Chapter 15

Myths, Rituals and the Influence of Tradition

An interpretation of social and cultural structures in terms of morphic fields provides a new way of bridging the gulf between the ‘soft’ and the ‘hard’ sciences. Social and cultural fields are similar in nature to the morphic fields that organize biological and chemical systems, although they are not reducible to these biological and chemical fields. Like the morphic fields of systems at all levels of complexity, social and cultural fields are stabilized by morphic resonance from similar systems in the past, including self-resonance from the systems’ own past.

In this chapter, I consider the nature of myths, rituals, traditions and initiations in the context of morphic resonance.

Myths and origins

Myths are stories of origins. They concern the doings of gods, heroes, and superhuman beings and account for the way things are as they are. ‘They are both explanations and examples: examples in the sense that they are repeatable, and serve as models and justifications for all human actions’ (Mircea Eliade).1 In traditional societies there is no sense of a progressive development: what happens now repeats what happened before, and this repetition always refers to the first time it happened, in the mythic time of origins. This time was in the past, but it is also in some sense present now, because the original patterns are continually repeated.

An anthropologist who lived among the Aranda aborigines of Australia in the 1930s wrote of their myths:

The gurra ancestor hunts, kills, and eats bandicoots; and his sons are always engaged upon the same quest. The witchetty grub men of Lukara spend every day of their lives in digging up grubs from the roots of acacia trees … The ragia (wild plum tree) ancestor lives on the ragia berries which he is continually collecting into a large wooden vessel. The crayfish ancestor is always building fresh weirs across the course of the moving flood of water which he is pursuing; and he is forever engaged in spearing fish. If the myths gathered in the Northern Aranda area are treated collectively, a full and very detailed account will be found of all the occupations which are still practised in Central Australia. In his myths we see the native at his daily task of hunting, fishing, gathering vegetable food, cooking, and fashioning his implements. All occupations originated with the totemic ancestors; and here too the native follows tradition blindly: he clings to the primitive weapons used by his forefathers, and no thought of improving them ever enters his mind.2

This fidelity to the past conceived of as a timeless model is alien to our modern way of thinking. We see the past in terms of stages in a progressive historical process. But in traditional societies all over the world the mythic attitude prevailed. Every technique, rule, and custom was justified by the simple argument that ‘the ancestors taught it to us’. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Mythical history thus presents the paradox of being both disjointed from and conjoined with the present. It is disjointed from it because the original ancestors were of a nature different from contemporary men: they were creators and these are imitators. It is conjoined with it because nothing has been going on since the appearance of the ancestors except events whose recurrence periodically effaces their particularity.3

This sounds like a description of morphic resonance. Patterns of activity are repeated again and again, stabilized by resonance from all similar past patterns, right back to the first time they came into being.

The standard modern attitude is to regard the myths of traditional societies as fanciful stories that are not only untrue but prevent progress. By contrast, it is assumed that modern scientific accounts of the origin of the universe, the evolution of life, and the development of civilization are objective and true. But this attitude is simplistic. The disciplines of science and of history are themselves influenced by the prevailing culture and shaped by the dominant paradigms.4 They involve implicit assumptions that are often deeply habitual. Scientific theories are like myths in that they are mental constructs, ways of making sense of the world; they are also like myths in that they have a social dimension. Scientific paradigms are shared by members of scientific communities, and play a major role in defining the activities of these communities. In the light of formative causation, both myths and scientific paradigms are shaped by morphic fields and maintained by morphic resonance. I return to a discussion of paradigms towards the end of this chapter.

Scientific theories themselves have origins, and they are often associated with stories that sound like myths. Thus, for example, according to Descartes himself his philosophy was inspired by an encounter with the Angel of Truth in a dream; and Newton’s theory of gravitation, the grandest theory of classical physics, is said by popular legend to have come to him under an apple tree when a fruit of the tree fell on his head. Few great innovators’ life stories are devoid of legendary features; some, like Einstein, are widely seen as being endowed with the spirit of genius; others, like Marx, Darwin, and Freud, are often compared to Old Testament prophets.

