Imagine you are watching the Bandarlog at play in the forest. As
you behold them and comprehend their natures, now hugely brave and
boastful, now full of dread, the most weakly emotional of any
intelligent species, ever trying to attract the notice of some
greater animal, not happy indeed unless noticed,--is it not plain
they are bound to invent things called gods? Don't think for the
moment of whether there are gods or not; think of how sure these
beings would be to invent them. (Not wait to find them.) Having
small self-reliance they can not bear to face life alone. With no
self-sufficingness, they must have the countenance of others. It
is these pressing needs that will hurry the primates to build, out
of each shred of truth they can possibly twist to their purpose, and
out of imaginings that will impress them because they are vast, deity
after deity to prop up their souls.
What a strange company they will be, these gods, in their day, each
of them an old bearded simian up in the sky, who begins by fishing
the universe out of a void, like a conjurer taking a rabbit out of
a hat. (A hat which, if it resembled a void, wasn't there.) And
after creating enormous suns and spheres, and filling the farthest
heavens with vaster stars, one god will turn back and long for the
smell of roast flesh, another will call desert tribes to "holy"
wars, and a third will grieve about divorce or dancing.
All gods that any groups of simians ever conceive of, from the
woodenest little idol in the forest to the mightiest Spirit, no
matter how much they may differ, will have one trait in common:
a readiness to drop any cosmic affair at short notice, focus their
minds on the far-away pellet called Earth, and become immediately
wholly concerned, aye, engrossed, with any individual worshipper's
woes or desires,--a readiness to notice a fellow when he is going
to bed. This will bring indescribable comfort to simian hearts;
and a god that neglects this duty won't last very long, no matter
how competent he may be in other respects.
But one must reciprocate. For the maker of the Cosmos, as they see
him, wants noticing too; he is fond of the deference and attention
that simians pay him, and naturally he will be angry if it is
withheld;--or if he is not, it will be most magnanimous of him.
Hence prayers and hymns. Hence queer vague attempts at communing
with this noble kinsman.
To desire communion with gods is a lofty desire, but hard to attain
through an ignobly definite creed. Dealing with the highest, most
wordless states of being, the simians will attempt to conceive them
in material form. They will have beliefs, for example, as to the
furnishings and occupations in heaven. And why? Why, to help men
to have religious conceptions without themselves being seers,--which
in any true sense of "religious" is an impossible plan.
In their efforts to be concrete they will make their creeds amusingly
simian. Consider the simian amorousness of Jupiter, and the brawls
on Olympus. Again, in the old Jewish Bible, what tempts the first
pair? The Tree of Knowledge, of course. It appealed to the
curiosity of their nature, and who could control _that!_
And Satan in the Bible is distinctly a simian's devil. The snake, it
is known, is the animal monkeys most dread. Hence when men give their
devil a definite form they make him a snake. A race of super-chickens
would have pictured their devil a hawk.