"Living with the Gods" by Neil MacGregor

Neil Macgregor is an ex-director of the British Museum and so he starts many of the narratives in this book about the religious experience with an artefact. For example, the first chapter begins with the Lion Man, a 40,000 year old sculpture of a man with the head of a mountain lion carved from mammoth ivory during the Ice Age and found in a European cave. From these artefacts MacGregor draws out ideas although the sceptic in me rather thinks that the ideas were there and he found the artefacts to illustrate them.

There were some brilliant facts in this book but I found the overall structure confusing: the parts are entitled Our Part in the Pattern, Believing Together, Theatres of Faith, The Power of Images, One God or Many, and Powers Earthly and Divine. It was as if I was wandering through the galleries of a museum, each one with such a title. It just seemed a strange way of categorising aspects of the religious experience and consequently I found it rather rambling. Perhaps, as he suggests in  chapter 22, I am a closet monotheist.

His thesis is that religion is a universal human experience which is manifested in all sorts of religion. I dare say he is right. But to say that the religious experience is an inherent part of the human psyche is not to say that it is good. Hate and greed and lust are inherent parts of the human psyche. In fact, time and again, MacGregor shows how religion has been interpreted or devised or manipulated to serve the needs of those seeking power over others. For example, in chapter 10 MacGregor celebrates the power of communal singing and then reminds us that “Every totalitarian regime has used marching, singing and synchronized movement - many people acting as one - to rouse participants and spectators alike to a confident conviction of shared purpose.” (C 10) Many organised religions in history have behaved in the same way as totalitarian regimes, claiming a monopoly on truth and exerting a monopoly on power.

One of the interesting discussions is that between monotheism and polytheism. Islam, Christianity and Judaism are three monotheisms, each claiming a monopoly of truth. The result has often been conflict. There are other major religions, such as Hinduism, which are polytheistic. Even nominally monotheistic Sikhism in syncretic. MacGregor suggests that monotheism has assisted Science, since “If there is a single will, a single intellect that created and sustains the universe, then everything must ultimately be organized on coherent, comprehensible principles.” (C 22) However, he points out that the Romans built a long-lasting multi-faith empire by adopting other people's gods: "If you honour other people's gods, you acknowledge them, and the people who worship them, as a legitimate part of your community.” (C 21) He also quotes Mary Beard as saying that “One of the big advantages of having lots of gods is that you can have more or fewer as you decide.” (C 21) and he tells the original flood story (Noah's tale is an adaptation of what was them a widespread middle-eastern myth about Gilgamesh) which involves “a group of dysfunctional insomniac gods" who decide to drown the noisy humans keeping them awake and are thwarted when a single god rescues a single human: "The problem with the gods in assembly is that they often have beer to drink, and therefore their discussions are not always thought out properly.” In the end they decide to create death to control the human population. “They saw that their decision to unleash the flood had been a wrong one, which a dissenter had put right, allowing them to change their collective mind. It is a model of governance that is possible only if you have many gods, and only if they are, and know themselves to be, fallible.” In contrast, “In the Book of Genesis, Noah is saved because Noah alone is righteous. Those who drown are wicked: the victims are to blame for their own suffering.”

Sometimes, Neil MacGregor uses other commentators in a way that shows the origins of this book in a series of radio broadcasts. So, for example, Eamon Duffy says: “In thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe there is a new kind of spiritual interiority, not just in religion but in love poetry too. People become more interested in what we would now call human psychology. This brings with it an emphasis on the emotional element in religion, cultivated particularly by the Franciscan order but also on people like Saint Anselm and the Cistercians. That approach to faith moves out into the lay world, where people explore a wider range of emotions in their religious experience. This is the beginning of the age of the Christmas carol, for example, when you think tenderly about the baby in the crib. There is none of that in the first millennium. And, in the same way, you think sorrowfully about the sufferings of the god-man on the cross. Images like this become a spiritual tool, helping people to come to their senses about what life is for.” (C 19) This linked very much to what I had just discovered about the context in which early Renaissance art operated, according to Andrew Graham-Dixon in Caravaggio.

There are many, many wonderful moments in this compendious book:

• “Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, who requires of his followers truth, good thoughts, good words and good deeds: the consequence will be a just society.” (C 2)
• “Zoroastrian priests take and combine different kinds of fire, from the hearths of bakers and metal-workers, priests and warriors, and so on: in all, fires from fourteen sectors of the community, combined and purified, until the whole of society is emblematically brought together in one shared flame. But to achieve the sacred fire, two further fires are needed. First, from a cremation pyre, so that the dead are joined to the living in reverence of Ahura Mazda; and lastly lightning, fire from the sky, binding earth to heaven.” (C 2)
• "The water of baptism serves as the door through which every Christian enters not just the faith but the whole Christian community, past, present and future.” (C 3)
• “The British monarchy to this day uses Jordan water for royal baptisms.” (C 3)
• "South is the direction of death.” (C 3)
• “In English to this day we refer to mid-winter as ‘the dead of winter’ and for most of history that was no mere poetic conceit, but a lethal reality. ...European mortality rates increased substantially in the winter months.” (C 4)
• “How do the living stay in touch with the dead? Do they need our help? Or is it we who need their help? And, if so, how do we ask for it? Are the dead and the living bound, for a while at least, in a network of reciprocal obligations?” (C 5)
• “In England 500 years ago, the dead were major employers.” (C 5)
• “Every [Roman Catholic] altar - even a portable altar-stone should contain within it the relics of a saint, ideally a martyr who died bearing witness to the faith.” (C 5)
• The Muisca used the ‘lost wax’ method to cast gold figues which they then cast into Lake Guativa during El Dorado ceremonies. “In order to have waxes with varying degrees of malleability, which would allow them to achieve the greatest possible precision in modelling, they kept several different varieties of bees.” (C 12)
• “At festival time, our ordinary lives, our everyday schedules, our plans for the future - all these are put to one side. In their place, for a few short, intense hours or days, we think about - and indeed come to feel - much larger patterns of life which contain us, but which also stretch far beyond us. And because each festival is a re-enactment of all its predecessors, we come to a powerful appreciation that life, both communitarian and cosmic, is not a lonely, one-act story with a beginning and an end, but a grand  dramatic cycle, whose end - if it has one - lies beyond our own lifetime.” (C 15)
• “The interesting thing is that this idea of the virgin really relates less to the idea of being sexually chaste than to the idea of being single and powerful, which is more the essence of the classical Greek or Roman idea of the virgo. The word is actually related to vir - the Latin for a man, a strong man - as well as to virtus, the word for virtue.” (C 16)
• “It is a major conservation hazard of Russian icons that they are on occasion kissed into extinction.” (C 17)
• “Saint Luke's account of Christ's birth seems to report a historical event which occurred when Caesar Augustus ordered a census. Neither ox nor ass, however, appears in the Gospel. Hundreds of years earlier the Hebrew prophet Isaiah had foretold that those animals would one day recognise the future master of Israel the Messiah.” (C 18)