The main difference between modern theories of progress and traditional myths is that the theories of progress do not refer back to prototypic models in the past, but refer forward to future goals, often envisioned as states of peace, prosperity, brotherhood, and wisdom. These notions of progress have developed within a culture shaped by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the most distinctive feature of this tradition is its myth of history: the idea of historical progress towards an end that in some sense recreates the primal paradise before the Fall. This model of history is itself a morphic field, strongly stabilized by morphic resonance. Western civilization has developed and is still developing within this field; Western science has grown up within it (Chapter 3). Its assumptions have been taken over by secular humanism. To what extent are modern scientific theories of the origin of the universe and of evolution new versions of this traditional Judeo-Christian model of history?

Superficially, there may seem to be no connection between this mythic view of history and the development of science and technology. Science and the accompanying growth of rational understanding are, after all, commonly supposed to have liberated Modern Man from the archaic systems of belief perpetuated by religion. From this point of view, science is altogether different from primitive mythical thought: through a heroic struggle against the forces of priestly prejudice, great men such as Galileo, Newton and Darwin have led humanity out of the darkness of superstition into the light of rational knowledge. This familiar story sounds very like a myth itself.5

The growth of scientific knowledge is assumed to have revealed that all traditional myths are false: at best they have a poetic value. In particular, the biblical story of the creation in the first chapter of the book of Genesis cannot be taken seriously in the light of modern theories of cosmology and evolution. According to this story, in the beginning ‘the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ God first of all created light; then the firmament of heaven; then the earth and the seas; then plants; then the Sun and the Moon; then the creatures of the sea and the birds of the air; then reptiles and mammals on land; and finally the first man and woman.

Instead, according to modern science, what first appeared in the Big Bang was energy. Then as the universe grew light separated from darkness, through the ‘decoupling’ of matter and radiation; galaxies and stars were formed; then the solar system came into being; as the Earth cooled, the seas and the dry land were formed; then life arose in the primeval broth; then plants began to evolve; then animals, first in water and then on dry land; then birds and mammals evolved from reptiles; and finally Homo sapiens arose from ape-like ancestors.

This sequence differs from the ancient story in the book of Genesis in several respects, perhaps the most notable being the creation of the Sun and Moon after the Earth. In the scientific account, of course, the Sun was formed before this planet, or at least about the same time. Most astronomers now believe that the Moon originated later and may have split off from the Earth as a result of a giant impact of a Mars-sized body.6 Another difference is that Genesis places the origin of birds before the origin of reptiles, whereas in evolutionary theory reptiles came before birds.

Nevertheless, the broad outlines of the Genesis myth and the contemporary scientific account have a strong family resemblance. The scientific account is of course far more detailed, and attributes creativity to evolution rather than to God. But as accounts of origins both refer to events that happened before anyone could witness them, and can only be imagined, calculated, inferred, or modelled. They are not statements of observed facts.

The creation theories of science have grown up within the Judeo-Christian cultural matrix, with the paradigmatic story of a beginning and belief in historical progress towards the end of history. The theory of the Big Bang and the modern doctrine of universal evolution bear a striking resemblance to this fundamental myth.

Rituals

A sociological definition of rituals is that they are ‘formal actions following a set pattern which expresses through symbols a public or shared meaning’. A symbol is ‘any gesture, artifact, sign, or concept which stands for, signifies, or expresses something else’.7

All cultures have rituals: the Jewish feast of the Passover, the Christian Mass, and Hindu weddings are religious examples; the state opening of parliament in Britain, and the inauguration of the President of the United States are political rituals; customs such as Guy Fawkes night in England and the Thanksgiving dinner in America are national rituals; and everyday life contains many more or less unconscious ritual elements, such as the conventional forms of greeting and saying goodbye. The word ‘goodbye’ itself, for example, is a form of blessing that persists when its original meaning is largely forgotten: ‘God be with you.’

Many rituals are associated with stories about the act the ritual commemorates: the original passover in Egypt on that dreadful night when the first-born sons of the Egyptians were slain; the last supper of Jesus with his disciples on the eve of his sacrifice on the cross; the foiling of the gunpowder plot of Guy Fawkes; the thanksgiving dinner of the Pilgrim Fathers after their first harvest in the New World. Other rituals, such as those of birth, marriage and death, concern the passage from one state of being to another. All, through their very repetition, in some sense connect the present with the past. We have a need or appetite for a connection with the past that rituals help to satisfy.

