well—that is, literate versions of the supernatural concepts that do not
connect with any of the supernatural templates listed in previous
chapters and do not activate inference systems either. Also, literate
guilds sometimes foster forms of mysticism supposed to resolve the
paradoxes created by literate religions. Theories created by theolo-
gians are to some extent comparable to philosophical systems,
although the latter do not offer mystical contemplation as an escape
from the puzzles they create. The divorce from common supernatural
templates and inference systems is one major reason why such systems
are often either ignored or blithely distorted by most congregations,
as we will see presently.^7 [279]
All human groups have some rituals for dealing with corpses and
some notion of how the "soul" or presence of dead people must set off
on a journey, to be separated from the living. In many places this is
associated with concepts of particular ancestors, local heroes who set-
tled the group, founders of the dead person's clan, gods of particular
places and spirits connected to particular families, which means that
these concepts differ from group to group, even from one village to
the next. This local god demands incense and flowers, that one the
sacrifice of chickens, and the divinities of each particular mountain or
river are likely to be the object of different ritual procedures.
As a guild claims to offer similar services throughout a large polity,
it cannot claim to have a particular connection to localsupernatural
agents, such as ancestors and local spirits. The agents that the institu-
tion claims to interact with must be such that any member of the
guild, wherever they are, could be said to be in contact with them.
This is one of the main reasons why such "small" gods and spirits are
usually demoted in the doctrines of religious institutions and replaced
with more general, cosmos-wide agents. The Fang have ancestors
who, they say, interact with them and usually protect them; they are
also plagued by evil spirits. Both the benevolent and malicious spirits
are members of the same social groups as the living people they inter-
act with. Christianity attempts to replace all this with a unique super-
natural agent that anyonecan interact with, provided they resort to the
Church's offices.
This is why organized literate guilds tend to promote a very spe-
cific understanding of death and the destiny of various components of
the person. What happens to the soul is presented as a consequence of
generalprocesses that apply to all humans. Religious guilds replace the
intrinsically local notions of "establishing" the ancestors, turning
WHYDOCTRINES, EXCLUSION AND VIOLENCE?