The drama of the Holy has several social psychological conventions that are embedded in the weave and warp of the sanctification process. The central epistemological convention in the drama of the Holy involves a social psychological process in which disbelief is sweep aside in a profound emotional experience. In that leap toward faith and belief, a qualitatively different social form emerges that deserve the name of the Holy. Separate human beings; themselves merely flesh and bone, become joined with other(s) in a state that is more than flesh and bone. It is a sacred union that has the same reality, the same facticity as does any other human product. Through the activity of believing individuals, separate parts of a social system together produce the whole.

Believing is the firm bedrock upon which all social reality is built. There is not a business or a nation or a city or a church that does not assume and depend upon the dynamics of belief. Belief is part of the symbolic interactional process that enables one to act as a physician, a parent, a police officer or a president. Without belief, there is only the physical facts of nature; rocks, water, tissue and sound. That the reification process uses belief in order to enact the drama of the Holy is not different in any substantive way from the use of belief to incorporate a company, charter a nation or to establish a university.

Symbolic interactional processes together comprise a form of social magic which entails a discontinuity of essence and existence that justifies the term, magic. These processes intervene in the natural world in ways that the dynamics of modern science forbid. In social magic, willing, wanting and hoping are intrinsic to the emergence of social events. Modern science gives very little agency to such factors; it holds that nature and society are comprised of natural categories which correspond precisely to objective entities and which exist prior to and apart from human activity.

Postmodern phenomenology accepts that such categories do exist but that human agency is most important to their facticity in both the seeing and the doing. Once created as human products through various forms of social magic in various iterations of the Drama of the Holy, these categories are natural categories and have the same (variable) facticity as any other distinct category in nature, that is, they have consequences.

We will begin with those activities by which an ontologically existent godhead is produced by believing and acting human beings. The ontological facticity of the god concept depends, in the first instance, upon a self-fulfilling prophecy in which such a social fact is defined and being, so defined, calls forth the behavior which is the epistemic correlate of the concept. The Drama of the Holy has many magical moments.

SEMIOTICS OF THE GOD CONCEPT

Part of the reification and much of the sanctification process entails the use of symbols with which to constitute a semiotic whole. The duration of the semiotic whole varies widely across cultures. For many societies, there is never an interruption of the god process. For a few societies, Western societies in recent times, the duration of the semiotic whole is relatively short. Whatever the duration, while the semiotic whole exists, each and every event takes part if not all of its meaning from the whole.

A word, a candle, a flower, a gown, an act, a person or a whole run of behavior can be understood in large part by the semiotic character of the whole. In the case at hand, the semiotic whole is a sanctification process in which people, places and times are made holy.

The architecture of the Drama of the Holy requires the use of words and linguistic styles which are forbidden in more profane activity. Spoken words vivify and enchant people in quite a literal sense. Around the world and across the centuries, words have been set aside for the special purpose of eliciting the Holy. Words have the power to sanctify or to profane persons, relationships, nations and occasions. Love songs, work chants, prayers, and invocations of the power and blessing of the god process are prelude and part of the very fabric of that god.

Cosmetics are used in Holy ceremonies that are forbidden in ordinary time and space. The wearing of a cosmetic signifies the special, holy work at hand. Clothing too is used in the Drama of the Holy which is forbidden to wear for purely physiological purpose; the purpose of such clothing is not to keep one warm or protect one from the sun but rather to enhance the drama of the moment. Special gifts are made which, because they are not earned, are thereby made holy. Food and drink are provided that are forbidden to imbibe in profane acts. The purpose of the food is not to nourish the body but to prepare the whole body to receive information; such provisions are used to generate extra- ordinary body states as prelude to the acquisition of divine knowledge. Drink and food become pathways to the Holy.

In the Drama of the Holy, lines of activity are embodied which are forbidden in ordinary work and play. Dancing, chanting, singing or the casting of stones or the reading of omens is part of the process by which the Holy is dramatized and sanctified, thus embodied and venerated, emerges as a distinct social fact. Music too is part of the sanctification process; it is forbidden for unclean persons to touch musical instruments when they are part of the sanctification process; it is forbidden for anyone to play musical instruments except in a ceremony in which the Holy is invoked.

The time of the Holy is a time outside of ordinary time. Past, present and future are collapsed into a particularly lucid and enduring moment that reaches into the past in order to shape the future. During a time of sanctification, all persons assembled in the drama of the Holy experience a profundity of emotion, a clarity of thought and physical ability are rare in profane time. These feelings, thoughts, and physical capacities are most basic in the grounding of the Holy. Modern thought and modern science dismiss them as fantasy, illness, madness or disease. Modern science displaces social time with the rhythms of radio-active elements and gives these linear rhythms preference to those constructed by social action. Postmodern thinking and postmodern science takes social rhythms at face value for what they are and what they mean within a social and cultural setting; they are the time embodiment of the Holy.

There is a geography of the Holy that transforms ordinary space into sacred grounds. Within the confines of a place or region defined as Holy ground, one is expected to act with decorum, speak with reverence and feel a special sense of awe and humility. The boundaries of Holy space vary with the religious culture of a society. For some societies, the holy place is a specific building and its grounds; for other societies, the realm of the Holy extends as far as one can imagine. It extends to wherever the tribe goes. As the poet put it:

There is a poetic in this passage that reveals the human face of the sanctification process. Each person, separately, must enlarge the heart and soul else ordinary geometries of space are the topic of the knowledge process. When one does act with love and with compassion, the boundaries of social space are extended. However, they extend only as far as love extends. We can watch the death of another person without fear or concern when that person is not within the geography of human love. We can engineer the death of unknown others without remorse if our social geography extends only to family and friends. Social space and social time are human constructs; the nature of the god concept helps draw those very real boundaries.

