(1) The promiscuous attribution of personhood

As an element of human behaviour found in every society known to scholarship, it should be possible to understand immanentism in terms of the inherent characteristics of the evolved mind.Footnote ³ I will not attempt to proceed very far into the field of cognitive science, which has its own internal debates about how mental processing may or may not be organised and its own epistemological problems to overcome. Nevertheless, it has established some foundational points that all serious thinkers about religion must address. We are obliged, for example, to consider the implications of the fact that the human mind is not some force of pure intelligence that simply perceives the world as it is.Footnote ⁴ It is extremely good at some things and rather poor at others; it is inconsistently attentive. Some lines of thought are followed more readily and intuitively than others. One of the best examples of this also turns out to be the most significant for a comprehension of religion. Not for the first time, David Hume arrived at the point without the benefit of subsequent theories of evolution:

The profound tendency towards anthropomorphism is impossible to deny for anyone who has cursed a car that has broken down – exhibiting what Alfred Gell called ‘vehicular animism’.Footnote ⁶ What informs such behaviour is the persistent assumption that significant effects are caused by somehow personlike agents rather than by the brute operations of nonconscious and nonintentional matter.

Some scholars working within an evolutionary perspective have argued that this was the product of various cognitive traits which promoted survival, such as predator detection: if a twig falls and snaps behind you, it pays to start as if it were a wolf rather than the wind.Footnote ⁷ Most promising, however, is the current interest in the supercharged development of social intelligence: the human mind appears to be distinguished by its capacity for complex feats of mind reading, speculating about the feelings, strategies, and intentions of other people.Footnote ⁸ Perhaps it became so important for survival and reproductive success to understand the complexities of social relations that it decisively altered the priorities of human cognition. However it happened, it is as if this fixation upon the logic of the social was inexorably transferred to other domains of cognition, such that it structured the comprehension of powers, forces, qualities, or even abstractions.Footnote ⁹ Of course, people in all societies discern ‘natural’ processes of cause and effect too. It is just that these are often held to proceed alongside a deeper or more satisfying level of explanation that revolves around the discernment of motivated agency.Footnote ¹⁰

At a stroke, this perspective renders any social functionalist theory of why religion exists unnecessary (although functionalism in the broad sense is indispensable for understanding why it takes the forms it does, as the following chapter suggests). Without some such appeal to the evolved mind, moreover, it is difficult to comprehend why certain features are independently invented time and again within otherwise very diverse and disconnected cultures, including types comparable to witches, spirits of possession, ancestors, and so on.Footnote ¹¹ Our attention is also drawn to the way that de facto assumptions (or ‘nonreflective beliefs’ in the terminology of Justin L. Barrett) may diverge widely from ostensibly esteemed knowledge.Footnote ¹² The cognitive tendency towards agency detection certainly helps explain the promiscuous attribution of personhood in the historical and anthropological record.Footnote ¹³

Two qualifications deserve brief acknowledgement: first that ‘personhood’ is used here to refer simply to motivated agency; emic theories of what exactly personhood is and how exactly matter relates to non-matter, may vary enormously and are often composite.Footnote ¹⁴ Secondly, many immanentist societies convey a sense that the capacity to organise the underlying realities of the universe in terms of personhood has distinct limits, as if any such identities might be merely shifting and plural masks allowing a dim apprehension of interacting powers or processes.Footnote ¹⁵

There is naturally some variety in how and where these metapersons were located. To the extent that such metapersons are conceived to be present in the animals, objects, and landscape of the observable world around us, this disposition has been described as animism.Footnote ¹⁶ ‘Animism’ sank into disrepute as a scholarly term for many decades due to its association with old civilisational hierarchies, but in recent years anthropology has cleared its head of this particular genealogical fallacy.Footnote ¹⁷ ‘Animism’ has therefore been revived for its capacity to convey an ontology radically different from that of modern Western common sense, one in which the world is held to be full of subjects rather than objects: ‘The attribution by humans to non-humans of an interiority identical to their own.’Footnote ¹⁸ One particularly striking subset of animism has become known as perspectivism, which is found in a number of societies in Amazonia and Siberia.Footnote ¹⁹ If, in the animist view, non-humans such as animals are held to be essentially human, perpsectivalist cultures complete this logic: the humans that appear as animals to us also see us as animals. These beings are not then fundamentally ‘other’, they are merely endowed with different bodies and perceptual equipment and therefore have a different, role-reversed view of the world, one in which, for example, people may be identified as prey.

The great majority of societies in the historical record, however, have attributed features of personhood not only to the animals and things around them, but to all manner of beings that are not usually visible nor inextricably tied to a single material instantiation, namely to ancestors, spirits, and deities. It is not always helpful to make strong distinctions between these entities, which is one reason why the term ‘metaperson’ may be preferable.Footnote ²⁰ But a very large number of societies have arranged their metapersons in a hierarchy, in which moving up the scale entails both greater distance from and greater powers over normal persons.Footnote ²¹ In Bellah’s view, a more acute sense of distance between man and metaperson, and thus stronger sensations of reverence – the emergence of ‘gods’ – was a hallmark of the ‘archaic religion’ that accompanied the rise of kings and states: religious and political differentiation proceeded hand in hand.Footnote ²² This must be qualified, for Sahlins has shown that societies without forms of political hierarchy have also imagined layers of godlike metapersons towering above them. They formed indeed a kind of invisible state before the state.Footnote ²³

(2) Cosmology is relatively monistic

The literature is emphatic that visions of reality existing before and outside those produced by the Axial Age tend to the monistic.Footnote ²⁴ In the words of Bellah, ‘Both tribal and archaic religions are “cosmological”, in that supernature, nature, and society were all fused in a single cosmos.’Footnote ²⁵ Monism is a concept of which it is easy to lose control, however. If it is pushed too far it might imply that the inhabitants of immanentist societies imagine metapersons as inhabiting the world in exactly the manner that normal persons do. There would be no sense in having special, set-apart (‘sacred’) modes of representing or interacting with them. Evidently, the behaviour of ancestors, spirits, and gods is obstreperously obscured and mysterious.Footnote ²⁶ The whole panoply of rite and sacrifice is an attempt to throw a rope bridge across the frustrating divide that separates person and metaperson. Moreover, it is precisely because there are normally some such emic distinctions between, say, cosmos and society, or gods and men, that so much energy is put into setting up relations between them (a truly monistic entity would allow for no inter-relationality).Footnote ²⁷ Hence Jan Assmann refers not to monism but to

Certainly, for some purposes, it may make sense to describe the spirits and gods of immanentist societies as existing ‘beyond’ or ‘transcending’ domestic human society in some form – indeed, it is this which allows them to underpin, represent, or legitimate it.Footnote ²⁹ However, they do not ‘transcend’ the mundane world in a ‘transcendentalist’ manner! Assmann comments:

The point is not then to deny that many immanentist cultures created special locations (otherworlds, underworlds, spirit worlds) for metapersons to inhabit, but rather that these locations were somehow circumscribed by or homologous to mundane reality in profound ways.Footnote ³¹ This is why, whenever anthropologists or historians are obliged to explain the nature of religion in any given immanentist society – to a readership universally assumed to have been reared within naturalism and/or transcendentalism – they have nearly always understood that their main exegetical duty is the explosion of dualisms. Repeatedly, we are told that distinctions between society and cosmos, man and god, god and thing, man and thing, thing and god, were consistently overcome by the intensity of analogical reasoning to which they are subject, the chains of cause and effect strung between them, and the routine nature of their mutual participation.Footnote ³² Above all, the nature/supernature distinction is often presented as an obstacle to grasping the emic sensibility.Footnote ³³ Marshall Sahlins has recently referred to a raft of ethnographic literature in order to demonstrate the extent to which people of many societies have felt themselves to be living among metapersons, as empirical realities, as forces continuously dictating their fortunes, as sharing their world rather than inhabiting some distant other sphere.Footnote ³⁴ Alfredo López Austin describes something like this as the experience of the sixteenth-century Nahua:

In Ancient Greece, the gods may be described as being ‘entirely of this world. They may have dwelled on the most remote, elevated mountain in Greece… they may have been capable of flight, but they nevertheless inhabited the same ecosystem as we do’.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, gods had once lived with men; their reign was contingent, their immortality only maintained through nectar and ambrosia.Footnote ³⁷ Scholars of contemporary Central Africa report widespread apprehensions of a ‘spirit world’. In one sense this is distinct from mundane reality; in another sense it is not distinct all, insofar as it is a simulacrum of this world.Footnote ³⁸ According to one account today, it has its universities, airports, government.Footnote ³⁹ Among the Chukchi of Kamchatka, the spirit world is a kind of reversed, upside-down version of this one, where day is night.Footnote ⁴⁰

The submergence of the distinction between thing and spirit is no less important. This is again most fundamentally explicable in terms of the cognitive tendency towards agency or personhood attribution. Many behaviours, taking place within very divergent cultural systems, bear witness to this propensity to make objects into subjects, from the making of masks and fetishes in West Africa to the looting of temple icons in medieval India.Footnote ⁴¹ To take an example from early nineteenth-century Oceania, the English missionary John Williams reported a conversation among the recently converted Samoans debating how to destroy their god of war, apparently resident within a piece of matting. When burning was proposed it was deemed too cruel a death for the god, and so drowning was opted for.Footnote ⁴² In some of these cases, at the level of explicitly held knowledge there may well be important distinctions to be drawn between the object and the metaperson it represents or hosts. But at the level of non-explicit assumption, this distinction is often obliterated. Alfred Gell, in perhaps the most audacious act of liberation from the genealogical fallacy, has sought to resurrect the concept of the ‘idol’ in order to highlight such commonalities.Footnote ⁴³

For all traditions outside of the monotheisms, and especially for immanentist ones, their academic exegetes have also been concerned to highlight the liquidity of movement across the man/god frontier.Footnote ⁴⁴ For J. D. Y. Peel,

This has obvious significance for the matter of sacred kingship, as considered in Chapter 3.

(3) The afterlife is relatively undifferentiated and insignificant

In nearly all religious cultures, both immanentist and transcendentalist, however, there is one sense in which all persons must become somewhat ‘meta’: when they die. But to what extent is a form of ontological dualism entailed by the afterlife? In many societies, the dead are considered to remain within the community in an important sense and as the condition of the possibility of its existence. In some Central African societies the land of the dead has been seen as coterminous with the living, reachable through bodies of water, for example. Such substantial continuity is maintained across this boundary that ‘death’ itself may be a misnomer.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, recently dead ancestors could be imagined to take the form of Australian explorers making first contact.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Hawaii, the dead Captain Cook could be identified with a volcano.Footnote ⁴⁸ Wherever we find societies burying the dead surrounded by the paraphernalia of life such as chariots, money, or slaves, we surely also find afterlives that are simulacra of this life. Indeed such gravesites often indicate that social status – being a king, say – was something that could pass to the next life. The Jesuit Baltasar Barreira described his frustrations with West African interlocutors in the early seventeenth century: ‘They evaluate all points about the next world in terms of things of this world, believing that the former are also material, and hence that they will employ in the other life what they used in this one.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Hence, wherever in the world the archaeological record of gravesites suddenly plunges into mute emptiness it may be taken as an indication of the arrival of transcendentalism. Paradisical afterlives may be found in some forms of immanentism but they tend to be concretely magnified versions of worldly good fortune.Footnote ⁵⁰

Frequently, if not quite invariably, the scholarship is at pains to observe the relative insignificance of the afterlife.Footnote ⁵¹ The definitive feature of the immanentist afterlife is simply that it is not the raison d’être of religious activity. As such, it may well be essentially untheorised. The missionary William Ellis recounted a conversation in Hawaii in the 1820s:

In these circumstances, it may be difficult to make people care about a new concept of the hereafter. The Welsh missionary John Davies in Tahiti found that even when working among people terribly afflicted by the new diseases brought by the English ships, they were irritated by talk of the next world and ‘would say we want no other salvation but to live in this world’.Footnote ⁵³ ‘They cannot be persuaded that as to them, there is anything to be feared, or hoped for beyond the present life. Salvation from sin and its consequences is utterly despised. It is what they look upon as a useless and foolish tale.’Footnote ⁵⁴

(4) The purpose of religion is to access supernatural power for the flourishing of existence in the here and now

