FORAYS INTO RELIGION

One might imagine that vast and mysterious (yet familiar) territory we call ‘religion’ as a kind of Amazonian jungle: some parts dense and impenetrable, other areas with great rivers flowing serenely through them, unexpected clearings where minutely small human settlements have created astonishingly original ways of life for themselves, other settlements whose inhabitants seem to live oppressed and brutish and fearful existences, vistas of marvellous beauty and swamps of foreboding darkness devoid of sunlight and life. The jungle is so vast and so various that we know it can never be fully explored or mapped. The more we explore parts of it, the more we are confronted by radical surprises of all kinds and the more we have to readjust our anticipations and redraw our crude maps.

The four essays that make up the main part of this book are no more than tentative and partial forays into the Amazonian jungle of religion, and, it goes without saying, they make no claim to provide a map of the whole terrain.