    34

    The mammal and reptile brains seemed totally in control of

    Oliver Cromwell's mind.  But eventually those animal puppet-masters

    would prove useful in the service of a meme.

    The times were rife with roiling memes.  The Catholic Church

    had held Europe in a headlock for over a thousand years.  Then in

    1517, a discontented priest in Wittenberg, Germany, had nailed a set of

    complaints to the door of the castle church.  The priest's name was

    Martin Luther.  Luther's protest against ecclesiastical corruption soon

    swelled into a movement.  It was called Protestantism.

    At the heart of the new movement was a meme that accumulated

    human converts at a tumultuous pace.  According to the old ideas of

    the Church, men could reach God only through the intercession of

    Catholicism's priests, bishops and cardinals.  But those who embraced

    the new meme believed that men could find God in a far easier way.

    Printing had recently made the written word available to those who'd

    never had access to it before.  Now the faithful could find the wisdom

    of the Lord by simply flipping open the pages of a Bible.

    One country the new meme soon won over was England.  Well,

    sort of.  King Henry VIII, always on the prowl for a wife who would

    give him a son, had a problem with Church authorities in Rome.  The

    Pope would not issue enough divorces.  And Henry needed lots of

    them.  So, taking matters in hand, in 1533 he used the new Protestant

    movement as an excuse to set up his own church.  Henry hired his

    personal substitute for a Pope (the Archbishop of Canterbury), and

    ensured a source of divorces on demand.  Under the new English

    system, God was still available only through a hierarchy of priests.

    They just happened to be Anglican priests.

    Some Englishmen, infected with Martin Luther's meme, insisted

    on a more direct route to the deity.  They read their Bibles and came up

    with their own ideas of what God might have in mind.  Among those

    Englishmen were the Puritans.  Oliver Cromwell became one of them.

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