The Faith Instinct (14 page)

So where does language fit in? Many observers from Darwin onward have noted the similarities between music and language. Both require the generation and perception of sound. Both have the essential quality of recursiveness, that of being able to embed one phrase within another. Both are vehicles of communication, even though music communicates principally at the emotional level. Darwin suggested that music was in some way a precursor of language. “We must suppose that the rhythms and cadences of oratory are derived from previously developed musical powers,” he wrote. “We can thus understand how it is that musi
c, dancing, song, and poetry are such very ancient arts. We may go even further than this and ... believe that musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language.”
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In support of Darwin’s idea, there is wide variation in people’s musical abilities, but everyone speaks with much the same degree of competence. From the geneticist’s perspective, this is a sign that language is under tight selection, meaning that any genes that degrade or disrupt it are quickly eliminated from the population. Music, in contrast, being evolution’s first attempt at a human auditory communications system and now no longer essential for that purpose, is free of exacting constraints on its perception and production and so can absorb considerable genetic variation.
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Also favoring the view that music is more ancient than language is the fact that it speaks more strongly to the emotions than to the mind’s purely cognitive faculties.

If language provides a powerful enhancement of ritual but is not in fact essential to it, as argued above, then it was perhaps a latecomer to the emerging complex of behaviors that underlie religion. This raises the interesting possibility that language in fact emerged in the context of ritual. Language is so powerful that if it had evolved early, it would surely have dominated religious behavior. The fact that it seems to have been almost an optional ingredient in the mix suggests it was a late arrival. So a tentative sequence of events would be 1) dance, 2) music, 3) proto-religion based on ritual, 4) language, 5) religion based on shared beliefs about the supernatural. In such a staging there would doubtless have been copious overlaps between the evolutionary initiation and completion of each faculty.

The archaeological record at present holds little evidence to help set dates on the emergence of music, language and religion, all of which must have been in place before the modern human exodus from the African homeland 50,000 years ago. The oldest known musical instruments are a pair of flutes, made from the wing bones of a swan. Found in Geissenkloesterle in Germany, they are some 36,000 years old. This is a minimum age for instrumental music, which is presumably far older. Instruments like drums and rattles are made of perishable materials that leave no trace in the archaeological record. Authorities generally agree that the oldest musical instrument of all is the human voice, and it seems likely that song predated language.

There is one significant clue to the date of language, and that is the exodus of modern humans from Africa. Their behavior, as judged by their appearance in Europe fairly shortly afterward, is far more sophisticated than that of the anatomically modern humans who started to appear in the archaeological record some 200,000 years ago. It looks as though some neural development has brought about a quantum leap in their cognitive powers. Since few faculties could be of greater value to a social species than language, it seems possible that language, although it must have been generations in development, did not attain its mode
rn form until 50,000 years ago, and that this development was what allowed behaviora
lly modern humans to break out of Africa, escaping the encircli
ng Neanderthals who had long penned them into their ancestral homeland.
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If this scenario is correct, then language would have been perfected as the last in a series of communicative behaviors.

The final form of communication that is part of religious behavior is one designed for dialogue not between people, but between people and gods. This special channel is the trance.

At the culmination of their ritual dances, primitive peoples would fall into trance states in which they communicated with their gods. The trances didn’t affect everyone, just a few of the dancers. But their experiences allowed others to witness a supernatural power inhabiting the body of the affected dancer.

The evidence for these practices comes from observations of hunter gatherer religions, as well as from remnants of the behavior visible in today’s cultures, from the spirit possessions of voodoo rituals to the crowd frenzy at rock concerts.

Trances are hard for people today to understand because like other aspects of ancient religion they were mostly suppressed long ago. With the advent of settled societies, priests appointed themselves official intermediaries with the supernatural world and had no wish to see people communicate directly with their gods.

Trances seem to have been a central feature of the ancient religion. In a survey of almost 500 small-scale societies the anthropologist Erika Bourguignon found that 90 percent had rites in which regular trance states occurred, data for the other 10 percent being insufficient to know whether or not this was the case.
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Trance is a state resembling hypnosis, in which a person has limited sensory awareness, and no memory afterward of what happened. The symptoms may also include trembling, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, paralysis, rasping breathing and a fixed stare. “Trance always manifests itself in one way or another as a transcendence of one’s normal self, as a liberation resulting from the intensification of a mental or physical disposition, in short, as an exaltation—sometimes a self-mutilating one—of the self,” writes the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget.
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It was through these trances, perhaps, that the gods were first discovered. People would have surmised the existence of a supernatural world through dreams, in which they saw relatives and acquaintances who were dead. But dreams are personal and cannot be directly shared. Through the trances induced by prolonged dancing, early people came to believe that they had acquired a means of entering the supernatural realm a
t will. The trances proved that the supernatural world existed. It would have been a small step from there to reconstructing the nature of the gods who might inhabit this strange, parallel world of primitive peoples’ imaginings.