If the afterlife is usually a vague and minor detail of the immanentist canvas, what is the central motif? It is simply the pursuit of power – but power conceived in the broadest sense possible. The basic immanentist assumption is that the capacity to achieve any worthwhile objective is dependent on the approval or intervention of supernatural forces and metapersons. These constitute the fundamental origin of the ability to produce food, survive ill health, become wealthy, give birth, and wage war. Supernatural power may at times be imagined as a unified impersonal force – like electricity – that can be accessed both with and without the intervention of metapersons. The Polynesian concept of mana could stand as a label for the whole category.Footnote ⁵⁵ But it is always also in the gift of ancestors, spirits, and gods with whom it is therefore vital to maintain good relations. This may seem like a very obvious point. But the more seriously we take the emic conception that all power is ultimately supernatural in origin – what Sahlins calls determination by religious basis – the more radical the implications for understanding how immanentist societies and politics works.Footnote ⁵⁶

(5) Morality is communal, local, and unsystematised

It follows that there is no sphere of religious values that may be differentiated from the values of society per se. What the stories and symbols and rites of immanentist religion embody are the normal appetites and desiderata of this world: heroism, consumption, fertility, sexuality, honour, order, peace, victory – in short, ‘life’, as A. M. Hocart put it.Footnote ⁵⁷ (These are also the values of modern secular society.) This is not at all to suggest that immanentist religious activity is unrelated to morality, just that ‘morality’ here signifies the maintenance of successful communal living.Footnote ⁵⁸ In seventeenth-century Central Africa, initiation cults aimed at the moral regeneration of society, punishing falsehood with sickness and death.Footnote ⁵⁹ Everywhere, metapersons are ready to chastise oath breakers.Footnote ⁶⁰ If Sahlins sees the precursor to the state in the heavenly hierarchies of metapersons, then evidently the invocation of their displeasure provided the police, judiciary, and penal systems (see Chapter 2). This may be held to be aroused by ritual infelicities – by neglecting sacrifice, for example – but also by the flouting of taboos, conventions, or moral rules of thumb.Footnote ⁶¹ More generally, ritual participation helps create communally oriented human subjects. However, immanentist systems have not developed systematic sets of ethical principles applicable to the whole of humanity and which deserve to be followed regardless of their impact on community. They have not made the internalisation of such abstract ethical codes a central function of religious life. And they are not formed around a worship of or search for ‘the good’. Ancestors in mid-twentieth-century Mount Hagen may have punished behaviour that was too egocentric, but they did so as social agents who have effectively thereby been ignored, who may themselves suffer from popkl (deep-seated anger and frustration), and may be partial or ambiguous in how they deal out sickness to those who have been wronged or done wrong.Footnote ⁶²

(6) Metapersons (and their relations with persons) are defined by power rather than ethics

That is to say: ancestors and spirits and deities are not defined by their role in a good–evil dualism. They are no more or less given to moral behaviour than visible human persons. The field of the sacred is set apart rather by its veiled and abnormal power, a power which is in itself ethically ambiguous.Footnote ⁶³ It was understood, as many would understand today, that the origins of evil lay not in the very being of any agent but in their contingent motivations and strategies – and these may be opaque. From the Andes to Madagascar, from Nigeria to Fiji, metapersons have been as capricious as fate or the weather or any other cosmic force that may bear humanity on or grind it down.Footnote ⁶⁴ They bring plague with one hand and cure it with the other. They may be terrifying, merciless, wrathful, violent. They may be petty, jealous, irritable, deceitful. They were, in that sense, no different from mortal lords and kings, who required constant appeasement and genuflection but could never quite be trusted.

Indeed, the tenor of relations with these entities is in many ways akin to that of normal social relations, and often takes on a decidedly transactional logic. Sacrifice is not quite a universal practice, for Philippe Descola has highlighted the importance of its absence in certain animist societies.Footnote ⁶⁵ But in all other immanentist traditions, where some sort of distance has opened up between person and metaperson, sacrifice is the quintessential form of communication between them. One of the oldest (and therefore oft-critiqued) explanations of sacrifice is that it is a form of gift exchange with or debt payment to metapersons conducted to elicit the reciprocal bestowal of supernatural productivity and power.Footnote ⁶⁶ This still remains the most compelling way of accounting for sacrifice as a global phenomenon, even if any given tradition of it may be loaded with all manner of other complex operations and significations.Footnote ⁶⁷ The act of sacrifice therefore encodes something fundamental to the spirit of immanentism, which is the mutual dependency of life and death.Footnote ⁶⁸ Like other immanent beings, the ancestors and gods require feeding – sacrifice can also be seen as the induction of metapersons into commensality – and that means they require violence, just as human must commit violence in order to eat.Footnote ⁶⁹ But if this is gift exchange, it is with superior, unpredictable parties, who are by no means compelled to respond: like powerful humans, they may even simply require signs of submission.Footnote ⁷⁰

If sacrifice is the exchange mechanism for the economy of life force – the giving of life in order to obtain life – then it follows that the more precious the gift the more powerful the return. This is one reason why human sacrifice should be independently invented in entirely unconnected regions of the world; the other reason is its utility in the construction of divinised kingship (Chapter 3).

If it needed underlining that the ‘transcendentalist revolution’ is not some generic feature of societal development – a congeries of features that any society must produce once it attains a certain level of political complexity, urbanisation, and literacy – but rather a contingent and distinctive if extremely powerful cultural pattern, then we need only consider what happened when the Spanish reached the New World. When they arrived into the Aztec empire in 1519, the Spanish found at its centre the great city of Tenochtitlan, which – at more than 200,000 people – was larger than Madrid. It was radiantly attractive, clean, and orderly, and the setting for social behaviour that spoke to their preconceived notions of civility.Footnote ⁷¹ And yet at the heart of this city and the whole business of politics, was the Templo Mayor, dedicated to a god of war and a god of fertility, which churned through the slaughter of perhaps thousands of human victims every year, carried out by priests whose uncut hair was matted with their blood.Footnote ⁷² This is a scene that was unthinkable in any other major Eurasian polity by this time. And yet when Europeans reached Benin, one of the most important states in sub-Sahraran Africa, around the same time, they also found human sacrifice at the heart of politics – and when finally they reached the isolated societies of the islands of Hawaii, Tahiti, and Fiji in the eighteenth century, they found it once more.Footnote ⁷³

The point here is not at all that such societies produced less ethical behaviours. All societies destroy human life in the name of some such ideal, whether justice or order or salvation, and once one accepts the basic immanentist proposition that all mortal flourishing lies in the hands of metapersons and the secondary proposition that these metapersons demand tribute or sustenance, then some kind of moral foundation for ritual homicide may readily be imagined.Footnote ⁷⁴ Rather, these cases indicate what may happen to political theology in communities untouched by the transcendentalist devaluation of these immanentist propositions in favour of their universalised ethical codes – to which any reader vaguely shocked by such phenomena is indubitably the heir. Neither gods nor rulers are embodiments of the good here but are more or less successful participants in an economy of mutual fructification and destruction. One consequence is that the aesthetics of immanentist religiosity can sometimes embrace the themes of violence and darkness in a way that wreaks havoc among notions of the ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ fashioned by the transcendentalisms.

Insofar as the purpose of ritual activity is the harnessing of power, then there is no reason why it must be conducted in a public and open context; indeed to the extent that this power is to be deployed for the benefit of an individual or select group rather than for the good of the community, it may well make sense to restrict access to it, and surround it with great secrecy.Footnote ⁷⁵ In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, indeed, the very hiddenness, scarcity, and exclusivity of rites have been taken as an index of their power.Footnote ⁷⁶

Nor is a reverential attitude mandated by the immanentist mentality. The German navigator Otto von Kotzebue, generally rather relativist and celebratory about Hawaiian culture, commented on the rites of kapu pule, set about by strict taboos:

The transactional quality to human–deity relations in immanentist traditions is nowhere clearer than when it breaks out into agonistic and antagonistic forms.Footnote ⁷⁸ In Hawaii there was a procedure for ‘casting off the gods’ who had become tiresome, terrifying, or ineffective – who no longer reciprocated.Footnote ⁷⁹ Michael Puett has drawn on the scholarship of Hawaii to elucidate how the spirits of Ancient China were not just ‘powers with which one harmonised; they were often powers one fought, cheated, appropriated and tried to become or transcend’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the seventeenth century, European writers were wont to observe, as did Louis Le Compte (1655–1728):

In the early twentieth century, the inhabitants of one village in the New Territories of Hong Kong decided to abandon their ‘useless’ ancestors who had not helped them out of poverty over the past 200 years, by dragging them out of the hall to set fire to them.Footnote ⁸² In Ancient Rome the gods could be punished for national disasters – ‘breach of contract’ – by the closing of their temples.Footnote ⁸³ Spanish missionaries found that the Mexica would weep to snag the attention of the gods but heap abuse on them if they were unresponsive.Footnote ⁸⁴ As for the Incas, a story about their conquests of the fifteenth century had Topa Inca Yupanqui questioning why the huacas (the idols and metapersons they instantiated) had not rewarded him with victory after all the precious items and food he had given them. When they did not reply he threatened to burn all their possessions until they relented.Footnote ⁸⁵ The huacas of subject people who rebelled would be whipped. When the Spanish arrived among the Incas and into a raging war of succession, both the main rivals angrily destroyed shrines and threatened huacas when prophecies went unfulfilled or battles were lost.Footnote ⁸⁶

(7) Religiosity tends to the empirical, pragmatic, and experimental

These examples indicate the empirical quality of immanentist religiosity. Relations with metapersons were expected to produce tangible results and, under certain circumstances, could be set aside if they failed to deliver.Footnote ⁸⁷ This point raises some significant theoretical questions that will be addressed Chapter 4. For the moment, it is enough to simply note the diversity of societies for which scholarship has observed such utilitarianism or ‘ruthless pragmatism’ at work, in which particular metapersons, rituals, or ritual specialists may be dropped if they fail to work in favour of alternatives.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this particular sense, immanentism is not characterised by an absence of scepticism but a particular form of it.Footnote ⁸⁹ Among the Tupinambá of Brazil, for example, a sixteenth-century missionary reports that ‘concerning some of those who make themselves into holy ones among them, they trust sometimes and sometimes not because most of the time they catch the holy ones in lies’.Footnote ⁹⁰ As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points out, missionaries who started out with an image of the universal credulity of the heathen realised that things were far more complicated. In Mount Hagen in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, a Big Man, Ru, recounted his leadership of a cult after a female spirit visited him in 1976. Since many people were dying he was able to convince people to join in the new form of cult activity, but then some children died and ‘our pigs did not grow well, so I decided to forget about Kindip [a ritual specialist] and go get another set of experts’.Footnote ⁹¹ Ru had been involved in an earlier cult, the ‘Red Box Money cult’, about which a neighbouring Big Man, Ongka, had been sceptical all along.Footnote ⁹² The great majority of the time such scepticism does not extend to the overarching system in which any given ritual effort takes place, but sometimes quite significant shifts in religious practice may indeed be related to empirical adversity. Before the arrival of missionaries on the remote Pacific island of Niue, the institution of chieftainship itself had been badly undermined by failures in harvest, which had led to a resurgence of shamans who claimed they were better able to control the harvests and weather.Footnote ⁹³

(8) Dynamism, mutability, orality, and continuous revelation

This is one reason why immanentist religions display a particularly dynamic and mutable disposition. The most important reasons, however, are that these religious systems are not defined and authorised by canonical texts, and they do not pivot around a single decisive moment of revelation. For John K. Thornton, Central African religion was characterised by ‘continuous revelation and precarious priesthood’ in which a perpetual stream of knowledge arrived into this world through anybody who claimed to experience it.Footnote ⁹⁴ There were few ways of arbitrating between valid and invalid revelations. Indeed, it may be tempting to attribute the key attributes of immanentism simply to a lack of literacy.Footnote ⁹⁵ But note that immanentism has flourished in societies with large literate classes and magnificent feats of second-order thinking. It is not so much the absence of literacy that is crucial as the fact that no set of teachings have been enshrined as uniquely authoritative.

