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Theories of witchcraft, its function, origins and the causes for some decline in the belief in witches.

What is witchcraft?

Dear Lily,

Almost every day we are faced with problems of explaining why unpleasant things happen. Friends are injured, children are ill, we suffer accidents and pain or, despite our best plans, we fail to achieve what we set out to do. It is natural to search for causes of these misfortunes, both in order to help deal with the suffering and to avoid future difficulties. Why did the car skid and crash on this particular day? Why do I and not someone else contract a painful disease?

Usually we know the obvious cause. The road was slippery, the light was poor. Yet we have driven down this road many times and there has previously been no problem. We drank untreated water, or went to a new restaurant, or were bitten by an insect. Yet at other times we took the same risks and this did not lead to illness. So, very early on in life, we learn to distinguish between the 'how' questions, how something happened, and the 'why' questions.

There is a story of an African who got malaria and went to the doctor, claiming he had been bewitched. The doctor said that malaria was spread by mosquitoes, to which the sick man replied that he knew that, but who had sent the mosquito?

There are two levels of cause, the material one and another which we like to relate to human purpose. When a granary falls and crushes someone among the Azande of North Africa everyone knows that the immediate cause is white ants which have eaten away the wooden pillars. But why was this person walking under it and not another? Who was the witch who turned chance into design.?

Since most things that have happened to us from when we were very young seem to be the result of decisions made by others, it is quite natural that we should believe that the suffering which constantly afflicts us is caused by a human-like force, someone who consciously hurts us in some way. Once we have decided on such a cause we have various choices depending on the culture we live in. They may be evil spirits, ancestors, God or witches.

To choose witchcraft as the explanation, that is the bad intentions of another human being, has a number of advantages. Evil spirits are largely uncontrollable. We are uncomfortable (if we believe in them) to think our ancestors are plotting against us. God is supposed to love and care for us, not kill or maim us. On the other hand, we know many people who are ambivalent towards us. They blow hot and cold. They may secretly be wishing us harm and be able to carry out their intentions because they are witches.

Why not believe in witches?

People in the majority of human societies both today and in the past believe that much of the pain and trouble in the world is caused by witchcraft. The effects of the stars, of random chance or of God's punishment, are less appealing as explanations largely because there is less we can do as a result of such beliefs. The stars are mindless and unapproachable, chance is uncontrollable and random, God is inscrutable and acts on a plan which often runs counter to our wishes. Yet witches are detectable and can be fought. They think like us, but with evil intentions. To find them we can turn to diviners.

Divination, using various kinds of oracle or shamanic ritual, is a technique to discover the cause for a misfortune. A sign in a mirror or glass ball, throwing of dice, bones or stones, footprints in ash or sand or the voice of a summoned spirit, points us to the offending witch. We can then take action and eradicate him or her. We can set up anti-witchcraft devices such as special substances or sacrifices to ward off the evil or treat the afflicted. All such divination uses devices which prevent it from being shown to be false. If a cure fails, it is because the witch was too strong or the counter-magic used against her was wrongly performed. If the wrong person is accused of witchcraft it is because the real witch has laid a false trail.

Witchcraft is a closed world. It is impossible to challenge its basic premises from within. In the past, almost everyone believed in the power of witchcraft. A sceptic, if such existed, would be accused of being a witch or in the power of one. It is very like many other closed systems which you will have heard about, for example communism. It explains much of the suffering in the world. Every new event adds to its strength. It is very attractive to human beings who live a pain-filled existence.

Does witchcraft help us to feel less guilty?

All of us have ambivalent feelings to those around us, even towards our nearest and most loved friends and families. Sometimes we even want to hurt our parents or siblings in a burst of rage. Witchcraft helps to explain and even justify many of these feelings. It helps to shift the blame for them onto the witch. It helps us to feel less guilty.

Many of us have experienced confusion when stopped by a hungry, poorly dressed beggar in the streets, particularly if it is a girl or woman with a baby. They ask for money. Sometimes we give, often we turn away. In our mind we justify our lack of charity: 'the money would only go on alcohol, it will only encourage further begging'. 'Anyway', we tell ourselves, 'we are not going to give in to menacing or threatening behaviour'. Yet we still feel guilt, which often leads to a sense of impotence or even anger.

In many parts of the world, including England three centuries ago, this was the typical witchcraft situation. A poor old woman comes to the door and asks for help. She is a neighbour or distant relative. We have helped her before, but this time we refuse. Our religion tells us that we ought to give, but our fear of encouraging dependency or the demands of our family leads us to say no. We feel guilt.

As we turn her away we think we hear her muttering or see a scowl on her face. She looks a bit frightening, witch-like. We are apprehensive. A few days later our child is sick or an animal dies. We suspect that her malevolent anger has caused this. We go to a diviner or take a case to court and the inner suspicions are made external. Others support us and report similar incidents. She is shortly imprisoned and tried as a witch. This is a situation I have read about in English court records many times and seen in action in a Nepalese village.

So witchcraft beliefs can be seen to be both intellectually and socially attractive. It should not surprise us that they are so deep-rooted and almost universal. Rather, the surprise is the exception, the societies where witchcraft has, apparently, never been believed in (for example Japan for a thousand years). Even more curious are the places where witchcraft, having been an important belief system then died away, as in England in the later seventeenth century or most of Europe from the middle of the eighteenth century.

Why did witchcraft decline?

Up to the later seventeenth century in Europe almost everybody believed in the reality of witchcraft and the courts tried many suspected witches. A hundred years later most intellectuals had rejected such a belief and the courts no longer accepted this as a subject for trial.

If the beliefs in witchcraft were circular and irrefutable, how were they undermined? If it is so logical, why give it up for the less emotionally satisfying world which we now inhabit where we constantly ask 'why' questions and are given such answers as 'I don't know', 'it is all random', 'there is no meaning or pattern'? If witchcraft beliefs help us to overcome feelings of anger and ambivalence (which we continue to feel to this day) by projecting the guilt onto others, why abandon them and leave us alone with both our suffering and our guilt? We seem to have chosen a dry and rather unsatisfactory option, even if in doing so we have saved many poor old people from torture and death.

Some say that the rise of experimental science in seventeenth century western Europe undermined the world of magic and witchcraft. This is part of the story, but we need to remember that many of the early scientists were believers in witchcraft. When I asked my 'adopted' niece, who had done biology and other sciences at school in a town in Nepal, whether she believed in witchcraft she said that of course she did. Whenever a mysterious or incurable disease occurred, she would suspect witches.

This suggests that to a certain extent 'scientific' explanations in terms of atoms and germs only answer the 'how' questions and so the need for a 'why' cause is still present. Indeed this blend of science and religion is what a number of distinguished modern scientists who argue for the need for religion often affirm. Albert Einstein caught this beautifully. 'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.'

Another argument is that the levels of risk and suffering which were behind many of the accusations began to diminish in the later seventeenth century. It is suggested that magical and witchcraft beliefs bridge gaps in our control of the material world. When we lack technical, organizational or social solutions, we turn to magic.

Faced with rough seas in a fragile wooden boat, we use magical protections. Faced with the hazards of the road, we hang little charms and talismen in our cars. When we do not know why hundreds are dying of a mysterious disease, we use amulets and magical protections. When financial insecurity, crime, disastrous fires are widespread, the beliefs in a magical universe, so the argument goes, tend to rise.

If, on the other hand, the risks from fire, flood, old age poverty, crime or disease are diminished, confidence will rise. The 'swamps' of insecurity where witchcraft 'breeds', will be drained, so such beliefs will decline, or so it is argued.

There are many difficulties with this argument, although again there is probably something in it. Most of the insecurities continued largely unabated until several centuries after witchcraft accusations and beliefs had died away. People would have had to anticipate a more secure world some generations before it happened. It was not until the later nineteenth century that the causes of disease began to be properly understood, or that public sanitation and financial security for the old and sick improved significantly.

We can see that witchcraft beliefs fluctuate. My visits to a Nepalese village over thirty years gave me the experience of a place which was full of witches and counter-witchcraft rituals in 1970. Twenty years later the shamans were gone and open beliefs and accusations of witchcraft had greatly declined. There was far less interest in magical explanations. For even though the risks remained and the western scientific and technological solutions, medicine, electricity, artificial fertilizer, were largely unobtainable at the village level, people believed in the new technologies as potentially more powerful than spirits or witches.

Certainly one reason for this was largely accidental. Just as some have argued that doctors 'manufacture' disease, lawyers encourage disputes, teachers generate ignorance, missionaries imbue a sin complex, so it is clear that having a resident diviner who earns his living by finding witches generates, or at least re-enforces, the belief in witches. Once the shaman had left the village for more lucrative work in the town, witchcraft beliefs, or at least accusations, dried up.

Yet there are other parts of the world where the fear of witchcraft is increasing. It is reported that in many of the cities and shanty towns of Africa the consciousness of witchcraft and the desire to try to protect oneself from it is growing. There are new witch-finding cults and diviners are doing a good trade.

Furthermore, the emotions and fears that lay behind the great witch purges of the past are still with us today. We still engage in 'witch hunts', though the subjects may be suspected communists or terrorists. So we refuse to accept the blame. We feel less consumed by guilt when we turn from the hungry and hopeless and blame them for their own condition, whether on the streets of our town or in the developing world. We still surround our risky endeavours with magic, whether setting out on a journey, taking an exam or going to hospital for an operation. We still read the stars and peer into the future with mixed hope and scepticism.


What do we learn from witchcraft?

We learn to distinguish between types of power. There is power to do good, which we approve of, and power to do harm which, if directed at us, we dislike. So people, using the association of black with night and evil, call these 'black' and 'white' witchcraft.