Physiologists do not understand how the trance state is brought about, but music, especially drumming, and strenuous dancing are conducive. Drumming can affect the body directly with its vibrations, as well as through the ear’s perception of sound. “If one nears one of the extremely large drums the Yorubabeat at their secret
oro
ceremonies,” writes Rouget, “one will hear the sounds through one’s abdomen—which vibrates in sympathy—as much as through one’s ears.”

Despite the drum’s reputation as an instrument of frenzy, R
ouget concludes that “there is no valid theory to justify the idea that the tr
iggering of trance can be attributed to the neurophysiological
effects of drum sounds.”
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A different view is held by Mickey Hart,
a percussionist for the Grateful Dead, who has explored shamans’ use of drums
to enter the trance state. “For myself,” he writes, “I know that it’s possible to
ride the rhythms of a drum until you fall into a state of receptivity that can be c
onstrued as the beginnings of trance. When I’m drumming, I like to get as clos
e to this state as I can, yet I also know that I can’t let myself go completel
y because if I do, my drumming will deteriorate and I will quic
kly lose the state. There have been many times when I’ve felt as if the drum h
as carried me to an open door into another world.”
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A common belief in societies that practice trance is that the person who falls into a trance is either possessed by a supernatural entity, or is traveling out of his body to meet with such agents. Different cultures have many variations on this central belief. Shamans, trance specialists first recognized among the Tungus and other peoples of Siberia, will take an out-of-body journey to meet the spirits of the underworld. Among the Azande, a people of north central Africa, witch doctors enter trance for purposes of divination. Here is a description of a witch doctors’ dance by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, one of the most careful of anthropological observers:

The trance state may sometimes be faked but for the most part it seems a real phenomenon, even if no precise scientific description is available as to how it is induced, maintained or recovered from. Why did trances play so central a role in the ancient religion? A plausible explanation has been developed by McNeill. He suggests that early peoples’ beliefs about the supernatural were drawn principally from dreams. But dreams are an unreliable channel of communication with the other world and are not adaptable to public ritual. Trances, on the other hand, can reliably be induced by strenuous communal dances. There is no need for everyone to enter trance; just a few susceptible individuals in trance can serve as a doorway for everyone to peer into the supernatural.

The trance state, with its strange tremblings and altered breathing, naturally suggested that the person was possessed by a good or evil spirit, or that their spirit had gone wandering in the supernatural realm. This interpretation made trances a compelling public confirmation of a supernatural world, existing in parallel with the real one. “Important new meanings were attached to the extreme trance state that dancing can induce. This, indeed, became one of the important growth points for the enormously influential complex of rituals and beliefs that we call religion,” McNeill writes.
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Trance dancing became the most reliable way of entering into communication with the spirit world. Believing they had opened a channel between the realms of the natural and supernatural, early people devised an elaborate array of rites and ceremonies for manipulating the gods of the supernatural world into bringing about desired ends in the real world.

Dancing for hours on end was an arduous way to gain access to the supernatural. Early peoples discovered a variety of other ways to alter brain chemistry and lightly distort the sensory gates of the conscious mind. In appropriate contexts, these transcendental experiences could be interpreted as communications with the supernatural. Some species of plant contain mind-altering drugs which were taken by shamans to help their travels into the spirit world. The Aztecs used the hallucinogen found in the peyote cactus, and made ritual use of the family of mushrooms that generate psilocybin. Soma, the sacred brew mentioned in the Rig Vedas of ancient India, may have been the psychoactive mushroom known as fly agaric. The Eleusinian mysteries, held at Athens for some 2,000 years starting in 1700 B.C., involved drinking potions that may have contained hallucinogens of some sort.

The oracle at Delphi, on the other hand, was based on the inhalations by the prophetess of a subterranean gas, recently identified as probably ethylene. The Pythia, as she was known, fell into a gas-induced trance and her mind was possessed by the god Apollo. Her utterance
s, generally not very comprehensible, were interpreted by priests, and carried considerable political influence in the ancient Greek world.
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The Pythia may have been the first to experiment with anesthetic gases but she was not the last. “Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree,” wrote the psychologist William James. “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.” That person may have been himself; James tried nitrous oxide and was persuaded that there exist other forms of consciousness that may provide different and valuable insights.

Naturally occurring mystical religious experiences often include such feelings as stepping outside oneself, transcending space and time, a sense of knowing ultimate truths, a sensation of sacredness and a deeply felt positive mood. In an experiment of 1962, later known as the Good Friday experiment, Walter Pahnke gave psilocybin, a hallucinogenic drug, to 10 Protestant divinity students, and a placebo to 10 others, with neither himself nor his subjects knowing who had received which. He sat all 20 in the basement chapel beneath Boston University’s Marsh Chapel while they listened to the Good Friday church service being held above them. His goal was to see if psychedelic drugs could facilitate a mystical experience in religiously inclined volunteers who took the drug in a religious setting.