(9) The concepts of ‘religion’, ‘belief’, and ‘belonging’ have little emic resonance

Scholars of immanentist societies are typically at pains to underline that the concept of ‘religion’ itself is alien to their subjects’ self-understanding.Footnote ⁹⁶ There are nearly always, as noted above, a web of concepts and behaviours surrounding relations with metapersons that mark them out as special in some way. But such relations tend to permeate all aspects of life, and the ideas, stories, habits, and rituals that pertain to them are not abstracted out into a conceptual unit of ‘religion’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The idea then that society is made up of individuals who may choose to ‘belong’ to a ‘religion’, as if it were one among several options, is also likely to be alien. Religion is therefore not an entity that can determine social identity in and of itself; it is simply part of one’s cultural inheritance. Anthropologists in particular are likely to repudiate the emic relevance of the concept of ‘belief’ for many societies too.Footnote ⁹⁸ The meaning of ‘belief’ is notoriously hard to pin down, but tends to be used for propositions that are affirmed in the light of the possibility that others may doubt their validity. Some of the societies that anthropologists have studied have simply been essentially unaware that profoundly different ways of understanding the world are possible. But even where such awareness is developed, it has usually not led to the habitual use of a concept for a type of knowledge that has such self-reflexivity built in. Instead ‘all people act and react in the landscape of the real’ as the Africanist Paul Landau put it.Footnote ⁹⁹ For the Wari in Amazonia, the typical verb would simply be ‘to see’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

(10) Localism and translatable universalism

The absence of notions of either ‘religion or ‘a religion’ lies at the heart of the question of the portability of immanentism, which is much more vexed than it may initially appear. ‘Pagan’, ‘traditional’, or ‘tribal’ religions are often contrasted with the ‘world’ or ‘universal’ religions by virtue of the way they were embedded in local milieux. There is a certain truth to this. The metapersons of the immanentist imagination are often grounded in important ways, rooted to particular temples or features of the landscape, and held to be the guardians of particular peoples, cities, or states.Footnote ¹⁰¹ When considered in terms of whole systems, the great majority of immanentist religious forms have remained tied to a particular society. In another sense, however, it would be entirely misleading to attribute an image of staticity and closure to immanentism. In fact, both individual metapersons, and particular ways of relating to them (‘cults’) have travelled large distances across immanentist societies: they can travel with conquerors (Hellenistic religion to West Asia) with the enslaved (Central African religion to the Caribbean), or be invited in from glamorous neighbours.Footnote ¹⁰² Indeed, in Chapter 4 we shall have cause to underline the particular appeal of rites from afar. Relatively recently before the missionaries arrived in Tahiti, the cult of the war god ’Oro had been imported into there from the Leeward island group, and was changing the social status of different political and ritual specialists in specific ways.Footnote ¹⁰³ Partly in reaction to Robin Horton’s arguments, some scholars of African religion emphasise the capacity of cults to traverse and express macrocosms.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Possession cults, for example, could claim initiates from across hundreds or thousands of square miles, facilitating the work of traders moving amongst many different peoples.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

It is not quite right to describe immanetism as ‘tolerant’ because that would assume a pre-existing notion of isolable and competing religious systems. Instead the religious field was rather borderless and elastic.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Assmann refers to the ‘translatability’ of religious forms across the diverse societies of ancient Mesopotamia or the Roman world.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This was not an automatic process, and the Durkheimian qualities of religion naturally allowed distinctions to be drawn between our cults and ‘theirs’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Yet equivalences could be found between particular metapersons, such that a sun god here was equivalent to a sun god there: the names and associations of metapersons could proliferate, combining and recombining with various others, taking in more local or more universal guises in different contexts. It was the shared, universal forms of immanentism that allowed such translatability to occur. There is an important sense in which immanentism is a more truly universalist – as well as universal – form of religiosity than the divisive transcendentalisms. It may seem as if appealing to a certain unity among extremely diverse worldviews steers us uncomfortably close to the Christian concept of ‘paganism’. In fact it helps undermine a more insidious feature of the Christian worldview, which is that of a world of competing ‘religions’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

(1) An ontological breach opens up between a transcendent realm and a mundane one

Transcendentalist traditions embody the frightening apprehension of meaninglessness and relativism that they have been constructed against. Indeed, they weaponise that apprehension and fiercely insist on it, but as the defining feature of only one plane of existence: our own. Mundane existence is therefore not just afflicted by transience, corruption, unsatisfactoriness, and negligibility, it is defined by it. It is cast into the shadows by the pure light of the transcendent. This dimension of reality is now considered as inherently superior to that of normal life, but it is so distant from us that it is radically unknowable and ineffable. This is what the literature of the Axial Age means by the ontological breach that cuts previously monistic worldviews in two.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The transcendent dimension may be defined as that which is attained by liberation or salvation. In Buddhism this is nirvana – nibbāna in the language of the Pali canon.Footnote ¹¹¹ In many Buddhist traditions, that which lies ‘beyond this world’ by pertaining to the realm of nirvana may be termed lokottara; it is defined against laukika to form a dichotomy that corresponds quite well to ‘transcendent’ versus ‘mundane’.Footnote ¹¹² One of the reasons why the nature of parinibbāna (attained on death) is still a matter of disagreement is because the Buddha is said to have refused to offer an account of it – even whether it was existence, nonexistence, both of these things or neither of them.Footnote ¹¹³ It could only be talked about by describing what it was not: it was what happened when one escaped the cycle of rebirth, when desire was extinguished, when illusions fell away; it was permanence rather than transience. It was not a ‘realm’ in that sense but a status that stood completely outside of the normal laws of reality, including cause and effect, and the purchase of language or concepts.

The Christian heaven may often be granted more content than this, but it is still radically different from this worldly existence.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Moreover, heaven is really simply an attribute of, or way of talking about, God. God is therefore the principal transcendent dimension of reality in Christian ontology, surpassing the laws of existence as something unconditioned, uncaused, infinite, and sometimes ineffable. As with any theistic system, the basic anthropomorphic drive remains apparent in the attribution of conscious agency to cosmic forces, but the process of transcendentalisation attempts to tug the nature of the metaperson as far away from our normal concept of a person as it is possible to get. In one sense, of course, that is not very far at all: for God remains loving, judgemental, fatherly, and so on. In another sense, however, God is forbiddingly unknowable, inscrutable, and completely beyond the normal limitations of personhood.Footnote ¹¹⁵

A resonant symbol of the new nothingness exalted by the transcendentalist traditions is the reluctance or hostility towards representing the divine or liberated state that has emerged from among these traditions from time to time. This is very far from a defining feature of transcendentalism, for it cuts too hard against the grain of human cognition (to be denied images to work with is to be forced into strenuous mental labour). Nevertheless it is striking that aniconism emerged among forms of Judaism, Islam, early Christianity, Protestantism, and the Byzantine orthodox church.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Tacitus noted of the Jews: ‘They regard as impious those who make from perishable materials representations of gods in man’s image; that supreme and eternal being is to them incapable of representation and without end.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ An important aniconic movement developed among Jainism (Śvetāmbara Jaina) in the fifteenth century. The first few centuries of Buddhist material culture are characterised by a dearth of representations of the Buddha – or, more interestingly, representations of his absence.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Even in artistic scenes otherwise full of concretely realised persons and metapersons, it was felt most appropriate to represent the Buddha by an empty throne or a footprint: an evocation of the unrepresentable Buddha through his representable effects. As one climbs the temple of Borobudur in Java (c. 800 CE) and reaches the uppermost level representing enlightenment, the Buddha statues are hidden by perforated stupas through which he may only be glimpsed obliquely, and his enlightenment is fully expressed only by the pure symbol of the complete stupa at the centre.Footnote ¹¹⁹ (See Figures 1.1 and 1.2) The monotheistic strand is most given to aniconism due to its jealous monopoly of metapersonhood. But wherever we find these movements we find precisely an anxiety over some characteristic features of immanentism: the human disposition to attribute personhood to things; to convey ideas through images and to make images into ideas, to fuse representation and substance, to speak the ineffable.

Figure 1.1 The upper level of Borobudur, a Buddhist temple in Java, constructed c. 800 CE.

Figure 1.2. A Buddha glimpsed through a stupa at Borobudur.

(2) Escape from mundane existence – or salvation – becomes the definitive goal

Transcendentalism launches an all-out assault on the immanentist project of securing a flourishing existence in the ‘here and now’ by insisting that any such ‘flourishing’ is relatively worthless. Ultimate purpose is drained out of mundane existence in order to concentrate it in the attainment of the transcendentalist objective. This is salvation, liberation, or enlightenment.Footnote ¹²¹ Again, it is Theravada Buddhism which shows how far removed this is from an ‘afterlife’ per se.Footnote ¹²² For most Buddhist cosmologies contain many layers of heavens and hell, which the good may enjoy and the wicked endure, but these are categorically distinct from nirvana: even the most glorious heaven populated by the most evolved divine being is still at bottom a form of suffering – at least for the hegemonic nibbānnic orientation pursued by the sangha (monastic community).Footnote ¹²³ In Christianity, the newly distant form of afterlife is indicated by how deeply it problematises relationships with the ancestors that many immanentist societies have felt living amongst them: those who never converted are sucked away into an unreachable hell; while those who now convert are lifted up into a far distant heaven.Footnote ¹²⁴ Not only is the soteriological objective incomprehensible by the standards of worldly existence, but it cannot be obtained by the normal forms of human success. One certainly does not enter it, like an Aztec warrior accompanying the passage of the sun or a Viking cast into Valhalla, by fighting courageously in battle.Footnote ¹²⁵

Instead, temporal adversity may indicate or stimulate soteriological prowess; indeed, transcendentalism may be considered a colossal effort to draw the sting of mundane misfortune: for the Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667): ‘Christ … hath taken away the unhappiness of Sickness, and the sting of Death … of decay and change, and hath turned them into acts of favour.’Footnote ¹²⁶ Christianity takes the tortured, destroyed human body as its symbol, as a visceral image of something higher, and many of the missionaries mentioned in the companion volume were inspired by dreams of martyrdom. The history of Christianity, as we shall see, is characterised by a particular ability to both stimulate and defy persecution. On one level, the Buddhist vision may work to deprecate worldly success: even a prince – as the Buddha once was – is no worthwhile object of jealousy, for he is still sunk into the cycle of craving and suffering. Transcendentalisms are therefore much less beholden to promises to secure a better existence in the here and now.

Both traditions do also find a way of connecting mundane fortune and soteriological status. But note the way that Christians may slip effortlessly between attributing any bounties they receive to the mercy of God (in the manner of an immanentist metaperson) while any setbacks they experience are attributed to the final mystery of his being (in the manner of a truly transcendent force): ‘God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform’ may seem a banal saying, but it encodes an important truth about Christian means of handling the empirical.Footnote ¹²⁷ Buddhism attaches soteriology to worldly fortune more profoundly insofar as the effects of kamma also improve one’s lot in this life: it may therefore act as an important buttress of social hierarchy.Footnote ¹²⁸ But note how this potentially undercuts the basic immanentist proposition: by removing the gods out of the most fundamental understanding of cause and effect. Via the doctrine of kamma, fortune or misfortune become simply the product of one’s past actions and thoughts.Footnote ¹²⁹

(3) Religious activity is profoundly restructured according to a process of ethicisation

The relativistic challenge to morality as a given quality of communal life resulted, in all variants of the Axial Age, in the attempt to produce much more comprehensive, abstract, and explicit understandings of ethics, founded upon on the golden rule and aiming for universal applicability. If these were expressed in the Greek and Chinese cases principally through the vehicle of what could be termed, with some reservations, ‘philosophy’, the transcendentalist systems made what is now usually identified as ‘religion’ the vehicle. Five further features distinguish transcendentalist morality from its immanentist counterpart: ethical norms are codified, arranged into lists of prohibitions and injunctions as in the Ten Commandments of Christianity or the Five Precepts of BuddhismFootnote ¹³⁰; adherence to ethical norms is connected to the attainment of liberation or salvation; that adherence is considered to be a matter of interiority more than mere obedience; the overall ethical vision is highly idealised to the point of utopianism; this vision represents an inversion of worldly norms in certain ways.

