252 mind
antors of good crops, social harmony, and so on. But why are supernatural
agents construed as having such causal powers? The notion that gods and
spirits matter because of their powers does not just beg the question of why
they are represented as having such powers. It also creates difficult puzzles.
For instance, in many places the most powerful supernatural agents are not
the ones that matter most. The Fang of Cameroon and Gabon, among whom
I conducted anthropological fieldwork, have all these rituals and complex emo-
tions associated with the possible presence of the ghosts-ancestors. Now the
Fang also say that the world (meaning earth and sky and all living things) was
created by a god calledMebeghe, vastly more powerful than either the living or
the dead. His work was completed by another god,Nzame, who invented all
cultural objects: tools, houses, and so on, and taught people how to hunt,
domesticate animals, and raise crops. Neither of these gods seems to matter
that much. That is, there are no cults or rituals specifically directed atMebeghe
orNzame, although they are assumed to be around, and they are in fact very
rarely mentioned. For a long time, this puzzled many travelers, anthropolo-
gists, and, of course, missionaries. Many African people seemed to recognize
a Creator in the same sense as the biblical one, yet were remarkably indifferent
to Him. We will see below the explanation for this apparent paradox.
What matters is not so much the “powers” of supernatural beings consid-
ered in the abstract as those powers that are relevant topracticalconcerns. In
particular, ancestors, gods, and spirits are readily mentioned when people rep-
resent or try to explain salient situations of misfortune. Indeed, this connection
is so frequent that, for many nonspecialists, it seems to provide an easy expla-
nation for the origin and persistence of religious concepts. People are afflicted
with various calamities, they cannot explain the amoral nature of their destiny,
so they imagine gods and spirits that pull the strings. This, like many other
popular origin-of-religion scenarios, points to a real association, but in my view
fails to appreciate the complexity of the mental operations involved.
We often assume that people want to understand what happens to them.
This is where gods and spirits, however feeble as explanations, at least provide
some measure of intelligibility. A weak explanation is better than no explana-
tion. But why would people want to understand their own misfortune? What
drives their minds to seek an explanation? Again, this seems to have an obvious
explanation. Minds are designed that way, because a mind that produces a
richer understanding of what happens (especially bad things that happen) is
certainly better equipped for survival.
Accepting this, it remains that some aspects of the association between
religious agents and misfortune may seem paradoxical. To see this, let me
return to the Kwaio example. The ancestors are generally responsible for what-
ever happens in a village: “Spirits, a child learns early, are beings that help and
punish: the source of success, gratification, and security, and the cause of ill-
ness, death, and misfortune; makers and enforcers of rules that must at first