Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas

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Supernatural Agents

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Supernatural Agents Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas

ilkka P yysiäinen

1 2009

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pyysiäinen, Ilkka. Supernatural agents: why we believe in souls, gods, and buddhas / Ilkka Pyysiäinen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-538002-6 1. Psychology, Religious. 2. Cognitive science. 3. Soul. 4. Buddhas. 5. Gods. I. Title. BL53.P99 2009 202'.1—dc22 2008039709

987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Acknowledgments

I had been working with the idea of this book for a couple of years when Harvey Whitehouse kindly invited me to work as a visiting researcher at the newly founded Center for Anthropology and Mind at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University. I am very grateful for this unique opportunity. It was at Oxford, in the summer of 2007, that the ideas of this book finally began to take shape and different pieces of the puzzle started gradually to find their place. I am also hugely indebted to Justin Barrett, Emma Cohen, Jon Lanman, and Harvey Whitehouse, as well as Pascal Boyer, for help and advice during that summer. The seminars, lectures, and informal discussions we had have been an important source of inspiration. I also want to thank all others who have in many ways helped and inspired this project. This book would never have been written had I not met in March 1995 with Tom Lawson, whose support, advice, and friendship is much appreciated. Bob McCauley helped me and my family move to Oxford. Thanks also to Barbara de Bruine for kind help in many practical matters, as well as to the staff of the Tylor Library. Over the years, I have had numerous enjoyable discussions with István Czachesz, Nicholas Gibson, Jeppe Jensen, Pierre Liénard, Luther Martin, Joel Mort, Tom Ryba, Benson Saler, Jesper Sørensen, and Don Wiebe; I am grateful to them for help, advice, and friendship. This work was begun during my term as an Academy Research Fellow ( project 1111683) at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. I am grateful both to the Academy of Finland that has

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acknowledgments

funded my work and to the Collegium that has provided me with a first-class academic environment for many years. Its past and present directors, Raimo Väyrynen and Juha Sihvola, have supported my work with keen and muchappreciated interest. I also thank the fellows of the Collegium and my colleagues at its administration: Minna Franck, Hanna Pellinen, Marjut Salokannel, Taina Seiro, Iiris Sinervuo, Maria Soukkio, Tuomas Tammilehto, and Aarno Villa. Thanks also to my first teacher of comparative religion, Juha Pentikäinen, who showed me the importance of not forgetting one’s own cultural heritage, in my case the long traditions of Finnish scholarship on folk beliefs. I began the study of religion together with Veikko Anttonen, now the godfather of my daughter Milja. I would not be what I am without his help, support, and always perceptive criticism of my most ambitious speculations. For many years I have also had the pleasure of working closely with Kimmo Ketola and Tom Sjöblom in Helsinki. I could never have done it all alone. I have learned a lot from the members of the governing board of the Mind Forum, a two-year series of multidisciplinary workshops on the study of mind at Helsinki—Riitta Hari, Johannes Lehtonen, Kirsti Lonka, Anssi Peräkylä, Stephan Salenius, Mikko Sams, and Petri Ylikoski—as well as all the participants in our seminars, too numerous to be listed here. Last but by no means least, I thank my students and Ph.D. students who have at times worked very hard in advancing the cognitive science of religion in Finland: Elisa Järnefelt, Kaisa Maria Kouri, Jani Närhi, Outi Pohjanheimo, Mia Rikala, Aku Visala, especially, and many others. Thanks also to such important fellow scholars as Scott Atran, Tamás Bíró, Joseph Bulbulia, Armin Geertz, Harry Halén, Sara Heinämaa, Timo Honkela, Markus Jokela, Jutta Jokiranta, Kai Kaila, Klaus Karttunen, Simo Knuuttila, Hanna Kokko, Teija Kujala, Arto Laitinen, Jason Lavery, Marjaana Lindeman, Dan Lloyd, Petri Luomanen, Brian Malley, Juri Mykkänen, Matti Myllykoski, Markku Niemivirta, Asko Parpola, Anna Rotkirch, J. P. Roos, Heikki Räisänen, Pertti Saariluoma, Risto Saarinen, Mikko Salmela, Stephen Sanderson, Matti Sintonen, Jason Slone, Todd Tremlin, Reijo Työrinoja, Risto Uro, and Ted Vial. The kind of interdisciplinary work that underlies this book would not have been possible without many good contacts across disciplinary boundaries. Finally, I am grateful to Cynthia Read and Oxford University Press for accepting my book for publication. It has been a pleasure to work with Meechal Hoffman, Martha Ramsey, and Mariana Templin. The two anonymous reviewers made some good suggestions for improvements. I am also happy that my family had the wonderful opportunity to enjoy a summer at Oxford with me while I was finishing this book. Thanks for being there, Sari, Miihkali, and Milja!

