I said I wasn’t.
“Audiences are almost always amazed by this news. Occasionally someone will think I’m referring to what is sometimes called the ‘Old Religion’—paganism, Wicca—but of course I’m not. In the first place, paganism isn’t old. It’s a farmer’s religion through and through, which means it’s just a few thousand years old, and of course it was never a universal religion, for the simple reason that farming was never universal. Very often—almost invariably, in fact—no one will even recognize the name of the religion I’m talking about, which of course is animism. They’ve literally never heard of it.”
“I can believe it,” I said.
“Do you know animism?”
“I think you’d better assume I don’t. Most people in my position, with my training, are aware of animism the way modern-day chemists are aware of alchemy.”
“You mean you’re aware of animism as a crude and simpleminded precursor of religion the way chemists are aware of alchemy as a crude and simpleminded precursor of chemistry. Not really religion in the proper sense any more than alchemy is chemistry in the proper sense.”
“That’s right.”
She pawed through her collection of oddments and selected the film canister. “This is animism,” she said, holding it up for my consideration. “An empty container as far as you’re concerned.” Then she dived into her purse and came up with a travelers sewing kit, from which she extracted a bit of thread long enough to bind film canister and ammonite together.
“Here, hold on to this,” she said, and I took it from her. “Tell me about the shell.”
“What do you mean?”
“What is it?”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s the community of life on this planet.”
“And what did I just say to you about it?”
“You said that when mental process became human thought, perhaps this community began to resound with one harmonic that corresponds to what we call religion or awareness of the sacred. If I learn how to listen to it, it’ll ring out with that harmonic.”
“Good. But it occurs to me that I’ve introduced a puzzle here. I said that when mental process (a common phenomenon in the animal kingdom) became human thought, it began to ring out with a harmonic that I’ve identified as awareness of the sacred. But now I’m saying that the community of life rings with that harmonic. Which is it, human thought or the community of life?”
“I don’t find this too puzzling,” I told her. “I think the community of life began to ring with that harmonic when human thought began to ring with it.”
“Yes, that’s what I had in mind. And when this shell begins to resonate with that harmonic, this hollow canister that I’ve called animism will also begin to resonate, because it’s in contact with the shell.”
“Okay,” I said. “This is what you mean by bricolage?”
“This is what I mean by bricolage.”
Regarding the number of the gods
“Someone inevitably asks why I speak of gods rather than one God, as if I simply hadn’t been informed on this matter and was speaking in error, and I ask them how they happen to know the number of the gods. Sometimes I’m told this is just something ‘everyone’ knows, the way everyone knows there are twenty-four hours in a day. Sometimes I’m told God must be one, because this seems to us the most ‘enlightened’ number for God to be—as if the facts don’t count in this particular case. This is like reasoning that the earth must be the center of the universe, because no other place makes as much sense. Most often, of course, I’m told this is an undoubtable number, since it’s the number given in monotheistic scriptures. Needless to say, I have a rather different take on the whole matter.
“The number of the gods is written nowhere in the universe, Jared, so there’s really no way to decide whether that number is zero (as atheists believe) or one (as monotheists believe) or many (as polytheists believe). The matter is one of complete indifference to me. I don’t care whether the number of the gods is one, zero, or nine billion. If it turned out that the number of the gods is zero, this wouldn’t cause me to alter a single syllable of what I’ve said to you.”
She seemed to want a reaction to this, so I said okay.
“To speak of gods instead of God has this additional advantage, that I’m spared the embarrassing necessity of forever playing stupid gender games with them. I never have to decide between he and she, him and her. For me, they’re just they and them!”
“A not inconsiderable advantage,” I observed.
She picked up the plastic comb and ran a thumbnail down its teeth. “Is it one thing or many?”
“You mean the comb? I don’t know. Depends on how you look at it.”
“This comb is the number of the gods, Jared. Not something to be added to our work of bricolage, but rather something to be discussed and dismissed.” She tossed the comb over her shoulder and out of sight.
Where the gods write what they write
“The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can’t seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. What’s that—a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyway. To be honest, I’d be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that.”