Prayer

• 1. Introduction

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  Prayer is attested in written sources as early as five thousand years ago. The Kesh temple hymn, composed around the 26th century BC, is liturgy addressed to deities, and so it counts technically as prayer. The Egyptian Pyramid Texts of roughly the same period carry spells and incantations aimed at the gods. From those first inscriptions to a survey released in May 2004, the act has never stopped evolving. That survey, from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, found that in 2002-43 percent of Americans prayed for their own health. So what exactly is a person doing when they pray? Is it a conversation, a bargain, a form of self-analysis, or something that reaches into the fabric of reality itself? And when scientists tried to measure whether it works, what did the records actually show?

• 2. Postures And Gestures

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  Standing, looking up to heaven, with outspread arms and a bare head: that was the early Christian prayer posture. It was the pre-Christian, pagan stance too, except for the bare head, which First Corinthians 11:4 prescribed for males. In Roman paganism the rule ran the other way, and the head had to be covered. The kneeling posture with clasped hands appears only at the beginning of the high medieval period. It was presumably adopted from a gesture of feudal homage.

  Certain Cretan and Cypriote figures of the Late Bronze Age, arms raised, have been read as worshippers. Their posture resembles the crouching flight posture with raised hands, tied to the universal hands up gesture of surrender. Anthropologically, prayer sits close to the ideas of surrender and supplication. In medieval Europe the traditional posture was kneeling or supine with clasped hands, while in antiquity raised hands were more typical.

  Devotional acts spread far beyond posture. Some Christians bow their heads and fold their hands, and some Native Americans regard dancing as a form of prayer. Hindus chant mantras. Jewish prayer may involve swaying back and forth and bowing, and typically Hindus join their palms in pranam. Muslim prayer involves bowing, kneeling, and prostration, while some Sufis whirl. Outward acts can include anointing with oil, ringing a bell, burning incense or paper, lighting candles, facing toward Mecca or the East, and making the sign of the cross. One less noticeable act tied to prayer is fasting.

• 3. Bargains And Spirits

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  Do ut des, the Romans said: I give, so that you may give. Roman prayers and sacrifices were envisioned as legal bargains between deity and worshipper. Cato the Elder's treatise on agriculture preserves many traditional prayers, and in one a farmer addresses the unknown deity of a possibly sacred grove. He sacrifices a pig to placate the god or goddess of the place and to beg permission to cut down some trees.

  Etruscan prayers were still used in the Roman world by augurs and other oracles long after Etruscan had become a dead language. The Carmen Arvale and the Carmen Saliare are two partially preserved specimens that seem to have baffled even their own scribes, their language full of archaisms and difficult passages. These Iron Age traditions, most notably Ancient Greek religion, developed directly out of earlier Bronze Age religions, and Greek religion strongly influenced Roman religion.

  Although prayer in its literal sense is not used in animism, communication with the spirit world is vital to the animist way of life. This is usually done through a shaman who, in a trance, reaches the spirit world and relays the spirits' thoughts to the people. Anthropologists such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Sir James George Frazer argued that prayer, as magical thinking combined with animism, is a human cultural universal present since the emergence of behavioral modernity.

  Vestiges of ancestor worship persist most notably in Japanese Shinto, Vietnamese folk religion, and Chinese folk religion. Shinto prayers often consist of wishes or favors asked of the kami rather than lengthy praises. The practice of votive offering is attested at least since the Bronze Age, and in Shinto it takes the form of a small wooden tablet called an ema.

• 4. Myth And Charm

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  Sigrdrífa, a valkyrie, prays to the gods and the earth after the hero Sigurd wakes her. This Old Norse prayer survives in stanzas 2 and 3 of the poem Sigrdrífumál, compiled in the 13th century Poetic Edda from earlier traditional sources. In chapter 2 of the Völsunga saga, King Rerir prays to Odin for a child. In stanza 9 of Oddrúnargrátr, a prayer goes out to kind wights, Frigg and Freyja, and many gods.

  Haakon Sigurdsson, wishing to turn the tide of the Battle of Hjörungavágr in chapter 21 of Jómsvíkinga saga, finally finds his prayers answered by the goddesses Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr and Irpa. Germanic prayer is reliably attested, yet no actual liturgy survives from the early Roman era period. Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic religions are recorded much later and far more fragmentarily than the religions of classical antiquity, though they show substantial parallels to them.

  Folk religion in the medieval period produced syncretisms between pre-Christian and Christian traditions. The 11th-century Anglo-Saxon charm Æcerbot sought fertility for crops and land, alongside the medical Wið færstice. The 8th-century Wessobrunn Prayer has been proposed as a Christianized pagan prayer, compared to the pagan Völuspá and to the Merseburg Incantations, which were recorded in the 9th or 10th century but carry much older traditional origins.

• 5. Six Ways To Pray

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  Within Christian circles, Friedrich Heiler is frequently referenced for his Typology of Prayer, which lists six types: primitive, ritual, Greek cultural, philosophical, mystical, and prophetic. Some forms require a prior ritual of cleansing or purification, such as ghusl and wudhu. Prayer may occur privately and individually, sometimes called affective prayer, or collectively, led on behalf of fellow believers.

