Obviously, the presence of such different accounts of personality
creates an inconsistent or at least ambiguous theory. But that is not
really a matter of much concern to most people. This is not because
people do not mind inconsistencies or contradictions. On the con-
trary, when they are faced withparticularsituations, they argue vehe-
mently that one of these perspectives, not the other, provides a true
explanation for what happened. For example, Kandasany is a thief who
was caught making off with the village schoolmaster's chickens. He is
arrested and his relatives have to pawn their goods to pay his fine.
Unable to bear the shame, he then commits suicide. As Daniel reports,
"A crowd of villagers had gathered [and] openly discussed the case." [171]
Some family members tried to argue that Kandasany was a victim of
his fate, that is, of Shiva'slila(whim, sport). But to most people this
was unacceptable; the thief's behavior was a matter of personal deci-
sion, which made the "headwriting" irrelevant.
The notion that the gods laid down the moral rulesanddecreed
people's destinies makes it difficult to understand serious transgres-
sions. If a god intends people to behave and has the power to instill
moral dispositions in the mind, why is there so much immorality? But
again inconsistency is not too problematic. Faced with striking exam-
ples of moral violations, one Brahman tells Daniel: "We are mere
human beings. It is hard for us to understand thelilaof the gods,"
which is of course a diplomatic (the word Jesuiticalsprings to mind)
way of dodging the issue. But another informant is more direct:
"What do you expect?... Just look at Shiva's family life. One son is a
womanizer and the other one refuses to marry. Shiva and Parvati can
never stop quarreling. If even the gods behave like this, what do you
expect of men?"^1
People everywhere have moral intuitions, and in most places they
have concepts of supernatural agents, but there are several ways to
understand this connection. A common one is to think that there are
moral principles because the gods or ancestors themselves decided
what these norms would be. This is what we could call the gods as legis-
latorsstory. Many theological systems include lists of prohibitions and
prescriptions, of varying length, attributed to some direct communica-
tion from the supernatural legislature. We must follow moral princi-
ples because the gods decreedhow people should behave. In most liter-
ate cultures this is accompanied by some formal and fixed description
of the rules in question. There is a text. But people can have the
notion of gods and spirits as legislators without having such a descrip-
WHYDOGODSANDSPIRITSMATTER?