Gods in jungles and pandemic in cities

By B. Nimal Veerasingham

School days are always straddled with many fun times in everyone’s hard drives. Remembering growing up, our psyche always keeps the pleasant ones permanent rather than others, as a holistic booster to our overall wellbeing.

Listening to stories is everyone’s favourite, especially during childhood. During my primary school days there were class buddies who could relate fictional stories, at times we don’t know whether it’s one or many, craftly encompassed into one. Many times, there is no official end to such stories and always left in a state of ‘to be continued’. When a subject teacher is absent, the temporary teacher, or the Senior student who fills up, engages such storytellers to the rescue. The class is mesmerised delving deep into the unknown without end. Occasionally there are few temporary teachers who would pose questions to amuse themselves while keeping the class engaged. In one such session a question of futuristic pondering was posed, ‘what do you want to become when grown?’ I can clearly remember almost half of the class raising their hands to become, of course, ‘Father’ (Catholic priest). The young students perceived priesthood as an act of nobility and selfless service to others, as the school was managed by American Jesuits then.

Only one became a Father and all the rest became real fathers to families.

During the same time period at school, I had another classmate whose father had several lorries (trucks) plying back and forth to Colombo as he was an agent to several commercial consumer goods in town. I have noticed that all lorries have a large straight board, mounted from one end to the other behind the driver’s seat. This board contained almost all the known Gods equally in separate square frames. One day I asked my friend as to the logic of having all Gods in the lorries. Coming closer and tapping on my shoulder he told me with a chuckle, ‘Machan, as you know, the road to Colombo after dark has many unknown obstacles. Floods, robbers, wild animals and notably elephants. I am sure one God out of all would help us to overcome those, as we do not want to bet on just one.’

Thinking of it now, he reminds me of the most common recommended strategy of all present-day financial advisers, ‘do not put all eggs in one basket’.

Religions, notably the organised ones, nowadays, undergo a major transformation in many circles all around the globe. As the world becomes intrinsically connected more than ever, the change in the West is quite apparent as droves mainly the younger generation stay away from organised religions. ‘Spiritual, not religious’ is one of the catchphrases. The growth of practical application of knowledge and science perpetuates critical thinking and questions the validity of many beliefs of the past.

Americans’ membership in houses of worship continued to decline, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, temple or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.

While precise numbers of church closures are elusive, a conservative estimate is that thousands of U.S. churches are closing each year. It’s not uncommon to see ‘Churches for Sale’ in real estate classified advertisements. Developers are busy turning many into condominiums providing the serene structure and reverberating invocations, as part of the sales pitch for potential condo dwellers.

When I see old places of worship, some almost 100 years old, with perceived accumulated positivity are being sold and converted into normal dwellings, it brings back the memory of a science teacher we had at school. True to his calling, he wanted us to think differently, not falling in line with simple ‘why’, but more so with ‘why not’ school of thought. Once he described how he and his friends had stayed the whole night in a very old, abandoned temple to record anything that sounded abnormal. According to his theory when the exact temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind patterns repeats that of a past date, ideally the sounds from that past date also would repeat. It’s kind of placing Newton’s law of motion in analytical interpretation. It made us spellbound to listen to challenging situational variations of physics and life sciences by our beloved science teacher, sharpening critical thinking along the way.

As adults we know that humans are certainly a believing bunch. And evolutionary anthropologists say that’s no miracle. The origins and ubiquity of religious beliefs can be explained by evolutionary theory.

First, our ancestors evolved certain mental abilities, useful for survival and reproduction, which predisposed them to religious beliefs. Many mental ingredients are necessary for religion as we know it. But scholars emphasise three tendencies, which are pronounced in humans, but minimally expressed in other species, that we seek patterns, infer intentions and learn by imitation.

These are cognitive adaptations that helped our ancestors survive. For example, it is obviously useful to notice paw prints (a pattern) laid by an animal planning to eat you (an intention), and to deter the predator with tactics others have successfully used (imitation). But people overextend these tendencies as part of human expression and energized renditions. This led to connecting disasters to angry deities and reading the future by way of a whole heap of bodily features and cosmic timings.

Our natural tendency to over-imitate predisposes us to religious practices. Rather than relying on experience and trial-and-error, humans learn most behaviors and skills from other people. Evolved features of our brains, such as Theory of Mind and over-imitation, likely caused the emergence of religions in human societies. It doesn’t take supernatural beings to explain why so many people believe in them, just natural evolutionary processes.

One of the household names in Sri Lanka and one of the oldest God worshipped by both Sinhalese and Tamils is ‘Kataragama deviyo’ or Kandan/Murugan/Karthigayan/Subramaniyan/Velan/Sayon/Shanmuga or Kumaran. There are records even before Christ the existence of Kataragama God situated in a jungle terrain not easily accessed. Sir Pon Arunachalam (celebrated civil servant, legislative member, father of University of Ceylon) writing in the Journal of the Asiatic Society 1924 edition, mentions that ‘hardly anyone goes there except for pilgrimage twice a year, the forest haunted by bears, elephants, leopards and deadlier malaria.

The last stage of about 11 miles beyond Tissamaharama is over a difficult forest track and a river, Menik Ganga, which in flood time has to be swum across there being no boats. In the 1930s, when good roads were scarce even in Colombo, my grandmother walked barefoot the whole way to Kataragama and back in fulfilment of a vow for the recovery from illness of her child, the future Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy (Legislative member and the first Asian to be knighted). Hardships they endured are such as are yearly borne with cheerfulness by thousands travelling by foot along the coastal jungle tracks of the Northern, Eastern and Uva provinces and many from India’ he writes.