We distinguish power which is internal, a matter of thought and emotion, which leads to prayers and curses, and we call this witchcraft or religion. Such power usually comes from requesting, addressing words of an imploring kind, to a larger power, Satan or God. We ask for diabolical or divine power.

On the other hand there are externalized actions, making of images and sticking pins in them, burning of hair or fingernails, making a potion and uttering a commanding spell aloud. Here by the manipulation of objects, often accompanied by words, we force or conjure nature to act. This is magic.

This famous distinction, first developed in the study of the Azande tribe, is somewhat similar to that between religion and science. Witchcraft is internal and invisible, like religion. Magic is external and visible, like science. Magic like science aims to control nature. Its goals are also very similar to those of science.

Are we free of magic?

Our modern lives, however apparently 'rational' and free of superstition, contain much magical thinking. We curse our politicians, half hoping the curse will strike them down. We pray for delivery when we are frightened, we engage in a thousand minor protective rituals through our day. Just observe yourself and you will see how many magical acts there are, particularly when you are afraid or out of control. The world of witchcraft and magic is never far away.

One reason Harry Potter, the hobbits, even Alice in Wonderland strike so many resonances is that because even as adults we are reluctant to relinquish magic. There are those who argue that the greatest art derives its power from enchantment, or magical beliefs. Certainly many great artists seem like magicians.

We may think that we now live in a 'disenchanted' world, that we have banished the witches, vampires, goblins. Yet five minutes in the 'real world', in a bookshop, watching television or in a school playground will show us how wrong such a presumption is. Magic is alive and well. Its capital is Disneyland.

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An analysis of various types of mass hysteria, from medieval heretics, Jews and witches, through to McCarthy, child abuse and the War on Terror.

Who are the terrorists?

Dear Lily,

There are many secret organizations dedicated to undermining the State. These are often classified as rebel or terrorist movements. The main point here is the obvious one that one person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist. To some Chechens, Karens in Burma, Catholic Irish, Basques, Kurds, Nagas, Palestinians, Tamil Tigers, their dreams and hopes for independence only seem possible to reach through organized violence against what they consider to be an overbearing State. They believe they are fighting for their freedom and dignity. Yet to those in power they are terrorists. It is mainly a question of perspective.

We can see this easily enough by the way in which terrorists become non-terrorists once they achieve their goals. When they become the Israeli State, Maoist China, or ANC led South Africa, the terrorist label is discreetly forgotten. Nelson Mandela is a good example of the movement from 'terrorist' to national hero.

There seem to be a growing number of these organizations. This partly reflects access to weapons and explosives, partly increasing wealth. They often centre on the lines that have been drawn across the world by colonial powers. The borders between states, mainly set out in the nineteenth century, which cross-cut or ignore ethnic groups such as the Kurds, Basques, Nagas, Tamils and many African groups, are often felt to impose apparently arbitrary and alien rule upon them.

What seems to be at the root of this widespread problem is the lack of strategies to make people free but united. The idea of an international umbrella, under which almost sovereign states could carry on their lives according to their own wishes and customs, seems very difficult to achieve.

The bloody history of resistance and terrorism over the last century could have led to a two-tier model in which certain functions necessary for co-working at a high level were done by an over-arching State, but everything else was devolved. This is the model which, for example, some hope that the European Union will achieve. Yet it seems very difficult to manage. Almost every large nation faces the draining effects of local terrorism or resistance in the absence of a satisfactory legal solution.

What seems relatively new is the spread of these organizations round the world. The new type of terror is international, a coalescing of some of these groups and the emergence of others. This has led into the so-called 'war on terrorism'. In fact, however, there is nothing particularly new about such a supposed 'war'.

Why do people feel menaced?

Those in power usually feel under threat. At one time it was the Jews who were rumoured to form an international conspiracy to undermine Christian values. They were believed to eat Christian children, engage in obscene rituals and generally to be subversive of all good values. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries certain beliefs coming in from Asia were declared to be heretical and the Cathars or Albigensians in the south of France were destroyed by sword and fire in a giant and ferocious crusade led by the Pope.

Then in the fifteenth century an even greater menace was thought to have arisen. Satan or the Devil emerged to lead a secret assault on civilization with his army of witches. For two hundred years the international conspiracy of evil was thought to consist of witches. Since they were such a threat and could not be detected by normal means, special measures were needed. Manuals were written, legal codes were bent and amended to deal with the new threat. The previous tools to crush heresy, including the Holy Office of the Inquisition, were now used in the war against supposed witches. Thousands were rounded up, tried, convicted and burnt.

So extreme was the fear that even in countries without the Catholic Inquisition and with a different legal system, the laws were altered to deal with the new threat. In England in the sixteenth century, people who could not normally act as witnesses, children against their parents, a husband against his wife, were permitted to do so in these special circumstances. Previous evidence of behaviour, attitudes and crimes, not normally revealed, could be brought before the court. The individual could be placed under unusual physical and mental pressures in order to find evidence. He or she could be deprived of sleep for long periods, supposedly to see if her 'familiars' (a small diabolical pet) came to visit her, but, in effect, breaking down her resistance. The presumption of innocence was greatly diminished, the necessity for direct proof was waived and circumstantial or 'spectral' (hazy spiritual) evidence was allowed.

In the end, faced with universal fear and loathing, shunned by their friends, told that they were part of a grand conspiracy of Satanic covens or cells loosely joined to each other, the poor creatures confessed and implicated others. They then confirmed that an organization existed whose totally irrational, unjustified and unprovoked aim was to undermine 'civilization' as we know it. So 'civilization' responded by further abandoning the very justification for its existence. Using the special techniques now allowed, it 'proved' the existence of witches and hanged or burnt thousands of them. Only much later did doubt set in. It emerged that the whole conspiracy was a delusion created by the legal methods used to attack it. Thousands had been destroyed on the basis of an illusion.

Similar panics still occur. In the 1950's it was a panic about a secret conspiracy of 'communists' which led to the McCarthy trials in America and the destruction of the reputation of many innocent people.

Then in the 1980's in Britain a new threat came to light, the so-called paedophile rings. The details of their activities and the widespread sexual abuse of children by their parents were often 'recalled' when children were 'counselled' by sympathetic experts. Satanic rituals in which children were sexually abused and even human sacrifices were supposed to occur, were suddenly believed to be widespread. Hundreds were imprisoned, thousands of children were taken away from their parents in dawn raids. Only later, as the panic declined, was it discovered that most of the accusations were false, created by the very methods of trying to deal with them.

So there are plenty of precedents for the fear of a malevolent Other, and all of them tend to involve the shadowy presence of Evil, the Devil or Satan. Worldwide conspiracies against civilization were thought to have existed for thousands of years. Among them were Christianity and Islam themselves before they came to dominate.

What is the 'Axis of Evil'?

The recent rise in the fear of what a President of the United States called the 'Axis of Evil' is a general umbrella term. Like an earlier President's remark about 'the Empire of Evil', referring to the Soviet Union, it has wider implications once it circulates through the media.

The evil is envisaged as a threat to all civilized values. It is believed to threaten the State and all aspects of a society, just as witches or Jews or heretics were thought to menace the foundations of Christian morality in the past.

Some think the threat is sufficiently serious to justify the dismantling of the protections for 'terrorists'. A vast conspiracy is feared and this tends to be fuelled by the moral panic that is whipped up. This movement appeals to those whose power and prestige is enhanced. They may, as with the great witch-hunters of the past, feel a glow of satisfaction and passionately believe that they are protecting their God and their country.

Looking back after the event, as we can now do with witch hunting, we may well come to feel the same about the current panic. People may conclude that the action of the State in countering terrorism is undermining the very values it claims to protect.

Beliefs in Satan, witches and the Axis of Evil are a perpetual, irrefutable, justification for sweeping counter measures. We are used to the temporary and drastic suspension of normal legal protections and processes during a limited war. In the Second World War, for example, suspected aliens were rounded up and imprisoned without trial, all citizens immediately lost many of their rights, freedom of speech was severely curtailed, loyalty to the State became paramount. Serious criticism was discouraged as being close to treason. If you are not fully for us, it was argued, you must be against us. The State was justified in bullying, lying, deceiving, swooping down, spying on anyone. Truth is said to be the first casualty of war; the freedom and rights of individuals are the second.

Afterwards there may be apologies, as there were, for example, to the large numbers of innocent Japanese rounded up and locked away in America after Pearl Harbour. But that is afterwards. War itself usually spells an end to liberty and equality before the law.

Yet wars, at least the typical wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had one compensation. They tended to be bounded. There was a period of war and civil liberties and the normal processes of law were suspended. But then there was peace and the luxury of freedom could again be afforded by the State and was demanded by a citizenry who had not forgotten its earlier freedoms. People even persuaded themselves that this is what they had been fighting for, even if they had had to abandon the rights and freedoms temporarily.

The 'Axis of Evil', whether al-Qua'ida, or the satanic cults of witches, is rather different. This is a world linked to certain tendencies within Christianity and Islam. Those involved on both sides of the struggle believe that there is someone out there who is trying to undermine their way of life and whose motives they cannot fathom. These unseen folk are Evil, whether they are the feared western capitalists or Islamic fundamentalists. They are believed by many to be in league with the Devil.

The defenders of 'our' way of life believe that Evil never sleeps, is always plotting, always invisible, irrationally consumed with a desire to destroy 'our' rational, sane, orderly, pleasant way of life. It lurks menacingly, 'reds under the beds' as the communists were once described, or, to use a more modern metaphor, the 'monster' hiding in the wardrobe of the frightened child in 'Monsters Inc'.

Just as in the past witches were thought to hide behind the outward smiles of neighbours, terrorists are believed by some to conceal themselves as 'students' in our universities. Evil will use any weapons, of single or 'mass' destruction, curses, the poisoning of wells (a well known technique ascribed to witches and Jews in the past), and pestilences (biological warfare against animals and humans) and plagues of caterpillars or locusts.