As Charles Taylor has realised, the transcendent dimension of existence is characterised by a moral absolutism: ethical ambiguity has been expunged from cosmic reality, and this pure vision of ‘the good’ is placed at the heart of religious life.Footnote ¹³¹ In fact this absolutist dualism – good versus evil or merit versus sin – was translated into real properties or forces in themselves that individuals may share in. As Hocart put it, most bluntly, about India: it is now ‘better to be good than to be healthy and wealthy.’Footnote ¹³² Moreover, morality has been refitted for the macrocosm: transcendentalism creates moral communities which are potentially distinct from – and may far outstrip in scale – the communities to which one otherwise de facto belongs. These new communities are committed to a moral vision not only for its ability to preserve order among any one society, but for its essential role in facilitating individual salvation. If ritual is the characteristic mode of religious activity in the immanentist mode (and sacrifice the most typical form), then ethics is the characteristic mode of religious activity in the transcendentalist mode (and self-sacrifice the most typical form).Footnote ¹³³

Indeed, the radicalism of this ethical revolution is signified by a most shocking innovation: the repudiation of blood sacrifice.Footnote ¹³⁴ In many ways, Buddhism presented itself as an inversion of the concepts and norms of prevailing Vedic culture, for which animal sacrifice was one of its greatest mysteries.Footnote ¹³⁵ Indeed, as if intent on demonstrating the truth of its insight into the purely contingent nature of language, the Pali texts took the Vedic term for sacrifice or ritual foundations – dhárman – and twisted it to mean ‘teachings’.Footnote ¹³⁶ And one of those teachings was the utter worthlessness of sacrifice. The deliberate causation of suffering that it necessitated could now only be considered as grave karmic damage. A deprecation of bloody sacrifice is not therefore a peculiarity of Western or Christian rhetoric.Footnote ¹³⁷ Instead, in parts of the world, such as Central and Inner Asia, where several transcendentalisms encountered and engaged each other, we find that they resorted to such accusations in order to disparage their rivals. Thus the Muslim ritual of halal could be attacked as animal sacrifice by Buddhists, while Muslims could assert that human sacrifice took place in Hindu temples.Footnote ¹³⁸

The extent to which memories of human sacrifice may linger on in the folk memory while also being castigated by transcendentalist morality is disclosed in Obeyesekere’s analysis of events in the Sri Lankan chronicle, the Mahāvamsa.Footnote ¹³⁹ There is a trace too of lingering sacrificial logic in the jātaka tales and paintings that dwell on bodhisattvas as giving up their body for the good of humankind –leaving their body parts behind as merit-filled lifeboats for the soteriologically adrift.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This idea is conveyed too by the story of Christ. Part of the power of Christianity is that it concedes the logic of sacrifice – indeed human sacrifice – in order then to banish it, just as it concedes the presence of a single metaperson in order to banish other metapersons.Footnote ¹⁴¹ ‘It is finished,’ says Christ from the cross: he is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.Footnote ¹⁴² The rationalisation of this is surprisingly weak: why the pain and bloodshed of the son of God should assist the salvific quests of others is most difficult to elucidate.Footnote ¹⁴³ But because it meets the immanentist mentality part way, it became a powerful theme of evangelism. A chronicle account of the conversion of Vladimir of Rus in the late tenth century CE:

In medieval Christian culture, the importance of Christ’s blood, his continual sacrifice, was replayed in the form of his ritual dismemberment and consumption in the mass.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Among the Tupi-Guarani in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Brazil, the fact that the blood sacrifice was ingested by the flock spoke profoundly to local ideas of exocannibalism as a powerful ritual device.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In nineteenth-century Oceania, and among the Bunong in twentieth-century northern Cambodia, and no doubt in many other areas, missionaries recognised the powerful appeal of referring to Christ as the ultimate sacrifice, obviating the need for all further ones.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

For all the importance of this line of continuity, it would not do to obscure the profound implications of the transcendentalisation of sacrifice in Christianity. The single god did not need to be fed; he was not really going to benefit from burnt meat. If he demanded sacrifice from his followers, it was of their worldly self-seeking and pride.

(4) The inversion of worldly values and the soteriological virtuoso

As transcendentalism weaponised relativism so the values it came to exalt scrambled the usual signals of human success – as Nietzsche famously realised. Ethics took on an otherworldly quality, as if they were at war with human nature. The unattainability that Edward Westermarck noted for Christian ethics could apply no less well to Buddhism.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Normal human appetites were ruthlessly problematised. Is it any wonder that transcendentalism bucks against certain evolved tendencies of human cognition, given that it also bucks against the evolutionary imperatives of sexual gratification and kin preference? Consider Siddhartha waking up on the night of his renunciation after an evening of revelry and walking among the women of the palace now asleep and disgustingly contorted, the whole scene appearing ‘like a cremation ground before the eyes’.Footnote ¹⁵² He walks outwards into the night, leaving his young wife and child behind. The real truth of the human body was simply foul decay. This is the insight revealed by the meditative practice of aṭṭhika-saññā or contemplation of thirty-eight parts of a skeleton, in the forest monasteries of Sri Lanka.

Immanentist traditions sometimes produced superficially similar forms of ascetic behaviour. Fasting or sexual abstinence or self-mutilation may be seen as means of corralling supernatural power, or as a form of auto-sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁵³ Such forms of asceticism may have been ‘ethicised’ or ‘axiologised’ to use the language of Obeyesekere, by creeds such as Buddhism.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Transcendentalist asceticism may be understood as an attempt to deny the concrete, animal, and embodied qualities of the human person in order to somehow close the gap with the ethereal nothingness of the transcendentalist realm. It is an attempt to turn a human being into an idea. If this was unachievable within the normal structures of life, then the structures of life would have to change – at least for a few. These monastics, mendicants, and hermits are soteriological virtuosos, taking on the burden of the utopian strangeness of transcendentalist morality so that the rest of society does not need to.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ But then the rest of society remains correspondingly further from liberation. And so many were attracted to the living out of self-denial: joining orders of monks such as the paṃsukūlika in medieval Sri Lanka who only wore rags from dust heaps and the crematorium, or religious orders in medieval England who worked with lepers, and identified with them, and only imitated Christ all the more successfully if they caught the disease themselves.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

How clearly this speaks to the redefinition of the sacred. In the immanentist mode one may become sacred by approximating the qualities of metapersons: amassing power, success, brilliance. In the transcendentalist mode one does it by denying the quest for power, success, brilliance. Therefore, when ascetic aesthetics arrived in immanentist societies they could be received with bemusement, as the Jesuit Francisco de Gouveia reported with some dismay from Angola in 1564.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ He found that there was no intrinsic merit in the signals of poverty and hunger that he so diligently emitted.

What is monasticism but an institution that tears across kinship, which snubs marriage and lifts children away from their parents? Simon de La Loubère observed in Siam in the 1680s that a monk ‘sins when he grieves his parents lost to death’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In one of the most popular accounts of the Buddha’s life, the Vessantara Jātaka, Siddhartha returns to his kingdom after having achieved enlightenment only to find that his elders refuse to accord him respect. He rises into the air and tells them a story of one of his past lives as the king Vessantara, in which he had given away not only his treasures and his kingdom but his children too. Caste was undermined no less than family or seniority: the brahmans, his rivals, were stripped of their pretensions to inherent superiority and left only with status as a matter of mere convention.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Thus the acid of relativism ate through all social conventions in order to make way for absolutist morality. Just as people left behind their old ascriptions as they began to ‘take refuge with the Buddha’ in parts of northern India, so the Christ of the New Testament welcomed the despised and impure.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ All such traditional statuses were cast into irrelevance, along with the primacy of kinship again:Footnote ¹⁶¹

(5) Individual interiority rather than ritual action becomes the privileged arena of religious life

This anti-communal quality to transcendentalism is extremely important. It reflects the fact that the fields of ethics and salvation arrived in a form that was not only universalised but individualised. It is the self – not the social group – which becomes the most fundamental focus of religious life.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Each human being takes on alone the burden of responsibility for her liberation. This is important insofar as certain histories of the self have considered it to have been in some sense a creation of Western thought, the Renaissance, the Reformation, or even modernity. Yet evidently the self became the subject of intense focus in all the Axial Age bursts of creativity in first millennium BCE Eurasia, in keeping with the general context of reflexivity and second-order thinking.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

As will be considered in more detail in the section ‘An Unstable Synthesis’, in practice of course, religion never lost its Durkheimian dimension as a phenomenon of communal participation, ritual action, and external observance. But transcendentalism frames these activities within a powerful relativisation of them. They become merely secondary refractions of interior states, as the person within is made the locus of endeavour. In the Pali Buddhist canon, clinging to rules and rituals (sīlabbata-parāmāsa) is explicitly identified as an obstacle to progress towards nirvana.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In immanentist contexts such a critique of ritual as ‘merely mechanical’ would simply make no sense. But this is what Paul does when he twists the meaning of the term ‘circumcision’ such that it is no longer either a bodily fact or an illocutionary event:

No doubt the principal reason why the focus on the self should have been so searching in the Indic traditions was because of the way they developed hand in hand with the ancient practices of yoga and meditation. These functioned as telescopes for the soul, magnifying the inner landscape to an exceptional degree. In Buddhism this resulted in a paradox: the doctrine of anattā or ‘no-self’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Superficially, this may seem like a contradiction of the transcendentalist infatuation with the self; in fact it is a function of it. The focus on the self was so acute that, on a theoretical plane, it dissolved from sight, much as it may in the hands of modern philosophers. The result was a most extraordinary achievement of anti-anthropomorphic, anti-agential mental labour. It amounts to a kind of denial of personhood not only to all other forces in the world but the human subject itself. The Buddha’s assault on the brahmans’ reification of the self (ātman) was also an assault on their ascription of agency to the cosmos (brahman) and on sacrifice as the mediating term between the two: thus was the analogical exuberance of elaborated immanentism rubbished.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ On another level, of course, the self – or the interior zone in which the illusion of the self was generated – remained the most significant realm of soteriological action. It was, as everywhere in the Axial Age vision, the contents of one’s thoughts and feelings that ultimately determined one’s progress. In Christianity, meanwhile, the self was also identified only to be chastened and disciplined. Joel Robbins’s work on Christianisation of the Urapmin of the highlands of Papua New Guinea, has indicated how profoundly new and unsettling this sudden revelation of the self as the principal site of religious endeavour could be.Footnote ¹⁷¹ And, as in other Axial traditions, the revelation of the self also implied the imperative of its transcendence, in the sense that one was now obliged to value other selves just as one might value one’s own.Footnote ¹⁷² This may be why explicit selfhood and explicit ethics arrive together.

(6) Truth, belief, and offensiveness

Similarly to the history of the ‘self’, or ‘religion’, the cluster of concepts around ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ is sometimes held to be distinctively European or monotheistic or Reformation or Enlightenment in origin.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Once again this disguises the origins of a broadly equivalent mentality implicit in all the Axial Age revolutions. Here we may proceed from what Ernest Gellner made the definitive quality of ‘ideological’ systems: their offensiveness.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The transcendentalist teachings are offensive in that they are predicated on the assumption that alternative visions of reality exist and indeed typically predominate. Offensive systems are set up to be jarring, to challenge these alternative accounts masquerading as common sense. They generate hope and fear by virtue of the distance opened up between ‘how things seem to be’ and ‘how things actually are’. The Vessantara Jātaka is an excellent example of the way that such counterintuitive accounts snag the emotions.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ As it happens, this evocation of offensiveness comes close to Weber’s portrayal of the prophet as the voice of anti-traditionalism, conveying an alarming message pitched at a higher level of meaning than ordinary discourse allows.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

There is no doubt much worthwhile scholarly discussion to be had with regard to how easily exact equivalents to the English terms ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ may be found in the various languages employed in the texts of the various transcendentalisms. But the essential conclusion would surely be that all such traditions peddle in the ‘truth’ rather than simply ‘knowledge’, and all aspire to ideological hegemony.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This may take its most aggressive form in the monotheistic traditions following what Assmann calls ‘the Mosaic distinction’, by which all other religions were rendered inherently false or evil.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ But it is a recurrent theme of this book that Buddhism mounts a no less assertive claim to be the vehicle for profound truths that otherwise lie veiled. It had its origins, after all, in a milieu that valued formal and public debates in which all premises were laid open to question.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The Pali texts have the Buddha explicitly denounce tradition or any appeal to authority as invalid epistemology. They routinely frame their teachings within a description of the Buddha arriving in a public park where many other intellectuals and renunciants had set up their stall and then proceeding to win them all round.Footnote ¹⁸²

(7) The closure and textualisation of the canon and the historical singularity of primary revelation

If the transcendentalist traditions remained of ‘axial’ importance it was partly because of the astonishing durability of scripture as an authority structure.Footnote ¹⁸³ In one sense, the flow of revelation suddenly became ‘discontinuous’, or at the very least impeded and hierarchicalised, simply because of the historical singularity of their founding teachers.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ All subsequent claims could now only be evaluated in the light of their original insights. In fact, as Weber indicated, ‘the closing of the canon’ was a more drawn out and contingent process that was still evolving centuries after the initial revelations.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ This process of canonisation is greatly enhanced by the use of texts but it is not exactly dependent on it. The main body of Pali Buddhist works (Tipiṭaka) was apparently first established as an orally transmitted canon and only set down in texts many generations afterwards.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In other words, certain recitational devices and strategies employed within specialist institutions (such as the sangha) are apparently able to replicate some of the stability of cultural memory afforded by the text. This implies, too, that canonisation is not simply a function of the appearance of the technology of writing.