July 2020; 470 pages

Lots of brilliant illustrations

Also see Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists

"Religion for atheists" by Alain de Botton

This wonderful book ends with the statement that: “The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.” (10.iii.3) It proposes that the secular world learns how religions pass on their message, which is, after all, a message intended to support the fragile human psyche through its many times of troubles, in order to enable such support without the use of the supernatural. He asserts that religions are fundamentally false (“No one intent on starting a new religion from scratch in the modern era would dream of proposing anything as hoary and improbable as the rituals and precepts bequeathed to us by our ancestors.”; 10.ii.1), that they were invented, but he then suggests that: “We invented religions to serve two central needs ... first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and too our decay and demise.” (1.2) Given that these needs still exist, we need to develop secular systems which will promote social harmony and support vulnerable individuals without the mumbo-jumbo.

Then, in eloquent writing which sometimes reaches the heights of lyrical beauty, he proposes how this can be done.

Community
“One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighbourliness which has been replaced by ruthless anonymity.” (2.i.1) He recognises that this is partly due to overcrowding: “Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must - in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity - give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them all sides.” (2.i.2)  But churches are places where strangers from all walks of life meet. Often they are beautiful places. People are instructed to move together: when to kneel, when to stand or sit, when to sing together, when to listen. Importantly, the weakest are welcomed as well as the strongest. And he points out that the Christian mass began as a meal: “Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and off benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However the proximity required by a meal ... disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted.” (2.i.6) 

Apologies

AdB suggests that we institutionalize apologies, as with the Jewish Day of Atonement or the Catholic Confession. He suggests that we are all nasty in some ways to other people and this causes two lots of suffering:

• “As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appals our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we've given to the unkind remark.” (2.ii.2)
• If we have offended we may “feel intolerably guilty” so that we “run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them” so making them suffer twice. (2.ii.2)

One problem is that we don't like being told we are naughty by someone else. It provokes the 'who do you think you are' response and one of the flaws of religions is that often the priest is promoted as Mr Perfect Pants. “Among religions’ more unpalatable features is the tendency of their clergies to speak to people as if they, and they alone, were in possession of maturity and moral authority.” (3.i.7) AdB argues that the concept of Original Sin is that we are all flawed. “The doctrine of original sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about.”. (3.i.7)

He then proposes that in order to get the message across we need to institutionalize the secular church. He shows how institutions have vastly more wealth, and power, and influence than even the greatest individual thinker. He contrasts the cottage industry of wellness gurus with the brand recognition of the church. He suggests we advertise our secular beliefs by beautiful paintings, for example, and by beautiful architecture. (I take issue with his idea that beauty somehow equates with goodness: there is sufficient cult today of beautiful people and the downside of beauty = goodness is to suggest that the ugly should be shunned; besides, his two pictures contrasting a protestant chapel with a Roman Catholic chapel are presumably intended to suggested that the lush ornamentation of the RC ceiling is preferable whereas I personally prefer the elegance of the protestant building; beauty is even more individual perhaps than ethics.)

He considers the universities should have the duty to teach courses in eg How to have a successful marriage, and How to Die, and that these courses should be illustrated with extracts from great literature but he sees that the present universities have missed their way by considering literature as texts to be studied rather than improving moral works: “We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture ... as a source of guidance.” (4.i.4) “The redesigned universities of the future would draw upon the same rich catalogue of culture treated by their traditional counterparts ... but they would teach this material with a view to illuminating students lives ... Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary would that be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage ... Epicurus and Seneca would appear in a syllabus for a course about dying.” (4.i.7)

He also suggests that universities, by relying on a single method of transmission, the (often boring) lecture, have missed the goal. 

• “Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ ... the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greek sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (logos) and emotion (pathos)” (4.ii.1) 
• “Ever since Plato attacked the Greek sophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence.” (4.ii.2)
• “Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers.” (4.ii.3)

Finally he proposes that we lack perspective, being insufficiently pessimistic about our powerlessness in the face of the cosmos. This is interesting given that others suggest that it was the Coperbnican revolution that displaced mankind and the earth from its position of centrality in the Universe. But de Botton states:

•  “Our secular world ... surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history” (7.2)
• “Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.” (7.3) 