There may be temporary victories, but there can be no truce or termination. We must fight continuously, for evil is hydra-headed. Cut off one of its manifestations, for instance the Taliban in Afghanistan, and it will spring up again elsewhere. Worst of all, it is not just an external threat, as are the conventional enemies, the Germans, the French, the British or whoever we were fighting against in the wars between nation-states. The minions of the Evil One are in our midst, or so it is alleged.

We are told that terrorism feeds on envy, in the envy of poor immigrants for their hosts, of impoverished Third World people who cannot accept that the fact that they earn one hundredth of what a westerner in many affluent societies earns is perfectly fair. The poison lurks in the devious practices of people who eat strange foods (not, as was supposed with Jews and witches in the past, babies and other sacrificial victims, but highly spiced and strange substances, or rubbishy fast food), who go through strange rituals (not satanic ones, but worshipping Allah or other Gods), who wear too few clothes (mini skirts) or too many (veils).

Of course there are differences between earlier panics and the present one. Witches, we know, could not actually harm people. A bomb, delivered by whichever side in the battle, kills and maims. The main point, however, is to realize from past experience that it is very easy to get into an almost unending vicious circle of fear. We would do well to remember a line from Edwin Muir's poem. 'We have seen Good men made evil wrangling with the evil, Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.'

Can the struggle against Evil ever end?

The fight against 'Evil' continues, the 'elimination' of terrorism or, in the past witchcraft, is the goal. We are told this is a war we must 'win'. Yet a moment's thought will show that such a goal forever recedes before us. In a world so blatantly unjust, where some consume three quarters of the world's resources while the rest live indebted and enslaved, how can those who wish us ill be eliminated?

Witches in the past were blamed for the envy which they understandably felt against those who denied them help. The guilt felt by the better off was reflected back and uncharitable behaviour became justified because it was against a 'witch'. So nowadays a rich westerner or Asian can blame 'fanatics' for being potential suicide bombers. They can be angry at 'asylum seekers' for foolishly getting themselves born in a country where no economic living can be made or where torture is widespread.

A 'war on terrorism', the endless battle, paranoia, aggression and undermining of civil liberties which it justifies inevitably feeds the power of the State. It is easy to see how swiftly we can move towards the world portrayed by George Orwell in Nineteen eighty-four, with a seemingly benevolent 'Big Brother' telling us that 'one more effort', one more (temporary of course) erosion of our privacy, dignity, freedom or wealth will finally eliminate the 'Evil One'. Just one more invasion to 'root out' the contagion, to 'drain the swamps', to eradicate the 'vermin', to crush and destroy.

All the metaphors are taken from the constant human battle to destroy - weeds, vermin, pests, wild animals – which have been classified as unworthy of respect or understanding. They are metaphors which were used in the medieval battle with Satan and his witches, and they are the ones used today.

If we make this last effort, the nightmare will be over, the 'foreign bodies' that infect our world will be eliminated, and utopia will be ushered in. For some this means eliminating the insidious poison of consumer capitalism. For others, the nightmare of closed and illiberal religious fanaticism.

Both dreams are unrealistic in our interconnected world. The masses will not want to give up the hope of living in a rich industrial society. Nor will we be able to stop them hating us, to persuade them to thank us for our civilized ability to soak up the world's wealth. The best we can do is to control our level of fear. I agree with the great American president Franklin D.Roosevelt, 'Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

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Various theories concerning the nature and functions of religion and a belief in God or gods, from an anthropological viewpoint.

Who is God?

Dear Lily,

Religion is usually defined as a belief in some entity or entities who exist(s) alongside but outside this material world. It can be one person, as in the monotheistic (one God) systems of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, or the many gods of Hinduism, Shinto, Daoism and certain forms of Buddhism.

In the west, believing in one God, creator and sustainer of the world, lovingly concerned with His children, there are rituals to keep close contact with this father figure. At birth, marriage and death God joins His family, ratifying and consoling. At certain times of the year He is asked to bless and in times of trouble He is leant on for support.

Questions are put to Him. Why is there so much pain in the world? What happens when we die? And the answers are usually found in His holy word, the Bible. This gives rules of conduct in the Ten Commandments and in the Sermon on the Mount. Divided into a multitude of sects, often at war with one another, this religion shares enough common beliefs to give it one name, Christianity.

In this and other religions there are sacred spaces, godly areas set apart from the everyday concerns of our lives. In these, prayers are directed at the all powerful One, who is pleaded with and cajoled, but not, as in magic, commanded.

In the West a set of beliefs defines Christianity, which is both its strength and its weakness, since it can be divisive and intolerant. In other parts of the world there is often a more relaxed attitude. Different beliefs and rituals can be blended together. In a Nepalese village, for example, a person may call in a Hindu Brahmin to do a puja for success, bury an elderly relative with the help of a Buddhist lama and then try to cure a sick relation with a shamanic ritual.

In Japan, belief is partly dealt with by western philosophy or Buddhism, many rituals are performed by Shinto priests, and ethics are partly catered for by Confucianism. There is no single system. When I asked a group of Japanese schoolchildren what their 'religion' was they were puzzled. They did not recognize the word or a special thing one could call 'religion'.

This often makes it very difficult for Japanese or Chinese visitors to understand western societies. Even a relatively secular country like England seems to them to be highly 'superstitious', full of the assumptions of religion. There are traces of God in our philosophy, poetry, art and everyday life and nothing makes sense unless we see the ghost of Christianity behind it. Many foreigners think of us, whether we go to Church or not, as religion-soaked.

Where is the sacred?

The distinction between the sacred and profane is more complicated than it looks. If we go up to the altar in a church, we feel we are in a sacred space. Yet there are many other places and actions which feel special, a cremation, a prayer before a meal, a moment of national celebration or mourning. Are these sacred?

In much of the West after the Protestant Reformation the division into sacred and profane was undermined. All of this world became a profane, secular, sphere and God was removed to another, distant, sacred space. So there is no obvious distinction of the kind felt in many religions whereby a particular day, or place, relic or icon is sacred. Many westerners lack a strong idea of 'sacredness' in their lives.

On the other hand, in many societies it is the opposite. Everything is to a certain extent sacred. In a Nepalese village, all of life is simultaneously and potentially sacred and profane at the same time. There is a little godling living in the fireplace, another in a basket in the corner of the living room, another in a bowl of water, others on the door-step and round the eaves of the house. There are numerous godlings in large trees or rocks. Divinity lurks everywhere and its power can be activated at any time by an appropriate ritual.

Religion is impossible to define precisely because it has so many features. Yet not all of them will be found in any specific society or in the same combination. This helps to explain the fact that though there can be no societies without a code of right and wrong, there have been some where it has not been possible to find a sense of a particular God or gods.

Are right and wrong the same everywhere?

In many societies murder is immoral, others consider it the highest of moral acts in certain circumstances. In many, sexual intercourse between unmarried people is sinful, but in the majority there is nothing wrong with it. In many it was fine to lie to a stranger, in others one should never lie.

It is even more confusing because ethical systems seem to be blown by the winds of change. In my life I have seen sexual ethics totally transformed from the system in which I was brought up. The concepts of right and wrong are being transformed by genetic engineering, which alters our basic attitude to the borders between the natural and the artificial. If we look at the ethics of our own country in the past we can see that they are very different from our own.

Furthermore, in most societies, ethics are not universal but contextual. The morality or immorality of whether to lie, kill or eat someone all depends on the circumstances. We know this in a mild way in that 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' evaporates quickly in war, or similarly 'Thou shalt not steal or lie' is forgotten in a famine or when faced by life in a concentration camp. Yet it is even more extreme than this. The ethical system usually varies for different castes or classes, men and women, differs according to whether one is dealing with relatives or not, differs if one is treating members of one's own or another ethnic group.

One of the astonishing features of parts of western society is that we not only have a strong ethical system, which we pursue as an ideal, but that the foundations of this, the idea of innate 'human rights' is now proclaimed as not only incontestable but universal. These rights are believed to apply everywhere on the planet, to men, women, rich, poor, old, young, irrespective of class or kinship. This is an extraordinary claim.

Furthermore, they are increasingly dissociated from God or a particular religion. Rather they are based on ideas about what is the ultimate nature of human beings, love, respect, 'do as you would be done by'.

So ethical codes have become more relative. We are aware of their limitations and the variations around the world. Certain old standards, for example in sexual behaviour, are abandoned. Yet ethical standards have simultaneously become more universal. They are now increasingly based on the local traditions developed in western Europe and America and are spread by a combination of military and technological supremacy. It is a truly confusing world.

Does religion mirror this world?

In most societies and over most of time, it was believed that God or gods came first and then they created humankind, often in their own image. Increasingly this was questioned. In the nineteenth century many people described religion as something constructed by humans. People made the gods to be like themselves.

Indeed the idea that we construct God, rather than the other way round, is an old one reaching back to the Greeks. Later, in the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne wrote that 'Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot and he creates Gods by the dozen.' Two centuries later another French philosopher, the Baron de Montesquieu referred to 'a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.'

This seems to make sense the moment we look at a range of societies, since it becomes obvious that their ideas of God, heaven and hell vary enormously. Those who herded animals, like the people who created the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, had a picture of God as the patriarch or father-figure of a tribe of herdsman who wanted animals as a gift. Those who grew grains and lived in settled villages often had a variety of smaller and larger gods who reflected their diversity, as in Hinduism, Daoism or Shinto.

It is even possible to find direct mirrors of this world in the ideas of heaven. In a Nepalese village, the dead spirits are believed to live in an exact copy of the ordinary village. In 'soul village', people keep similar animals, eat similar grains, dance in a similar way, and live in houses like those which they occupied when alive. The only difference is that there is no disease, hard work or death. The whole idea of such a projection is described by the English poet Rupert Brooke when he imagined the 'Heaven' of some fish.