Postmodern understanding, as did premodern thought, accepts the qualitative transformation of a meadow into a shrine without reserve. A meadow is a natural object in modern scientific thought and cannot be transformed by human action into a Holy place. In modern thought, a meadow has a geology, a biology, a physics and a chemistry but can be nothing more. Postmodern critique argues that it is just as natural; just as legitimate to define a meadow (or a grove of trees or a group of rocks) as a Holy place as it is to draw a map and set lines on it to represent private property, political boundaries, weather zones or time zones.

Definition of a place on a map as New Zealand or Argentina is equally a cultural act as to define a place a holy place. To define a meadow as a shrine is as valid a social process as to define piece of paper as a dollar or to define a set of words as a law or to define a given procedure as a scientific method. The consecration of physical space into Holy space has the same standing as cultural activity as is the swearing-in of a President; the incorporation of a business or the coding of a unit act as a vote in a cultural process called an election. All are, equally, legitimate, natural, cultural practices; all are equally arbitrary; all are equally emergent in the consequence of the definition.

The sanctification of space is not different in kind or action from any social action that is treated as real except that it produces a form of social space that is hostile to the specific interests of any large or powerful coalition within the boundaries of sacred space. I deal with the politics of the (de)sanctification process in the essay on the Death of God. For the moment, I will simply point out that the sanctification of trees, mountains, people or social relationship makes it difficult to exploit them, to abuse them, to turn them into a commodity or to ignore them. Indeed, the human purpose of sanctification is to protect, cherish and sustain.

Together, the various sets of symbols constitute a larger symbolic environment, a semiotic context if you will, in which all subsequent events are to be interpreted. Whatever happens within the Drama of the Holy takes its special meaning from the words used, the costumes worn, the cosmetics applied, the times aside, the space sanctified. When one enters such a symbolic environment, one is to be understood as doing Holy work until one disengages from such labor.

It is central to the case that I am building that, although the god concept is a human product, it is/can be just as real as any other form of social reality; that the particular expression of the god concept depends upon the embodiment of the elements of the Holy associated with that particular god concept. The drama of the Holy involves poetic and operatic practices of human beings in social formations. The shape of that formation sets the tone and tenor of the reign of god. In order to fashion a postmodern concept (and fractal reality) of the god concept, for those who want or need a god concept in order to engage the drama of the Holy, it is necessary to appreciate and to incorporate the social processes that give facticity and efficacy to the god concept.

Social Magic

In the context of its use here, social magic is a very ordinary even if remarkable activity; simply put it is the process of realization--of bringing social facts into being. In social science that process is called the self-fulfilling process. The elements of social magic are well known: there is the prophecy of a thing; there is the suspension of disbelief in the facticity of the thing; there is the transformation of behavior by individuals and by groups in which a new thing comes to have real being.

Social magic is a form of social labor in which social forms which have no prior ontological basis are thereby brought into being. When a child is put through a naming ceremony, it becomes a person with all the rights and obligations of a specific socio- cultural formation. Prior to that, the child is a physiological and a psychological fact but subsequent to such magic, it has the status of a member of a society. A Mohawk Indian is qualitatively different from a Parisian but both are products of the same physiological and psychological raw material; it is social magic which creates one as a Mohawk or a Parisian. When a maid goes through a wedding ceremony, she becomes a wife. Nuns are made of the same biological raw material but are qualitatively different from wives. Police officers and priests are, equally, the product of a social magic that we take for granted so much that we seldom pause to think about its meaning for a philosophy of science or the drama of the Holy.

Readers who are versed in Chaos theory will appreciate that each person born to a woman begins with very similar initial characteristics but becomes very different by virtue of small differences in these magical rituals. In normal science, small changes produce small effects; in social magic, a small difference (the naming process) can produce differences which in social terms are great indeed. The difference between genders are mostly a feature of social magic. The difference between slave and slavemaster are mostly made by social magic. The difference between saint and villain are likewise part of a self fulfilling prophecy sometimes elided into labeling theory.

The social consequences of social magic are manifold and central to the facticity of the god concept. In the sections to come, I will argue that these consequences are the empirical bases for the central attributes of the god concept as it emerges in many major religions: omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence. There are, to be sure, god concepts which are local and more fallible; which are not endowed with these absolute powers. However, part of the drama of the Holy as it is presented here locates the god concept in the social formation of which it is a part. In fragmented societies such as in India, millions of local gods can exist side by side; in more global or integrated societies, the absolutistic god concept tends to emerge.

Each process involved in social magic has empirical bases which grounds it. Each process has empirical consequences which validates it. Each process has a human hand that authors it. Such is the postmodern view. Here is the case for it.

A primordial source of the superorganic is the bonding that goes on between infants and parents; between sibs; between members of a team or within any other social group in which each person becomes a significant other to another. The social power deriving from bonding forms one empiric base for the concept of the Holy. I propose that such bonding is the empirical beginnings of the Generalized Other which some interpret as God and which Durkheim conceptualized as the superorganic. Bonding produces an Nth entity which serves as the ontological base for reification, sanctification and vivification.

The bonding process is one in which another person become significant to one. The bonding of an infant to mother begins in uterus; the fetus lives with the heart beat and bodily rhythms, the smell and the taste of bodily fluids of the mother and learns to associate these with security and sustenance. The process goes on after birth but can be undertaken by anyone who holds, feeds, talks and stimulates the infant. As time goes on the number of persons who are significant increases through others involved in the parenting process; sibs and other relatives; through play and touch in it; through work and the dynamics of that or any other shared endeavor.

Bonding is usually a two-way street; the mother bonds to the child as the child bonds to the mother. Children at play bond to each other. Soldiers in jeopardy bond to each other. Husbands and wives bond to each other as joint architects of their lives. Members of an authentically religious community bond each to all others separately and collectively.

Bonding is a variable fact that changes discontinuously; that appears and disappears in infinite pattern. Friendship bonds serve as case in point; one can be in continuous emotional awareness of another person or one can go for years without seeing, thinking or feeling anything toward that same person. A card, a phone call, a memory or a visit can, instantaneously resurrect those bonds.

Bonding can be dissolved either slowly or in an instant. Most societies have formalized routines by which social bonds are dissolved. A funeral is a final social event designed to reorganized social bonds given the physical death of a significant person. Physical death ordinarily fits the canons of modern science in which cause and effect are linked together in quite stable ways. Social death is engineered by divorce, bankruptcy proceedings, disbarment and other such social processes; equally discontinuous, equally magical.

Bonding exhibits therefore, unstable dynamics. But while there are social bonds, there is grounds for treating the emergent entity as real.

Emergent We's From Social Bonding

If there are two persons, then, given bonding, there are three possible entities; if there are five members in a family, then there are six entities there to be counted. If there are 300 members of a tribe, then there are 301 entities to be counted. If there are 40 members of a church, then there are 41 entities to be counted. The extra one, the nth is that which Durkheim and others call the superorganic. It is called the superorganic for purposes of modern anthropology to denote that it is a discrete entity but it is not supernatural...it is quite natural; as natural as is a forest or a snowflake comprised of water molecules bonded together.

Actually, there are N!/(N-1) permutations possible if one counts the combinations of mother with each child; the father with each child; the mother and the father; and each child with each other child. However, such coalitions other than the mother-father bond are, ordinarily, fragile and fleeting except in so far as they are part of the larger whole. Thus a brother and sister can be bonded and support and sustain each other but only as members of the family--anything else would be seen and defined as illness, sin, deviancy or corruption. For purposes of social reification; the family is the emergent super- organic entity; the nth entity.

Omnipotence

The omnipotence assigned to god has its beginnings in social power. For our purposes, we can understand social power as the capacity to shape the behavior of another person by virtue of a social relationship. When relationships are rich and deep, social power is pervasive enough to speak of omnipotence. When relationships are short and shallow, held together by mere market dynamics or by physical need, then social power fades and fails and omnipotence loses its grounding. Arguments about the death of god take on greater saliency in that event.

When people are bonded to each other, each has the power to move the other. Beyond words, beyond thought, beyond doubt, the mother has the power to shape behavior of her child and, ceteris paribus, the child has the power to shape the behavior of the mother. In any interactively rich and informationally rich group, bonding occurs and social power develops such that any member of the group is able to shape the behavior of any other member of that group. It is the fact of social power which is the beginning of the construction of a natural category which some interpret as omnipotence.

In patriarchal families, much of the social power of those bonds is allocated to elder males; beyond words, beyond doubt, beyond question, the husband has social power over wife, children and others in the household. The simulacrum of the father expands to become the image of God in patriarchal societies. In all authoritarian institutions; work, play, school, police or wherever social power is stratified, those who occupy positions at the top of the hierarchy command while those at the 'lower' echelons are responsive.

In the drama of the Holy, that nth entity is present with particular vivacity; being there, it is proper to deify it. The next question then becomes, is the vivification of the nth entity, justified. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is more complex.

Language

In acquiring language, we acquire social power to affect the behavior of others in the same moment that we use a word...a word calls forth the same feelings, understandings and actions of each of us who have been socialized within a linguistic tradition.

There are four sets of symbols used in human history to create intersubjective understandings; to elicit shared emotional responses and to activate cooperative lines of behavior. These media include voiced plosives we call words; the media include hair style, cosmetics, clothes and body decorations that we use to construct age, gender, political and religious status; the media include body movements and positions with which we define and delineate social occasions and social relations as well as lines of behavior into which we assign meaning.

Part of the socialization process involves a definition of referential content, of emotional tone and of behavioral cues into each group of words we call sentences. 'Come here!,' 'Feel this!,' 'Get water,' are simple sentences that embody all three dimensions of the symbol. Socialization thus results in a symbol set calling forth the same meaning, the same emotional response, the same behavioral events in the understanding of the speaker and the one to whom one speaks. When language becomes internalized, the contents of a symbol becomes the internal software of human life: socialization is the means by which collective human conscience and societal consciousness patterns the behavior of the individual in ways only vaguely understood by the acting individual.

Omnipotence

That words, clothes, body talk and behavioral runs used by a society have power to move people within that society to tears and to delight is commonplace; what is not commonplace is the additional insight that having the power to use symbols and thus to move people comes not from the symbol itself but rather from the currency of the symbol in the general population. If a symbol were not in common, everyday use in a society, it would have no power at all. There is no one place or source to which to look to find the location of this form of social power. Having no definite center and having great capacity to move one to compassion or to violence, attribution of such power to a god is most reasonable.

Symbols come and go; iterations of the symbol moves through an epistemological and ontological trajectory that defines semi- stable structure which exhibits qualitative change over time...that which could drive us into a fury no longer moves us since it is not in common use; that which could wring us out or lift us up no longer works; its license has been withdraw from circulation. Who now knows the sharpness of a noop; who now practices the magic of sycomancy? Variation in the saliency of words and other symbol sets give added grounds for assigning their potency to society assembled and acting.

Both the power of status and the power of words are an emergent feature of the collective. We call this power, social power; it is part of the social magic by which we shape and limit the behavior of each other. Without common agreement, both the word, the king and the dollar would be powerless.

It is the social power of symbols to move us, even against our will, that convinces us, rightly, that there is something greater than we; something greater than the other(s) who use the symbols. This power of language is not mysterious; it is not outside the realm of that which is natural but it most certainly locates the separate individual in a symbolic universe which has the power to shape his or her behavior apart from purely personal preferences.

Language, and the social power embedded in symbols is then, another source of the superorganic entity that we, properly, call society as a reified whole greater than the sum of its parts. Language calls forth the nth member and gives it its awesome power; language as a collective product is the invisible hand that shapes the behavior of all included members of a social occasion...the behavior of individuals even when not in the physical presence of a live human being. The omnipresence of social power, embedded in the symbol, is translated into the omnipotence of the god concept.

In the profane world, the nth entity takes the active linguistic form, We. In the realm of the Holy, the active form of the Generalized Other, of society assembled as a totality, takes the active linguistic form, God. The passive form of the nth entity is us. The external active form of the nth entity of other societies, we call the they and the them. The passive profane form of the Generalized Outsider, the stranger or the foreigner, is called the barbarian or the enemy. In its more threatening form, the generalized outsider is called the Devil, Baal, Lucifer or corruption.

It is part of the genius of humankind that people are able to abstract and to reify the common, empirically existing, features of a group...one's own included...and to give it a name. The name, in turn, helps constitute it as an ontologically existing entity. This a self-fulfilling prophecy which we help fulfill and which in turn helps fulfill itself.

Socialization: Social Conscience

A third source of the facticity of the nth member of a set is, as noted, in the socialization process. One should note that socialization, in the same moment that it produces a social identity and a social actor, intimately connects the child to the mother and effectively imparts social power to the symbol sets we use to create social reality.

Socialization is a process that varies greatly between cultures both in its content and in its efficacy. Whatever the content, as a result of socialization, the practices of a society take on a heavy emotional charge...there are things that are done and things that are not done. There are things that make the other smile and there are things that make the other frown. We learn this; we internalize these practices and we take on the attitudes of others about ourselves and what we do. In so doing, we define and create the limits of good and evil.

Socialization instructs us in and binds us to the forms of social reality we must create if we are to be human beings. It practices us in the creation of kinship and friendship relations and groupings. It instructs us in the opening and closing routines we use to begin and end each kind of social reality created in the adult world. Socialization demands and enhances our ability to observe the norms of reciprocity and of mutuality. Socialization inserts society into the very fabric of our mind and body. It provides the software which will program our behavior until the end of our time. Socialization is the empiric source of what we call a soul complete with conscience, superego which Mead called the Me, and, as Mead also put it, an I.

Since no one can be a human being without being socialized and since, once socialized, one cannot escape the collective conscience inculcated into person and personality, an empirical base for omnipresence is lain. The moment we are assigned social identities in a rite of passage is a moment in which we, from that day hence, carry with us all the norms, rules, expectations and obligations such status-role entail. Since a status-role always implies as least one other human being and since those human beings in status-roles have social power over each other, one can never escape the pull of one's group except by denying ones self. In the instant, one denies one's mother, one destroys self as son.

The interaction between physiology, psychology, sociology and culture is so complex that no two persons are ever alike. Each iteration of a social event called a person has a distinct flavor, charm, and color to it which is recognizable by anyone who lives within a socio-cultural complex. Yet the differences are so small that outsiders have trouble distinguishing between members of a group.

Without socialization, we are merely living organisms. As animals, we may behave in complex societies such as ant colonies or bird flocks but ants and birds are not socialized to the symbolic activity involved in construction of those remarkable social life worlds which each human society creates.

In standard American culture as elsewhere, to be friendly, helpful, courteous and generous are inserted into the soul of a child there to mediate behavior until the child is no more. This set of values inculcated into the very fabric of our soul is beyond ordinary reflection and rejection. The impulse of such values is keenly felt by each and every one of us who has been socialized with some success. We don't decide to be kind; we are kind.

In societies where social engagements are short, commercial and soliptic, denial of others is not a difficult matter but such denial, if endemic in a society, gives further strength to death of god arguments. Without the omnipresence pull of social bonds, one has no grounds for belief in the god concept.

Omnipresence

Yet there are times when kindness turns back on us and still we act kindly. We know, existentially, that there is another power beyond our conscious will. We desire not to be kind or generous at times and still we feel the pull within us. This inner pull joins with language and with bonding to ground the idea of the superorganic. We feel a power that transcends us, surrounds us and follows us where ever we go--awake or asleep we experience that power and we give that power a name...and rightly so.

On a personal level, the totality of approved and disapproved practices constitute the social conscience of a person; an indwelling inventory of the good and the evil. On a societal level, approved and forbidden practices are codified in morality, common law and religion. Again, the omnipresence of such understandings both inside memory and everywhere in society justify recognition of an entity larger than and superior to the ordinary individual. Good and evil have an empiric dimension not weighed in modern understandings of the god concept and the religious impulse.

The Looking Glass Process

Every tyrant, every friend, every thief, every priest must trust and must believe in others or tyranny, friendship, thievery, and holy sacrament would be impossible. In order to make a case of the superorganic power of the collective, I will give the most extreme case this side of madness. Even the behavior of the worst tyrant is shaped in many ways by the understandings and interpretations of others. Often the tyrant is surrounded by yes men and yes women who reflect and amplify the wishes and fancies of the tyrant; often those who gainsay the tyrant find themselves saying nothing more. Non the less, the tyrant is very sensitive to those close to him; sensitive to the mood of the mass; sensitive to the plans of his opponents.

Every tyrant must reify something as his domain and claim hegemony over it. Every tyrant must use the cherished concepts of his society in order to get her will executed. Every tyrant must subscribe to the forms of social power defined and deployed by that society in order to use them. No one is an island unto herself; no one a law unto himself; no one immune from the language used; from the bondings made; from the social institutions erected or from the socialization experienced. Usually a tyrant embodies some of the most cherished values in society else all power would fade. Indeed, the tyrant comes to believe that s/he embodies the common Will and the common Good. S/he is as the gods.

Omnipotence, Sources of

All of the processes above converge to produce the acting individual. All of the socialization converges to inculcate the values, goals, interests and themes of a culture into the self system of the acting, thinking, judging, wanting, working individual. All of the looking glass processes are internalized to form the conscience of the acting individual. All of the social identities repose in the self system of the individual to be activated by role-others, by rituals, ceremonies and other social occasions. All of the self identifications of a given individual shape behavior in a shifting, creative but recognizable pattern we call the personality of that person.

One cannot underestimate the importance of a role-set in activating and actualizing any given social identity; still social identities by themselves are powerful stabilizers and activators of human behavior. While I will give prosaic explanations of role-structures and their associated social identities that bind acting individuals together, I want to pause to emphasize the part played by religious social identities by themselves.

A religious social identity of all religious traditions offer each person socialized to it, a history and a way of life that reaches far back into the beginnings of social time. These identities, if firmly internalized, can sustain the individual through hardships and indignities that beggar the imagination. Yet, being a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim makes unholy behavior unimaginable. The actions of the Huguenots in the French village of le Chambot during World War II offers a case in point.

While the rest of France were collaborating or standing by without protest, the villagers of le Chambot were actively sheltering Jewish refugees from their Nazi hunters. Over 5000 Jews lived or passed through the village in the war years. In his documentary of the episode, Pierre Sauvage noted that none of the villagers thought they had done anything heroic or unusual; of course one shelters others from evil. Of course one resists oppression. Of course one lies to the authorities and if one is an authority, of course one looks away if one knows of the Jews in the village.

Omnipresence of Social Identity

Religious social identities make the drama of the Holy seem ordinary and part of nature. It is important to note that these religious identities mediated behavior outside of any specific role-set; outside of any formal organization. Indeed, there was no formal organization of resistance in le Chambot; few people talked about the persons they sheltered; few asked about them yet everyone seemed to know and to approve of giving refuge to Jews in a time of troubles. Others, involved in more exclusive religious traditions; in religious traditions hostile to Jews or engaged in official roles did participate in the identification, transport and execution of millions of people who had not harmed them directly or indirectly.

One should be very thoughtful about displacing religious identities with the short term social takes in mass society if one wishes to enjoy the benefits of religion: compassion and sharing, self control, prosocial labor, and resistance to evil; values oriented to community and to domestic tranquility. The rationalization of society through bureaucracy and scientific management may have its own merits but it also leads to the dispossession of the self system of its long term social identities. If religious identities are eroded, the prosocial behavior called forth by those identities is diminished in the same moment. I return to this point in the essay on the Death of God.

Role-sets

Parallel to the effects of society, assembled in rituals, ceremonies and festivals, in shaping the behavior of the individual and thus, giving tangible proof of a superorganic, is the role-set. Social identities are called forth by engagement in a role-set; these, in concert with symbolic interaction between members of the role-set, shape human behavior.

In the very act of doing society; of creating the wondrous realms of social life, it is necessary for each of us to respond to another member of a role-set whether or not we will or want. It is an impossibility to have a friendship or a marriage or a Court or a team without reciprocity of meaning and action. We each must honor, to a much greater extent than we might wish as individuals, the interpretations of others; the presentations of others; the social inventions of others, the demands of others.

When each one of us defines another as a friend or as a priest, we must trust and act according to our (collective) understanding of friend and priest. When one of us acts as if that one were police or physician, we must believe their presentations of self. When one of us says that we are entering holy ground, we must have faith in the holy ground designated. When we get a cue that we can read as a friendly overture, we are right to hope that friendly action will ensue. Belief, trust, faith, and hope are the firm precursors of social reality. Without them, no one is a friend, a wife, president or a priest.

Omnipotence of Role-Others

The social power of the role-set combines with the other sources to bend the knee of the proudest man; to soften the tone of the fiercest warrior; to slow the hand of the most vicious tyrant. We have all seen it at work. Role relations trump socialization; trump personal preferences and trump formal control mechanisms. If we did not respond to the wishes and desires; orders and commands; expectations and obligations of role others, we would not be humans and society would not be possible.

Social Identities Socialization includes the allocation of social identities to each individual permitted to enter the socialization process. At the end of some period of socialization, each person usually in a class with others, are put through a rite of passage which publicly assigns a social identity to those who are judged to be adequately socialized.

These social identities include kinship identity; occupational identity; gender identity; age-grade identity as well as ethnic and national identities. In the identification process, each person is taught that s/she is one of those things; is taught the duties and prerogatives of the identity; is given practice at play and 'for real' in the embodiment of the identity and, then, is put through a rite of passage in which s/he is assigned that identity as a gift of God.

In the everyday business of life, one embodies one or more social identities in every social occasion. There are few moments in the day when one or another of these social identities is not ordering and organizing one's behavior. From morning until night, one is a mother, a wife, a friend, a Catholic, a Brit and a woman. These identities pull one to work beyond one's endurance; to give beyond one's means; to sacrifice beyond one's desire. The social power of these internalized identities become another empirical base for the god concept and for the good work, the liturgy, of the Holy.

Each social identity answers to a social role-set in the larger society. That role-set limits the individuality of the person and expands the nth entity. When one embodies a social identity, one joins with others in a role-set; the role is never a separate, solitary endeavor. It is always a collective, shared entity.

If one does not embody the social identity in ways loosely compatible with the expectations of the associated role, one can be dis-engaged from the social identity by a stripping process. Spouses are divorced; lawyers are disbarred; doctors are de- certified; priests are defrocked and soldiers are demoted. In a mass society, social identities are allocated temporarily and the self structure becomes very unstable. In a capitalist society, the social identity is the property of the owner and, under law, can be allocated and removed without the drama of the Holy involved.

Omnipresence of the Social Self

Social identities are the enduring core of social behavior. Without them, behavior is unstable and uncertain. Without social identities, the looking glass process so vital to self judgment and self control is shattered since there is no internal configuration to recognize and to evaluate. Without the social identity, there is no legitimation for active participation in the construction of any social structure and all become non-persons.

All of these structures converge to justify the reification of the nth entity that premodern knowledge processes interpret as the god concept and which modern knowledge partisans call the superorganic. Postmodern theology interprets such structures as part of the drama of the Holy if and only if they entail a sanctification of nature and others around the person. Essential to the sanctification process is the assignment of divine agency to these structures. That process is one of vivification.

VIVIFICATION OF THE GOD CONCEPT

When we attribute human or animal capacities to a thing, we vivify it. When we look at nature with awe and wonder at her majesty, we have both reified all the components of nature and have deified Her as a wondrous thing. In the same moment, the Deification is vivified: that is, given life and the power to act as a living thing. The process of reification, vivification and deification is readily seen in this excerpt, about nature, from Emily Dickenson:

Dickenson takes the separate elements of a winter storm and treats each element as if it had a separate volition. She then blends them together with all of the other kinds of weather we find to conjure up something called Nature...with a capital 'N.' In this poem, Dickenson gives the snow flake human thought as she vivifies the Wind by giving it the power to complain; the clouds are viewed a mean spirited entities; the snowflake treated as if it could ponder between choices. All of these literary devices are parallel to theogenic contrivances. Dickenson deifies nature by giving her a crown and vivifies 'her' by attributing social or physical power to act as do humans act.

All Human beings vivify social facts. We assign gender to social objects. In Spanish, French, Italian and English, we vivify the objects of everyday use; knives, boats, guns, and pens. We assign willfulness and intention to the same objects. We assign good and evil to any number of practices assigned the opposite meaning in other societies. We assign being and agency to social groups, social cohorts, and social categories. We believe in the malevolence of some ethnic groups and we have pejorative terms with which to desanctify them. We believe in the conspiratorial nature of the capitalist class and we have theories and models to prove it. We believe in the collective psychological character of gender, race or age-grade and we act in the consequence of these vivifications. Indeed, the whole point of such vivification; of the attribution of special living attributes to social collectivities is to justify and to call forth such action.

If one can understand the processes of reification, deification and vivification in a poem or in a group; one is ready to ask the question, Why should ancient men and women reify and deify then vivify their gods? The answer lies, I think, in the facticity of super-individual entity. Durkheim called that entity which was superior but inclusive of the members of a society...the superorganic. I will use that concept and trace its transformation into the concept of God.

Remember I said that sometime we reify falsely? Sometimes we reify truly. A forest is different than the sum of its parts and thus should be treated as a new, transcendent entity. Human beings can be and are more than the sum of all the individuals taken one at a time...that something more is, in the anthropological understanding...that which we call society. When we reify and vivify society, we create our God.

It is the bonding, the social magic of language, the innocent embodiment of an identity and the engagement in a role- set that leads women to tolerate an abusive husband; that keeps children loving and helping abusive parents; that preserves a tyrant far beyond the limits of human endurance. At the same time, this bonding and role engagement gives social power and healing efficacy to the physician; gives compassion and comfort to the pastor; gives authority and attention to the teacher. In the emergence of role-sets and the social occasions which call each role-set forth, we experience the emergent nth entity. When all society is assembled and embodies its collective social power, we are justified in reifying it and, if it demands that we be better than we are, we are justified in deifying it.

Reifications and Deifications of God

Once we have, through a variety of quite ordinary social psychological processes, reified the god concept, it is but an easy step to deify it.  The Deification of the God concept rests, ultimately as Durkheim noted, upon the extensive evidence all about us, of the Super-Organic...i.e., the effects of socialization, of social identities, of social role-sets, of social others and of our vivid memories of these social facts, every day renewed within interactively rich and informationally lucid social encounters.