Other important ideas

• “In the past, we got to know others because we have no option but to ask them for help” because there were no social safety nets. “We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of that income for the common good” but this is through taxation which tends to leave us resentful imagining that “our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies” rather than considering “those less fortunate members of the policy for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin.” (2.i.2)
• We get our ideas of strangers from the media so we think “that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles” although when disasters strike and we are actually vulnerable “we tend to marvel that our fellow citizens have shown surprisingly little interest in slicing us in half or molesting our children and may even be surprisingly good-natured and ready to help.” (2.i.2)
• “The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert - all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.” (2.i.3)
• “It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realising that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.” (2.iii.3)
• “Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together.” 
• “Freedom has become our supreme political virtue ...the state should harbour no aspirations to tinker with the inner well-being or outward manners of its members.” (3.i.1)
• “ Heady romantic longings are fragile materials with which to construct a relationship. We grow thoughtless and mendacious towards each other. We surprise ourselves with our rudeness. We become deceitful and vindictive.” (3.i.5)
• “It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms ... But if we can now own up to spiritualising our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. ... We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves ... who want to live the sort of life which we want imagine supernatural beings demanded of us.” (3.i.6)
• “We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together.” (3.1.8)
• “We would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. ... Rudeness and emotional humiliation maybe just as corrosive to a well-functioning society as robbery and murder.” (3.1.8)
• “Consider ... how belatedly and how bluntly the modern state enters into our lives ... It intervenes when it is already far too late, after we have picked up the gun.” (3.i.8)
• “Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognised as a serious subject ... The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like the Gospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and therefore prompt affective identification and self-examination.” (4.i.4)
• “There is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a grown-up who does not regularly yearn to be comforted like a child.” (5.3)
• “If there is a problem with Christianity’s approach, it is that ... the need for comfort has come to be overly identified with a need for Mary herself, instead of being seen for what it really is: an eternal appetite which began long before the Gospels, originating at the very moment when the first child was picked up by his or her mother and soothed amid the darkness and cold of the first underground cave.” (5.4)
• “The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings ... are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality.” (7.2)
• “Tourists making their way around some of the world's great museums ... appear to want to be transformed by art, but the lightning bolts they are waiting for seem never to strike. They resemble the disappointed participants in a failed seance.” (8.2)
• “Art ...is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls.” (8.3)
• “The unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.” (8.5)
• “If our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.” (8.5)
• “There are places which by virtue of their remoteness, solitude, beauty or cultural richness retain an ability to salve the wounded parts of us.” (9.3)
• “Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and the tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, and cut off from practical affairs.” (10.i.1)
• “Why should only phones and shampoos benefit from coherent retail identities?” (10.i.3)
• “Because we are embodied creatures - sensory animals as well as rational beings - we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels ... in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.” (10.i.4)

An incredibly thought-provoking (and timely) book. Beautifully written, both easy to read and lyrical, and with many illustrations who, together with their captions, add a considerable amount to the text,

Alain de Botton has also written How Proust can change your life

August 2019; 312

"The Loney" by Andrew Michael Hurley

Winner of the Costa debut novel award in 2015.

The Loney is a bleak place on the Cumbrian coast where the tides can roar in and drown the unsuspecting. And in an isolated farmhouse three couples, two children and their parish priest arrive for a Catholic retreat with the ambition of effecting a miraculous cure for one of the boys who is mute. But their belief in God is challenged by mysterious things that begin to happen and by sinister men who seem to want to chase them away. And what is happening in the old house on the island that the tides cut off.

The Sunday Times called it an "excursion into terror". I wasn't in the least terrified. The most interesting part of the book is the character of the narrator's mother who is an obssessive compulsive religious; for whom religion is ritual and every ritual has to be performed correctly in every detail if there is to be any chance that God will perform a miracle and cure her mute, retarded son. In this she battles everyone including the gentle forgiving parish priest who is, in her eyes, no adequate replacement for the cruel disciplinarian he replaced. This is a novel in which religion is dissected: the narrow cruelties of small-minded ritualists versus forgiving generosity; the derelict customs of the sterile good versus the evil fecundity of magic.

The book is beautifully written. The descriptions are lovely and the evocation of the landscape masterful. The characters are depicted perfectly. But the plot is a textbook in hinting. Who are the sinister local men and what do they want? Why has a room in the house been sealed off and what is in it? Who is the very pregnant schoolgirl in the Daimler? Why is there a gun under the floorboards? And how did Father Wilfred die?

Some wonderful moments:

• "The emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all ... more the soggy afterbirth of winter." (C 2)
• "I'd never seen a man be so unkind to his own body." (C 2)
• "Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance." (C 2)
• "The specious grin of a teacher who wishes to punish and befriend in equal measure and ends up doing neither."(C 3)
• "All along the beach ... the sea had left its offerings like a cat trying to curry favour with its owner."(C 8)
• "It was an albino with eyes that looked as if they had been marinated in blood." (C 10)
• "Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children." (C 12)
• "He was the type that, given a different time and place, would have joined the Hitler Youth like a shot or been on the front row at a public hanging." (C 14)
• "Death was a poor draughtsman and had rendered his likeness just a little off-centre, giving him the look of someone who was almost familiar but lacking the something that made him so." (C 23)
• "Praying's like tuning a radio ... You have to be on the right frequency, otherwise all God hears is static." (C 23)

A perfectly structured book with great characterisation and an evocative setting. A page-turner. November 2018; 360 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes

Jayners wrote this book in 1976 when he was professor of psychology at Princeton University and so, on the face of it, not a nutter. His thesis is, on the face of it, nutty. He believes that consciousness evolved in human minds somewhere between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey when all around the world people began to mourn that they had lost their gods, the voices they had heard commanding them to do things in their heads. These voices were the voices of gods. In other words, “before the second Millennium BC, everyone was schizophrenic.” (p 405)

The bicameral mind itself evolved: Archaeological evidence suggest early human tribe size like gorillas of about 30. "And it is the problem of this limitation of group size which the gods may have come into evolutionary history to solve." (p 129) Social control was effected by individuals hallucinating the voices of gods and kings. "The bicameral mind is a form of social control and it is that form of social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural communities. The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language." (p 126)

What was that like? He presumes that the Iliad describes humans well: "the gods were organizations of the central nervous system ... The god is a part of the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact the gods never step outside of natural laws. ... The Greek god never steps forth in thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from the outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be." (p 74)

But then a further evolution took place. Language had ushered in bicamerality, now writing ushered it out again.  The world (middle east) became anarchic and a socially useful control that ran small city states was no longer an evolutionary asset; consciousness had to evolve. The change factors were:

