It’s a rainy Tuesday evening. I’ve just removed the pressure cooker full of thrown-together chicken curry from the heat to initiate a “natural release” and I’m in my kitchen listening to the hiss of the steam powering down.

What a thing to ponder!

Here I am, a primate of the highest order, bringing to bear the full power of culture on the problem of feeding myself something tasty and sustaining on a Tuesday night.

Our forebears had to master fire, metallurgy, agriculture, hunting, animal husbandry, and electricity and untold other magicks to make all of this possible.

It’s a curry that I’m waxing poetic about here…The defining characteristic of a curry is spice. Think of all the madness and upheaval that spice trading has facilitated over the centuries!

What sort it creature am I? My ancestors were slaves and slave owners! Warriors and peasants and priests and shamans and tyrants and laborers!

What sort of creatures were the chickens I’m eating? What was the ancestor of a chicken like when our ancestors were coming down from the trees?

What sort of entities are the sweet potatoes and butternut squashes and onions and garlic and coconuts that went into this curry? What of the rice I’m serving it over? The paddy where it was grown? The people who tended it, harvested it and shipped it across vast and terrible oceans to get it to me?

I’m told Carl Jung believed that one one of the purposes of Religion was to keep people from having religious experiences…

Well I’m here to tell you that trying to eat a pressure-cooked curry on a random Tuesday is no simple task for a man without a Religion.