William Blake gave more thought to the nature of God and to the sources of it than most modern theologians. I will use his treatise on the deification process as a starting place to speak of the deities produced:

The Ancient Poets animated all objects with their genius,
Calling them by lovely names and adorning them with wondrous
property; woods, rivers, streams, mountains, lakes, cities,
nations...whatever their senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied each city and country giving
each a deity appropriate to its nature; 'til a system was
formed...which some took advantage and enslaved the common
man by separating the deity from its object: thus began the
priesthood.

Choosing the forms of worship from poetic tales, And at
length they pronounced that Gods had order'd such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
...Blake

I agree with Blake that the separation of the object of veneration from the lovely names we gave those objects permitted the worshipping the name as a deity apart from society, or nature or nations. Whether we should be worshipping nature or nations in the form of gods is another question but the reification and deification of name apart from the thing is an epistemological act of momentous proportion. Some call it a categorical error; a more friendly reading of the practice would be to call it the drama of the Holy--without prejudice or dismissal. It is as legitimate to create the Holy as it is to create a company, a nation or a gender role. It is part of the social process and needs respect or condemnation as such.

The deification of a god begins when we assign to the nth concept a sense of the holy. In our practice of setting aside some words, some clothing, some utensils, some colors, some foods and drink, some times and some places where only those who worship their god may go and use, we create the drama of the holy.

Justice and Reason

Deification is based upon presumed attributes of the god process that parallel human activity. Four such activities seem central: creativity, intentionality, extensive knowledge collection, storage and retrieval as well as rational judgement with benevolence (or malevolence). Judgment with benevolent response (or malevolent) must be just; i.e., it must be patterned closely enough to conformity to God's wishes to permit reasoning people to see the correspondence and to attribute it to a superorganic entity.

Justice is essential. In some societies, justice takes the form of retribution for failing to abide by God's will. One falls into disfavor or one is beneficiary of favors for compliance to God's Will. In other societies, compassion, mercy, charity, and forgiveness satisfies the concept of just judgment. Whatever the case, there has to be some reasonable connection between the rule and the judgment if justice is to be served.

For dozens of billions of peoples over hundreds of thousands of years to believe in divine agency, more than merely an imperfect justice is necessary. If justice is not reasonable, i.e., if it fails to display a high correspondence between a "blameless and upright" life and good fortune, then one must ask as did Job, why did the Lord God desert him? One does not ask questions of a god; such questions presume that God is dead, mad, or wrong. To be dead is fair; to be mad is a tragedy but to be wrong is an indictment of god's intelligence. Although the Job story appears to explain injustice by a Just God, it ends with God rewarding Job for his unfailing faith in the face of travail.

The question arises, what is the agent of divine judgment. If there is to be some correspondence between the good life and a just reward, what is the agent by which such is bestowed. The short answer is that, given a good life, people remember and in that remembrance, do little things which accumulate to a just reward for the good life. Since there is no one planner or a specific time when such judgments are made, it appears that some larger, transpersonal force rewards. In its more negative moments such general and diffuse response by members translates into conspiracy theory. But no such conspiracy is needed to explain why good things happen to good people or bad things happen to bad people.

What is necessary is an explanation of why bad things happen to good people or, even more outrageous, why good things happen to bad people. The first is easy; bad things happen to good people because no one is perfect and, Job aside, we all know that we have done things which deserve punishment. When it comes along, we suspect the Hand of God. When homosexuals get AIDs, we conclude that AIDs is the instrument of God for behaving in such a way. When good people get AIDs or when 'bad' people do not, then one appeals to a larger, unknown purpose which, if known, would satisfy the need for justice.

When good things happen to bad people, one concludes that it is precisely because they do evil that they prosper but, given the omnipotence of God, there remains the problem of justice. One can then appeal to devils, satans, witches, or demons who have tempted and have seduced some to their evil ways.

Such devices are convenient and, in turn, have empirical bases. When two societies with tribal gods engage in conflict, the god of the other personifies evil. If one tribe triumphs, it is proof presumptive that it has the superior god and if the conquered tribe continues in its own pathways to the Holy which are different from that of the conqueror, it is proof demonstrative that the other gods are still doing mischief. All this becomes more understandable if we appreciate that, what ever sacred supplies one society uses to determine the will of its god: dance, meditation, holy words, the casting of sticks, or the use of psychogens, use the same supplies will be defined as evil, corrupt or a profanation when another society uses them. Evil is intrinsic to the use of sacred supplies in ways other than used by the dominant society.

Creativity of Nature

Creativity is not a great problem either in the social structures above or in nature. Any living person can see creativity all around one; in the long history of one's society; in the short history of living institutions; in the daily life of friends and family, new ways of doing things that are more productive or more efficient testify to social creativity. Every person sees the play of imagination and genius in the lighter moments of play and jest. There is no living human being who has not said or done something absolutely original under the sun.

In nature too, creativity is visible. In the pathway of the lightening, in the course of the rivers, in the aftermath of the flood, in the birthing of all creatures as in reports from distant lands of wonderful fruits and impossible wild things, creativity is experienced. In the snowflake, in the green leaf, in the smallest animal, variation and originality is seen.

The deification of Nature is limited in that, while it displays creativity and an imperfect judgment in natural events (and thus the presumption of intention), still it does not appear to mirror the self-conscious knowledge processes of the acting human being. Floods kill the just and blameless along with the wicked and arrogant. Plague takes the rich and powerful along with the peasant and his kin.