• writing weakens auditory brain
• control using hallucinations is inherently fragile
• The massive social upheaval throughout the ancient world consequent on the eruption of Thera making it more difficult for social control to be via hallucinated gods
• Social mixing causing people to observe differences in others and thus to hypothesise internality
• epic poetry introducing narrative
• deceit becoming socially useful
• natural selection

The major gods became invisible. "We have the beginning of hybrid human-animal beings as the intermediaries and messengers between the banished gods and their forlorn followers. Such messengers were always part bird and part human ..." (p 230). The epic of Gilgamesh has later interpolations: a "barmaid" (late interpolation, c650 BC) in Gilgamesh story speaks to her heart. (p 252) Gilgamesh has sadness in his heart (p 253). "God Utnapishtim, the Distant ... is looking into the distance and speaking words to his heart, asking it questions and coming to his own conclusions." (p 253) "The literature on the loss of gods is an unquestionable change in the history of Mesopotamia, unlike anything that preceded it. It is indeed the birth of modern religious attitudes and we can discover ourselves in the very psalm-like yearnings for religious certainty" (p 253) 

He notes the change in the character of God within the Old Testament: “He walks in his garden at the cool of the day, talking to his recent creation.Adam. He is present and visible at the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, shuts the door of Noah's Ark with his own hand, speaks with Abraham at Sechem, Bethel, and Hebron, and scuffles all night with Jacob like a hoodlum.” (p 301) “There is no question of virtue or of justice. So He-Who-Is prefers Abel to Cain, slays Er, the first-born of Judah, having taken a dislike to him, first tells Abraham to beget a son, and then later orders him to kill the son even as criminal psychotics might be directed today.” (p 304)

He notes that words that are key in the Iliad change as we move to the Odyssey:

• thumos: activity, movement, agitation (perhaps caused by adrenaline) (p 262)
• phrenes: lungs, breathing (p 263)
• kradie: later kardia, cardiac, heart (p 265); "originally, I suggest, it simply meant quivering, coming from the verb kroteo, to beat." (p 266)
• etor: belly, guts (p 267)
• ker: trembling, perhaps from kradie, perhaps from cheir, hand (p 268)
• noos: "from noeo = to see, is perception itself" (p 269) "The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind". (p 269)
• mermerizo: divided into two parts, in two minds (p 259)
• psyche: from "psychein = to breathe", life

From Iliad to Odyssey these terms increase except for thumos which decreases. (p 274) "The Odyssey shows an increased spatialization of time ... there is also an increased ratio of abstract terms to concrete" (p 276)

And oracles which were once everyday now become specialized. He sees six stages in the development of oracles: (pp 329 - 330)

• Place
• Prophet
• Trained prophet
• Possessed prophet
• Interpreted possessed prophet
• Erratic

Nowadays he sees the vestiges of bicamerality in those with Tourette's syndrome, in schizophrenics and in religious group ceremonies like Voodoo and the glossolalia experienced in certain charismatic churches.

• “Hallucinations are dependent on the teachings and expectations of childhood” (p 410)
• The memoirs of Schreiber a German suffering from schizophrenia mention that “as he slowly recuperated, the tempo of speech of his gods slowed down and then degenerated into an indistinct hissing.” (p 416)
• “The patient in trying to keep some control over his behaviour repeats over and over to himself ‘I am’ or ‘I am the one present in everything’ ... another patient may use only single words like ‘strength’ or ‘life’ to try to anchor himself against the dissolution of his consciousness.” (p 420)

I didn't find it convincing. Clearly there were profound social and cultural changes at these times and the nature of godness changed (and has changed again more recently) but these are surely much easier to explain as cultural changes. We all (?) hear voices in our heads and some interpret this as voices from outside their heads. Perhaps that interpretation was more common among pre-literate people. Perhaps, also, hallucinations were more common in ancient times: the ancient Greeks were always watering their strong wines, perhaps before modern methods of food production it was quite common to ingest psychoactive substances with your bread and your beer. It just seems a step too far to postulate that bicamerality evolved into human brain architecture and then evolved out again in favour of consciousness.

One of the troubles with this thesis is his use of language. For example: "The function of meter in poetry is to drive the electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener." (p 73) The use of "most certainly" suggest to my bullshit detection faculty that he is using rhetoric to bolster a weak argument. If the argument is strong enough, don't add superfluous qualifiers.

He also makes claims that are just plain wrong. "The Iliad is not imaginative creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion. It is history." (p 76) But of course it is imaginative creative literature. It is historical fiction. It is like saying the Shakespeare's Richard III is not drama but biography. Furthermore, the analysis of words used in the Iliad which Jaynes undertakes later is a type of literary criticism. 

But a fascinating read and there were lots of side snippets some of which I have recorded below.

By products:

• If you continually mistype 'the' as 'hte' you should practise typing 'hte': "the mistake drops away - a phenomenon called negative practice" (p 34)
• "Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds." (p 256)
• Time is “spread out in a spatial succession ... The before and after of time on metaphored into a spatial succession.” (p 280)
• “When I am melting I have no hands, I go into a doorway in order not to be trampled on. Everything is flying away from me. In the doorway I can gather together the pieces of my body.” (p 425 )
• The word psyche originally meant life and only later came to mean soul. (p 291) “So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. ... So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins it's huge haunted career through history.” (p 291)
• “The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes Hebrew.” (p 294)
• "You cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in side-by-sideness." (p 60)
• "the most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors". (p 48) He gives huge numbers of examples that use the human body such as the head of the household, the face of a clock, the brow of a hill, the teeth of a comb, the lip of a crater, the arm of a chair, the leg of a table ... (p 49) 
• All the tablets from Hammurabi "are apparently incised in wet clay by the same hand" (p 198): H himself?

