Until now we have really only uncovered one generator of religion: the human body. Even Thomas Tweed, who does such a good job at pointing out the more-than-human agents behind religious behavior, summarizes the ultimate truth: “Religions begin, and end, with bodies.” Bodies appear to generate all of our experiences, actually, sacred and profane. Anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and religion scholars also claim that religiousness is best understood as a kind of systematic anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things or events (Gutherie 1993). This includes the attribution of some concept of agency. Gutherie and others argue it’s the nature of human perception to anthropomorphize. Even if they are just projections, illusions, mistakes, dreams, the humans that assumed that the rustling in the bushes was something human-like were the ones who survived. Human bodies then produced inspired texts and material cultures based on their religious experiences with these mental projections.
Volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, these all captured our ancestors’ imagination, but sky-activity did so in especially interesting ways. Historian of the senses Richard Rath explores why early American settlers, Native and European, believed that thunder and lightning was actually the voice of god and the actions of thunderbirds. Karl Marx put it this way: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” As true and relatively uncontroversial as this theory of religion is, it’s marked reductionist by post-humanists, technologists, and by me. We can even mark it anthropocentric, another egoic dream rooted in the delusion of free will and a separate self. In Latour’s (1993: 138) words, “modern humanists are reductionist because they seek to attribute action to a small number of powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothing but simple mute forces.”
Exploring the creative power of human bodies is wonderful, and has enriched our theologies and lives. Don’t get me wrong. By focusing on anthropomorphism and the body as agent, we gain magnificent branches of knowledge exploring gender, sex, race, oppression, justice, free will, and incarnational theologies. But when we focus on the figure, we miss the ground, don’t we? We miss that truth that we are not only human. Non-human powers configure and contribute to our lives.
Also, within people’s decidedly “religious experience” is an irreducible “more-than-human”. But because non-human elements may resemble too closely the agentic “other” of animism, where the tree is listening and the magic stone has good-doo powers, the natural aversion to these premodern pre-rational religious thinking gets confused with actual more-than-human actors in our story. Thus, the more-than-human agents of culture remain unacknowledged in religion and gender studies (However, they are touched on within a materialist theory of religion). Further, what Gutherie and other proponents of the anthropomorphic theory of religion forget to address is that we not only project human-likeness into surrounding non-human events, but we also project landscape-likeness into our bodies, our minds, souls, and onto our gods! What is that? The reverse of anthropomorphism is also going on. And it goes deeper than mere metaphor. These landforms are, as cognitive neuroscientists would say, metaphors we live by. Our minds are alive like the sky, our thoughts are as shapeshifting as the clouds; human bodies have limbs, a trunk; our bones are like stones; cultures have roots, weather, caves; Family is a tree; Heaven is a kingdom, a realm, a pure land; there is a Garden of Eden and a Mount Meru; our life is a path, a river; a stream, there is an ocean of suffering; a ground of being; an other shore and a summit of spiritual achievement; there is a field of merit; Christ is called a cornerstone, a seed, and we read in the bible again and again that God is a rock. “And who is a rock, besides our God?.” Deuteronomy 32:4: “The Rock!” Is this animism? Residual paganism that also used trees and moutnains and rocks as analogues for God? Or is it an eco/geo awareness of the true significance of the landscape and material flesh in human life? Even in the example above, where the weather in early American skies was understood as “thunder birds.” Both of those symbols come from the landscape, not from the body. Its a thunder-bird hybrid. Is that anthropomorphism?
We can see how stones and landscape elements hold the conceptual shape of God’s “body” in other religions as well. Holy rocks signify the gods inside many Shinto shrines in Japan, and Muslims enshrine two stones, the black stone and the red stone at The Cube in Mecca, and pray to these magic rocks, send to earth by God. “The black stone is the right hand of Allah.” This is not only anthropomorphism because it is projecting landscape-likeness onto non-landscape things and events. God is like a rock. It is a rock. Dzogchen Buddhist teachers like to compare the mind to the sky, and say thinks like “Losing ego is like losing the clouds but gaining the sky.” The image leads our experience, as the nature of the soul is described in landscape terms. We have no name for this other religion-making process, for ascribing landscape-atributes to non-landsacape things. What should we call it?
