and incidentally give me a case of malaria). If a wildcat attacks me in the hills of New Mexico, I don’t expect the gods to help me kill it. If I’m swimming in the ocean, I don’t expect the gods to chase away the sharks. I have no illusion that the gods favor me (or any other human) over viruses, sharks, wildcats, mosquitos, or any other life form. And if they don’t favor me over a june bug or a mushroom, why would they favor me over another human being? If a friend of mine is killed in a random act of terrorist violence, I’m not going to blame the gods for this. To me, this would be nonsense. And I certainly don’t expect the gods to suspend the laws of physics to protect me from landslides, lightning bolts, or burning buildings.