  Direct petition is one shape the act can take, an appeal to a deity to grant one's requests, sometimes called the social approach. Atheist arguments tend to target petitionary prayer in particular. Daniel Dennett argued that it might have the undesirable psychological effect of relieving a person of the need to take active measures. He pointed to Christian Scientists who rely on prayer instead of seeking medical treatment for family members with easily curable conditions that later prove fatal.

  Christopher Hitchens argued in 2012 that praying to an omnipotent, all-knowing god would be presumptuous. Interpreting Ambrose Bierce, he said the man who prays thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, yet also thinks he can instruct god on how to put them right. Against this stands the educational approach, in which prayer is not a conversation but a way to inculcate certain attitudes in the one praying, without trying to influence. Among Jews this was the path of Rabbenu Bachya, Yehuda Halevi, Joseph Albo, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

  Maimonides and the other medieval rationalists took prayer as training to focus on divinity through philosophy and intellectual contemplation. In this rationalist view, praying is a one-way direction to the divine, not a conversation, drawing its spiritual roots from Hellenistic philosophy and particularly Aristotle. Rabbi Steven Weil, appointed the Orthodox Union's Executive-Vice President in 2009, noted that the Latin precari means to beg, while the Hebrew tefilah, with its root pelel, means the act of self-analysis or self-evaluation.

• 6. The Words Of The Faiths

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  Three times a day, observant Jews pray Shacharit, Mincha, and Ma'ariv, with longer services on the Shabbat and Jewish holidays. The siddur is the prayerbook used by Jews worldwide, and Jewish prayer is described through two aspects: kavanah, intention, and keva, the structured ritual elements. Orthodox Judaism treats a quorum of ten adult males, a minyan, as a prerequisite for several communal prayers. Kabbalah uses a series of kavanot, directions of intent, ascribing to prayer the power to affect the very fabric of reality and repair the universe.

  The Lord's Prayer is the most common prayer among Christians, taught by Jesus to his disciples according to gospel accounts such as Matthew 6:9 to 13. In the second century Apostolic Tradition, Hippolytus instructed Christians to pray at seven fixed times, including on rising, at the lighting of the evening lamp, at bedtime, and at midnight. Breviaries such as the Shehimo and Agpeya guide Oriental Orthodox Christians through these seven canonical hours while facing east. The most common closure is Amen, from a Hebrew adverb of affirmation usually translated as so be it.

  Salah is the Arabic word for prayer, and the daily obligatory prayers form the second of the five pillars of Islam. The worshipper faces the Kaaba in Mecca, and the muezzin gives the adhan, the call for prayer. The prayer ends with the words Peace be with you and God's mercy, after which a Muslim may offer personal supplications known as dua. In Mandaeism, daily prayer called brakha is recited three times a day at dawn, noontime, and evening, with Mandaeans standing facing north and not practicing prostration.

  Bahá'u'lláh, the Báb, and Abdu'l-Bahá wrote many prayers, and followers of the Baháʼí Faith must each day recite one of three obligatory prayers composed by Bahá'u'lláh while facing the Qiblih. In the earliest Buddhist tradition, the Theravada, and in the later Zen tradition, prayer plays only an ancillary role, and Buddhists do not pray to a higher deity. Pure Land Buddhism stresses recitation of prayer-like mantras, a practice often called Nembutsu, and Shinran, founder of the tradition most prevalent in the US, held that for the long haul nothing is as efficacious as the Nembutsu. The Ardas of Sikhism, whose beginning was strictly set by the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, is one of the few well-known Sikh prayers not written in its entirety by the Gurus, since it has kept evolving across generations.

• 7. Putting Prayer To The Test

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  In 1872, Francis Galton conducted a famous statistical experiment to see whether prayer had a physical effect on the external environment. He reasoned that if prayer worked, the British Royal family should live longer, since thousands prayed for their wellbeing every Sunday. He compared their longevity with that of the general population and found no difference. The experiment was probably intended to satirize, and it suffered from confounders, but it set a precedent for many contradictory studies to come.

  A double-blind study published in 1988, with about 500 subjects per group, suggested that intercessory prayer by born again Christians had a statistically significant positive effect on a coronary care unit population. Critics contend it carried severe methodological problems and was not fully double-blinded. In a remote retroactive intercessory prayer study in Israel, Leibovici used 3393 patient records from 1990 to 1996 and blindly assigned some to a prayer group, which then showed shorter hospital stays and shorter fevers.

  A 2001 double-blind study at the Mayo Clinic found no significant difference in recovery rates between patients assigned to a prayer group and those who were not. The MANTRA study at Duke University found no differences in the outcome of cardiac procedures. A study in the American Heart Journal in 2006 found that scripted Christian intercessory prayer had no effect on heart surgery patients, while those who knew they were receiving prayer had slightly higher rates of complications. Another 2006 study suggested prayer had a significant negative effect on cardiac bypass patients, with more frequent deaths and slower recovery.

  Some of the intercessors in the American Heart Journal study complained about the scripted prayers imposed on them, saying it was not how they usually pray. Before the study, they reported, they would normally receive a patient's age, gender, and progress reports, converse with family or the patient, use individualized prayers of their own choosing, and pray for a variable time based on the family's request. A 2006 meta-analysis of 14 studies concluded there is no discernable effect, while a 2007 systematic review of intercessory prayer found inconclusive results, noting that the most methodologically rigorous studies failed to produce significant findings.