all. It is time to reveal that—to my knowledge at least—one does not
find a concept of people who disappear when they are really thirsty or
the notion of a wristwatch that keeps an eye on one's enemies. (How-
ever, when my friend Michael Houseman was doing anthropological
work in Cameroon he was told of a magical watch that could tell the
exact time when your friends would call on you; a nicer, less paranoid
conceit that nobody took very seriously.) That incest may trigger all
sorts of natural catastrophes is a common theme the world over, but I
made up the story of a river that flows upstream. Note that these
imaginary concepts are neither more bizarre nor less coherent than
the other items listed. [71]
Why put imaginary examples in the list? We want to explain the
religious concepts people actually have, the ones that are stable in a
culture and that seem to be found, in slightly different versions, in
many different cultures. The explanation is that successful, culturally
spreading concepts are those with specific properties. Now this
implies that human minds are receptive not just to the concepts they
actually have but also to many other possible concepts, provided they
correspond to this model. What we want to describe is the envelope of
possiblereligious concepts. Indeed, as I will show below, we now have
experimental means to test whether new, artificial, supernatural con-
cepts have the potential to spread or not.
TEMPLATES IN RELIGIOUSCONCEPTS:
STEP 2The examples given above illustrate the first step in our recipe for
supernatural concepts: the insertion of a violation of expectations. But
they also show why this cannot be the whole story. As I said, the
counterintuitive ebony trees have the special feature that they can
understand and remember what people say. This is used to produce
all sorts of inferences about them. These inferences are what make the
concept "work," as it were. If the trees heard conversations but could
not remember them or if they remembered conversations that had
never actually happened, the concept would probably not be that suc-
cessful.
We can now describe more precisely this distinction between
"workable" and "unworkable" concepts such as the following:
WHATSUPERNATURALCONCEPTSARELIKE