Cuneiform poetry: (p 225)

One who has no god, as he walks along the street,
Headache envelops him like a garment

My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

September 2017; 446 pages

"The Popes" by John Julius Norwich

Written in 2011 and therefore missing out the resignation of Benedict XVI and the new Pope Francis, this covers 265 men over 2000 years in 450 pages; few popes receive more than a few paragraphs and judgements necessarily lack nuance. The overall impression is that the incumbents of the papacy are either holy men, wholly unsuited to the tasks of leading a church, or that they believe the propaganda about infallibility and become authoritarian despots with no ability to understand that alternative perspectives from their own might exist let alone be valid, or that they are crooks and probably corrupt to boot. It seems that out of 265 only a handful have managed a consistently good job.

The other impression is that, certainly in the days before antibiotics and decent medical care, electing an old man to a job was a recipe for instability. Given the average papal reign is less than eight years long and given the human predilection for voting next time for the opposite of what you have got, it seems miraculous that the church still exists.

But these are superficial impressions. The other thing about this book is that there are a lot of fascinating characters and papal history is a lot of fun. Although some of the theological disputes are so abstruse and difficult to understand that even JJN finds it difficult to explain them. Has Christ two separate natures, one human and one divine or only one and if so is it human or divine and if not can the two both coexist or does one (and which one) predominate? I'm still confused as to what 'monophysite' means and what the doctrinal differences are between the Catholic and the orthodox, not to mention Copts, Nestorians and the rest.

There was one moment which I hated: "Attila, like all his race, was incorrigibly superstitious": even if you can assign a 'race' to Attila it can surely not be correct that every last member of that 'race' is superstitious let alone incorrigibly so. Please lose this lazy thinking if another edition is to be prepared.

I also found the numbers for the coronation feast for Clement VI inbelievable. There were three thousand guests. According to the quoted source they ate, each one, on average, one third of a sheep, three hens, half a goose, fifty cheeses, and seventeen tarts and cattle, calves, kids, pigs, and pike as well and drank at least four litres of wine. I just don't believe that possible.

But there were moments of wonder.

• French King John II was captured by the English at Poitiers and released pending ransom in exchange for hostages including his son; when his son escaped he voluntarily returned to captivity. That's chivalry!
• Deposed as ruler of Naples by Urban VI, Joanna was imprisoned by her replacement, papally sponsored Charles, and suffocated.
• Once there was a pope and an antipope, one in Rome and one in Avignon, some cardinals decided to resolve the situation by declaring them both deposed and electing another. This led to three popes. The new one (JohnXXIII) was an ex-pirate who, while papal legate to Bologna, "seduced 200 matrons, widows and virgins, to say nothing of an alarming number of nuns". "As Edward Gibbon delightedly noted, 'the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, sodomy and incest." Having eventually been deposed they made him a Bishop!
• Pope Pius II as a young man was caught in a storm on a voyage to Scotland; having pledged a pilgrimage to the nearest Virgin Mary shrine if he was spared "he duly trudged over the frozen earth to the holy well at Whitekirk" which, although only 5 miles "he found that he had lost all sensation in his feet" and suffered arthritis for the rest of his life.
• Sixtus IV, a Franciscan monk who loved poverty, changed completely on becoming Pope. "He spent money like water" and to fund it had to sell offices: "He bestowed the see of Milan on an eleven-year-old and the archbishopric of Lisbon on a boy of eight." But he was the one who built the Sistine chapel.
• A church council in Milan in 1511 "was openly ridiculed to the point where a local chronicler forbore to record its proceedings because, he claimed, they could not be taken seriously, and anyway he was short of ink"
• Leo X had a catamite who was a singer, the son of a Turkish Prince. This Prince had lived for years in the Vatican having fled Istanbul after attempting a coup against his brother, the Sultan. Gay Leo was the Pope who gave Henry VIII the title of Defender of the Faith, a title the British monarch still flaunts.
• There were two expeditions to reclaim Crete from the Turks in 1668 and 1669. The first "consisted largely of aristocratic young Frenchmen who fought only for their own glory; in their opening battle they showed considerable courage, but when it was over the survivors could not get out fast enough" The story of the second was "much the same, but without the courage."
• Gregory XVI's (1831- 1846) "mind was totally closed to progress, or indeed to any innovation"; he "banned the new railways - which he called chemins d'enfer"
• John Paul II "surprised everybody ... in his berserk canonisations of everything in sight ... he canonised no fewer than 483 new saints, more than had been made in the previous five centuries."

An interesting book. November 2016; 450 pages

"The Road to Eleusis" by Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman and Carla Ruck

Eleusis was a place where Athenian used to travel to take part in a religious rite which unlocked some sort of secret about the meaning of life; they were forbidden to reveal the secrets under pain of death and this prohibition seems to have been successful although in 415 BC Alcibiades and his chums were accused of "celebrating the Mystery at home with groups of drunken guests at dinner parties" (p 47). Perhaps it was not so much that the Mystery shouldn't be told but that it couldn't: "Even a poet could only say that he had seen the beginning and the end of life and known that they were one, something given by god. The division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light." (p 47)

This 30 year old book attempts to explain the secret of the Mystery as being a drug induced hallucination. It notes that "There were physical symptoms ... that accompanied the vision: feat and a trembling in the limbs, vertigo, nausea and a cold sweat." (p 47) It claims that "What was witnessed there was no play by actors, but phasmata, ghostly apparitions" (p 47). Athenians had plays, they would have been too sophisticated to be taken in by mere drama, it claims. The authors note that the Greeks diluted their wine although "Greeks did not know the art of distillation" (p 51); nevertheless "The word for drunkenness in Greek designates a state of raving madness. We hear of some wines so strong that they could be diluted with twenty parts of water and that required at least eight parts of water to be drunk" (p 51). From this they conclude that the Greek process of making wine led to a product that was adulterated with psychotropic impurities "capable of inducing different physical symptoms, ranging from slumber to insomnia and hallucinations" (p 52). The drunken dinner parties therefore connect with the Eleusian Mysteries.