'Fish say, they have their stream and pond;
But is there anything beyond?'

Fish conclude that:

.... 'somewhere, beyond space and time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!'

In such a world, all is perfect.

'Oh! Never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair.

Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.'

There is obviously something in this mirror image idea. In relatively uniform small societies, the group affirms itself in the supernatural realm, and then the moral rules of society and the present arrangements are endorsed by an apparently separate God.

Yet usually constructing a heaven is more complicated than this. People in most societies have for a long time become divided by class or caste, by gender and by occupation. If one group were designing heaven it would look like one thing, another group would design it in another way. Hence feminists see God as a She, young people would prefer her young, and black people may not be too keen on her whiteness.

The only solution is to make God, heaven and the spiritual world as vague and abstract as possible, as in Anglican Christianity. In the Anglican heaven, when I pressed my teachers on the subject, I learnt that there are clouds, a vague fatherly figure, but the rest is up to the believer to fill in. Dead friends and relatives can be placed in the context of one's choice.

You Lily, as a child, could invent your own heaven where, as you explained to me, an endless game of 'Pass the Parcel' took place. Each person won a prize when they unwrapped a layer of the parcel, and the prized were their heart's desire.

What is sin?

A society with a religion of rules imparts a strong sense of sin. To break the ethical rule is bound to displease God or the gods. In Christianity, to masturbate, to lie, to cheat, are widely thought to be sins which God will punish. On the other hand, in the majority of societies, where ethics are one thing, and religion and ritual another, it is different. In Japan, for instance, breaking rules of sexual behaviour might lead to social sanctions, but it does not upset God.

So when the Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century they found one of their most difficult tasks was to persuade the Japanese that they were sinful. There was no such concept as 'sin'. Many Japanese could see little reason to adopt a religion which preached salvation from the consequences of sin through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ who had taken upon him the sins of the world. It was a big problem.

The same difficulty was faced by missionaries in other parts of the world. In many tribal societies people were believed to be good or bad human beings, moral or immoral, kind or unkind. Yet this had nothing to do with whether they would go to heaven or hell. Indeed, in most of them there was only a Heaven. There was no Hell at all, just a rebirth into this world in another form, or a land where all the dead went. So again the missionaries had first to persuade people of their sinfulness and then to provide the remedy in their teaching, just as merchants had to persuade people they needed their goods before trying to sell them.

One way some people have tried to explain the difference between attitudes is to note that in the majority of societies people feel shame when they do bad things, particularly if they are found out. The failure is in relation to other people.

On the other hand there are those religions such as Christianity where people feel a sense of guilt. That is to say, people experience an inner feeling that they have betrayed something beyond this human society. Even if they are never found out in their lies or sexual misbehaviour, God will know and they feel guilt. Robinson Crusoe on his island clearly felt guilt at certain times although there was no-one else on the island. This is because he had a sense of an invisible God watching him.

The opposition between shame and guilt is a little over-simple, but it is a useful first way to start to try to understand the difference. Too much sense of sin and guilt has weighed down and even destroyed many people. Equally, an absence of a sense of sin and guilt has turned others into 'amoral supermen', that is people with no real sense of good and bad. A little more sense of sin and guilt might not have been amiss in the case of Stalin or Chairman Mao, perhaps a little less might benefit some of the anxious and guilt-ridden individuals you are bound to meet.

Does Evil really exist?

It is not widely recognized that Evil and the Devil are so closely linked as to be inseparable. In the Lord's prayer 'Deliver us from Evil', used to be 'Deliver us from the Devil'. Yet the word Evil with a capital E has come back into fashion lately with a great deal of talk of this or that action being 'utterly Evil', of the 'Empire of Evil', the 'Axis of Evil'. So what is Evil and does it exist?

There are clearly many wrong, immoral or criminal thoughts and actions and when we condemn them we call them evil. In this sense we refer to anti-social acts as evil. We consider rape, cruelty to animals, serious lying, incest, and many other things as 'evil', that is 'seriously not good'. No-one would have difficulty with this. In this sense, almost all behaviour, if carried to extremes, or done for the wrong reason, can turn into evil. 'To tell a truth with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent'.

The problem comes when a Bishop or politician condemns a barbaric murder or genocide or terrorist attack as 'Evil' with a capital 'E'. Sometimes the use of this word is an attempt to deal with the extreme feeling of revulsion and outrage people feel. To call it 'absolutely Evil' is the strongest condemnation we can make. Hitler or a suicide bomber who kills dozens of innocent civilians are condemned as 'pure Evil'.

The word gets its power from the often hidden connections with its history and link with the Devil. An Evil person or act is completely unacceptable. People often feel that there is no purpose in trying to understand it, no way we should try to think whether we might have done such a thing in the situation of the person we condemn. It is pure corruption, pure irrationality, pure evil intention. Evil comes from some dark force that hovers on the edge of our world, Satan, the Devil, the Anti-Christ, the opposite of God.

This absolute Evil is only sustainable in a world that believes in the radical opposition between Good (God) and Evil (Devil). Most civilizations do not have this opposition. Some Japanese may consider the dropping of atom bombs on their cities as 'evil'. Yet since they have no Satan or Devil, a concept absent in Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto and Daoism, they cannot think of a conspiracy of Evil, or pure Evil.

Why does God allow so much pain?

One of the greatest puzzles facing all of those who seek meaning in this world is how to reconcile a loving, caring and all powerful Creator with the horrors we find every day in the newspapers and television, and in our personal lives.

It was a problem seriously examined by Shakespeare whose character King Lear concluded that 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport', or by William Blake who asks the tiger 'Did he who made the lamb make thee?', or by Tennyson when he tried to understand why his dear friend had died but could only see around him 'nature red in tooth and claw'. Or by Joseph Heller when he half facetiously wrote 'Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation?'

We seem to be trapped. If God is what he is claimed to be, why does he allow all this suffering? Or, putting it another way, can I believe in a God who seems to preside over such mayhem? Where was God in the Ruanda genocide, where was he in the death trenches of the World Wars or in Stalin's gulag or Hitler's concentration camps or Pol Pot's killing fields? Where was he in the floods, fires, volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes?

The conventional answers do not seem totally satisfactory. We are told that humans brought all this pain on themselves through an act of disobedience, that we are being punished for our 'original sin'. But surely God, being all wise and all powerful could have foreseen this outcome and killed the serpent or provided an alternative apple tree, or talked the over-ambitious angel out of rebelling?

Another suggestion is that God, like a loving parent who gives his children the exercise of free will, has to allow them to make mistakes and hence to suffer. If a small child is to be sheltered from all risks it would have to be locked up in a padded cell. God made us a wonderful world in which we can make good or bad choices, and the latter can lead us into dangerous situations, injury or death. This sounds vaguely plausible, but of little comfort.

An alternative solution in some religions is to treat the world as a painful illusion. There are a set of trials and apparent miseries, from which we can withdraw into our inner selves and await the bliss of Nirvana or extinction. Another alternative is to accept that biology, society and economics control our lives. We do appear to have some free will, and we will try to increase happiness for ourselves and others. Yet, in the end, pain is present from the moment we are born. It is part of being human and something which constantly asks us to wonder with the philosopher Nietzsche 'Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?'

Description:

An analysis of the functions and nature of rituals, symbols, taboos and other constraints on human beings, from an anthropological and historical viewpoint.

Can we control the spiritual world?

Dear Lily,

Much of the effort to control supernatural spirits revolves around various rituals. There is ritual with a small 'r' which covers almost everything that humans do. This is standardized, repetitive, formalized, communicative behaviour. A hand-shake or a kiss of greeting are good examples. In much of the west, the bodily movements of greeting have taken a recognized form; to shake with the left hand, or kiss someone on the nose rather than the cheek, would be considered strange.

The handshake communicates friendship, trust, affection or the sealing of a bargain. It is a social ritual and if you examine your life you will find it is full of these actions. Such a general use of the word would also cover a great deal of low level repetitive obsessive behaviour associated with certain forms of mental illness (such as constantly washing one's hands or brushing one's hair).

Other people's rituals almost always seem odd. Here is part of the account of a visiting anthropologist who wrote an article on 'Body Rituals among the Nacirema' (worth spelling backwards).

'The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite... this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.

In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client... The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth man year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.'

What is real Ritual?

What turns these small 'r' rituals, including cleaning one's teeth, into Ritual with a capital R, can be seen by looking at the difference between the Protestant and Catholic communion in Christianity. The Protestant communion is a ritual. The clergyman takes the bread and wine and gives it to a communicant who eats and drinks it 'in remembrance' of Christ's sacrifice for us. It is a gesture of communication between the present congregation and Christ. Yet nothing spiritual happens or is changed.

In the Catholic communion, when the priest blesses the bread and wine a small miracle occurs. The bread becomes the flesh of Christ, the wine His blood. This is not just a way of speaking. It is really believed to happen, and hence it is called 'transubstantiation', that is the changing of substance. Some Catholics believe that if we took the wine after the blessing and put it under a powerful microscope we would find that it was no longer grape-juice, but had the DNA of Christ's blood.

So Ritual creates a bridge between this material world and a spiritual dimension which is always there but normally invisible. It is like plugging a device into an electric socket and then being able to tap the energy which is ever present, though concealed. Once one is plugged in, it is possible to use the energy to have effects at a distance in space or time and to change this material world.

A hand-shake or kiss symbolizes or expresses friendship and equality. It may also inaugurate such friendship. So it can be both expressive and instrumental. Yet it has no particular link to the Gods, except in certain special Rituals where, for example, a person kisses the Holy Cross or takes an oath of allegiance to an overlord, followed by a kiss or handshake.