Lévi-Strauss summarized the relationship of rituals to time as follows: ‘Thanks to ritual, the “disjointed” past of myth is expressed, on the one hand, through biological and seasonal periodicity and, on the other, through the “conjoined” past, which unites from generation to generation the living and the dead.’8 One example that he used to illustrate these principles concerned the rituals of some Australian tribes, which fall into three categories: rites of control, historical rites, and mourning rites. The rites of control are concerned with the regulation of natural and spiritual phenomena by fixing the quantity of spirit or spirit-substance allowed to emanate from places established by the ancestors within the tribal territory. The annual presentation of the national budget could be seen as a secular reflection of a rite of control.

The commemorative or historical rites recreate the sacred and beneficial atmosphere of mythical times – the ‘dream age’, as the Australians call it – mirroring its protagonists and their great deeds. The mourning rites correspond to an inverse procedure: instead of charging living men with the personification of their remote ancestors, these rites assure the conversion of men who are no longer living men into ancestors. It can thus be seen that the function of the system of ritual is to overcome and integrate three oppositions: that of diachrony and synchrony [i.e. of change across time and of simultaneity]; that of the periodic and non-periodic features which either may exhibit; and, finally within diachrony, that of reversible and irreversible time, for, although present and past are theoretically distinct, the historical rites bring the past into the present and the rites of mourning the present into the past, and the two processes are not equivalent; mythical heroes can truly be said to return, for their only reality lies in their personification; but human beings die for good.9

The effectiveness of rituals is believed in all cultures to depend on their conformity to the patterns handed down by the ancestors. Ritual forms are highly conservative. The gestures and actions should be done in the correct way; ritual forms of language are conserved even when the language is no longer in everyday use: thus the liturgy of the Coptic church is in the otherwise extinct language of ancient Egypt; until the 1960s the Roman Catholic liturgy was in Latin; the brahminic rituals of India are in Sanskrit; and so on.

Why is the effectiveness of rituals so universally believed to depend on their close similarity to the way they have been done before? Why should this similarity of ritual forms in the present to those in the past be regarded as essential to establishing a connection with the ancestors?

Morphic resonance offers a natural answer. Through morphic resonance, rituals do indeed bring the past into the present. The greater the similarity between the ritual now and then, the stronger the connection between past and present participants.10

Initiations

Culturally transmitted behaviour, language, and thought do not by definition arise spontaneously in human beings. They are acquired by imitation. All involve initiation in a broad sense of the word. This is true of the learning of languages, songs, dances, social customs and manners, physical and mental skills, crafts, professions, and so on. Much imitative learning, usually from parents, elders, and teachers, is picked up informally, and is taken for granted. In modern neuroscience it is thought of in terms of mirror neurons, whereby the brain activity of someone watching someone else’s activity shows similar patterns of change, called ‘resonant behaviour.’11 According to the hypothesis of formative causation all such learning is facilitated by morphic resonance, both from those who are directly imitated and from all those who have done the same things before (Chapter 10).

I now consider social and religious initiations, which take place through rituals that both mark and bring about the transition of a person from one social role to another or from one status to another.

Initiation rituals are concerned with the crossing of boundaries such as those between boyhood and manhood or between the unmarried and the married state. From an anthropological point of view, they are rites of passage. So are the rituals associated with birth and death and the crossing of boundaries in space and time, for example from one country to another or from one year to another.

Typically, rites of passage have three phases. In the first, the initial state is stripped away: the state of childhood in rites of maturity, the responsibilities of life in many funeral customs. The individual is separated from his or her initial state and left in transition. This threshold state is characterized by danger and ambiguity, for example symbolized by being blindfolded or removed into the bush or forest far away from normal life, or by undergoing painful trials. A ritual of integration ends this phase and emphasizes the individual’s integration into his or her new state. Such rituals are often similar in different cultures. Washing, head-shaving, circumcision and other bodily mutilations indicate separation, as do the crossing of streams and other obstacles. Anointing, eating, and dressing in new clothes indicate integration.12

Initiation rituals carry individuals across social or religious boundaries, and at the same time they define these boundaries and make them manifest. Thus, for example, the Gisu of Uganda say that they initiate boys to make them into men, so that they do not remain uninitiated boys. The initiation defines the categories it presupposes. Such rituals are not simply a way of marking biological maturity, since they are carried out with boys at different stages of maturity; rather, they are concerned with the crossing of boundaries that are defined culturally.

