Alien Belief Systems

Abstract

In this chapter I am going to discuss the interpretation and explanation of what are often called ‘alien belief systems’. Roughly speaking, these are those systems of beliefs about primitive gods, ancestral spirits, magical powers, totemic creatures, witches, sorcerers, and so forth, which are found amongst traditional peoples, and which inform their magical and religious practices and the explanations they offer for various natural and human events. As such, ‘alien belief systems’ are to be distinguished from modern world religions, which have given up altogether to science the attempt to control and explain the natural world. As a recent writer has put it, modern religions are almost exclusively ‘anthropocentric’ in being concerned solely with the moral status of man in his relation to God, while traditional thought has a ‘cosmocentric’ focus on the explanation and anticipation of natural and human events.¹