What Ritual can do is to bring together special words and actions in such a way that it automatically changes this material world. So there are Rituals to bring the rain, to make the crops flourish, to prevent sickness in animals, to cure sick children, to take the spirits off to the land of the dead, to make a woman fertile or to bring success in battle.

Where has Ritual gone?

After the Protestant Reformation in western Europe in the sixteenth century and the rise of a new scientific outlook around the same time, Ritual was supposedly banished. We have lots of ceremonies, processions and formalized behaviour. But the idea that spiritual power could automatically be released by saying words in a certain order or doing things in a formal way, for example beating a drum or lighting candles to bring rain, seemed to the reformers and rationalists both superstitious and un-scientific. This scepticism has persisted among many Europeans and Americans.

So while there are many 'secular rituals', public parades and much of what goes on in sport and entertainment, this is limited to this material world. This is the case even if it often gives people the slightly 'out of this world' feeling of true Rituals, what has been called 'effervescence' or excitement.

These secular rituals may have great power over us. Mass parades, Hitler's rallies or the displays for Chairman Mao, when hundreds of thousands march and wave flags, obviously move people deeply. Fascism and Communism and all strong political ideologies love secular rituals since they help to control hearts and minds. Yet while they may have the psychological power of Ritual, they are not religious. They do not ask God to interfere and change this material world.

Both ritual and Ritual are immensely powerful and they shape our lives. They obtain their power because humans are deeply affected by symbols and standardized actions. Put up certain symbols, colours, signs and shapes, play the right music, orchestrate a specific set of actions (a goose step or swinging of arms), and an individual, especially if he or she is in a large crowd, will quickly be deeply transfixed.

Drama and ritual are therefore very closely linked. The Greeks knew this well when they talked about the purging, cathartic, transforming effects of plays. The same effects can be seen in many other forms of dance and drama around the world, for instance in Hindu societies or Japanese noh performances. As humans we find ritual and drama deeply influences much of our waking life and even our dreams. We are constrained in what we can do and what we can think by rituals because they create paths through time which force us in a certain direction.

Even when we try to release ourselves from the power of ritual we are often trapped. The Quakers were amongst the most extreme anti-ritualists among religious groups. They tried to expel all formal, standardized, repetitive, behaviour from their lives, in language, gestures and in their worship. Their services have no music, no symbols, no apparent formality. Yet the stillness and simplicity becomes a sort of anti-Ritual ritual which is in some ways as compulsive and constraining as anything they were attacking. Anyone who tried to stand up and sell goods in a Quaker meeting would soon discover that there were ritual rules.

What are myths?

Most rituals contain a mythical dimension for they are based on a myth, or mythical stories are recited during them. So myth and ritual are inextricably linked. Yet our common understanding of myths makes it difficult for most of us to understand what they are.

People often describe other people's beliefs as 'just myths'. This assumes that myths are untrue, as if myth and factual truth are contradictory, or that they are to be distinguished from real history; 'we know that Robin Hood never existed though there is a myth that he did'. In a fact-obsessed and scientific culture we use the word 'myth' in order to describe what people believe without foundation, or beliefs which we do not share.

Yet this strong opposition between 'truth' and 'fact' on the one hand and 'myth' on the other conceals something which is much more important. It fails to account for the strong hold which myth has in all our lives whether we are explicitly 'religious' or not. Myths are particular kinds of stories which cannot be judged by the simple criterion of scientific truth or falsehood. They are trying to say something beyond the level of ordinary truth.

The opposition between 'myth' and 'fact' or 'truth' disappears further when we consider modern science. Many cosmologists and astro-physicists now believe in the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, or its successor String Theory. This concept is so abstruse and the information so complex that the theories cannot be subjected to all or many of the scientific proofs. They cannot be shown to be factually true. They are just a guess, a working model. So it is a paradox that our most rationalistic and scientific thinkers have surrounded themselves with an explanation of the origin of our universe and world which is beyond proof and perhaps a 'myth' in the wider sense.

In doing this, they are demonstrating one of the major functions of myths, one large category of which are myths of origin. The story of the Garden of Eden in Christianity, or the Sun Goddess who founded Japan, or many of the stories of the origins of drums or incest in a Nepalese village are like this. People do not usually ask whether they are literally true. They are ways of thinking about puzzling and irresolvable questions.

We still do not know how human life, or life at all, arose on this planet. We do not know why we have a sense of right and wrong. Myths give us complex accounts of such matters. Kipling's Just So Stories, 'How the Elephant Got Its Trunk' or 'How the Leopard Got Its Spots' are myths in this sense. When we read them we do not ask whether they are true or false, they just make sense at a different level.

Another function of myth is as a charter or explanation of how things are as they are. Some people say that women are inferior because they came from Adam's rib, that the Fascists are superior because they are descended from the ancient Teutons, that Communism will finally triumph because humans in their original innocent beginnings had no property. We live by myths of many kinds and manufacture them every day to justify the inequalities and injustices, or the surprises and changes, of our lives.

Myths try to explain the contradictions and mentally insoluble, irresolvable, tensions in our world. How is it that we seem to be both animals and non-animals? Many myths tell of the changing of humans into animals, vampire myths and were-animals. How do we seem both to be mortal, born to die, yet immortal? The death and re-birth of Christ, of King Arthur, myths of birth and re-birth in Hinduism, many myths tell us stories to help us think through these problems. This is obviously like much great literature and drama which puts forward these mysteries and irresolvable contradictions and states the arguments on both sides, then leaves us to decide the truth.

So myths and mysteries are closely linked. We can believe in fairies, hobbits, Harry Potter's world, Father Christmas or the little spirits that steal children's souls in the forests around the village in Nepal. Yet if pressed as to whether they are literally true, we would be sceptical. The room for half-belief, poetic belief, 'as if' belief is immense and most humans spend much of their time thinking in this way. Myths, like poetry and drama, only require a 'willing suspension of disbelief' to exercise their power over us.

What are symbols?

Basically symbols are objects, physical or immaterial (such as a sound), which stand for something else. Supposing you wanted to send someone a message to tell them that you were happy. You could do this by a direct method such as sending them a photograph of yourself laughing. In this case what you sent them, the representation of yourself, the photograph or thing which signified what you felt, is identical with the thing it represented or signified. A photograph is a wysiwyg. 'What you see is what you get'. When you look at the photo, the link between the signifier (the photograph) and the signified (your face) is very strong, almost identical. It is nothing more nor less. The relationship is explicit, an exact matching. Some very elementary picture writing or 'pictographs' are like this. It is not symbolic.

Or you could show your friend a smiley face, not your own but a conventionalised one of the kind many people send as an e-mail. There is now some relationship between you, happiness and the smiling face, but the gap between what you want to represent and how you represent it is a little more distant. There is room for interpretation and your friend may need to be taught to recognize a couple of lines and a couple of dots as a smiley face and to realize that this stands for your happiness. Chinese writing is like this. For example, the word for 'house' is a picture of a house, but over the ages it has become distorted. We are still not in the land of real symbolism.

Or you could send them a short note saying 'I am very happy'. Now, if you examine those letters, they are absolutely arbitrary. There is no possible relationship between the letters 'h a p p y' and the human emotion of happiness. The letters are abstract and arbitrary symbols, which have been joined together. When the reader sees them, having been taught how to decode them, they can be interpreted as symbols pointing towards the idea of happiness.

So symbols get their power from their arbitrary and abstract nature. When we decipher them, they can affect us deeply. When a persecuted Christian saw the sign of a fish on a wall, he or she could read into it the Greek letters for fish, which could be read as the first letters of words in the phrase 'Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Saviour'. Yet others just saw a picture of a fish. When the police arrive to examine a murdered man in southern Italy and find a prickly pear lying in his lap as if by accident, they know it is a mafia killing. Or when you see a blue poster in a window at election time in Britain you believe that the people inside will probably vote Conservative. Yet there is no intrinsic relationship between prickly pears and the mafia, or blue and the Conservatives.

Each culture has its symbols and this is particularly true of colours. White is the symbol of death in Asia, black is that symbol in Europe. Red is the royal colour in China, gold in many parts of the world. Why the important colours in much of Africa should be brown, white and red has been widely discussed. Can it be related to their prominence in human life in the form of milk, blood and faeces? Whatever the reason, colours, sounds, shapes, all carry powerful meanings as we all know too well with the swastikas of the Nazis, who perverted a benevolent eastern symbol into one of power and hate.

Symbols are enormously powerful because although there is a commonly understood element to them, each of us can also read our own meanings into them and respond in different ways. They gain even more power when placed together in a series. When they are carefully constructed into a ritual or work of art we are enchanted and overwhelmed.

So religion is largely about the use of these apparently arbitrary symbols which we usually interpret at a level below our consciousness. We are symbol-producing and symbol-consuming creatures. We are able both to explore and communicate very deep truths, particularly in the most abstract symbolic forms such as music, art and mathematics. Yet we are also trapped, confused and led astray by symbols and our minds seduced by their power.

What are taboos?

Symbols are often associated with boundaries and these boundaries are in turn enforced by taboos. So what are 'taboos'? The word 'taboo' came into our language from the Pacific island term tapu meaning a combination of secret and forbidden. It is a useful word for us since we find that much of our life seems to be broken up into things we can and can't do. It is good to have a short-hand way to speak of apparently meaningless or unexplained prohibitions as 'taboos'.

We classify certain things as safe, decent, acceptable and clean, while others are dangerous, indecent, unacceptable and dirty. Of course what we classify in these boxes is very culture-specific, as are our reactions to breaking taboos. In some societies to eat the brains of another human being would be taboo, in others, not to eat them when offered would be taboo. In some, for an older male to have sex with a young boy is taboo, in others not to do so if he is in a position of initiating the youth would be shameful.

