them into mountains or pillars of a house, with a general and abstract
notion of salvationconditioned by moral behavior. Such a notion is
found in most written religious doctrines, with important differences
in how salvation is defined and what kind of morality is attached to
such definitions. The Jewish and Christian versions implied proximity
to God as well as a very vaguely defined (especially in the Jewish case)
afterlife, while the Indian (Hindu or Buddhist) versions implied an exit
from the cycle of reincarnation and the elimination of the soul as a
self. These are among the many variations on a theme found in many
literate traditions—that death should not be construed only as a pas-
[280] sage to the status of ancestor but also as a radical leave-taking from
society. This makes sense, as the doctrine is offered by specialists who
have no particular service to offer in terms of local cults to local char-
acters, or in any case nothing that could be plausibly better than the
services of local shamans and other religious specialists.
GUILDS AND LITERACY
All these features are very general to religious guilds, although I must
insist that the history of such groups presents many variations on
these themes. Anthropologists who have noticed these features have
often debated whether they were straightforward consequences of the
technology of literacy, or a result of the special political role of reli-
gious guilds within large polities.
For anthropologist Jack Goody, literacy does result in a different
cognitive style. The use of literacy does change cognitive operations, in
the sense that the written text is used as an external memory. For
instance, literacy allows complex mathematical operations during
which some intermediate results must be stored. It allows long argu-
ments because it makes it possible to make long lists of elements that
prove a particular point. It allows people to think of various concep-
tual structures as visual templates. In this way the "sketch-pad" aspect
of writing is every bit as important as its long-term "storage" function.
Some features of literate religion support this interpretation. For
instance, enumerating the 613 mitzvoth of Jewish law or the thou-
sands of omens recorded in Sumerian and Egyptian texts would obvi-
ously require literate aids. Complex theologies, ritual prescriptions for
thousands of different occasions, collected texts of various wise men,RELIGION EXPLAINED