God

A god is an anima bank that has acquired a will, and the four allocation methods listed are the four ways such a bank has been understood to distribute what it holds. Whim, supplication, deception and justice cover roughly the whole history of religious practice, from propitiation to bargaining to trickster narratives to moral desert, and the definition treats them as variants of one operation rather than as different theologies. Anima banks are repositories containing surplus anima obtained through sacrifice, devotion, offerings or interactions, and Marsh's key observation is that they are created by their use. Gods are anima banks because they are used as anima banks, and as in every endogroup the reflectors create the idol and its attributes rather than discovering them. Her reading of Durkheim runs the same way, since if the totem is at once the symbol of the god and of the society then the god is a bank containing the surplus group anima, and an attack on it is an attack on the nation's life, which is why mass suicides have followed such attacks. The account is not confined to religion. People torment and kill others in the name of meaningless abstract ideas such as Economy, Science or Progress, none of which is capable of endorsing an act, which places the economy in the same category by the same reasoning. Marsh gives the historical order too, since evidence strongly indicates that all early people worshipped a mother goddess, life having emanated from women.

Durkheim's argument that religion is society worshipping itself is the direct ancestor of this reading and Marsh cites him. Feuerbach made the projection argument earlier, that God is human nature externalized, and Marx built on it. The cognitive science of religion accounts for god concepts through agency detection and minimally counterintuitive representations, and Rappaport's work on ritual treats sanctity as underwriting social order. Marsh's version differs by giving the bank a substance. For Durkheim the god represents collective energy symbolically, whereas for her it holds anima literally, which makes the question of whether the god exists less important than the question of what has been deposited in it and who controls the withdrawals.