A frequent theme in many initiation rites is the death of a person’s previous social or religious identity and the birth of the new. The person is ‘born again’ in a new religious or social role.

Various initiatory rituals survive in modern societies, in weddings, for example. Even many seemingly modern practices reflect features of initiation rites: the passing of tests and the awarding of certificates in schools; the gaining of university degrees and graduation ceremonies; inductions into professional bodies; the commissioning of army officers; and so on.

Social roles have norms that are both patterns of expectation and often-repeated patterns of behaviour. The socially expected norm does not necessarily correspond to actual behaviour or simply reflect the most frequent pattern; nevertheless, a relationship between the norm and the behaviour of a person in this social role is maintained by sanctions against deviation from the norm. In the language of sociology, norms are acquired by socialization and by internalization. The latter concept expresses ‘the process by which an individual learns and accepts as binding the social values and norms of conduct relevant to his or her social group or wider society’.13 The ritual initiations of individuals mark transitions into roles that are already established and governed by such norms; a person takes on a role and is shaped by it.

Taking on a new role, often symbolized by putting on new clothes, is to enter a new morphic field. The patterns of behaviour of individuals within social roles are stabilized and maintained by morphic resonance from previous members of the society.

Similarly, in religious initiations, such as the ordination of a Christian priest or a Buddhist monk, a person enters a new way of being, a new norm. His or her development within this morphic field can be thought of as following a chreode, a canalized pathway of change (Fig. 6.2), and in many religious traditions the metaphor of a path or way is common. The founders of the tradition, for example the Buddha or Jesus, established the prototypic paths. The initiate begins to follow this path, which has already been traversed by many people before. Jesus Christ proclaimed that ‘I am the way’, and in the Christian tradition it is believed that Christ is in some sense present in the lives of those who follow him, and that they are helped to follow his path by all those who have followed it before them, referred to in the Apostles’ Creed as the ‘communion of saints’.

The influence of past followers of a path is explicitly recognized in many – perhaps all – religious traditions. On the present hypothesis, the initiate is tuned in by morphic resonance to those who have followed this path before. The use of mantras provides an example of this principle. These sacred words or phrases are transmitted from guru to disciple during initiation rites and in the course of spiritual training. In the words of Lama Anagarica Govinda:

The mantra has power and meaning only for the initiated, i.e., for one who has gone through a particular kind of experience connected with the mantra … However, this experience can only be acquired under guidance of a competent Guru (being the embodiment of a living tradition) and by constant practice. If after such preparation the mantra is used, all the necessary associations and the accumulated forces of previous experiences are aroused in the initiate and produce the atmosphere and power for which the mantra was intended.14

Traditions, schools, styles and influences

Histories of religions, the arts, ideas, and cultural movements abound in concepts of heritage, tradition, and influence. Within broad categories such as the Middle Ages or Romanticism, historians describe the appearance and development of schools, sects, styles, movements, and trace patterns of interconnection and influence between them.

This is too vast an area to be discussed in any detail in this book, but it is worth observing that nested hierarchies of morphic fields makes good sense of many of these phenomena, while the idea of morphic resonance points towards a new understanding of heritages, traditions, and influences.