Immanentist traditions have shown the capacity to challenge and reformulate societal norms.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In this book we shall encounter developments – prophetic movements, witch hunts, bonfires of the idols – that sought to restructure religious life in quite general terms as a response to profound upheaval. But in the normal course of events they tended to dissipate as swiftly as they arose. It is possible that it is primarily the absence of a textual foundation that ensures that such movements do not turn into anything more lasting or far-reaching in their implications.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

The formation of a textual canon both reflects and drives the development of a clerisy who must act as its exegetes and who establish their authority upon it. It both reflects and drives the quest to fix upon ‘the truth’ and a codified set of ethical principles. And it both reflects and drives the creation of self-conscious moral communities defined by their relationship to the text.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

(8) Intellectualisation and conceptual control

One of the most problematic – but still somehow essential – features of the Weberian tradition is the theme of ‘rationalisation’. It is perhaps in relation to this issue that genealogical critiques of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developmental schemas deserve most consideration, lest we slip into a teleology of progressive mental liberation. It is therefore important to distinguish specific developments that have been discussed under the heading of ‘rationalisation’ from more sweeping evaluations of whole systems of thought as more or less ‘rational’ or superior at making sense of reality.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ On this point, then, there is merit in not drawing too sharp a distinction between transcendentalist and immanentist religions.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Apart from their diversity, many of the latter have shown considerable intellectual dynamism, fecundity, and flexibility, and continued to produce compelling explanations of the world in the face of societal upheavals.Footnote ¹⁹² Many immanentist societies developed professional priesthoods that functioned as an intellectual class given to producing impressively systematised and elaborate cosmologies. Reading Valeri Valerio on Hawaii, Jan Assmann on Ancient Egypt, or James Maffie on the Aztecs is an antidote to any immediate assumptions of relative incoherence or simplicity of thought.Footnote ¹⁹³ Lastly, it is also important to distinguish strongly between different versions of transcendentalism. The fact that monotheism did not emerge in the same milieu of philosophical ferment as found in other Axial Age cases means that the role of formal rationality was less central in both its initial formulation in Judaism and its reformulation as Christianity. Very early on its formulation, however, Christianity was already drawing upon the Greek intellectual tradition under the influence of Platonism, and its subsequent elaboration of monotheism exhibited intense rationalisation.

Indeed, let us consider the case of ancient Greece.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ What happens to a religious field that is not itself wholly restructured according to transcendentalism but yet sits within a society in which intellectuals have laid everything open to searching criticism, exhibiting some of the most impressive feats of second-order thinking and explicit debate? The result is an unmistakable distance that starts to open up between these elites and their religious inheritance – and it is surely worth pausing on the fact that it was often the immanentist qualities to the gods, their anthropomorphic features, or their amorality, for instance, that troubled various Greek thinkers. If gods fight battles, can they be wounded?Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Were cult statues instantiations of gods or representations of them?Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Did sacrifice as some sort of commercial exchange make any sense?Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Secular models of reality that simply left the gods out of the picture could be constructed; outright materialism asserted; idolatry mocked; tragic and comic poets could underline the perversity and unfathomableness of divine behaviour; and little bubbles of proto-transcendentalism could emerge, destined eventually to slip into the Christian tradition itself.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

It is very intriguing that a small but noticeable distance also opened up between some literati and their religious inheritance in the Chinese version of the Axial Age – where again much of the religious field was relatively unreconstructed by the intellectual ferment around it. The result is that from the age of Confucius onwards we find indications of a relativisation of popular religion, an awareness that ritual behaviour was more socially useful than grounded in unarguable truths, and a long-lingering suspicion of superstitious excess – all famously inspirational for much later European Enlightenment thinkers.Footnote ¹⁹⁹

This is suggestive that immanentist systems may strain to cope with exceptionally highly charged, combative, sophisticated, and open intellectual fields. And yet, Greek and Roman immanentism did survive into late antiquity; Chinese immanentism has persisted in some form (albeit alongside Buddhism and Daoism) and was largely accepted by the literati into the twentieth century. Moreover, the freedom of intellectual enquiry in the case of Greece may contrast strikingly with long stretches of monotheistic history, for example, in which the closing of the canon entailed distinct limitations on the scope of rational enquiry.Footnote ²⁰⁰ And there is now much scholarship on the enchantment of the world under the conditions of modernity, in which, particularly in areas outside the West, the forces of modern capitalism, individualist competition, and digitalisation have driven recourse to novel, experimental, empirical, results-focused forms of ritual practice – have made immanentism particularly compelling, in other words.Footnote ²⁰¹ All this speaks, again to the importance of distinguishing aspects of ‘rationalisation’ in a narrow sense from rationality in general.Footnote ²⁰²

What remains of value, then, from the theme of rationalisation, for our purposes? It follows from the discussion thus far that if all religious traditions are means of understanding and ordering existence, transcendentalist traditions are ones that have been battle hardened against philosophical onslaught. It may be more helpful to refer to this process as ‘intellectualisation’ and to conceive this in four aspects:

First, the process of canonisation and textualisation necessitates the development of a class of literate intellectuals – a ‘clerisy’ – to act as its guardians and exegetes. Everywhere, this amounted to the establishment of a tradition of scholarship, insistently concerned with ordering, systematising, arguing, and providing intellectual justifications for their core commitments.Footnote ²⁰³ As a result, whatever their genesis, all the transcendentalisms create sophisticated traditions of philosophical thought. They subject the ‘intuitive’ understandings of religious life to unusually intense forms of scrutiny.Footnote ²⁰⁴ They pour energy into elaborating and disseminating ‘doctrine’ – understood as a select but integrated bundle of truths as opposed to a general cultural inheritance of stories and practices. In Harvey Whitehouse’s theoretical schema such doctrinalism involves a quite distinct cognitive mode to the ‘imagistic’ form that dominates much religious activity.Footnote ²⁰⁵

Second, the ‘offensive’ quality of transcendentalist traditions means that they are engineered to engage in and provoke intellectual competition and debate.Footnote ²⁰⁶ They set out to prove their assertions and demand proof of the assertions of others.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Where other transcendentalisms are encountered they are likely to be engaged in both agonistic and mimetic relations.Footnote ²⁰⁸ And when the milk of pure immanentism is encountered, the acid of transcendentalism will proceed to curdle it, creating distinction and competition where there were none. Third, transcendentalisms appear to thrive amidst sensations of epistemological crisis, social upheaval, and multicultural challenge. This is what Robert Hefner means when he argues that the world religions ‘often enjoy a competitive advantage over their rivals in that they are preadapted to the macrocosm. Catalysts of moral crisis, they stand ready to provide, or impose, prefigured ideals for a posttraditional world’.Footnote ²⁰⁹

Fourth, transcendentalism provides generalised explanations of worldly vicissitudes which are impervious to empirical examination. For Weber, the most important features of rationalisation were the disenchantment or demagification of the world and a more holistic approach to the problem of evil and misfortune.Footnote ²¹⁰ This involves the replacement of a plural, piecemeal, and ad hoc approach to the question of suffering – by engaging diverse metapersons through diverse ritual forms on the occasion of each setback – with a single story or account. As Clifford Geertz put it:

In Buddhism the concept of kamma supplied a single principle as the explanation of all the vicissitudes of life. Indeed the process of converting villagers in far northwestern Thailand to Buddhism, as observed by Charles F. Keyes, was a matter of inducting them into seeing suffering ‘not as the consequence of the malevolence of spirits, though these may still be the immediate agents, but as the result of a general ‘law’, namely that of kamma.’Footnote ²¹²

Again, it must be emphasised that whether the results of this were any more ‘rational’ in absolute terms is a moot point.Footnote ²¹³ Christianity may be taken as an intensification of the problem of suffering as much as a solution to it. There is, however, one intriguing implication of the transcendentalist approach to explaining and dealing with misfortune: a certain enhancement of ‘conceptual control’ in the sense that the term has been used by certain cognitive scientists.Footnote ²¹⁴ This derives from transcendentalism’s devaluation of the mundane world: whatever happens in this plane of existence is ultimately irrelevant. The ostensible objective of religious activity is therefore withdrawn from empirical jeopardy. From one angle, at least, the moral underpinning provided by Christianity is little different from that provided in less absolute terms in some forms of immanentism: here we also have a metaperson who acts as a ‘big brother’ providing supernatural punishment of mundane wrongdoing. The key difference is that these sanctions are provided in an afterlife that lies beyond the discernment of mortals in the ‘here and now’.Footnote ²¹⁵ In this context, mundane disaster may entail transcendent rewards.Footnote ²¹⁶ As for Buddhism, the operation of kamma could always be used to shift attention away from the business of metapersons and towards forms of ethical attainment. When the gods of Sri Lanka failed to protect the island from an invasion from southern India in the thirteenth century, the main Pali chronicle was able to explain it in terms of the sins of the Sinhala people.Footnote ²¹⁷ It led to a redoubling of commitment to an authentic form of the Buddha’s teaching.Footnote ²¹⁸

(9) Self-conscious identity and pugnacity – albeit construed differently by the Indic and monotheistic variants

Implicit in the ‘offensiveness’ of the transcendentalisms is their potential mobilisation for identity construction: they create moral communities which are presented as compelling ‘reference groups’ for adherents, and these may be either coterminous with or in competition with their other social identities.Footnote ²²⁰ Yet this process worked quite differently in the Indic and monotheistic variants. Since the broad lines of the monotheistic understanding of identity are relatively widely understood, they will not be spelled out at length here. The case of Buddhism is more complex.

To avoid misunderstanding, it should first be noted that the dynamics of boundary construction are of course always historically contingent to some extent. The Ottoman emperor may cite an uncompromising verse from the Koran (71:26) when writing to his Safavid counterpart Ismail in 1514 – ‘Do not leave a single unbeliever on the earth’ – but the exigencies of Islamic empires had long meant that large numbers of unbelievers were peacefully incorporated in practice.Footnote ²²¹ The characteristic intolerance of Christianity, meanwhile, only truly crystallised in the Papal revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries according to some historians.Footnote ²²² Equally, Buddhism in China was subordinated to Confucianism in certain ways for much of Chinese history, while it was in a position to materialise its assertion of hegemony far more successfully in the Theravada world. And so on.