Omniscience of the Generalized Other

Knowledge storage and retrieval are part and parcel of the social process. Solutions to rare occurrences are stored in folktales, plays, children's rhymes and ancient books. Endogamy brings new ways to reap, store and prepare foods in time of drought or famine. Trading offers dozens of libraries for the asking for other ways to rear children, to plant crops, to built a house. In the beads, knots, and marks on clay, the past is stored. In the entrails of chickens, the fall of sticks or the trances of old folk, the future can be read. The pathways to knowledge among the tribes of man are many.

Intentionality in Nature is a more difficult assignment. It is difficult to assign intentionality to natural events since they come and go without heed to the qualities of mercy and justice that should follow the good all the days of their life, Job notwithstanding. Although some see intentionality in the advent of AIDs; innocent children die of AIDs for sins they never made. Early death appears at random among strong men; good women are left destitute by drought as are women who lead more questionable lives.

The researches of Darwin and Wallace brought intentionality cum teleology back into Nature. Both saw an evolution in which those most able to survive the competitive struggles lived to reproduce while the least fit were weeded out. The further interpretation of progress was added to assign a long-term trend toward perfection in biology and in society. Thus Nature tends to weed out those who die and reward those who survive. Tendency becomes divine intendency for many.

Postmodern science questions the tendency toward perfection in either nature or society. For cultural marxists, knowledge mediated by power and privilege serves to reinforce power, privilege and hence, injustice in societies. The primacy of Venice in the 13th century came from naval power not superior social relations. The primacy of Brussels in the 16th century came from economic power, not superior morality. The primacy of England in the 18th century came from the barrel of its sea and land artillery not a superior culture. The primacy of the USA in the 19th and 20th century came from its strategic military and economic position in the world capitalist system as did the primacy of Japan in the last half of the 20th century. Stephen Jay Gould (1989) argues that any number of paths are possible at any stage of evolution and nature is not headed toward one final omega point. Homo sapiens might appear to be the telos of evolution but planaria, cockroaches, sharks, Norwegian rats, coyotes or some other species might have better claim.

It is, I think, on the bases of social power and social justice that the attributes of divinity rest most comfortably; more so than upon natural events or upon organic evolution. I regard it as more than mere coincidence that the attributes that justify deification parallel the moments of praxis set forward by socialists as the desiratum of social power. Markovic, (1974) posits creativity, intentionality, self-determination, rationality and sociality as the interconnected moment (or aspects) of praxis. When the social power of society as a totality; of its included institutions, role-sets and social actors are oriented toward praxis, then social power serves up a pattern of justice that resonates with that assigned to the god concept.

Gods, thus, become omnipresent in the world when we reify them; omnipotent in the world when we vivify them and assign them social power. Gods become divinities and worthy of veneration when social power is used to empower and enable everyone; when each person combines sociality with each act of creativity and rationality. It is justice that fuels our faith in the omniscience of the god concept; which warrants our belief and which motivates our compliance. Injustice fuels resistance and rebellion in everyone who is less patient and confident than was Job.

Just so, the God concept is given great social power since it embodies and signifies the most over-arching of social relationships; that of society collectively and/or society assembled. Just so, the God concept is deified and incorporated in the lived experience of the faithful in so far as society assembled preserves and pursues social justice. Boulding (1989) equates social power with legitimacy, respect, affection, love, community and identity.

God in the World

After the gods are reified as an in Postmodern Theology embodiment of the social power of society assembled...or from the forces of nature; after they are deified as gods-to-worship and to placate, then comes the practice of assigning them power to work in this world. Central to the vivification of god in postmodern theology is recognition of human agency in miracles and magic. It is appropriate to vivify our god concept and give that concept the power to do things in this world if we keep in mind that it is social power that works in this world.

Social power, focused and set inside the realm of the Holy, can heal the 'incurable'. It can undo nations overnight. It can transform the most hardened criminal. Social power, assigned to the god concept, can displace the most cherished practices in marriage, politics or economics. Social power, in a word, can produce changes that are discontinuous from all that has gone before and qualitatively different from that which would occur were it not invoked.

In postmodern theology, the gods are separated from the natural forces they once embodied (lightening, thunder, earthquake, flood and pestilence) and are given the capacity to alter the forces of society and nature on behalf of the tribe; on behalf of the family; on behalf of the believing individual. As belief is wedded to ritual, prayer to the gods come to have the power to do miracles...to do things that would not otherwise happen: feats of healing; feats of strength; feats of understanding; feats of social change.

Earlier, I re-opened the possibility that magic works; that there is a social magic that is not supernatural but does work to affect the ordinary body and social processes that we hold to be in the realm of the technical and the rational. Social magic works well in reproducing existing social relations since those relations have worked to preserve the society in which they are found. I want to say that social magic works best; works more miracles when it is oriented to social justice; that others will put aside old ways of doing things and adopt new ways when they see, clearly, the possibility of social justice.

The drama of the Holy is inextricably bound up with the moments of praxis and the programs of social justice found in a society. The drama of the Holy is a complex theatre in which there is a script attributed to the god concept; there is a suspension of disbelief essential to the moments of highest drama; there are actors who embody their roles with innocence and openness; there is a mutuality of audience in which each actor plays to all others and the play of all other actors confirms individual actors in their roles. Thus the drama of the Holy is a form of theatre which sanctifies all within its boundaries. Just as human beings can produce theatre as sacred, it can also desanctify theatre.