Many taboos seem to be centred on periods of ambiguity, ambivalence or in-between positions. So there are many taboos at the turning points of life, at birth, at marriage and particularly at death. There are also taboos associated with the intersections between our body and the outside world. There are many taboos linked with menstruation, with faeces and urine, breaking wind, burping and spitting.

Certain bounded groups, for example Indian castes, some Orthodox Jews, gypsies, are particularly concerned with trying to keep certain categories apart. They are anxious about the ritual pollution or degrading danger that occurs for instance if we mix milk and blood, eat the flesh of certain animals or have sex with the wrong person or at the wrong time. These groups have taboos in the strong sense, Taboos with a capital letter. That is to say that if you break a Taboo, something serious will happen unless you purify yourself.

In my Nepalese village, if you come into contact with death, or touch an unclean (lower caste) person, you have to go through a little purification ritual with water in which gold has been dipped. In tapu, even if you did not mean to offend, danger is there and you will be punished. The 'incest taboo' is one of the most famous of these precisely for this reason. To commit incest is to break boundaries, to mix up blood. The Gods will punish you, even if you are not aware that you are breaking a taboo, as in the case of Oedipus who unknowingly married his mother.

On the other hand, most of us use the word in a much looser sense, just meaning that one should not do something. I might tell you that it is 'taboo' to walk on the grass in King's College, Cambridge, it is 'taboo' to spit in the street, it is 'taboo' to wander around naked in public. Yet, if we do any of these things, though there may be social or even legal consequences, there is no particular spiritual danger.

We are not polluted by walking on the grass, nor is the grass polluted by our feet. Our children will not become sick, our animals will not die, if we do these things. Nor will we expect to be sent to Hell for them. We have broken a rule which we do not necessarily agree with, or even see the point of. There is no particular moral or spiritual danger. Indeed, as a child, you and your sister Rosa particularly delighted in the breaking of taboo and insisted on walking over the grass with me (a Fellow, so above taboo), whenever you could.

This is because Taboo in the strong sense only works with people who have a particular idea of a world divided into strong areas of purity and impurity, of safety and danger, even of the sacred and the profane. Many of us think of the world as being roughly level and uniform in spiritual terms. There are clean things and 'matter out of place' or dirty things. But the boundaries between things are not so rigid. When we come into contact with the pollution of death, we do not have to destroy everything associated with the dead person, as happens with gypsy caravans or in some Hindu funerals.

What is sacrifice?

It is not easy to communicate with God or the gods and it is even more difficult to spur the Divine into action. The most obvious way to try to compel them is to offer them a gift or bribe, to which they should reciprocate.

Obviously this gift should be of something we really value. So in societies which herd animals, the sacrifice is usually one of these precious beasts, a cow, buffalo, sheep or cockerel. So Christianity, which came out of the nomadic herding societies of the middle east, was built around the sacrifice of sheep, culminating in the gift of God's own son, the 'Lamb of God'. In rice growing cultures such as Japan, the sacrifice is of rice or rice wine.

The sacrifice has two elements. There is the gift, the physical object which is placed on the altar, and there is the spirit which it contains. So in a Nepalese village a cock, sheep or buffalo is sacrificed and the blood placed on the shrine. The gods drink the blood, but what they really consume is the spirit of the gift, the essence or soul of the sacrificed object. When they receive this they are pleased and return a favour or protect the worshippers.

In Christianity the sacrifice was shifted from actual animals to a symbolic sacrifice of God's own son. Yet this began to be taken very literally and the Protestant Reformers reacted to what was considered an over-emphasis on the outward form. They said it was no good burning candles, burning incense or sacrificing money. What God really wanted was an internal offering. So the idea spread that the way to please God was to give up sinful behaviour. 'The sacrifices of [for] God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.' Better an obedient and disciplined heart and strong intentions to be good than the smoke of burnt offerings and streams of blood.

So, over much of the world, religion has been internalised. Yet sacrifice has not gone away. Many people still give up things for Lent, or abstain from this or that because they feel that it will somehow do them not only physical but also spiritual good. Being a vegetarian, weight-watching, giving up time and money to charities, all these are forms of sacrifice. Even in a world of consumerism and pleasure seeking, there is a strong Puritan streak in many people.

Furthermore, the notion of 'sacrifice' and its value varies enormously from culture to culture. Many British War Memorials to those who were killed in the two world wars speaks of their 'sacrifice'. Have a look at what is written on such memorials when you travel around elsewhere. In France it will be 'glory', and in Japan you will find no such memorials with lists of names at all.

Why does ritual matter?

Almost all of our life revolves around patterns and rhythms of repetitive, standardized, behaviour. This feature of humanity has often been co-opted in the service of politics or religion. When the power of ritual is harnessed, whether it is in the formal language of prayers or political speeches, or in the compulsive movements of our bodies when praying or marching, our minds are constrained.

Rituals give us confidence, unite us to others, and help us through our most difficult times such as grieving or death. They help to re-arrange social relations as at a wedding, or re-order our social networks as at a funeral. A life without ritual would be inconceivable. It would make it patternless and meaningless. Yet we should remember that there is a price to pay for the power of ritual.

I have often wondered why no-one has ever suddenly stood up in the middle of the famous Christmas Carol Service at King's College, Cambridge in order to proclaim their particular view of life, drawing the attention of the millions of listeners around the world to some cause. Yet as I sit through the service I feel the huge weight of solemnity and ritual which makes it difficult even to cough or shift in my seat. Rituals act on us through our body and senses so that they become entrenched in our way of life and leave us little control. We cannot easily escape from their power.

This is as true of secular rituals as it is of those clothed in formal religion. During the Cultural Revolution in China there were numerous 'rituals' to worship Chairman Mao. People conscientiously observed them, like the rituals of 'Asking for Instructions in the Morning' and 'Reporting Back in the Evening' during which millions recited quotations from Mao's works, holding the 'little red book' pressed to their breast. Chinese friends now say that they were often embarrassed and sceptical at the time, but could not resist the group pressure.

So all we can do is to celebrate rituals, but at the same time try to stand back and examine the ways in which we are constrained, brain-washed as it were, by ritual power. Freedom of a sort comes from understanding and controlling the rituals we perform and are involved in.

Description:

An analysis of some of the ways in which humans increase their knowledge of the world through formal education and other means.

How do we learn?

Dear Lily,

Being human, we ought to know more and more. Certain biological drives, if harnessed, will encourage inventiveness and effort. These are the ones which we share with other animals; the drive to sexual reproduction, the drive to satisfy hunger, the drive for warmth and shelter. The pursuit of these is undoubtedly a powerful background force in the evolution of ingenious solutions by humans. It also leads to a great deal of competition.
Almost all human societies develop inequality. Sometimes this is within games, art, and knowledge, sometimes it is in material or symbolic goods (things which bring status and respect). The important thing is that competition, the desire to rise and the fear of falling, is the spur which drives many to attempt and perform difficult and often unpleasant things. This spur is not confined to modern western societies. One of the major sources of creative and inventive energy is the desire to win the admiration or envy of people we want to impress.
On the other hand, equally important is the pleasure of working successfully with people. Thus, with unique linguistic and co-operative tools, humans are above all social animals. Almost all significant advances in human culture involve mutual, co-operative, effort. A single person can achieve little.
Why do we give?
One way of understanding this is to think of the pleasure we get not only from receiving, but also giving, presents. The idea of a gift is that we offer it freely to another. Yet in practice it often means this means that the receiver must then return the compliment. In the wider sense, a gift is not just a present but can be many things done to please or impress another.

Whatever the gift it has several elements. There is the external, 'material' element, anything from food to a poem, from a victorious battle to a new theory in mathematics. Then behind this there is the 'spirit' of the gift, that is the social and symbolic relationship it represents. To give something and have it received, the way of giving and receiving, and the appreciation expressed in the counter gift, all express a social relation. They allow the individual to show respect, express his or her personality, win esteem.

The pursuit of knowledge can be seen as a giant gift giving network. What is presented to others in the network is more than mere material things. A scientist may discover a new fact or theory that she presents to her colleagues. Part of the scientist's spirit is invested in the theory. Furthermore, the gift tends to set up the obligation to reciprocate. Hence each scientific discovery is cumulative, not merely because it opens up diverse new understandings, but because it puts an obligation on others to give something back.

The gift should not be too precise, calculating or 'rational'. If scientists are constantly thinking of what would 'pay off' quickly, the kind of fundamental science which requires real risks and long-term effort would never be undertaken. Most significant science is fairly crazy, following hunches for years, struggling for very small rewards and forgoing short cuts and short term gains. For whom does the scientist do this? For others, a small group of friends and colleagues, teachers and pupils, a society which will honour his name, for posterity or God, but always as a gift to the other.

What puzzles us?
Humans, like a number of higher animals, have a great deal of curiosity, love of pattern-making, ingenuity and playfulness. If this is encouraged, or just allowed to flourish over time, it will lead to experiments, creative solutions to problems, avoiding obstacles and lead to rational attempts to overcome difficulties.
The processes of wonder, surprise and admiration are obvious in the case of a young child. I remember filming you Lily in Australia when you were very young as you tried out foods, fitted shapes together and explored your world. I could see a very powerful survival instinct at work in your desire, from a few days old, to understand how things work and are connected. Just to look is to start asking those 'why' questions for which children are famous.

In order to answer these questions, the child uses all sorts of methods; comparison, deduction (working from general laws to particular cases), induction (working from particular cases to general laws) and experimental testing. Every child has to be a pretty good scientist in order to survive. Yet this sense of curiosity and wonder is very often dampened in later life, either by external pressures or by an inner feeling that the answers are already known.

