"archetypes" that would be common to all religion. On the whole, this
exercise did not prove terribly successful. People thought that religion
everywhere must have something to do with the "sacred" or "divinity"
or "ultimate reality," or in a more baroque vein, that all religions were
about the sun, or the planets, or blood, or fear of one's father, or wor-
ship of nature. But human cultures are not that simple. For each of
these themes that seemed very general, anthropologists soon found
many counterexamples. For instance, people used to think that a reli-
gious artifact was, by necessity, a "sacred" object treated with awe and
respect. Now in many places in Africa people wear elaborate masks
during ceremonies. The person wearing the mask is said to have [57]
become the spirit or ancestor represented. The mask is about as "reli-
gious" an object as could be. Yet after the ceremony people throw the
mask away or let children play with it. The only way to fit this into a
description of religion as "sacred" is to say that these people either
have no religion or else have a special conception of "the sacred."^1
Such contortions are in fact inevitable if we limit ourselves to the sur-
faceof religious concepts. Suppose you were a Martian anthropologist
and observed that all human beings sustain themselves by eating food.
You could compare the different tastes of food the world over and try
and find common features. That would take lots of effort without any
very clear results. It would seem that there are many, many different
foods on Earth and no simple way of finding the common elements. But
now imagine you were a goodMartian anthropologist. You would study
the chemistry of cooking, which would reveal that there are only a few
ways to process food (marinating, salting, roasting, smoking, boiling,
grilling, etc.) and a large but limited number of ingredients. You would
soon be able to report that the apparently unlimited variety of human
cuisine is explained by combinationsof a limited set of techniques and a
limited set of materials. This is precisely what we can do with religious
concepts, moving from the table to the kitchen and observing how the
concepts are concocted in human minds.
ACQUIRING NEW CONCEPTS
In Chapter 1, I gave a hugely simplified account of what happens
when a child receives some new information—for instance when she
sees a walrus, a rather unfamiliar animal, give birth to live cubs. Using
WHATSUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARELIKE