accounts for a whole variety of concepts: notions of invisible dead peo-
ple hovering about, of statuettes that listen to people's prayers, of ani-
mals that disappear or change shapes at will, of ancient people who
lived on a floating island adrift on the ocean, of an omniscient Creator
who keeps track of every single person's acts and intentions, of trees
that record conversations, of heroes with iron organs and of plants that
feel emotions. That is a pretty mixed bunch, to say the least. Most of
this sounds like a catalogue of superstitions, old wives' tales, urban
myths and cartoon characters much more than a list of religious
notions.
[90] Religion seems more serious than that, less baroque than all these
strange combinations. Also, religion is far more important.Legends
about Santa Claus or the Bogeyman are interesting, even arresting, but
they do not seem to matterthat much, while people's notions of God
seem to have direct and important effects on their lives. We generally
call supernatural concepts "religious" when they have such important
social effects, when rituals are performed that include these concepts,
when people define their group identity in connection with them, when
strong emotional states are associated with them, and so on. These fea-
tures are not always all present together, but in most places one finds
these two registers: a vast domain of supernatural notions and a more
restricted set of "serious" ones. People feel very strongly about God, less
so about Santa. In Cameroon where I did fieldwork, people have a pop-
ular version of the Bogeyman: a big white man who will kidnap and eat
children who misbehave. This is not taken very seriously, whereas invis-
ible dead people are a menace that is taken very seriously indeed.^11
The crucial mistake is to assume that there is no point in understand-
ing "nonserious" or "folkloric" supernatural representations because
they do not create strong emotional states in individuals or trigger
important social effects. That would be a mistake, because there is no
difference in origin between concepts in the serious and nonserious reg-
isters. Indeed, concepts often migrate from one to the other. The
Greeks sacrificed to Apollo and Athena and ostracized those who com-
mitted sacrilege against these gods. From the Renaissance onward, the
whole Greek and Roman pantheon was the source of rich but nonseri-
ous artistic inspiration. Conversely, Lenin and Stalin were to Russians
what De Gaulle was to most Europeans, the stuff of history and ideol-
ogy. In Gabon the French general became for some time the object of a
cult, and Russian dictators were among the higher deities visited by
RELIGION EXPLAINED