A child, a painter, a poet, a scientist, all are filled with wonder and surprise and try to explore and solve puzzles. The only difference between a child and a modern scientist is that as science becomes more effective it develops other tools and methods for this purpose. The child uses its natural intelligence; the musician the accumulated heritage of music in his own society; and the natural scientist uses mathematical and other methods in pursuit of understanding. Science also tends to be cumulative, knowledge can be tested, and questions are open and never finally settled. These three characteristics combine to give the potential for the development of reliable knowledge.

How does technology help?

What is special about human beings is that, more than other animals, they can transfer what they learn from their individual brains to the external world. They can store and transmit ideas through an elaborate cultural system. This makes knowledge grow quickly. This essential skill of human beings, their 'culture' can be either immaterial (language, songs, myths, traditions) or material (writing, physical tools, rituals and ways of working). Part of this vast realm, which is most dramatically changing your life, is the effect of technology.

One way in which technology alters our world is through the storage and expansion of ideas. New ideas become embedded in tools, which then, in turn, help us to think better. It is a triangular movement.

There is an increase in theoretical understanding, reliable knowledge about the world. This first point of the triangle is vital. The repeatable and dependable information about how the world works is almost always obtained through disinterested research. This is then sometimes embedded in improved or new physical artefacts or tools, the second point on the triangle. These artefacts, if they are useful and in demand and relatively easy to produce are disseminated in huge quantities. This multiplication of objects and their mass dissemination is the third point of the triangle. This then changes the conditions of life and may well feed back into the possibilities of further theoretical exploration.

This triangular movement has occurred in many spheres of life. The speed of moving round this triangle and its repetition lie behind much of what we describe as human development.

It is a general principle that as each piece of reliable knowledge is added it leads to the possibility of doing dozens of new things. Just as adding a wheel to a 'meccano' or other construction set transforms the potentials of all the previous pieces, so it is with many technologies, including wheels, printing, clocks, glass, photography and computing.

Unless something gets in the way of this process, reliable knowledge about the world and effective action to improve life should expand ever faster. This has been the story of the vast growth of the last three hundred years. Human understanding and control of nature have grown amazingly.

What did glass do?

Glass has changed the world. That it has done so appears to be the result of a giant accident, the fortuitous side product of other developments. The history of glass shows the way in which many of the increases in human knowledge through technology are the result of the unintended consequences of something else. It also shows that once the process of putting increased knowledge into artefacts becomes a conscious aim, it can lead to very rapid and impressive developments. It is an excellent illustration of the triangle of knowledge, leading through new artefacts and back to further knowledge by way of the multiplication of new tools. It also illustrates the meccano effect because glass itself has not just been one added resource for humans, but allowed changes in so many other technologies.

It began to be obvious to Islamic scholars from the ninth century, and to western European thinkers from the twelfth, that glass was more than just a marvellous substance for holding cool liquid and enhancing its beauty. It let in light but not cold. It could be manipulated to alter vision.

The idea of examining microscopic objects through glass and of bending and testing the properties of light was present from at least the ninth century. As the knowledge about the nature of light and of the chemistry of glass improved, so the tools of glass also improved. The most dramatic impact of this occurred at the end of the sixteenth century.

There is still a mystery about how people happened on the idea that by placing two suitably shaped pieces of glass near to each other it would be possible to see faraway things, or very tiny objects. Both the telescope and the microscope seem to have been developed in the Netherlands around the start of the seventeenth century and were obviously related to the making of spectacle lenses.

Without the telescope Galileo could not have developed and proved his fundamental theories. Without the microscope, the world of bacteria would never have been discovered. The developments had other side effects, on optics, on the discovery of the vacuum, which was only made possible with a large glass flask within which a vacuum could be created and observed.

Because glass is an inert substance which is not corroded easily, and it is possible to see through, it became essential to the progress of chemistry using glass retorts, flasks, thermometers and barometers. Nowadays almost all scientific disciplines depend on glass, not to mention almost all transport systems, electricity, watches, televisions and much of what makes our civilization work. Our lives have been transformed. Look around you and you will see how glass is everywhere.

At a more fundamental level it is arguable that without glass the philosophical and emotional bases of both the Renaissance and modern scientific thought would not have been established. Sight is humankind's strongest sense. By providing new tools with which to see an invisible world of tiny creatures, or to contemplate distant stars invisible to the naked eye, glass not only made possible particular scientific discoveries, but led to a growing confidence in a world of deeper truths to be discovered.

It became clear that, with this key, people could unlock secret treasures of knowledge, see below and above the surface of things, destabilize conventional views. The obvious was no longer necessarily true. The hidden connections and buried forces could be penetrated.

It is also clear that the spread and improvement of glass technologies through Europe from the fourteenth century had profound effects on mathematics and geometry, and hence on perspective and art. So glass is a perfect example of the movement round a triangle. There is some new knowledge, then some new artefacts, and finally the mass dissemination of these artefacts which can lead back into further new knowledge.

Does technology always help?

Good glass making techniques, including the blowing of glass, were known in China and Japan almost as early as in the west. Yet in those two countries there was little use for the substance. The major drink was hot water or boiled tea. For drinking tea, the excellent pottery and porcelain manufacture provided a perfect set of containers, from the humblest beaker to the most precious tea bowl. Thus there was little market for glass containers which were much more fragile. In Europe glass was particularly developed in order to satisfy the demand for wine goblets.

Glass making was developed in the cold northern part of Europe for letting in light but not wind. Some of the earlier glass could only be afforded by rich religious institutions and this was often partly decorative, stained to the amazing colours we can still see in Chartres Cathedral or King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The use of glass for ordinary windows spread rapidly in the sixteenth century, particularly in the wealthier houses of northern countries.

In China and Japan, however, window glass was not developed because it was not desirable. In Japan, the frequent earthquakes would have shattered the glass. The buildings made of bamboo and wood would not have been suited to glass windows. There was the presence of an excellent and much cheaper alternative, mulberry paper, which could be made into movable walls. All these combined to make window glass unattractive. Furthermore, here and elsewhere, glass making requires kilns fired to a very high temperature where the glass is kept continuously molten. It is very fuel intensive so can only be made in areas of thin population and thick forests. China and Japan seldom met these conditions.

Another use of glass is most directly linked to the tools of thought, that is its use for spectacles. It is one of the ironies of life that just as many reach the peak of knowledge, in the mid forties and fifties, they find it impossible to continue reading. They have to hold a book at such a distance away from their eyes that they cannot distinguish the characters. This was a serious drawback up to the fifteenth century, especially for bureaucracies and institutions where the most skilled in literacy and accounting could no longer read. It became an even more serious disability after the printing revolution made books for scholarship or private enjoyment widely available.

It is exactly around the time of the printing revolution that the making of spectacles developed rapidly. The increase in knowledge arising from this development was enormous, lengthening the intellectual life of some of the best trained minds.

What makes people creative?
The rapid development of knowledge and artefacts needs an exact balance between what we can call 'boundedness' and 'leakiness'. At the extreme, if a system has no bounds, then nothing will have time to grow before it is swept away by the next thought or invention. It is like a flat surface, swept by rapid winds or tides, or a bare mountainside with no crevice for plants to grow in, no ledge for the poppy.

Yet at the other extreme, if the ledges turn into impassable barriers, there is the opposite difficulty, of involution or stasis. Change and improvement have many foes and there are always more reasons for not doing things than for doing them. If almost complete control can be maintained within a bounded unit, as happened in China or Japan for long periods, then few new things can happen.

New ideas, coupled with the threat of being outflanked and outmoded make people inventive. However, ideas must come in at a constant, controlled, rate. This happened in Japan over the century from 1868. It is happening in rather different ways in China today. If they pour in too fast, as with market capitalism in Russia at the end of the twentieth century, they can overwhelm a civilization. From the ninth to the nineteenth century Europe combined bounded political and cultural entities within a highly inter-connected land mass. So ideas and artefacts could rapidly drift from place to place.
The interconnections between a number of independent centres of innovation are very important. Because of the difficulties of achieving major break-throughs, it is unlikely that they will often occur within a bounded unit all by themselves. There is too little data available, very highly trained and able thinkers are few, and people are blinkered. Thus major break-throughs tend to occur when scientists communicate with each other at a distance.
The major scientific discoveries from the twelfth century to the present were the results of wide European contacts. The ease of such networking in Europe was made much greater by a common religion (Christianity), common language (Latin) and many common traditions. There was a fraternity of scholars and inventors. Good ideas travelled very fast. The impact of printing as a way of moving ideas rapidly across Europe is obviously also crucial.

A major motive in the search for increasingly reliable knowledge is curiosity. The European experience increased the number of puzzles which faced people. Huge amounts of new information poured into Europe from the fifteenth century from long distance travel, the discovery of America and voyages to India, the Pacific and East Asia. The new knowledge challenged current ideas. For a long time the bracing effects of the mixing of cultural traditions in the relatively small area of the Mediterranean, in particular between Islamic societies and the Christian civilization which borrowed from it, also clearly stimulated new thought.

The outcome is the world we now live in where I am writing this letter to you on a device which was unimaginable to me only twenty years ago, the laptop computer.

Description:

Some of the blocks to knowledge - from power, religion, social structure and too much information.

Can education destroy knowledge?

Dear Lily,

Many people assume that the purpose of education is to make us think. We live in historically unusual societies where this is indeed often the case. Yet education can just as well be seen as a device to constrain thought. It is often used to direct people to think acceptable ideas, so that the only thoughts which are thinkable are those which one's teachers (and the society as a whole) consider appropriate.

Knowledge has been passed on through most of history by word of mouth. This does not allow much criticism. Nothing is written down, so different versions cannot easily be compared. There is no external Truth or Way which provides an orthodoxy against which there can be deviations. Formally recognized differences came later with the development of writing. Such writing was again usually monopolized by the rulers in order to preserve the status quo. It was not an instrument for questioning the system.

