leopard fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays? Among contem-
poraries, not everyone who reads horoscopes will profess be-
lief in them, and among those who do profess such a belief,
how many are actually to be found making a decision on a
primarily astrological basis? It would be safer to characterize
religion by attitudinal factors and ritual practice rather than
by belief. And any statement of belief should be taken with
a grain of salt. People like, for adaptive or escapist purposes,
to tell and hear stories that provide a map clarifying the con-
figuration of forces in the world, that show modes of coping
with those forces, and that do not demand any firm commit-
ment to belief and ensuring action. Children everywhere ac-
quire their bearing in reality from fairy tales. What beliefs
they fleetingly entertain or settle on matter less than the in-
ferences they learn to draw about possible realities. The high-
ly imaginative stories of primitives abound in wit and irony
and cannot be pinned down with the psychology of belief
common among sober scientists (whose thinking often re-
flects the easy and moralistic recourse to expressions of belief
characteristic of early modern theologians).
SYSTEMATIC CONSIDERATIONS. The human being has in its
favor a quick mobile mind, but it is frail and its body is des-
tined to contract disease and, ultimately, to die. Men and
women are thus constantly the potential victims of aleatory
events that can be painful to them. Fearful of impending di-
sasters, they seek the protection of stronger human beings.
As infants and children they start life with such protection.
Later they attach themselves to strong persons whom they
count on to be successful and wise so that they themselves
can live in a secure world, one without interstices from which
unpredictable attacks might come. When successful, these
strong ones ward off actual dangers. When unsuccessful, as
they inevitably will be, the strong ones, if wise, will be an au-
thority providing cognitive and affective reassurance: Yes,
loss and pain have occurred, but they are on the right path;
it was inevitable, some good may come of it, and, in any case,
there is lasting value in the new attitude gained and the new
turn taken (Sennett, 1980). Priests, who are typical examples
of strong ones, are also thinkers. They teach survival skills
and provide ritual and verbal comfort when these skills fail,
as necessarily they must. Strong ones are therefore in touch
with suitable explanations that ideally can help in those
boundary situations that occur when one’s ordinary world
falls apart.
Strong ones, in turn, feel themselves in touch with a
strength or with other real and enduring strong ones who are
beyond society, beyond this world, be they spirits, gods,
God, history, or “the way things are.” The label “supernatu-
ral” is appropriately attached to that strength or those preem-
inently strong beings that are not within the daily and social
range of interaction. The authority of the social strong ones
is thus always transitory and relative, more or less plausible.
The limits to their authority stem from one’s own willingness
or ability to trust them; but one’s trust rests on one’s sense
of their reliability: Are they in touch with the enduring
strength so that they can help one to keep in touch with it,
or do they devour one’s trust for their own petty human
benefit?The modern concept of nature and natural causes firmly
supports a reality principle: When physically sick (or, today,
even when anxious) people mainly turn to scientific medi-
cine. Fear of and belief in supernatural agencies do not color
in any significant way their sense of what is feasible in their
embodied condition. But people hold on to some nonscien-
tific health lore passed on through oral, unofficial channels,
and nostalgically transmit recipes for more natural care of the
human body and its ailments. Alternative “soft” medicines
prosper. In matters of wealth, prestige, and happiness there
is no scientific establishment that rules over one’s expecta-
tions; unproved arts and pleasurable illusions abound. The
reality principles that set limits to one’s desires are socially
determined: Rules are prescribed according to what is social-
ly admitted, rewarded, or punished.Human beings want both to be believed and to be un-
derstood, but usually not at the same time and not by the
same people. Individuals want their words and their symbols
(1) to be believed and accepted and (2) to create reality, a
safe common reality that is not limited to the individual
alone. Thus, individuals want to be supported and upheld,
but they also want to be understood. They want to share
something of their complex and problematic rapport by
means of their words and symbols. Thus individuals want
the liveliness of their consciousness to be acknowledged.
When they want to be believed, they construct presumably
strong structures (which are cemented by or rest upon strong
ones) that they then deconstruct in the process of under-
standing. The characteristic feature of modern society is not
fewer beliefs in supernatural beings but the variety of strong
ones turned to and included in one’s world for different pur-
poses and at different times, and the variety of the structures
of plausibility that buttress them.Thus, somewhat polytheistically, in matters of health
people turn to state-supported hospitals and the health-food
stores of the counterculture; they believe in public schools
and in private ones; they read mainstream literature and
avant-garde poems; they watch television and go to art films;
they attend institutionalized churches and buy books about
spirituality in the free market of ideas. Alternative modes of
knowledge prosper in the margins left by the dominant sci-
entific or nonscientific modes. The symbolization of human-
ity’s relation to the ultimate conditions of its existence is no
longer the monopoly of any group explicitly labeled “reli-
gious.” And, heroic or not, humans, like the hero of many
folk tales, have no permanent master to guide their steps
through all the perils of life. Everyone must encounter direct-
ly the Circes and Poseidons of this world. At different times
they turn to different masters for help and protection. But
in the present libertarian society the quality of their services
is uncertain, and, in any case, the good ones can help only
as long as one asks them to.SUPERNATURAL, THE 8863