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    of

    system for predicting heavenly events.  Because the priests could

    foretell a few celestial occurrences, the citizens around them jumped to

    the conclusion that priestly power didn't stop there.  Surely the priests

    must have found a way to peer into the invisible machinery that

    dominates life and death, illness, misfortune, and the luck of the

    triumphant.

    Newton, the Aztec priests, the medieval pope, and the modern

    doctor all gained power through a simple device--by giving the

    impression that they held the levers through which man could

    manipulate an invisible world.

    Our cultures, in fact, are our collective fantasies about the worlds

    we cannot see.  They are tapestries of memes.  If you were a Sioux

    Indian a hundred years ago, you believed that there were spirits who

    manifested themselves in eagles and clouds.59  If you're a modern

    westerner, you know all of this is bunkum.  If you're a traditional New

    Guinean, you believe that ancestors hover around your hut ruling the

    family's affairs like puppetmasters pulling the strings of health, wealth

    and happiness.  If you're a Christian, you feel that aside from an

    occasional ghost haunting a house in Amityville, the ancestors have all

    had the good grace to depart shortly after they died.  On the other

    hand, if you're a Christian, you believe that a man who breathed his

    last on a cross 2,000 years ago was the son of a vast and immortal being

    hovering somewhere above the visible sky, and that someday this

    long-departed soul will return to earth and usher in an entirely new

    order of things. If you're a Buddhist, you know with absolute certainty

    that this is a figment of the Christian's imagination.

    Many of us moderns are convinced that we are above believing

    in unseen forces which quietly shape our destiny.  But are we?  Not

    quite.  Our beliefs in invisible powers mold our behavior as surely as

    the certainty that an ancestor's spirit hovering in the corner of his hut

    influenced the habits of the New Guinean.  You've seen coughing and

    sneezing, but have you ever seen a germ?  Only the caretakers of our

    invisible world have spotted them--the scientists.  Yet many of your

      wisdom made careful astronomical observations and worked out a

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