The tendency thereafter was for those who developed writing systems to use them to instil traditional and accepted wisdom. The educators concentrated on the classics, whether religious, Buddhist sutras, Sanskritic texts, the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, or secular, the writings of Confucius or Aristotle. The assumption was that the truth had all been revealed long ago. The task of education was to instil this truth in young minds through repetition. There was no questioning, just some explanation, elaboration, teasing out obscure meanings.

This tendency is re-enforced as wealth increases. There are more priests and teachers, the ability to pass the examinations on the texts becomes ever more important as the key to power and status, the period of education becomes ever longer. Nowadays, where once a good school grade might get you a reasonable job, then a good Bachelor of Arts or Science at University, now you need a doctorate as well, so it was even more so in the past.

In this expansion and formalization of education there is little pressure towards independent, questioning, thought in the sense of encouraging originality, doubt and difference of opinion. Mental worlds are, if anything, increasingly closed. Truth is asserted and given sanction by being written down. Knowledge of the world is unquestioned and what is read is self-evidently true.

This tendency, as we see it developing in many great traditions of scholarship, ended up after some centuries in an almost total lack of change. There is nothing new to be said or thought. The aim is not to lose any of the accumulated wisdom. The charismatic founder's thought, Confucius, the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, is distributed to his followers who earn a reasonable living by interpreting it and passing it on to their pupils.

The tendency shows itself in the appeal to authority and the learning of things by heart without really understanding them. Persuading, intriguing, encouraging young minds is very strenuous work; much easier to assert and dominate using authority and telling students merely to copy down the wisdom.

If changes are to be made, they must be so small that they are invisible to the teachers. Tinkering on the edges of knowledge, 'shifting the mental furniture around', is all that is allowed. Since this requires much less mental effort and often brings prizes and even serious wealth, tinkering is often preferable to trying to make advances in deeper understanding even today.

Another widespread tendency is towards a situation where for every really creative thinker, there are dozens of less talented critics. It is often easier to live by destroying other people's ideas than generating many of one's own. The 'frogs in a well' syndrome, where humans, like frogs, down any frog escaping from the well, the misery of all is better than the escape of a few, according to an Indian proverb, is widespread. It is combined with the growing ethic of 'limited good', where it comes to be believed that another's success does one down, another's failure pushes one up. These are insidious pressures working against the increase of knowledge. Many have experienced this in schools when peer pressure will soon create an anti-work, anti-achievement ethic where a 'swot' is picked on.

Why does knowledge dry up?

Knowledge tends to become private. Yet over-privatization, over concentration on intellectual property rights, sets individual against individual, organization against organization in a world of secrecy and excessive competition. Good science usually operates best in an open market for ideas and through co operation

There are periods when an individual or institution may be forced into secrecy for a while, as in the famous case of Charles Darwin's concealing of his theory of the evolution of species for over twenty years because of fear of upsetting the religious hierarchy. But the ultimate aim is to publish the results and earn praise and gratitude by providing a rung upon which others can climb.

In contrast, in many societies all deep knowledge is by definition esoteric (specialist and secret). It is developed by a particular family, sect or organization and the widespread feeling is that it should never be made generally known. Yet all this is the opposite to modern science. Here where findings are, in theory, published and open so that the hypothesis can be fully tested by colleagues. The scientists and philosophers of Europe lived off their ability to spread their knowledge. The intellectual or priest in many societies lives off his monopoly of secret knowledge.

All this works against the rapid expansion of reliable knowledge. In a world of falsehood and deception, of secrecy and privatization, where is the 'reliable' to come from? For most people nothing can be relied on, least of all information from non related strangers. Why should others tell us the 'truth'?

Knowledge is usually costly to acquire. Once gained, like other capital it should pay dividends. Those who have worked themselves up to the top of the knowledge tree are hardly likely to favour radical thinkers who are hacking away at the trunk. Established systems of knowledge are not dislodged by rational argument but because the older generation die off or their theories just feel stale and out of fashion. In many societies the senior generation ensures that its successors are so indoctrinated that they never threaten the system.

Why do we know more and understand less?

A hunter-gatherer did not need huge libraries, encyclopaedias or computer databases to store accumulated information. He or she could probably remember well enough all the important things that had occurred in the previous week. If she wanted to catch a new animal or climb a strange tree, most of the general skills learnt as a child would be enough for the task. We are different.

You may think that as a species we have perhaps become more intelligent over the last fifty thousand years, individually more likely to discover new things using more powerful intellectual tools. This is undoubtedly the case at the level of the whole society. But, at the level of single individuals, I do not know of convincing evidence that there has been such obvious progression. Our brains have not grown, nor is there evidence of new mental processes.

In many ways we seem, individually, to know less and less about how the world works and find it more difficult as individuals to make a major discovery. Indeed, it could be argued that there is more ignorance, forgetting and wasted research effort in the world today than there has ever been in history. If this is the case, why is it so? Why do many societies and individuals seem to choose paths which lead their minds to become more closed and how, occasionally, have individuals and civilizations briefly escaped from these paths?

As knowledge increases through the rapid accumulation of a mass of details, it becomes more and more difficult to see the overall pattern. This is why, for example, a number of enormously learned people have produced so little and tend to produce less and less as they grow older.

Each new piece of information, when added to a complex, inter acting system, alters all the existing information. Thus to add a new piece becomes more and more difficult. We know this from our practical experience of storing our belongings. With one drawer with ten things in, it is not difficult to decide where to store or to find objects. With ten drawers, each with twenty objects it is far more difficult. Indeed the difficulty of the task grows at an increasing rate.

To find an item amongst ten thousand objects is much more than ten times as difficult as finding it amongst one thousand. These laws explain why the 'advancement of learning', the increase of knowledge, is so very difficult and seems to become increasingly so.

In our early days or when starting a new discipline, it is easy to be radical, to make large advances, everything is open and fluid, the returns on a little labour are great. The easiest advances are made first and difficult terrain can be avoided. But after a time the best mental land is occupied and one has to move to marginal areas. Furthermore each new piece of information has to be fitted into an increasingly complex pre existing set of information. Even minor changes come up against vast entrenched obstacles. It seems only possible to tinker at the boundaries. And we may know in our hearts that as the philosopher Karl Popper put it, 'Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.'

Do computers help?

The problems of knowledge storage and retrieval become greater and greater. Each major stage reaches a ceiling of what can be held and achieved efficiently. Oral cultures can only hold a very small amount of reliable information about the world. Writing created the possibility of libraries of information. Printing extended this possibility enormously through multiplication of texts. By the end of the nineteenth century the system of hand indexing using slips of paper had reached its limits. Only in the 1960s, with the development of computers, were new potentials for storage and retrieval reached.

At the moment, we are in the position that the increase of computing power (speed, size of storage media, searching methods) is in advance of the increase in information. The laws of information overload and saturation have been temporarily suspended by technological developments based on science.

Yet there is another area where computers do not help much. Radical innovations become more difficult because the time and energy it takes to master all the professional expertise needed to understand and then change a system starts to exceed any human being's normal capacity. At the start of a new discipline, an amateur can make huge advances by pursuing what is really a part time hobby. By the late nineteenth century, it required highly organized and disciplined teams to carry out major research.

The increasing complexity is one reason why we often see that conservatism, routinization and ritualization increases. This happens when processes become more complex, yet the understanding of the way in which they work, that is the reliable knowledge content, does not increase proportionately. This is the trap shown for example by the history of the making of Japanese swords. This technique reached a peak by about 1200 and was scarcely improved over the next five hundred years. In a situation such as this, the only way to make sure such complex processes continue to work is not to change them.

This 'lock in' occurs in all forms of knowledge. It occurs in secular processes (making things, education) and also in most religions (ritualization and formalism) and politics. Thus the knowledge component levels off or even decreases; the almost exclusive task is to remember how to repeat the words and actions which were passed on by the ancestors and seemed to work. This is the opposite of innovation and invention which deliberately force us to forget, superseding previous knowledge, making it 'out of date' and irrelevant. Very few civilizations have avoided this tendency towards conservatism for more than a few hundred years.

What blocks our thought?

One well known difficulty in finding new things has been termed by the cognitive psychologist David Perkins the 'oasis trap'. Knowledge becomes centred in an 'oasis' of rich findings and it is just too risky and expensive to leave that still productive and well watered zone. So people stick to what they know. This is what happened to a certain extent in China and Japan over many centuries. The huge physical distances between centres of knowledge in China, and the fact that even if one made the effort to travel to another it usually turned out to be little different to that which one had left, discouraged exploration.

In Europe in the last eight hundred years there were numerous oases, separate national cultures a few hundred miles apart, yet each with a very different intellectual flora and fauna. This network of 'oases', each independently developing thoughts and then communicating with other oases is perhaps the ideal one for the development of new ideas.

Another way of putting it is that in order to advance one often has to go backward, go down hill before one can go up. It is not possible to proceed steadily up the slope of increased knowledge for it becomes necessary to make a costly detour.

To do so requires great faith, self confidence and ample patronage. These are assets which many Europeans seem to have had at certain points in history. Yet they are pretty unusual in general. In order for an entirely new technology to come up and replace an old one, such as a new weapon or ship, there may be quite a long period when the new is less efficient than the old, even though its potential is far greater. There is a long, loss making, period when the older views can outpace the new, untried and inexperienced ones. Who is going to bear the long development costs?

This difficulty also applies to scholarly progress; often the older, experienced, intellectuals can effectively destroy the half baked, if ultimately more powerful and 'true' new ideas. Very often, the innovators give up, discouraged. Or they are left hanging from some literal or metaphorical cross. As Oscar Wilde noted, 'An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all'. Yet, if it is dangerous, we have to be careful. Sometimes the risk is not worth taking.