Clearly, the abode of Lord Murugan or Skandakumara is mountainous jungle terrain (Kuringi tract as per Sangam literature) and intrinsically affiliated to the then Hunter-gatherer framework. Even the celebrated six abodes of Lord Murugan tied to Vedic times are situated in hilly and once jungle regions of Tamil Nadu. The earliest mention of Kartikeya in Buddhist texts may be found in the ‘Janayasabha Sutta’ of the Pali Canon, where he is referred to as ‘Sanankumara’. Here he is introduced as a deva of the rank of ‘Mahabrahma’ and a disciple of the Buddha.

The antiquity of Skanda worship has been noted in Sangam literature (400BCE – 300 CE) and differing views are still debated on the symbols found in Harappa-Indus valley civilizations (Old Bronze age). The jungle God’s close association with native aboriginals, wild honey in the offerings, ‘aalathi Bami’ dance performed by Vedda women during rituals, and the native priesthood untouched by Brahmanical influences, reinforce the organic nature of the history. To cap it, his second concert Valli Amma originated from the same aboriginal clan. Even the weapon he is identified with, lance or spear, is the first hunting weapon humans adopted to safely hunt from a distance. Lord Skanda’s favourite jungle dwelling peacock and his elephant-faced brother Ganesh are not mysteries in this string of evidence.

Appreciation to nature and origins of human civilization is the centre and possible reason for Skanda worship. Anthropologists argue that this ancient form of rituals and forms of worship originated and got shaped, when humans started or were moving into an agrarian society from the jungle dependent hunter-gatherer society.

As our societies continue to evolve, with the current technological advancements that provide greater benefits and solutions to our existential challenges, the traditional role once religion played becomes foggy.

Societal, cultural and identity markers at times influence the degree of belief or pretention within societies. Developed countries show less, while developing countries show more in this equilibrium. Japan has only about 4% of its population identified as religious and a similar trend in Western Europe where social scientists now characterise as ‘post Christian’. Much of the developed world provides the best to their citizens in their hour of need, which also makes the belief in a benevolent God less attractive and meaningless, allowing a higher power to keep watch over people. Organised religion may no longer be needed in such societies, but its still human nature to perceive agency in the complexity and unpredictability of the world, even when there is none.

The current pandemic has travelled in unchartered territory, destabilising the ways to seek interference of a higher power. The growth in the knowledge and the power of science literally put the Gods muted, even putting their places of residence in curfew or lockdown modes, making the divide even greater for the devotees at the hour of need.

The ‘Groundhog Day’ is a Hollywood movie released in 1993, starring Bill Murray. It’s about a cynical television weatherman thoroughly caught up in a boring, slow-moving small town, facing the same situation again and again, and becoming depressed.

Groundhog is a lowland rodent. The North American farmers of a bygone era had a superstitious belief in its ability to predict a short or a long winter in early February. As weather mattered to farmers in terms of soil preparation, groundhog helped if anyone believed in its prediction. If the rodent coming after hibernation doesn’t see its shadow due to cloudy weather and remains out of its burrow, it means the winter is short. This tradition is kept alive in certain cities still as an entertainment, simply to invigorate the economy by way of publicity for tourism.

The weatherman’s agony of facing a bleak state without hope is captured in the below conversation.

‘What would you do if you were struck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered?’

That’s what Phil (Bill Murray) asks two men at a bar as he contemplates the boring dead-end of repeating Groundhog Day over and over, with a known outcome.

One of them answers, ‘That about sums it for me.’

For many of us the situation created by the pandemic has not changed much for the last two years, going through the drill of the same again and again, with no end in sight. No real togetherness, no travels, no public places and no family occasions. Every day is fraught with suspicion, caution and vigilance. Not to mention the physical and psychological complications of being isolated or feeling lonely. The only theme that rises above is the indefinite nature of the jam that we are all in at the same time.

Though Act 2 brings the darker side of depression and escapism through criminality Phil gets enlightened by way of overcoming hopelessness with two key components. He uses his time in the service of others and constantly engages in ‘self-improvement’. In the service of others need not be simply donating money but could be as easy as directly connecting others with gifts of time, empathy and humor. Sharing an uplifting remark or acknowledging or smiling at people that you come across daily or querying the neighbors of his/her welfare, are simple acts that we often take for granted. The inner satisfaction of truly generating care and concern for others also allows us to record the blessings or what we are grateful for. Numerous studies have indicated that this simple act of counting the blessings increases satisfaction with life and frees us from time prison. Constantly allowing us to develop and make new hobbies or getting better at acquiring new skills frees us from the clogged mind or memory lapses and will lead to optimism instead of negativity. Phil takes up ice carving and music lessons as part of acquiring new skills to keep his mind positively active.

When he made a difference in how he sees and reacts to the outside world, his outlook of what a ‘Groundhog Day’ changed entirely. He learnt to reinvent himself and to be in the service of others by acknowledging, ‘Anything different is good.’

Difference achieved by re-examining habits and attitudes.

Doing good we might say what all major faiths propose but ends up as mere habit or routine.

It is not like what we want to become when we grow up to do good, or betting on different Gods for increased probability. If we want to uplift our emotional and physical health now during this time of breakdown of our daily lives, then there is an answer within us, not necessarily a grant from any higher power.

The film encircles the most important theme Tolstoy propelled through the parable ‘The three questions’ published in 1885 as part of the ‘What men live by and other tales.’ When is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do all the time?

As the king learned from the sequent events including practising lifesaving skills, the answer is within us and no need to look for counsel from others when it comes to doing the right thing.

‘Do good for all, and learn new skills’