Hollowheads
This is said of primitive religions in an old encyclopedia britannica I just stumbled on by accident:
"The inwardness of primitive religion is, however, non-existent for those who observe it as uninitiated strangers; whilst, again, it evaporates as soon as native custom breaks down under pressure of civilization, when only fragments of meaningless superstition survive: wherefore do travesties of primitive religion abound."
When the essence of the thing is lost in Christianity I see only:
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Religions aren’t emptied of their vitality under the pressure of civilization; that’s the harvest—under the pressures and violence of the world as it is, not as it’s dreamt in a contained tribal context without contact with other people. Only those folk religions that express an inchoate knowledge of man’s relationship to others can be said to have anything in them of true religion that’s more than delusion masked as insight, denial masked as peace, helplessness to the passions masked as reverence for their power.