Second, not only our personal identities but also our collective institutions are built on the story. Consequently, it is extremely frightening to doubt the story. In many societies, anyone who tries to do so is ostracised or persecuted. Even if not, it takes strong nerves to question the very fabric of society. For if indeed the story is false, then the entire world as we know it makes no sense. State laws, social norms, economic institutions – they might all collapse.
Most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than by the strength of their foundations. Consider the Christian story. It has the flimsiest of foundations. What evidence do we have that the son of the Creator of the entire universe was born as a carbon-based life form somewhere in the Milky Way about 2,000 years ago? What evidence do we have that it happened in the Galilee area, and that His mother was a virgin? Yet enormous global institutions have been built on top of that story, and their weight presses down with such overwhelming force that they keep the story in place. Entire wars have been waged about changing a single word in the story. The thousand-year schism between Western Christians and Eastern Orthodox Christians, which has manifested itself recently in the mutual butchery of Croats by Serbs and Serbs by Croats, began over the lone word ‘filioque’ (‘and from the son’ in Latin). The Western Christians wanted to insert this word into the Christian profession of faith, while the Eastern Christians vehemently objected. (The theological implications of adding that word are so arcane that it would be impossible to explain them here in any meaningful way. If you are curious, ask Google.)
Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it, not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger a personal and social cataclysm. In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.
Hocus pocus and the industry of belief
The stories that provide us with meaning and identity are all fictional, but humans need to believe in them. So how to make the story feel real? It’s obvious why humans want to believe the story, but how do they actually believe? Already thousands of years ago priests and shamans discovered the answer: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real. The essence of ritual is the magical spell ‘Hocus pocus, X is Y!’5
How to make Christ real to his devotees? In the ceremony of Mass, the priest takes a piece of bread and a glass of wine, and proclaims that the bread is Christ’s flesh, the wine is Christ’s blood, and by eating and drinking them the faithful attain communion with Christ. What could be more real than actually tasting Christ in your mouth? Traditionally, the priest made these bold proclamations in Latin, the ancient language of religion, law, and the secrets of life. In front of the amazed eyes of the assembled peasants the priest held high a piece of bread and exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus!’– ‘This is the body!’ – and the bread supposedly became the flesh of Christ. In the minds of the illiterate peasants, who did not speak Latin, ‘Hoc est corpus!’ got garbled into ‘Hocus pocus!’ and thus was born the powerful spell that can transform a frog into a prince, and a pumpkin into a carriage.6
A thousand years before the birth of Christianity, the ancient Hindus used the same trick. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad interprets the ritual sacrifice of a horse as a realisation of the entire story of the cosmos. The text follows the ‘Hocus pocus, X is Y!’ structure, saying that: ‘The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn, its eye the sun, its vital force the air, its open mouth the fire called Vaisvanara, and the body of the sacrificial horse is the year … its members are the seasons, its joints the months and fortnights, its feet the days and nights, its bones the stars, and its flesh the clouds … its yawning is lightning, its shaking the body is thundering, its making water is raining, and its neighing is voice.’7
Almost anything can be turned into a ritual, by giving mundane gestures like lighting candles, ringing bells or counting beads a deep religious meaning. The same is true of physical gesticulations, such as bowing the head, prostrating the whole body, or bringing both palms together. Various forms of headgear, from the Sikh turban to the Muslim hijab, have been so laden with meaning that they have stirred passionate struggles for centuries.
Food too can be loaded with spiritual significance far beyond its nutritional value, be it Easter eggs that symbolise new life and Christ’s resurrection, or the bitter herbs and unleavened bread that Jews must eat at Passover to remember their slavery in Egypt and their miraculous escape. There is hardly a dish in the world that hasn’t been interpreted to symbolise something. Thus on New Year’s Day religious Jews eat honey so that the coming year will be sweet, they eat fish heads so that they will be fruitful like fish and will move forward rather than back, and they eat pomegranates so that their good deeds will multiply like the many seeds of the pomegranate.