Nevertheless, from a global perspective, the divergence between the approaches to identity taken by the Indic and monotheistic forms are clear enough and no less clearly rooted in differences in their most fundamental orientation. Because monotheism is in a sense merely an inflation of immanentist anthropomorphism, it must deal with the sphere of the metaperson by monopolising it; because Buddhism sidesteps the sphere of the metaperson it need only relativise it.Footnote ²²³ Monotheism is set up to destroy other religious forms; Buddhism to encompass and subordinate them.Footnote ²²⁴

Since Buddhism does not depend on any anathemisation of other religions, it may share ground and combine with them in a way that monotheism tends to preclude. It leaves adherents free to engage in relations with metapersons of diverse origin in a rather pluralist or ‘polytropic’ fashion.Footnote ²²⁵ Buddhism was not founded upon a covenant with a jealous metaperson demanding ‘faith’, but rather invited adherents to become followers or receive instruction. In these respects it resembled many Hindu traditions and also Daoism. This enabled what Prasenjit Duara refers to as the ‘dialogical transcendence’ of the Asian traditions, which ‘permits coexistence of different levels and expressions of truth’.Footnote ²²⁶ Of all the case studies explored in the companion volume, this was most characteristic of the ‘combinatory field’ of religion in Japan, as is evident in the letter by Toyotomi Hideyoshi to the Portuguese viceroy in 1591, lecturing him on the barbarity of exclusivism: ‘The shin is spoken of India as the Buddhist dharma, in China it is regarded as the Confucian way, and in Japan it is called Shinto (Way of the Gods).’Footnote ²²⁷

It is with good reason, then, that much scholarship of Buddhism is concerned to emphasise how different all this is from the field of exclusive identities set up by the monotheisms. Yet, if we push the distinction too far we end up failing to perceive something vital to the historical power of Buddhism, and which it indeed shared with all other transcendentalisms. In essence this is an assumed position of sublime ethical and soteriological superiority. Benjamin Schonthal has summarised the ways other views may be disparaged as ‘misguided (micchā), counterproductive (akusala), wicked (pāpaka) or ignorant (avidya)’ in the scriptures.Footnote ²²⁸ There was then certainly a potential concern with orthodoxy as well as the orthopraxy. It is true that Buddhist institutions rarely approached Christian churches in their desire or capacity to police these concerns among the lay population, principally because their focus was on maintaining the integrity of the monastic order rather than lay society, and this was most fundamentally a matter of adherence to a code of conduct rather than to a creed.Footnote ²²⁹ Yet, at certain historical moments, when Buddhism found its claim to hegemony under attack, it could indeed produce discourses of pugnacious ideological repudiation that spread well beyond the monastery.Footnote ²³⁰ We find this developing in seventeenth-century Japan and Siam and also in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka. In all these cases, such discourses arose as a reaction to Christianity itself, which became configured in both the official and popular imaginations as a kind of demonic sorcery.Footnote ²³¹

In contexts where several transcendentalisms compete for attention, the current scholarly emphasis on the artificiality of the concept of ‘religion’ can itself feel artificial. For here we find religious specialists (ulema, brahmans, mendicants, bhikkhus) making direct equivalences between themselves and their rivals, between their teachings and alternative ones.Footnote ²³² Anyone who has seen the headless and defaced Buddha statues of Angkor, part of a systematic iconoclasm in the reassertion of Hinduism under Jayavarman VIII (r. 1243–1296), will appreciate that the Indic traditions do not always settle into dialogic accommodation.Footnote ²³³

Genealogical and etymological approaches have enriched the scholarship of religion by highlighting the relative modernity of terms such as ‘Buddhism’ or ‘Theravada’.Footnote ²³⁴ But such a focus on the late appearance of these concepts in emic usage may obscure their rough comparability with other emic terms or their etic utility in capturing important aspects of how agents in the past actually behaved. Buddhists did not need to wait for Western scholarship to produce an ‘ism’ for them to appreciate their kinship with other Buddhists. Chinese monks making journeys to Thailand or Sri Lanka or northern India knew they were operating in a shared ecumene.Footnote ²³⁵ Nor did they need to have any exact equivalent to the term ‘religion’ in order to represent to themselves the Buddha’s dispensation as a distinct phenomenon: the term sāsana (the teachings and practices inaugurated by the Buddha) fulfilled a similar function, while dhamma (teachings, law) occupied a broadly equivalent semantic niche.Footnote ²³⁶ The sāsana was a contingent historical reality in a way that the dhamma was not; it required the active intervention and protection of human beings. The great reform of the Sangha in Sri Lanka by Parakramabāhu I (1153–1186) was described in a charter (katikāvata), which referred to monks ‘who having succumbed themselves to the poisonous influences (arising from) the non-observance and ill-observance (of precepts) through ignorance and imperfect knowledge were destined to the sufferings of the apāya [a hellish plane of existence]’. He could not remain indifferent ‘seeing such a blot on the immaculate Buddha-sāsana’.Footnote ²³⁷

Similarly, it is quite proper to warn against assuming that ‘taking refuge with the Buddha’ may be understood in the same terms as a Pauline vision of ‘conversion’ or that the missionary mentality of Christianity was straightforwardly replicated in Buddhism. But from a larger perspective it would be perverse not to recognise a common proselytising impetus.Footnote ²³⁸ The Vinaya enjoined monks to ‘Wander forth, O monks, for the benefit of many… Do not two of you take the same road.’Footnote ²³⁹ The Lan Na chronicle of the early sixteenth century, Jinakālamālīpakaraṇam, reported that in 1523, the king of Lan Na offered sixty volumes of the Pali canon to a neighbouring ruler in order ‘produce faith in him’.Footnote ²⁴⁰

The conversion described here was to the new ‘Theravada’ form of Buddhism that had crystallised in the era of Parakramabāhu I, which established the Mahāvihāra vision at the centre of the reorganised Lankan monastic order. The Mahāvihāra worldview may also be seen as an explicit retrenchment of Buddhist soteriology against the movement towards theism that swept across first millennium CE Eurasia. While forms of Mahayana Buddhism elevated the soteriological significance of metapersons (Bodhisattvas), the Theravada school defined itself by its rejection of their ultimate significance. It reduces deities in a deliberate and conscious manner; it is Buddhism with its offensiveness towards the theistic, anthropomorphic urge hardened anew.Footnote ²⁴¹

(10) Universalist creeds fashioned for export as coherent packages

Transcendentalist traditions are not all equally concerned with expansion and conversion,Footnote ²⁴² but their offensiveness engenders a strong potential for expansion. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in particular are distinguished by exceptional mobility. As noted in the previous sections, elements of immanentist traditions may move long distances too.Footnote ²⁴³ But what distinguishes the proselytising transcendentalisms is their capacity to move as whole systems that necessarily involve a radical reframing of other forms of knowledge. They may be seen as mechanisms for preserving the integrity of cultural transmission over space and time.Footnote ²⁴⁴ These transcendentalisms explode the de facto universalism of the immanentist world and replace it with a de jure universalism. The teachings of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are addressed to the whole of humanity – or even, in the latter case, all living beings. The touchstone of each tradition is not a particular temple or landscape but a portable, endlessly reproducible set of texts.

(11) The establishment of hegemony through the monopolisation (monotheism) or inferiorisation (Buddhism) of metapersons.

Transcendentalism recalibrates the meaning of relations with metapersons by redescribing them according to the language of soteriological–ethical endeavour.Footnote ²⁴⁵ In that sense, the Indic and monotheistic variants represent very different forms of the same project. In essence, the monotheistic approach looks relatively simple to comprehend: it is mass deicide, the exclusive monopolisation of metapersonhood. But such simplicity is deceptive. The Christian God is three beings as well as one being, much as a Hindu deity may be singular or plural at different levels of understanding. Moreover, Satan must be counted as a metaperson – indeed an extremely active one, and he has his minions, his devils, just as God has his angels. This is before we begin to consider the development of the cult of the saints. In this light, Christianity seems scarcely monotheistic: certainly, it has shown itself to be more promiscuous in the attribution of personhood than it may first appear.

The presumed existence of demons and fallen angels had many consequences for the mission field. Missionaries considered themselves to be at war with these entities as agents of possession who could only be combatted through their rites of exorcism.Footnote ²⁴⁶ In practice, missionary discourse has often been ambivalent about the nature of the deities and spirits imagined by rival traditions. They may be deemed ‘false’ in the sense of being actually nonexistent, but they may also be ‘false’ in the sense of not deserving of worship – because they are in reality demons masquerading as gods.Footnote ²⁴⁷ Typically, converts have seen existing metapersons as overmastered rather than disproven.Footnote ²⁴⁸ Even doctrinally, Christianity does not so much as abolish all other metapersons as (a) wipe away other pantheons and replace them with a new simplified set, and (b) order that set according to ethical and soteriological principles.

In essence, Buddhism operated by sidelining the sphere of metapersons: neither their eradication nor their assistance was vital for enlightenment. This must be qualified with regard to traditions of Mahayana Buddhism, where Bodhisattvas may become godlike metapersons endowed with the power to release people into nirvana. Nevertheless, in all Buddhist cultures, the sphere of relations with metapersons is allowed to continue in a form that is recognisable from immanentism. Local pantheons endure or are bundled into an expanding Buddhist universe of gods.Footnote ²⁴⁹

But the central point is that the gods themselves, in all forms of Buddhism, are subordinated to the Buddha.Footnote ²⁵⁰ This was conveyed by the image of the deities listening to the Buddha’s first preaching of the dhamma, as described in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. They cry out:

The gods were among the first converts to Buddhism, and as the Wheel of the Dhamma rolled into new lands, the new metapersons it encountered were converted and improved. They were not denied either existence or power, but their power was configured as banal, wild, or ugly until it had been Buddhicised. Ancestors and spirits were therefore domesticated by the compassion of the Sangha.Footnote ²⁵² This process is particularly clear in the scholarship on the taming of the gods of Japan, where monks founded shrine temples in locations associated with kami (gods, spirits).Footnote ²⁵³ It was not always a pacific process: the spirits and their ritual interlocutors could resist and strain against the leash.Footnote ²⁵⁴ But the result was a kind of permanent pacification of supernatural power: it was the quasi-human, nonethical, violent, and capricious qualities of the immanentist metapersons that were constrained and controlled. Buddhism converted both persons and metapersons and rendered them both more predictable, compassionate, harmonious. The gods were ‘emptied of particularity’ as Mark Teeuwen puts it, through their reclassification in Buddhist terms.Footnote ²⁵⁵ Thus were they encompassed.Footnote ²⁵⁶

Notice that the field of metapersons is also ethicised in this vision, if less completely than in the Abrahamic traditions. The high gods are fashioned into beings who have amassed great quantities of merit and who now act in accordance with the Buddha’s dispensation. In Sri Lanka the gods were conceived as recipients of a ‘warrant’ from the Buddha to protect the sāsana.Footnote ²⁵⁷ Contrariwise, the figure of Mara (mentioned in the quotation from the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta) acts as the Buddha’s negative, trying to tempt him away from the realisation of enlightenment just as Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. There are demonic beings too in this vision: evil metapersons who have failed to fashion themselves according to the dhamma.Footnote ²⁵⁸ In both Buddhism and Christianity, the evil beings are inferior to the Buddha/God in terms of both ethics and supernatural power. In both traditions, this assertion was stamped onto the landscape whenever a new church, monastery, or Buddha footprint was planted on top of the site of an old shrine to a vanquished metaperson.Footnote ²⁵⁹

(12) The ambivalent status of magic

Societies organised by immanentist religious traditions may identify forms of religious behaviour as negative from time to time, especially when they seem to have an anti-social or politically disruptive character. Indeed, Christianity acquired (and transformed) the language of superstition from pagan Roman discourse.Footnote ²⁶⁰ Magical activity aimed at delivering private personal advantage rather than more communal benefits has always needed to be policed.Footnote ²⁶¹ But the strong discourses of vilification of magical practices that were deployed by Christianity and Islam were of a different order. These must wipe the slate of the supernatural clean so as to write on it anew.Footnote ²⁶² The miracles of Jesus were then writ large. But the scriptures also represent Jesus’ attitude towards the production of miracles with a degree of ambivalence.

In one sense, this is all quite different from Buddhism, which did not attempt to monopolise the manipulation of supernatural power. And yet, here too one may discern a certain relativisation of such practices. The scholarship of Buddhism is not currently always inclined to underline this point. Its task is to shake the field free from the legacy of orientalist scholarship, which preferred a super-rationalist figure of the Buddha, and sometimes viewed the mythical and miraculous elements of the stories and practices of real world Buddhists as embarrassing corruptions or trivial accretions. There is no doubt that from the Pali canonical texts onwards the Buddha is presented as acting within a world in which supernatural events and powers are simply taken as a fact of life. However, from a global comparative perspective, it is more noteworthy that the Buddhist tradition preserves an unmistakeable ambivalence about the status of these affairs – which betrays the new values of transcendentalism.Footnote ²⁶³

In the Brahmajāla Sutta, the Buddha presents a very comprehensive list of magical arts that renouncers might be tempted to practise, including all manner of prophesying, predicting the movements of enemy forces, harvests or astrological events, peddling demon-pacifying charms, reciting spells to bring on deafness, invoking the goddess of luck, and ‘promising gifts to deities in return for favours’: These are described as ‘trifling and insignificant matters, those minor details of mere mortal virtue’ – they are not ‘evil’ note, just laukika – worldly, and therefore ultimately distractions.Footnote ^264, Footnote ²⁶⁵ The Buddha granted that miraculous powers such as flying through the air or walking on water are quite accessible to the monk. But in the Kevaṭṭa Sutta he makes it clear that even though exhibiting these powers may win followers, they should be regarded as a source of humiliation and disgust.Footnote ²⁶⁶ In a typical manoeuvre of conceptual redefinition, the only ‘miracle’ worthy of the name is that of helping another being on the road to enlightenment – much as Muhammad’s sole miracle was the Koran.Footnote ²⁶⁷ Here and there in the subsequent history of Buddhist monasticism, as in the eighth-century Taiho Code in Japan, meddling in magical arts was explicitly reproved.Footnote ²⁶⁸

In an immanentist field, magical practices may be ambivalent insofar as they may be the source of harm as well as good for the wider community; in a transcendentalist field they are ambivalent insofar as they thwart or detract from the soteriological quest.

