Why are we here?

W.G. Runciman

• Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors by Pascal Boyer
  Heinemann, 430 pp, £20.00, September 2001, ISBN 0 434 00843 5

Any argument about religion, whether conducted in the seminar room or the saloon bar, is likely to hit the buffers not just because people hold different religious beliefs but because they disagree about what should or should not be counted as an instance of religion in the first place. Nobody will query the inclusion of what goes on at High Mass in Notre Dame or on the prayer-mats of the Islamic faithful or in a Hindu temple or at a Merina death ritual in Madagascar. But what about initiation ceremonies, hero cults (including Elvis-worship), charter myths, civil weddings, national anthems, silences in memory of the dead, charms, talismans and amulets, taboos on bodily fluids, spiritualism, oneiromancy, rain dances, Christmas presents, oaths and curses, apotropaic rituals in the face of physical danger, Wordsworthian nature-worship (or present-day environmentalism), Confucian respect for authority, Neoplatonist metaphysics, Pythagorean reverence for number and harmony, Wittgensteinian mysticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, autonomist political theory, Kipling’s as well as Socrates’ references to a personal ‘demon’, and the mild fascination with the occult shared by Pliny the Elder, John Buchan, and generations of ghost-story enthusiasts and horror-movie buffs?