I got a little confused at this point. The authors had a number of suggestions for the source of the drugs used in the mysteries: impure alcohol, ergot on rye grain, baked into bread, sacred mushrooms, etc. So this left a number of questions in my mind:

• If the Greeks were used to ingesting psychotropic substances by accident in undiluted wine, bread made from infected grain etc, why were the Eleusian Mysteries regarded as special?
• Given that most hallucinogens produce markedly different affects in different people, or in the same person at different times, (the authors themselves note symptoms "from slumber to insomnia", two ends of a spectrum) how did the organisers at Eleusis ensure that everyone had more or less the same visions? (This assumes that they did; maybe a lot of people left Eleusis without any religious conversion.)

I think the authors have made the following points successfully:

• Greek wine was unusually potent for some reason
• Greeks were not unused to ingesting psychotropic substances
• Greek myths contain references to hallucinogens in the rites of Persephone, Demeter, Dionysus etc; there are references to Helen adulterating wine with 'nepenthe'; there are references to gathering mushrooms etc; there seem to be words which could be codes for hallucinogenic substances.
• The ceremonies at Eleusis certainly involved all the celebrants imbibing something in preparation.

But what we still need desperately to know is what else happened at Eleusis to give it such immense power to affect people.

I was a little disappointed in the structure of the book. It seems a loose collection of articles by the authors. Two of the articles seem to contain repeated material.

September 2015; 139 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Consilience" by Edward O Wilson

This far-ranging and brilliantly written book pleads the cause that science should be united with the social sciences, and the humanities, and the arts, and even ethics and religion, on the basis of the scientific method. The thesis is that biology, which accepts that is is linked to chemistry and physics, is the basis for psychology through the evolution by natural selection within the human brain of epigenetic rules, and that scientific psychology is (or should be) the basis for sociology, anthropology and economics. Wilson is predominantly a socio-biologist and presents compelling evidence for his point of view. This book thus complements, supports and is supported by Steven Pinker's brilliant book The Blank Slate.

He starts by celebrating the power of science:  "The idea of the unity of science ... has been tested in acid baths of experiment and logic and enjoyed repeated vindication. It has suffered no decisive defeats. At least not yet." (p 3). To those who fear the 'mad scientist', variously mythologised as Frankenstein, the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden, and Icarus, the ultimate in hubris, Wilson responds: "Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings." (p 5)

He believes that the romantics led the reaction against the Enlightenment ideal of consilience, the unit of knowledge, when  Rousseau "invented the deadly abstraction of the 'general will' ... the rule of justice agreed upon by assemblies of free people whose interest is only to serve the welfare of the society and of each person in it ... Those who do not conform to the general will ... are deviants subject to necessary force by the assembly. There is no other way to achieve a truly egalitarian democracy." (p 14) but he points out that  "The Enlightenment ... was less a determined swift river than a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels" (p 21) and reminds us that "What counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment." (p 22) "Reductionism, given its unbroken strong of successes ... may seem today the obvious best way to have constructed knowledge of the physical world." (p 31) "The cutting edge of science is reductionism ... It is the research strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems." (p 58) The present situation is one in which the "natural sciences have expanded to reach the borders of the social sciences and humanities" (p 71)

Wilson is at one with Dennett is his claims that "Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imaginations of sensory impressions." (p 119) and that "Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of" networks of neurons. These "create scenarios that flow back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality." (p 120) He thus denies the Cartesian theatre: "Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. ... There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. ... The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity." (p 120)

I think therefore I am? Wilson questions the identity of the Self, seeing it as an actor improvising: "The self, an actor in a perpetually changing drama, lacks full command of its actions." (p 131) Free will is an illusion: "We make decisions for reasons we can sense only vaguely, and seldom if ever understand fully. Ignorance of this kind is conceived by the conscious mind as uncertainty to be resolved; hence freedom of choice is ensured. An omniscient mind with total commitment to pure reason and fixed goals would lack free will." (p 131): this implies that an omniscient God could not have free will; this is a fascinating theological restriction on God that I need to think about.

He revisits the nature-nurture debate, accepting that culture affects us but claiming that culture is an amalgam of the evolution of epigenetic rules which are prescribed by genes. "We know that virtually all of human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact." (p 138) "Culture is reconstructed each generation collectively in the minds of individuals ... culture can grow indefinitely large ... But the fundamental biasing influence of the epigenetic rules, being genetic and ineradicable, stays constant." (p 139). This creates an unchangeable human nature. He has a great example showing how nature and nurture interact in the arrowleaf plant which has arrowhead leaves on land, lily-pad leaves in shallow water, grass-like ribbon leaves in deep water. Similarly, humans genetically predisposed to be fat can be thin with a significant dieting regime and "Later-borns, who identify least with the roles and beliefs of their parents, tend to become more innovative and accepting of political and scientific revolutions than do first-borns. As a result they have, on average, contributed more than first-borns have to cultural change throughout history." (p 152)

Culture itself evolves and Wilson suggests that this is because cultural evolution can facilitate survival faster than genetic evolution, thus enabling faster adaptation to environmental change and potentially explaining the success of our species. "The more successful epigenetic rules have spread through the population along with the genes that prescribe the rules. As a consequence the human species has evolved genetically by natural selection in behaviour. ... Certain cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms ... Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations." (p 140) Culture exists in other species: "Wild chimps regularly invent and use tools. And the particular kinds of artifacts they invent, just as in human culture, are often limited to local populations." (p 145). 

