As practiced within modern churches, the laying-on of hands represents yet another variant of prayer; that of the benediction. Within various forms of worship, it is a typical closing prayer offered by the shaman to the supplicants. Its purpose is one of fulfillment to the faithful. It offers assurance that their acts of supplication will be reflected through the benefits of the group going forward. We suggest that in this guise, it forms a complementary response to the metaphorical illustration that we recognized as representative of the World Wide Web in Chapter 10. The benediction symbolized by the ritual laying-of hands makes the statement:

I grant you this.

In both the literal as well as abstract sense, it is the response of the sentinel, or the ultimate source of content behind the sentinel, to the supplicant. Through gesture and speech, generally by the shaman, it forms a conveyance of blessings to the supplicant on behalf of the deity; essentially bestowing on the supplicant the purest form of content within the social ecosystem. The transaction framework of this prayer is bi-directional as well as recursive. The laying-on of hands illustrates the continuity of social order across the full lifetime of the species of modern man. Of course, if the ritual of the hand symbolizes trust and its conveyance, what then of the cut fingers?

In the 1990’s, expeditions lead by Luc-Henri Fage discovered 10,000 year-old painted caves in Indonesia with numerous hand imprints (National Geographic, August 2005). In one of them, Ilas Kenceng, an imprinted hand has cut fingers. Without needing to demonstrate a link, it is interesting to note that not far away, in Irian Jaya, today there live tribes where women still have fingers cut in ritual remembrance of a lost husband or other close relative. A picture of such can be found in Armando Favazza’s Bodies Under Siege, together with a list of recorded rites associating amputations with religious rituals. It seems quite plausible that if the plot represented by the ritual of the hand was trust, then the sub-plot of finger cutting was sacrifice, and 30,000 years ago our forebears performed the play for posterity under the direction of the shaman. The set of that story may have been a cave. The continuity of social order as an integral aspect of the species of modern man would thus be well illustrated. So, we come back to the nexus of computers and social systems.

The continuity that we observe suggests that as members of the species we’re much the same as our forebears who lived long millennia ago. Significant change is found primarily in the manner and content of the provisioning that we incur in our growth from infancy to become fully functional adult members of the species. Our brains are likely the same and our sensori-motor systems are likely the same. Perhaps our diet and daily activity has changed our form and size a bit; a by-product of our need of transcendence. However, we likely differ mostly in the mind that develops within the brain through our provisioning. With continuity in our sensori-motor system, the base metaphors through which we interact with the world around us and on which we base our social orders are much the same. As our tools have changed, we have modified the metaphors to keep pace. In relatively small ways we have altered our social orders. However, the painters of the handprints on the walls of the caves of antiquity would likely fit seamlessly into a NASA spaceship if given the same provisioning as was Neil Armstrong. Trust and authority are still conveyed through variants of the ritual laying-on of hands. Indeed, within a social grouping of the type we label as égalité, the President of the United States assumes office by laying a hand upon a symbol of personal trust and expressing an oath of sacrifice to the basis of trust for the social order. Thus, over the long ages as a species we have merely changed the context.

A transcendent personal device uses its sensori-motor apparatus and reasoning capabilities on behalf of its bearer to effect policy through interactions with other agents within the same trust

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