Religions can be grouped in families, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the religions of the Book, as Muslims call them; the family of religions of Indian origin, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism; the families of religions of Australian aborigines, North American Indians; and so on. The religions in each family share certain fundamental beliefs and attitudes; they participate in a broad morphic field, within which are the fields of specific religions. Within these fields are schools or sects, further subdivided into orders and denominations, each with its own traditions, beliefs and practices, associated with characteristic morphic fields. There are fields within fields within fields. In Christianity, for example, the entire Church is conceived of as an organic whole, ‘the mystical body of Christ which is the blessed company of all faithful people’, as expressed in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. Within the Church as a whole are Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions; and each of these is further differentiated, as for example in the Franciscan and Jesuit orders in the Roman Catholic Church. Characteristically all these orders and subdivisions, while acknowledging the church as a whole, have their own stories of origin centred around their founders – for example St Francis of Assisi for the Franciscans and St Ignatius Loyola for the Jesuits – and so do the various Protestant sects founded by Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley and others. Each order, sect and denomination has its own traditions and its own ways of initiating and incorporating new members. And then each local church has its own collective life and traditions. As new members grow up within them or are converted into them, they enter more or less fully into the spirit of the tradition. From the present point of view, they tune in to the tradition’s morphic fields.

A similar pattern is apparent in broad cultural movements such as the Renaissance and the schools of art and thought that developed within them. Schools of painting, like the Florentine, Venetian, and Flemish, were characterized by styles, artistic forms and atmospheres that enables their productions to be recognized by anyone with sufficient experience. The same can be said of schools of architecture, sculpture, literature, and music. Here is an example from the history of music:

The French violin school, born in the first years of the eighteenth century, originated from the spirit created by Corelli’s sonatas. The French musicians received these works with enthusiasm, but they had already evolved an instrumental style strong enough to receive the new style as an incentive rather than an overwhelming influence. In imitation of the Italian example French composers took to the writing of sonatas, but at first they remained faithful to the spirit of the suite, their early sonatas being rather loosely connected dance pieces with an occasional aria thrown in … The unifying feature of all these forms was the ground design of two animated movements separated by a quiet and restful movement of convincing aesthetic effect.15

Examples of this type could be multiplied indefinitely: there are dozens of them in almost every book on the history of the arts; and many comparable examples can be found in the history of ideas.16 Schools of art and of thought are made up of people who have been incorporated into them, often through a process of apprenticeship or training, and who enter into their spirit.17 The influences of different schools on each other involve an influence – literally, a flowing in – of forms, styles, and spirit. Such transfers between traditions as well as transmission within a tradition are morphic resonances.

This hypothesis also suggests that styles and forms of art are morphic fields expressed in the individual paintings, sonnets, or sonatas. Just as the morphic fields of an animal species are expressed in individual animals, and just as all individuals contribute cumulatively to the fields of the species, so individual works of art have a cumulative influence on the morphic fields of the school.

The notion of morphic resonance helps us to understand the maintenance of forms and styles, the continuity of traditions, and the transmission of influence; but it cannot account for creativity, for the origin of new fields.

The fields of science

The natural sciences all acknowledge common principles and recognize founding fathers like Galileo, Descartes and Newton. They are divided into several broad fields, such as physics, chemistry, geology, and biology, which in turn have developed under the influence of great historical figures, like Linnaeus and Darwin in biology. There are further subdivisions like organic chemistry and botany, and these in turn embrace a range of more specialized disciplines: botany includes plant taxonomy, anatomy, physiology, pathology, biochemistry, genetics, and so on. These in turn are subdivided into specialized subdisciplines: crop physiology, for example, is one branch of plant physiology. Each of these disciplines and subdisciplines has its own history, its own great men and women, whose photographs often look down from the walls of laboratory hallways. Each discipline and subdiscipline has its own textbooks, journals, newsletters, professional societies, and conferences. Science is practised by professional communities that regulate themselves and train those who enter into them. The members of these communities share interests and attitudes, and recognize others within the same field on the basis of their shared training and experience.

In the present context, the fields of science can indeed be seen as fields – morphic fields. On the one hand these embrace the members of the professional community and are social fields that underlie the solidarity and cohesion of the group: they are a kind of conscience collective. On the other hand they order the way in which the subject matter is perceived and categorized, the ways in which problems are tackled, and in general provide the framework for thought and practice within the discipline.

Such morphic fields correspond to what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called paradigms: ‘A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.’18 Kuhn argued that normal science is a cumulative and progressive activity that consists of solving puzzles within the context of a shared paradigm. By contrast, scientific revolutions, which are extraordinary and relatively infrequent, establish a new paradigm or framework. Typically this does not at first make sense to practitioners brought up within the old paradigm; a period of controversy ensues, which ends only when existing professionals have either been converted to the new paradigm or have died off. This new paradigm provides the framework for a further period of normal science.