(13) Clerisies form institutions with great organisational power, potential autonomy from state structures, and independent moral authority

The development of clerisies (learned guardians of transcendentalist scripture and interpretation) was noted previously in relation to the creation of traditions of scholarship. But on an institutional plane the consequences are no less significant. Sangha, church, and ulema have shown tremendous organisational power, maintaining their integrity, coherence, and techniques of discipline, their chains of command and common purpose even while states rose and fell around them. Indeed, states were driven to compete with, co-opt, or thwart such rival concentrations of hierarchy and organisation. Above all, the clerisy of transcendentalist tradition wields a moral authority that is quite distinct from that of the state.Footnote ²⁶⁹

(14) Transcendentalist traditions emerge outside the development of state ideology

The transcendentalist traditions were neither in origin nor in toto an articulation of a political vision: they were only drawn upon for that purpose subsequently. Indeed, they preserve a certain strand – however fine or invisible for long stretches of time – of anti-political or at least extra-political normativity. Islam is an exception of sorts, given that it became the central feature of a rapidly expanding politico–legal entity within the lifetime of its founder. But Muhammad was not a prince when his revelations began. Instead the process of the translation to the political sphere merely happened unusually quickly, taking years rather than centuries.

(15) The dynamic of reform

All the foregoing characteristics are liable to erosion. But transcendentalism fights back: it generates movements of reform, which call on the authority of scripture, or the imagery surrounding their founders, or the soteriological imperative, in order to reassert its primacy. The following section considers why such impulses of reform were necessary.

The Immanentisation of Buddhism

By contrast with the split personality of Christianity, Buddhism may appear much more uncompromisingly transcendentalist in terms of its core conceptualisation, and in one sense it is. In another sense, however, it makes a pact with immanentism that is even more wholehearted: it simply leaves the sphere of relations with metapersons to proceed largely as it always did, albeit now subtly relativised and reframed.Footnote ³²⁴ But that process of reframing could take a very long time. The history of kami worship in Japan shows how for long stretches of time they could be considered as capricious amoral entities who must be implored, cajoled, and reprimanded into reciprocity.Footnote ³²⁵ While they were gradually tamed and endowed with Buddhist functions through the honji suijaku theory, still both layfolk and monks could interact with them in fundamentally immanentist ways.Footnote ³²⁶

Moreover, the Buddha himself was no ordinary mortal. Just as with Christ, his soteriological perfection also endowed him with the ability to work miracles.Footnote ³²⁷ It is true that the Pali texts distinguish him from godhood per se (he is much more important than that), and that in the hegemonic doctrine of the Theravada tradition his attainment of nirvana does not render him in a form ready to dispense boons. But what La Loubère reports of seventeenth-century Siam rings true: on the one hand the Buddha’s enlightened status meant that he existed nowhere and with no ability to do good or evil to men, but ‘nevertheless on the other hand they offer up prayers to him and demand of him whatever they want’.Footnote ³²⁸ In other words, whatever particular canonical texts say, there are in every tradition discernible urges to treat Buddha as a conventional metaperson.Footnote ³²⁹ Indeed, from one angle, this is what the Mahayana tradition formalised – albeit with great intellectual sophistication and complexity – through the reification of Bodhisattvas, the various incarnations of the Buddha.Footnote ³³⁰

From another angle, however, this development also derived from an intellectual attempt to wrestle with an inherent transgression of the transcendentalist/immanentist boundary equivalent to that embodied in Christ: for Buddhists were likewise compelled to consider how a real historical person could also surpass mundane existence in the most complete form imaginable. Just as the first centuries of Christianity were replete with arguments as to how to conceive the nature of Christ qua God, so too Buddhists argued about whether the Buddha could ever really have been a man. The lokkottaravādins – or ‘transcendentalists’ – denied this possibility, thereby producing a germ of Mahayana Buddhology.Footnote ³³¹

Unless we grant the significance of the supernatural qualities of the Buddha in all traditions, it is difficult to understand why a cult of his relics should have become so important. Relics speak in a transcendentalist register, to be sure: they may be memento mori; they concretise and immortalise the moral authority of their original persons. But they also speak to the desire for embodied and tangible sacrality, and as such they are always liable to be apprehended as condensations of immanent power. The relics of the Buddha, then, were usually granted a mana-like force, preserving his powers in this plane of existence long after his parinibbāna. This is how they became central agents in the establishment of capitals, the foundation of temples, the conduct of diplomacy, and the waging of war.Footnote ³³²

The underlying equation here is simply that soteriological virtuosity equals immanentist power, and this is a paradoxical but irresistible principle manifest in the historical development of all transcendentalist traditions. Perhaps the self-discipline, liminality, and transgressive otherworldliness conveyed by the ascetic practices of early Christian saints and mendicants, Islamic sufis, or Theravada forest monks intrinsically trigger sensations of supernatural mastery: these are people able to endure lives that others can only marvel at; their strange conquest of human nature signalling their power.Footnote ³³³ Tambiah, for example, analysed the manner in which Thai forest monks are liable to be attributed with magical powers that are of little use to themselves, having diminished their attachment to worldly benefits, but of great value to the laity.Footnote ³³⁴ In earlier periods of Thai history the accumulation of merit was expected to be visible in the demonstration of abnormal power.Footnote ³³⁵ In Japan, Zen monks pursuing the most abstruse and rationalised of philosophies could become the focus of popular hopes for their blessings.

The need to develop strategies of popularisation may be particularly clear in Buddhism given that its elite carriers are monastics rather than priests. This means that they are at once dependent on the laity and yet also not defined by an orientation to serve them. As DeCaroli has put it about both early Jains and Buddhists: ‘How do those concentrating on a personal quest for enlightenment establish the religious authority and pertinence necessary to merit public support?’Footnote ³³⁶ Pattana Kitiarsa’s fieldwork in the Thai temple of Wat Thepthanthong shows that recourse to the business of the immanent can be a quite conscious decision:

In more profound, holistic and intellectualised ways, a transcendentalist system may become repurposed for immanentist ends. This is one way of conceiving of the emergence of Tantric Buddhism from the seventh century CE. It is telling that tantrism constitutes an inversion of transcendentalism across various dimensions simultaneously, and conveys a certain sense of the transgression and paradox that this entails. As a greater focus was placed on the capturing of supernatural forces, a highly intricate ritualism became the order of the day, and so a greater emphasis was placed on secrecy and esotericism to better preserve exclusive access to such powers; and so blood sacrifice reappeared; and so the aesthetic of the sacred returned to the earthy and the violent; and fierce warrior gods were exalted, and sexual activity celebrated.Footnote ³³⁸ Note, also, however, that all this was hung from a Buddhist framework, transcendentalist desiderata retained an ultimate hegemony, and some highly complex intellectual manoeuvres were carried out in order to rationalise the result.

Buddhist traditions, particularly the Mahayana, have often been explicit about the coexistence of different levels of truth corresponding to different capacities of comprehension.Footnote ³³⁹ Missionary observers, particularly as we shall see in Japan, noted that more difficult, radical, and abstract points of doctrine may be grasped by certain orders of monks or sections of the elite but were less digestible by the wider populace.Footnote ³⁴⁰ In particular, the radical qualities of the doctrine of no-self and nibbāna as complete annihilation were liable to be elided by popular conceptions of selves reincarnating and attaining heavenly planes.Footnote ³⁴¹ In other words, it was precisely the attribution of continuing personhood (to themselves) and metapersonhood (to the Buddha) that was often difficult to deny outright. If David Hume saw theism as subject to an entropic fall towards idolatry, the history of Buddhism shows an entropic tendency towards theism. Indeed, more generally, from the early first millennium there was a shift towards theist devotionalism (bhakti in Hinduism, strands of Mahayana Buddhism) among the Indic traditions that had previously held up the way of the renouncer, ethical rigour and philosophical wisdom. It is tempting to speculate that the popularisation of soteriological fervour lay behind this.Footnote ³⁴²

In the past, some Buddhist traditions have appealed to a grand cyclical conception of cosmic time, according to which the Buddha’s current dispensation was undergoing a period of decline. This is one way in which the equation of kami (deity) and Bodhisattva was rationalised in Japan: because the people of such a degraded age would find deity worship easier to comprehend.Footnote ³⁴³ Teeuwen and Rambelli quote a fourteenth-century collection of shrine legends:

One could not wish for a more conscious or explicit commentary on the way in which transcendentalist truths must become mingled with immanentist desires in order to maintain a foothold in the popular imagination.Footnote ³⁴⁵

As transcendentalist traditions acquire cultural hegemony, they certainly do have the capacity to bring the masses into the soteriological vision, then – but as soon as this happens, ethically and ascetically severe modes of attainment simply become impractical: it is the arousal of (transcendentalist) hunger for salvation among the laity that drives the (immanentist) focus on ritual as the means of its satiation. This process reached a particularly striking form with the Pure Land Buddhist sects in Japan, in which the gravitational force of devotional theism pulled Buddhism as far as quasi-monotheism. These were genuinely popular movements that swept people from all social classes into worldviews with a strong ideological or ‘offensive’ implications. But this entailed the immanentisation of Buddhist soteriology in at least two senses: the ultimate end was conceived as a paradisical afterlife akin to popular views of Christian heaven; and the means of attaining it were radically simplified and ritualised. For elements of the Jōdo Shinshū school in Japan, the gates to heaven might now swing open to those merely willing to chant the name of Amida Buddha.Footnote ³⁴⁶

The Immanentisation of Christianity

Having first explored a few of the ways in which Buddhism was subject to immanentisation, it may now be less controversial to extend that analysis to Christianity. At least the new anthropology of Christianity, unencumbered by the weight of generations of historiographical contention, has seen clearly that different varieties of Christianity found different ways of resolving the tensions between transcendentalism and immanentism.Footnote ³⁴⁷ In truth, at almost every level Christianity was immanentised over the course of its establishment. This was partly a function of the expansion of the faith, as it inevitably took on the functions of the paganism it displaced.Footnote ³⁴⁸ But it is in one sense unhelpful to think of this process as essentially a matter of pagan survival; instead it represents the universal salience of immanentist cognition and the inherent logic of its socialisation.Footnote ³⁴⁹ Doctrinalism was obscured by the breach between vernacular tongues and the Latin of church services. Ritualism took its place. A form of fetishism flourished in the cult of relics. The most worldly of tokens – money – could be exchanged for soteriological assistance. Kinship suffused the religious imagination. Jesus’ mother and grandmother were sanctified; God acquired his own family of sorts in the saints; the Church came to grace life-cycle rituals.Footnote ³⁵⁰ If the cosmological dualism of Christianity had the distressing effect of sundering living humans from their ancestors, this was felt in medieval Europe too, where ways of bridging the divide with the dead were created so that the living could care for their ancestors who ‘remained part of their kith and kin’.Footnote ³⁵¹

One of the most visible markers of the incessant immanentisation to which Catholicism was subject is the variety of forms that thaumaturgical ritual took and the variety of metapersons with whom people interacted in medieval Europe.Footnote ³⁵² God even in his most unified and abstracted form is still a prayer-answering being: was this enough? It was not: saints materialised who answered to more specific concerns in more specific contexts.Footnote ³⁵³ Nor was this enough, for people continued to populate their environment with a multitude of sprites, ghosts, goblins, witches, demons, tree spirits, and so on.Footnote ³⁵⁴ Catholicism developed rites and objects that could be used to hold and channel supernatural power. The sacrament of the host could be attributed with miraculous efficacy, as could sacramentals such as holy water, which only clung on to transcendentalism though the proviso that they needed faith to work.Footnote ³⁵⁵ Was this enough? It was not: parasitic practices arose which aped, appropriated, and repurposed Church sacramentals, and beyond this a vast array of magical practices were deployed that stood entirely outside the teachings and often the toleration of the Church.Footnote ³⁵⁶ Robin Briggs describes healers in the Lorraine region of France:

This could stand as an invocation of immanentism per se. In the witch hunts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, people believed to have such powers became vulnerable to being identified as witches invovled in a diabolic pact – a transcendentalist reinterpretation of immanentist behaviour. Practices that always risked suspicion for their ability to cause harm as well as good to the local community now became subordinated to an absolutist morality by which they became an affront to the soteriological imperative, a sin with most grave and universal implications.

