The Psychotically Conjoined Triplets

 

The Psychotically Conjoined Triplets

I am not an expert on any of the following: psychology, evolution by Natural Selection and anthropology. Yet I dare to post this. Call me foolishly intrepid and I would not demur.

To name the three conjoined triplets, they are religion, superstition and Homo sapiens sapiens. No, that was not a mistake, Homo sapiens sapiens is the only surviving sub-species of Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens Neandarthalensis went out hunting/foraging somewhere and never returned), and obviously we belong to it. Please do not take me deeper into such classifications lest I put my hand up.

Of the triplets which one came out first, which, the second, and the trivial which, the third? Not quite a million dollar question, merely one that engaged me for about a couple of hours typing out this post. Obviously, the second “sapiens” in Homo sapiens sapiens came later than the first, appropriately the primogeniture. Sapiens may be taken to mean something like “perceive”. That perception, I conjecture, came through superstition, which is the second in the order, as there had to be someone to do the perceiving. That leaves religion as the last to come on the horizon; this is my taxonomy for the triplets−Homo sapiens sapiens, superstition, religion in that order.

As the three are conjoined, as I claim, the temporal distance, in evolutionary scale, between them must have been very short. There was nothing to smirk at the first thousand generations of Homo sapiens sapiens. Their sapienness (credit that neologism to me) was quite a bit less than what is ours now, and the reason is the laggardly pace at which any change that concerns the mind happens.

So, our distant ancestors were afraid of thunder, lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes, the great expanse of the seas, steep mountains, great rivers, dense forests where even with the sun shining, the floor of the forest was dark and foreboding, not to mention ferocious beasts. They needed a support system and superstition became that.

The form of the superstition is interesting. They created one powerful being for each of these phenomena that has control over a phenomenon, basically to put fear in the hearts of the people and to appease that being to lessen the consequences. One must understand the beings in charge were all local in the sense they were imagined for small groups or a collection of a few groups. They were never really overarching for the Homo sapiens sapiens.

It is easy to dismiss what others do as superstition and fail to see it in oneself. I will put forth the following. It happened when it was decades since I had stopped being superstitious. I was visiting a family and stayed overnight in their house. What the family did was to immerse an iron ladle in an iron bucket when one of the family members left the house and let it stay so till that person returned. If more than one left the house, that one ladle would take care of him/her. But, the ladle would be taken out only when all had returned for the night. I did not tell them this was stupid.

Now, I will fess up to the following: When I was studying for my engineering undergraduate degree before every test (seven subjects and three tests in each subject per semester, 16 weeks), I visited the temple in the campus, 10-12 minutes cycling from the hostel. This was not for praying. It was merely to feel some comfort about how I would do in the test, though I must not have completed my preparation! I remember pedalling furiously in driving rain to visit my God at the temple. It was superstition, multiple times over.  

I overcame this particular superstition, which I realized only when I stopped doing it during my post-graduate studies in an institute and a temple too in the middle of nowhere. In a sense I was physically stopped from continuing my superstition! Then, it became an almost a mission for me to discard one superstition from my mental baggage after another. That is when I realized how much dead wood I was carrying. Religion was the heaviest.

Combine the above to see that I had no right to criticize my hosts.

In mathematics there are two different categories of conditions to prove something: Necessary and Sufficient. To the layman, it would appear that a “sufficient” condition is the weaker of the two, as it is only “sufficient” whereas the other is “necessary”. This is not so in mathematics, a sub-set of rational thinking. If one is not superstitious, that is a sufficient condition leading to irreligiosity. One does not need anything else to be irreligious. Superstition is the founding bed in which religion is anchored.

The next step is to ask oneself whether it is at all possible not to be religious yet be superstitious. The straight forward answer is a big NO! Superstition truly begs for an anchor, even a spurious one. Religions provide what superstitions beg for, only more spurious.

I will give another example that was prevalent many decades ago; I do not know whether it is still occupying the mind space of TamBrahms. If you saw the fourth phase of the waxing moon (and it is the brightest object in the sky just prior to sundown), all you need to do is to remove a thread from the cloth you are wearing and throw it in the direction of the moon. The evening prior to this, the third phase, if you are able to see the crescent of the moon, you are seeing the matted head of Lord Siva!     

My step-wise thesis is closing in on the end point: Only a sapient being can be religious and that too only when he/she/it is superstitious, being the necessary bridge between superstition and religion. The use of “necessary” is strategic. One can be non-superstitious but can be religious, That is, the “sufficiency” condition is not sufficient!

Let me repeat: Being non superstitious is “sufficient” for being irreligious; being superstitious is “necessary” for being religious. Superstition and irreligiosity cannot share the same conjugal bed.

Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple comes to mind.

Raghuram Ekambaram