Kuhn used the word paradigm in two main senses:19

On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community. On the other it denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.20

The first sense of the term paradigm is sociological, and Kuhn suggested as an alternative the term disciplinary matrix; for the second sense, of shared example, he suggested the alternative word exemplar.21 He illuminated both senses of the word by a consideration of the ‘educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice.’22 In part, this involves learning something of the development of the field through textbook accounts:

Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter, or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed … Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made to seem scientific. 23

For this reason the textbooks and the historical traditions have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. As Kuhn pointed out, scientists are not the only group that tends to see its own past developing linearly towards its present vantage point: the temptation to write history backwards is widespread. But scientists do it more than most because in periods of normal science the contemporary position seems so secure. Giving more historical detail about either the present or the past is likely to reveal the role of idiosyncrasy, error, and confusion:

Why dignify what science’s best and most persistent efforts have made it possible to discard? The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts.24

Absorbing this quasi-mythological perspective is only part of the professional initiation of scientists. Much of it consists of learning by doing, involving practice problem-solving with instruments in the laboratory and with pen and paper. As the student progresses from his freshman classes to his doctoral dissertation, the problems assigned to him become more complex and less precedented. But they continue to be modelled closely on previous achievements. These models are paradigms in the sense of exemplars. The student does not learn by verbal means alone; he also acquires a tacit knowledge that comes only through practice. One result of this experience is the ability to perceive similarities between new problems and the familiar exemplars: the student ‘views the situations that confront him as a scientist in the same gestalt as other members of his specialists’ group. For him they are no longer the same situations he had encountered when his training began. He has meanwhile assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing.’25

This acquired way of seeing is not confined to the perception of problems, but applies also to literal sense-perception. A novice looking at photographs of cloud chambers sees only a chaotic assembly of droplets; but a trained particle physicist sees the tracks of electrons, alpha particles, and so on. Likewise a novice looking through a microscope at a slide of plant tissue sees only a confusion of colours, lines, and blobs; but a plant anatomist sees cells of specific types, with nuclei, chloroplasts, and other structures inside them.

An interpretation of paradigms as morphic fields does not merely involve the substitution of one term for another, but helps to place Kuhn’s insights in the wider context of formative causation, both within human cultures and throughout the realm of nature. The stabilization of these fields by morphic resonance helps account for the continuity and conservatism of scientific traditions. As new members are initiated into the professional communities of scientists, through morphic resonance they come under the cumulative influence of other members of the community, going right back to the founders of the tradition, and assimilate the traditional habits.

Once again the appearance of new morphic fields, new paradigms, cannot be explained entirely in terms of what has gone before. New fields start off as insights, intuitive leaps, guesses, hypotheses, or conjectures. They are like mental mutations. New associations or patterns of connection come into being suddenly by a kind of ‘Gestalt switch’. Scientists often speak of ‘scales falling from their eyes’ or of a ‘lightning flash’ that ‘illuminates’ a previously obscure problem, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time enables it to be solved. Sometimes the relevant illumination comes in sleep. Here, for example, is the famous description by the chemist Friedrich von Kekulé of the dream through which he discovered the structure of the benzene ring:

I turned my chair to the fire and dozed … Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke.26

The mathematician Henri Poincaré described the origin of one of his fundamental discoveries, the theory of Fuchsian functions, as follows:

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions … One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions. I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.27

Another great mathematician, Karl Gauss, described how he had finally proved a theorem on which he had worked unsuccessfully for four years:

At last two days ago I succeeded, not by dint of painful effort but so to speak by the grace of God. As a sudden flash of light, the enigma was solved … For my part I am unable to name the nature of the thread which connected what I previously knew with that which made my success possible.28

The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace discovered the principle of natural selection, independently of Darwin, through a sudden illumination while he was suffering from a severe attack of malarial fever in the Dutch East Indies.29 There are many more examples. As Kuhn has expressed it: ‘No ordinary sense of the term “interpretation” fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born.’30

But to describe such creative intuitions is not to explain them. We come back to the mystery of origins.