    20

    Since nature endows the body with vast arsenals for self-defense,

    the majority of the Kurumba necromancers' clients recovered.

    Occasionally, however, one succumbed.  When a relative died, did the

    furious Kota artisan family ask for their money back?  Did they

    complain that the sorcery of their jungle neighbors was a fraud?   Far

    from it.  The Kurumba 'protector' would be offered sympathy for

    having had to grapple with so powerful an adversary.26

    The members of the Kota tribe did not know that their Kurumba

    spellmakers provided them with about as much protection against the

    evil spirits as a K-Mart Superman costume would offer against a drive-

    by shooter's bullets.  They clung to the belief in their "medical"

    protectors with a passion that went far beyond the borders of reason.

    But why?  To the Kota tribesmen illness and death were forces

    they could not touch, manipulate, slow down or shoo away.  The

    sorcerers sold the notion that through their intercession, mere mortals

    could stop the unstoppable, bringing death to heel like a well-trained

    dog.  They offered a fantasy that is more important to us than the

    reality of our daily bread, an illusion that actually can make the

    difference between life and death.  It is the illusion of control.

    Control is extremely powerful stuff.  Pioneering anthropologist

    Bronislaw Malinowski, researching the Trobriand Islanders in 1914 to

    1918, demonstrated that these South Sea fishermen used ritual to

    generate a false sense of mastery when they were about to set out on

    deep-sea expeditions--highly unpredictable ventures in which finding

    prey was more a matter of luck than skill and the chances of being lost

    to storm were great.  On the other hand, the islanders didn't bother

    with mumbo jumbo when harvesting sea life in their predictable

    lagoons.  Ritual, Malinowski concluded, was a means of creating a false

    sense of control when reality was intolerably slippery.  In his 1927 The

    Future of An Illusion, Sigmund Freud went a step further and declared

    that man will cling to religion's fantasy of control as long as science

    fails to give him actual power over his destiny.27

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