Animals can attack you if you claim their foraging grounds, i.e. their territory. Humans can attack you if you trespass on their holy land. Holiness is a human construct designed to make us believe there is something more to this world than the mundane life of food and security, that we are not animals. We are special. Our lives have meaning and purpose. Thus any attack on things deemed holy is an attack on our sense of self, and our self-worth.
Holiness is created in many ways. The oldest way is taboo. You are not allowed to enter a particular place, or touch a particular person or object, either always or during a particular ritual. The more you tell a person not to go up a mountain or into a valley, or not touch someone or something, the more he wants to, and the more power is granted to the object of taboo. This creates hierarchy—those with access to the taboo object become special people: priests, shamans, mystics.
Holiness is manufactured through ritual performance. A space or a time is charged with special art, rhythmic chanting, singing, music, and practices like wearing of special clothes, offering of special food, dancing, moving, lighting lamps, pouring water, listening to sermons, sitting in silence. Such dramatic sights and sounds evoke serenity or awe. Drums are beaten. Incense is lit. Chanting intensifies. All this makes the body feel the presence of something more than the natural—the extra natural, the supernatural. We start believing in the existence of the spirit, forces that give life and impact fortune. We turn to these forces in times of suffering and insecurity.
When spirituality is socialised and informs the economic and political behaviour of a group, it becomes religion. Spirituality is a private quest for something beyond the material. It is essentially deep psychology. But it can be a lonely journey. So we seek companions, who can guide us, or follow us, or encourage us. This creates a cult, a sense of belonging and family, which then needs to be institutionalised and made immortal, and protected from contamination and outsiders.
Devdutt Pattanaik is an Indian physician turned leadership consultant, mythologist, author and communicator whose works focus largely on the areas of myth, religion, mythology, and management.
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