There is a particular smell I associate with faith – camphor, incense and the smell of melting sugar. This smell is in my childhood memory because of the temple near my house always smelled of sweets. Long before I understood a single doctrine, I understood that. The lamp, the bell, the hush that settles over a room when someone begins to pray. Ritual arrives in the body before it ever arrives in the mind.
I thought about this a great deal while reading The Simplest Guide to Religion: Understanding Humanity’s Search for the Sacred. Tomichan Matheikal has written a book that begins exactly where my own memory begins; not with scripture, not with prophets, but with a human being standing in front of something enormous and unaccountable, and reaching for a way to name it. The sun. The river. The storm that takes the roof off. From there he traces the long, patient road to the religions we recognise today, with their texts and their calendars and their clerical hierarchies.
Across continents and centuries, humanity behaved as though the world could be persuaded, imitated, or manipulated through symbolic action.
This is the realm of magic and ritual, one of the oldest and most fascinating dimensions of religion.
What struck me first is how much reading sits beneath these pages. The research is genuinely, unshowily detailed and Matheikal wears it lightly, which is the harder skill. He is an educator by profession, and it tells in the best possible way: he explains without ever once talking down to you. There is no gatekeeping in his prose, no assumption that you ought to have come prepared. He simply takes your arm and walks.
And I did not expect to be so thoroughly held. A book with simplest in the title had prepared me for something brisk and diagrammatic. Instead I found myself immersed, reading past bedtime, the way I do with novels rather than with non-fiction. That is not a small thing. Most books of ideas ask for your attention. This one earns it.
I should say where I stand, because it shaped how I read. I do believe there is something above us, a presence that steadies you, that shows you the path when you cannot see two steps ahead of yourself. What I have never quite managed is the observance. The fasts, the fixed prayers, the correct way to fold your hands – these have always felt to me like someone else’s grammar for a language I speak differently. So it was oddly moving to watch Matheikal show me where all that grammar came from. The rituals I could never take up were not handed down from the sky. They were added, adapted, argued over, inherited and amended by generation after frightened, hopeful, imaginative generation. Seeing that laid out plainly did not diminish the sacred for me. It separated the reaching from the rulebook, and left the reaching entirely intact.
Read it if you are curious rather than certain. It is a generous, clear-eyed, quietly humane book.
My rating: 4.6/5
I would like to thank the author for a copy of his book.
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