20
Since nature endows the body with vast arsenals for self-defense,
the majority of the Kurumba necromancers' clients recovered.
Occasionally, however, one succumbed.  When a relative died, did the
furious Kota artisan family ask for their money back?  Did they
complain that the sorcery of their jungle neighbors was a fraud?   Far
from it.  The Kurumba 'protector' would be offered sympathy for
having had to grapple with so powerful an adversary.26
The members of the Kota tribe did not know that their Kurumba
spellmakers provided them with about as much protection against the
evil spirits as a K-Mart Superman costume would offer against a drive-
by shooter's bullets.  They clung to the belief in their "medical"
protectors with a passion that went far beyond the borders of reason.
But why?  To the Kota tribesmen illness and death were forces
they could not touch, manipulate, slow down or shoo away.  The
sorcerers sold the notion that through their intercession, mere mortals
could stop the unstoppable, bringing death to heel like a well-trained
dog.  They offered a fantasy that is more important to us than the
reality of our daily bread, an illusion that actually can make the
difference between life and death.  It is the illusion of control.
Control is extremely powerful stuff.  Pioneering anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski, researching the Trobriand Islanders in 1914 to
1918, demonstrated that these South Sea fishermen used ritual to
generate a false sense of mastery when they were about to set out on
deep-sea expeditions--highly unpredictable ventures in which finding
prey was more a matter of luck than skill and the chances of being lost
to storm were great.  On the other hand, the islanders didn't bother
with mumbo jumbo when harvesting sea life in their predictable
lagoons.  Ritual, Malinowski concluded, was a means of creating a false
sense of control when reality was intolerably slippery.  In his 1927 The
Future of An Illusion, Sigmund Freud went a step further and declared
that man will cling to religion's fantasy of control as long as science
fails to give him actual power over his destiny.27
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