the ritual. Their advice to each other is to try to "wring the neck" of
their clients, that is, extort as much money as possible from them.
The received wisdom among priests is that the customer who agrees
to a price probably was not squeezed hard enough. Conversely, the
clients know the value of their money but cannot be sure whether the
ritual is really effective, which leads to tenacious haggling on both
sides. On the whole, however, the priests know how to extract the
greatest benefit from their position, largely dominant if not monopo-
listic, on this market for highly valued ritual services.^5
It may seem strange to talk about markets, services and commercial
[274] negotiations in the context of ritual services. Not that we believe such
phenomena to be absent from religion—we all know that religious
institutions provide particular services and receive specific benefits in
exchange—but we generally tend to think of these economic aspects as
consequencesof religious organization rather than as its source. That is,
we assume that doctrine comes first, and its implementation leads to
particular economic and political behavior. This assumption may be
misguided. Indeed, some crucial aspects of religious institutions make
sense only if we understand what the market for religious services is
like, what kind of commodity religious knowledge and ritual consti-
tute. To describe this in more detail, we must consider the vast histor-
ical process that led to the emergence of religious organizations,
which began with the appearance of large state societies with literacy.
Literacy was invented three times in human history, in the Middle
East, in China and in the Mayan empire; and all present scripts are
descendants of one of three writing systems. Literacy evolved out of
various symbolic systems designed to represent particular facts (a
number of notches along a stick to stand for a particular debt, a series
of traces on a bone to represent various animals, etc.). But the real rev-
olution that allowed the storage and retrieval of unlimited amounts of
information was an inventory of signs that could represent speech
rather than facts or ideas. The new system thereby inherited all the
richness and flexibility of a natural language, and could express what-
ever language could express. The changes that resulted were stupen-
dous for religion but also for the economy and for the administration
of large states. Indeed, many early scripts were mainly used for
administrative purposes, for bookkeeping, legal and commercial doc-
uments before their use was extended to other types of texts, private
correspondence, religious writings, literature, etc. The use of literate
documents gradually spread around the world, but until recently the
RELIGION EXPLAINED