believers. What matters to rituals and makes them relevant is that one
construes the social effects as the resultof the actions prescribed. This
inevitably creates a causal gap. Because of the massive salience of
agency in our mental systems, most humans fill this gap with concepts
of agents; but an abstraction like "our tradition" or "society" can play
much the same role as gods or ancestors.WHAT WE KNOW ISSNOT
THE EXPLANATION OF RITUALS[262]
We are very far from having explored all the connections between our
evolved psychology and the use of ritual conceptual gadgets. So a rea-
sonable strategy is to identify the common mechanisms of some ritu-
als and explain how these are particularly catching for the kinds of
minds that we have. The contagion cues, the relational gadgets and
the openings for gods are such devices. They are not found in all ritu-
als but they are present in a number of them and may explain why
these apparently pointless behaviors are so common in human
groups.
Why do people get together and pretend they are offering the god-
dess a goat that they then cut up and eat? Why do they gather in a cir-
cle and hand around a were-tiger's trinkets? Why should a new
shaman try to bite a ram's tongue, a difficult enterprise in any circum-
stance, then climb a pole blindfolded, with the animal's heart in his
mouth? Why for that matter do people gather in a special building,
listen to accounts of a long-past torture-session and pretend to eat the
flesh of a god? I chose to open this discussion with unfamiliar exam-
ples because this gives us a general sense of the difficulty of such ques-
tions. The Catholic Mass (which I just described in very succinct
terms) is no more mysterious than the other cases. But as far as famil-
iar religious performances are concerned, we often think that the
answer is the official one given by the believers themselves or the
authorities: We have these Sunday sessions in order to commemorate
a crucial event, partake of supernatural blessings, celebrate a particular
supernatural agent and renew a special contract with that agent.
This cannot be the explanation. These thoughts are all perfectly
relevant to the situation in question, but they are not a description of
the mental processes that make a Mass, or any other ritual, a salient
event that people somehow assume they should perform again and
RELIGION EXPLAINED