He casts a new light on rationality itself! "I suggest that rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules." (p 199) But epigenetic rules ("rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment") (p 213) are "typically emotion driven" (p 214) so "Rational calculation is based on surges of competing emotions." (p 227)#

He is fascinating on a wide range of topics including pre-verbal communication which is probably "our primate heritage" and includes:

• "a male pheromone concentrated in perspiration and fresh urine. Perceived variously as musk or sandalwood, it changes sexual attraction and warmth of mood during social contacts." (p 174)
• Touching: strangers: arms only; other parts of body for more familiar acquaintances; more familiarity with opposite sex (p 174)
• "Dilation of the pupils": greater in women (p 174)
• "Pushing the tongue out and spitting are aggressive displays of rejection; flicking the tongue around the lips is a social invitation, used most commonly during flirtation" (p 174)
• Close eyes & wrinkle nose: rejection (p 174)
• "Opening the mouth while pulling down the corners of the mouth to expose the lower teeth is to threaten with contempt." (p 175)

"The optimum sexual instinct of men ... is to be assertive and ruttish, while that of women is to be coy and selective. Men are expected to be more drawn than women to pornography and prostitution. And in courtship, men are expected to stress exclusive sexual access and guarantees of paternity, while women consistently emphasize commitment of resources and material security." (p 187)

The theory of the family: "The basic assumption is evolution by natural selection" (p 214)
"Families are basically unstable, but the least so in those controlling high-quality resources. Dynasties ... arise in territories permanently rich in resources." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationships of the family members .. the higher the degree of cooperation." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, the lower the frequency of sexual conflict." (p 215)
"Breeding males invest less in offspring when paternity is uncertain. If the family consists of a single conjugal pair, and one of the parents is lost, the opposite-sex offspring compete with the surviving parent for breeder status. When the father dies, for example, a still fecund mother is likely to enter into conflict with a son over the status of a mate he may newly acquire, and a son is likely to discourage his mother from establishing a new sexual relationship." (p 215)
"Stepfamilies are less stable than biologically intact families." (p 215)
"Reproduction within a family ... is increasingly shared when there is an improvement in the alternative option for subordinate members to disperse and start families of their own. Such forbearance is greatest of all when the members are genetically very close and when the cooperating individuals are siblings rather than parents and offspring." (p 215)

Economists tend to use "folk psychology" (p 223) Their "principle of rational choice" assumes "narrow self-interest" but people are also "variously altruistic, loyal, spiteful, and masochistic." (p 224)

"The arts are not solely shaped by errant genius out of historical circumstances and idiosyncratic personal experience. The roots of that inspiration date back in deep history to the genetic origins of the human brain, and are permanent." (p 242)

"Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions." (p 265) But if ethical rules "increased the survival and reproductive success of those who conformed" then epigenetic ethical rules could have evolved. (p 275)

"Rarely do you see an argument that opens with the simple statement: This is my starting point and it could be wrong." (p 268)

Pascal's wager: I might as well believe: if I am right I get eternity in heaven, if I am wrong I lose nothing. This could be turned around: "If fear and hope and reason dictate that you must accept the faith, do so, but treat this world as if there is none other." (p 274)

The naturalistic fallacy (to go from is to ought) is itself a fallacy: "To translate is into ought makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts ... they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates, the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are willing to accept themselves for the common good." (p 278)

"One hunter considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide ... But he knows from experience that his chances of success alone are very low ... In addition ... he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their own prospects." (p 281) therefore those humans who cooperate have greater reproductive success and cooperation evolves. Therefore the prisoner's dilemma can be solved if "Honor does exist among thieves" (p 281)

"I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago." (p 4)

At then end he offers two warnings. 

First: we are destroying our environment. "At best an environmental bottleneck is coming in the twenty-first century." (p 320) "Economic miracles ... occur most often when countries consume not only their own material resources, including oil, timber, water, and agricultural produce, but those of other countries as well." (p 325) Life is becoming increasingly fragile:
"The more knowledge people acquire, the more they are able to increase their numbers and to alter the environment, whereupon the more they need new knowledge just to stay alive." (p 302)
"Greed demands an explanation." (p 302)

Secondly, we are about to become in charge of our own evolution.
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. ... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become. Our childhood having ended, we will hear the true voice of Mephistopheles." (p 309)

This is an amazing book. July 2016; 333 pages 

"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

The real beauty of this book is that it is written in very clear, very accessible, very simple language. It explains ideas and concepts. And it covers 2 million years of human history in 466 pages.

The inevitable downside of all this simplicity and brevity and clarity is that it admits no uncertainty. There is no suggestion that the ideas it presents may be controversial, that even the facts it offers are interpretations of evidence about which there are often fundamental disagreements.

For example, on page 55 he states that there is "some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging." (p 55) Fair enough. But he then builds speculation on this evidence as if it were a fact. Human brains have decreased in size because agriculture opened up "niches for imbeciles".  One of his great themes is how well adapted humans were to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and how much more miserable agricultural peasants were than their forebears.

He defines religion as "a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order" (p 255) and thus he claims that Buddhism and Marxism are religions even though they deny the supernatural. I would classify religions as systems of beliefs that accept the supernatural and thus I would deny that either Buddhism or Marxism are religions. He doesn't argue the point, he just states his definition and that is that. Later he says "if it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion" but that just made me feel patronised! Presumably science, in that the Laws of Nature are 'superhuman' and that  a scientist is likely to have a world view with human norms and values embedded into it (such as Occam's razor) qualifies as a religion. Hmm.

Another example: On page 266 he states that "one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline" is that "historians tend to be sceptical of ... deterministic theories." Yet this comes at the end of several pages when he is arguing that empires inevitably grow.

I mean, I like the idea that: "Capitalism's belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of nearly everything we know about the universe. ... The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years." (p 352) But is this a fact or Mr Harari's opinion?

I have grumbled enough. Such a wide sweep over world history in such an accessible book inevitably requires short cuts. On balance, Sapiens is a delightful book with lots of brilliant insights. I agree with most of his claims above. I also thoroughly enjoyed the insights below.