The tremendous profusion of practices and metapersons indicates that they were subject to empirical appraisal of their efficacy. If a single means of obtaining worldly fortune (such as a prayer to God or a dose of holy water) was regarded as reliably effective – as a matter of illocutionary effect rather than perlocutionary venture – then the constant generation of diverse other means makes little sense. It was at least partly because metapersons could visibly fail to reciprocate and rites fail to work that people were driven to seek new ones.

The most visible dimension of profusion in an official register was the cult of the saints. And for much of their careers across much of Europe the saints became vaguely amoral metapersons who were assumed to be actually present in their statues and figurines.Footnote ³⁵⁸ They were therefore subject to coercion in a manner that is immediately familiar from accounts of Inca lords whipping huacas or Chinese villagers burning their village deity for failing to protect them from the plague.Footnote ³⁵⁹ Healers in Lorraine had to devise rituals for working out which saint had afflicted a sufferer with illness and would respond to propitiation with pilgrimages and offerings.Footnote ³⁶⁰ Meanwhile ‘in Pamiers, the Catholic vicar might drop his Black Virgin of Foix when she failed to bring good weather; but then he tenderly repaired her broken neck with an iron pin.’Footnote ³⁶¹ What one Italian missionary observed of Portuguese Asia was not necessarily a reflection of the recent conversion of these areas so much as a manifestation of a mentality with deep European roots too: the laity had developed ceremonies for forcing the hand of a saint, giving its effigy

Meanwhile, the capacity of saints for fractal subdivision allowed them to become local rather than universal protectors of worldly fortune – to become, for example, St. Tryphon of Kotor in the Adriatic – and therefore to enable the formation of local rather than universal allegiances.Footnote ³⁶³

A Few Notes on Reform

However, the history of medieval Catholicism was no less punctuated by the impulses of reform, which could be as myriad and particular as the processes of immanentisation they fought against. Much of what scholars refer to when using the language of reform could happily be filed under the heading of ‘retranscendentalisation’.Footnote ³⁶⁴ This is especially visible in – but by no means limited to – the cycles of encroaching worldliness and reestablished otherworldliness characterising the orders of monasticism and mendicancy. Their reform movements looked back to their founding figures such as St. Francis of Assisi, just as Christianity as a whole looked back to Christ: recapitulating within a microcosm the cyclical movements of the faith as a whole. Other kinds of reform might insist on the importance of access to scripture, or interiority, or salvation as a lay imperative, or self-sacrifice, or the inversion of worldly values, or the unity of God, and so on. Whenever these objectives were pursued in a way that pushed too vigorously against the established structure of compromise erected by the Church they were identified as heretical and persecuted.Footnote ³⁶⁵ Where it could, the Church also tried to appropriate and harness their energies.

The Reformation, of course, was driven by movements that generated enough power to sweep aside the Church’s charges of heresy and develop their own structures of authority. It conveyed an urge to push apart the spiritual and temporal in certain ways, to reanimate an Augustinian vision of the relative worthlessness of man and the awesome majesty and otherness of God.Footnote ³⁶⁶ Whatever else the Reformation was, then, it was surely, at bottom, an attempt to reassert many of the defining features of transcendentalism – as were, indeed, in quite distinct and less radical ways, the contemporary waves of Catholic reform and Counter-Reformation.Footnote ³⁶⁷ This vision of it may be somewhat blurred by recent historiography suspicious of Protestantism’s role in modernisation narratives and concerned to restore the supernaturalism and strangeness of the Protestant worldview.Footnote ³⁶⁸ Much of this scholarship testifies to the inherent difficulties of inculcating certain features of transcendentalism such as doctrinal knowledge.Footnote ³⁶⁹ Reformers working among rural parishes even close to major urban centres of Lutheranism in Germany could first report dismay at how little comprehension of Christianity was evinced by the peasantry and then how difficult it was to embed a reformed understanding of it amongst them.Footnote ³⁷⁰ We have also learned how incomplete the Protestant project of ‘disenchantment’ was in itself, how early moves were somewhat blunted or reversed over time.Footnote ³⁷¹ When Alexandra Walsham refers to the ‘processes of adaptation that facilitated the rehabilitation of aspects of the medieval economy or system of the sacred in a distinctively Protestant guise’, this may be taken as an expression of the fact that Protestantism was also of course moulded by the corrugations of the immanentist mind.Footnote ³⁷² It too failed to shut the door of revelation.Footnote ³⁷³ Just as Christianity attempted to clear away the crowded field of pagan metapersonhood only to repopulate it with saints, angels, and demons, so forms of Protestantism tried to sweep it clean once more only to leave providence howling through the landscape and battling with the devil.

This story of reform and the immanentist digestion of reform could drop down a level to an analysis of certain sects of Protestantism. The most striking account here would concern Pentecostalism, now the fastest growing branch of Christianity in the world, in which the Holy Spirit takes the starring role in the drama of immanent power, making visible and real that which had been hidden, and the faith is once again returned to a mechanism for healing, exorcism, prophecy, and the bestowal of worldly fortune.Footnote ³⁷⁴ Or the story could move up a level to consider Islam as a seizure and reassertion of transcendent monotheism, and Sikhism likewise.Footnote ³⁷⁵ Contemporary Islamic reform may be seen as a reaction to the great compromises made with immanentism and other social realities during its journey of pre-modern expansion.Footnote ³⁷⁶

In Buddhism, the impulse of reform is less visible before the modern period insofar as it less often took the form of politically explosive movements, and insofar as the whole area of immanentist relations was far less problematised to begin with.Footnote ³⁷⁷ Nevertheless, it is discernible in the ceaseless imperative to purify the monastic orders, to hold them to their adherence to the ascetic principles and their knowledge and understanding of the canon. It is evident in the steps taken to reintroduce higher ordination from other regions, and to ensure that correct versions of the canonical texts are reproduced and circulated. It is revealed whenever a particularly ascetic new order of forest monks is created or acquires authority.Footnote ³⁷⁸ And the elevation of the Mahāvihāra tradition in Sri Lanka and its establishment across the Theravada world may itself be seen as a project of reform reasserting the primacy of the Pali canon and a conservative text-oriented vision of truth.Footnote ³⁷⁹ Indeed, in the flowering of Pali literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Alastair Gornall sees a reformist attempt to return to the ‘essential meanings’ (sārattha) of the canonical texts that later commentaries had obscured, a purified and systematised form of the dhamma.Footnote ³⁸⁰ In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Siam following the fall of Ayutthaya, ‘there was a radical shift in the interpretation of Buddhist thought, a process of reformation’ involving canonical fundamentalism and stripping out traditional practices that obscured ‘true Buddhism’ as King Mongkut referred to it.Footnote ³⁸¹ This impulse – which appears to predate the impact of obvious Western intellectual influences – also shaped Lankan Buddhism through the importation of the Siam Nikaya, while the Sudhamma monks played a similar role in Burma.Footnote ³⁸²

In Japan, a newly intense focus on salvation had emerged in the Kamakura schools of Buddhism (Pure Land, Nichiren, Zen) originating in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries but attaining their peak influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth. The first two sects empowered lay society to pursue salvation in a more direct and single-minded manner, and thereby posed a challenge to the established ‘esoteric’ system of compromise with immanentist tradition. The new sects might even be repudiated for their disregard for the kami (gods).Footnote ³⁸³ It was with some reason that the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano perceived the radical True Pure Land Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū) as akin to Lutheranism.Footnote ³⁸⁴

While engaged in the business of religious taxonomy, it may be in order to briefly reflect on the relationship between immanentism and discourses of philosophical monism that developed within certain transcendentalist religious fields. In the first place, the two must be seen as distinct, not least because the first is a form of religious behaviour and the second is the product of intellectual ratiocination. An Islamic example of the latter would be Ibn al-‘Arabī’s (d. 1240) pantheistic concept of waḥdat al-wujūd, the ‘oneness of being’ in the Islamic tradition, in which ‘there was no sharp separation between scripture and cosmos or self and divinity’.Footnote ³⁸⁵ The Indic and East Asian traditions have a particular tendency to generate monistic concepts (such as Dao or Brahman). In Mahayana Buddhism, the notion of the supreme Buddha-body (dharmakāya) allowed the Buddha and his teachings to be conceived as a substratum of the cosmos.Footnote ³⁸⁶ These may be attributed to the inventiveness of the rationalising mind when faced with the paradox of the transcendentalist–immanentist boundary, or the very yearning to attain that transcendent realm on the part of mystics and philosophers.Footnote ³⁸⁷ A future project of comparative research might consider the extent to which the history of these intellectual developments proceeded essentially independent from de facto immanentism, or as post hoc rationalisations of it, or even helped to facilitate it.Footnote ³⁸⁸

Supplementary Note: Christian Readings of Immanentism

How much of the distinction between transcendentalist and immanentist traditions was apparent to Christian missionaries? In their own faltering, often ignorant manner, missionaries did tend to register that there were some profound differences between the kind of thing that Christianity was and the relationships people had with supernatural beings and forces in parts of the world such as sub-Saharan Africa or Oceania. However, scholarship tends to consider the master concepts of the missionary, such as idolatry, superstition, and paganism, as obstacles to ethnological thought rather than as vehicles for genuine understanding. ‘Idolatry’, for example, may be taken to reduce cosmology to mere nullity, a spiritual void defined by what it lacks.Footnote ³⁸⁹ The pejorative function seems essential to these terms but even once it has been excised there is no doubt that they flatten and coarsen cultural variety profoundly.

Yet, from a rather distant comparative perspective, we may concede that missionaries in nineteenth-century Oceania were not wrong to conclude that the sincerity with which people related to their ‘idols’ did not entail a love of them in the Christian vision of worship, nor a counsel of morality in the Christian manner of rectitude.Footnote ³⁹⁰ And when earlier missionaries and travellers in West and Central Africa commented in confusion that they couldn’t find ‘religion’; that they weren’t sure if the natives had religion as opposed to sorcery; that locals did not have notion of an afterlife or of sin; that their notions of deities seemed inextricable from actual objects or places; that people could be treated with the kind of awe which seemed fit only for a god; these observers were not only repeating prejudices but were also expressing an encounter with discomfiting realities.Footnote ³⁹¹ None of this absolves the historian from the usual responsibility of source criticism.Footnote ³⁹² Naturally, missionaries were influenced by a weighty discursive tradition about paganism that derived from the polemics of early Christian writers. But this was not necessarily inapposite: a core feature of ‘paganism’ is its orientation towards the elicitation of earthly benefits.Footnote ³⁹³

Consider Sheldon Dibble’s long discussion of the difficulties besetting the translation of the Christian message into the vernacular in Hawaii:

Stripped of its judgementalism, this conveys an intimation of how unprecedented notions of eternity, ineffability, ethical assessment, salvation, and all the other hallmarks of transcendentalist religiosity were in the pre-existing cultural imagination. Indeed, as they reveal how much the old mentality persisted underneath the layering of Christian education (why did these converts feel so lightly the great burden of guilt?), such comments underline one of the central contentions of this book: that even the transcendentalist religions had first to obtain victory within the terms set by immanentist worldview.

In 1625, the Cape Verdean-Portuguese merchant, André Donelha described the Manes of the Sierra Leone region as having no religion or faith:

This was written close to the beginning of a long European tradition of discourse about the ‘fetish’, which tends now to be analysed for what it says about Europeans themselves (indeed it has been ascribed to a Protestant preoccupation, which the testimony of Donelha, as a Catholic certainly complicates).Footnote ³⁹⁶ But it clearly reflects something germane to parts of West and Central Africa in the importance given to the concrete effects produced by man-made items as repositories of immanent power. It also tells us something germane about immanentism per se – that is, if historians are willing to follow anthropologists in taking seriously Alfred Gell’s resurrection of the concept of idolatry.