• Chimpanzees have a hierarchical structure in which less dominant grunt and grovel to the alpha male (p 28)
• The Maoris only reached New Zealand 800 years ago; almost immediately the islands' mega-fauna became extinct. (p 74): We are not the first generation to drive other species out of existence.
• Wheat "domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than the other way around". (p 90)
• "From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural." (p 164) Some things are forbidden in our culture but they are not 'unnatural'
• "Every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions." (p 182) For example, the values of equality and freedom inevitably contradict one another (p 183) "Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values , it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture." (p 184) Eg God and the devil. Logically, monotheists cannot admit a dualistic belief such as the devil (p 247)
• History is a "level two chaotic system" (p 267) because predictions made by historians are likely to affect the outcome (the weather is a level 1 chaotic system because weather forecasts won't affect what the weather is ,unless we start seeding clouds etc). He suggests that this is likely to make historians "prophets who predict things that don't happen" (p 268)!
• Cultures are "a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host", carried by memes (p 270)
• "Ardent capitalists tend to argue that capital should be free to influence politics, but politics should not be allowed to influence capital." (p 367)
• "It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved ... like the French in Algeria." (p 414)
• Many of us act like a man on the beach trying to welcome good waves and push back bad waves. Buddhists suggest we should behave like a man who "sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please." (p 442)

Read this book. It is beautifully written and full of important ideas (but remember that they are ideas, not holy writ). November 2015; 466 pages

"Ragnarok" by A. S. Byatt

Byatt tells the story of a thin girl, evacuated with her mother during WWII and missing her airman father, who reads two books: Pilgrim's Progress and Asgard and the Gods. This last tells her the story of the Viking Gods, of Odin and Thor and Baldur and Loki, of wolves and sea serpents and bareserk warriors, of frost and forests and night.

Byatt has written a poem in prose form. Her images are intense and lyrical, her descriptions of seaweed and hedgerows are colourful and fresh. The great thing about the Norse Gods, which she brings out, is how vulnerable they are. Odin is one-eyed having sacrificed the other eye to buy prophesies from the head of Mimir, Tyr the hunter has his hand bitten off by Fenrir the wolf, Loki is captured and tied and has poison dripping into his face, Baldur is killed. And they are doomed. The world will end at Ragnarok and all of time is hurrying towards this finish.

This is a book filled with wonderful writing, fabulous, haunting characters (Hel, goddess of the underworld, has a face and a body which is half alive and half dead) and mysteries. What was the word whispered by Odin into the ear of his dead son? What will come after the destruction of Ragnarok?

Byatt has written a beautiful book. November 2015; 171 pages

Also reviewed by A S Byatt: Possession a delightful, Booker winning novel about a literary researcher tracing the details of an unknown and illicit Victorian love affair.

"Octavia; Daughter of God" by Jane Shaw

Shortly after the First World War, Mabel Barltrop, the widow of a vicar, who had already spent two periods in lunatic asylums because of her mental illness, discovered the writings of eighteenth century prophetess Joanna Southcott. She set up the Panacea Society in Albany Road in Bedford, UK. Quickly, the Society decided that Mabel was Octavia, daughter of God, and that Bedford was the site of the Garden of Eden. Octavia spoke with God every evening and passed on God's messages at the Society's evening worship. Another member who went into trances began to speak as the Divine Mother and it was discovered that Mabel's dead husband had been Jesus, come back to Earth. The practices of the community involved confessing one's sins (this gave the Divine Mother a significant psychological hold over members), and 'overcoming' the self; the reward was literal immortality. Octavia began to breath on small squares of linen. When these were infused in water, the water could heal every disease (hence Panacea) and water sprinkled around a building would protect it, even from bomb damage. The community grew to house seventy resident members, more who were 'sealed' (who would form the nucleus of the 144,000 who would survive the end of times) and the linen squares were requested by over 130,000 people world wide (especially in countries where healthcare was expensive). It survived the death of many members (so much for immortality) including Octavia herself, but has probably died out now. Nevertheless, the buildings still remain, including Octavia's own house where her bedroom is preserved for the return of her body (from Uranus), the Ark which has a cradle ready for the return of Jesus himself, and Castleside (which was once a Bedford School boarding house) which was fitted out so that the 24 Bishops of the Church of England could gather for the opening of Joanna Southcott's sealed Box of prophecies.

Incredible nonsense! It is difficult to understand how so many people could be so needy and gullible as to believe such rubbish and to submit themselves to total obedience to a pair of women who were either mad or charlatans.

This book focuses on the activities of the Society in its heyday, from origination to the death of Octavia. Even in this short time (1919 - 1934) a lot happened. Some of it is rather tedious: lengthy theological disputes motivated essentially by Octavia's right wing politics and Edwardian snobbishness. Some of it is racy: the introduction of Edgar Peissart in 1922 led to the development of a gay sex ring amongst some of the male resident members (in a community devoted to chastity); when this was discovered and one member of the community was forced to kneel and confess he noticed a knife and "thought he was about to be sacrificed"! The community also tried to persuade non-resident members (usually post-menopausal women) to give up 'sex-relations'.

There are some very sad stories. Dilys, Octavia's daughter, tried to break away but ended up, after some periods of mental illness, living, unmarried, in the community for the rest of her life, often lonely because most of the residents were older women. Poor people were only allowed to become residents if they worked for the community, usually as exploited domestic servants. Olivia's two surviving boys kept as far away from Bedford as possible, mostly living abroad, embarrassed by their mother and her claim that they were the sons of Jesus. And there is a sense of sadness about the whole thing: most of the residents were lonely or vulnerable in some way.

The book was compelling to me because I live in Bedford, a few streets away from The Ark, and Castleside, and the other Panacea properties. The idea that Bedford might be the New Jerusalem is both bizarre and (given the millennia of strife over the old Jerusalem) scary. The idea that people might imbue everyday ordinary Bedford with such daft beliefs is staggeringly weird.

In the end, I don't think I really understood why anybody believed in Octavia (let alone the Divine Mother!) They were promised immortality of the body but people still died. If they were old and lonely the community was a sort of rest home. But they were expected to give up very natural human things like sex and to deny themselves and to be totally obedient to two women whom they lived with everyday. Charisma can only take you so far. I just cannot imagine accepting some of these outlandish beliefs: Mabel is a prophetess, her dead husband was Jesus, Bedford is the Garden of Eden, Jesus will return to Earth here.

A usually interesting read. March 2015; 334 pages