Preface

A book needs a good title. To the extent that Supernatural Agents fulfills this purpose, it yet is nothing more than just a title. “Supernatural” is here not a technical, explanatory concept and does not necessarily identify any clearly demarcated phenomenon. I only use it as catchy term to refer to the representations of nonhuman agents described and analyzed in this book. These include ghosts and spirits in Finno-Ugric and western European traditions, God within the Christian traditions, and buddhas and bodhisattvas in the Buddhist traditions. My aim is to show that the mental representation of God and of buddhas are made possible by the same mental mechanisms that are used in representing ourselves and our fellow human beings as embodied agents (“souls”). God, buddhas, and human beings are agents in the sense of animated organisms that have a mentality or mind. Agency thus consists of the two properties of animacy ( liveliness, self-propelledness) and mentality (beliefs and desires). Mentality is subjectively experienced as an “I” or a “self” that inhabits the body; usually we do not think of ourselves as simply identical with the material body. I draw from the cognitive science of religion, trying to show how humans are able to represent agency in all its varieties and to draw agentive inferences that feel natural and compelling, irrespective of whether the agent in question can be directly perceived or not. The cognitive science of religion emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in religious studies and in anthropology and psychology of religion. It has by and large focused on producing empirically testable hypotheses about religious phenomena (Lawson and McCauley 1990; Boyer

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1994b, 2001, 2003a; Barrett 2000, 2004a; Pyysiäinen 2001b; Pyysiäinen and Anttonen 2002; Whitehouse 2004; Tremlin 2006; Paiva 2007; Barrett 2007). Not every scholar involved in this project is a natural scientist, and not every project directly aims at empirical testing of theories, however (e.g., Martin 2004a, 2005; Pyysiäinen 2004d; Cohen 2007; Vial 2004; Sørensen 2007). It is equally important to try to apply the findings of cognitive science in attempts at understanding and explaining religion as it is found in archaeological and historical records and documents, doctrinal treatises, archival sources, and ethnographic reports (e.g., Mithen 1998, 2004; Pearson 2002; Luomanen et al. 2007a). This book is an example of this kind of approach to religious materials. The first part of the book consists of an outline of the cognitive structures that make it possible to mentally represent agents and agency; some methodological remarks; and important conceptual clarifications. In the second part, I describe and analyze various kinds of conceptions of souls and spirits in folk traditions, representations of the Christian God in their varieties, and representations of supernatural agents in Buddhism. I try to show that conceptions of souls and supernatural agents are cognitively natural and that even the most abstract theological conceptualizations are elaborations of folk-psychological notions. Analysis develops bottom-up, in the sense that I proceed from spirit beliefs toward more abstract ideas about gods, buddhas, and bodhisattvas. I am well aware that I am comparing traditions many scholars regard as incommensurate: ancient Finno-Ugric conceptions of soul and Scholastic theology, everyday Christian beliefs about God and Buddhist doctrine, and so forth. The received view in anthropology has long been that beliefs and practices receive their meaning in a cultural context and that cultural systems cannot be understood from outside (e.g., Geertz 1973, 1993; cf. Boyer 1994b; D’Andrade 2000). The task of the anthropologist is to “read” particular cultures like texts and to interpret them. My own, essentially comparative project is based on the realization that there are crossculturally recurrent patterns and that cultures do not have any clear boundaries or an essence. As all comparison is always made from some point of view and all similarities and dissimilarities are relative to that point of view, there are many ways of comparing religious beliefs and practices (Boyer 1994b; Lawson 1996). As Tom Lawson (1996) points out, the problem of comparative religion has been precisely the lack of an independent measuring stick that would make comparison possible; here I suggest that a comparative exploration of religious traditions is possible by linking religious concepts and ideas to the human cognitive architecture that channels the cultural spread of ideas and beliefs. This is not to deny cultural or any other differences. To quote the Oxford anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett, “the special function of the comparative method is to testify to a unity in difference, as in this case constituted by the human mind . . . amid an endless diversity of outer circumstance” (Marett 1920, 81). Analyzing crossculturally recurrent patterns is not to deny

preface

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differences in semantic contents but only to recognize important continuities and invariances. It is mostly these continuities that I explore in the pages to follow. This book is intended for various kinds of audiences, and there are thus various ways of reading it. An easy way to grasp the basic ideas will be to read the summaries at the end of each chapter, and then to read the general conclusion; the main text provides detailed justifications for the claims made, based on extensive source materials.


Note on Transliteration

The transliteration of Sanskrit and Pali words has been simplified so that only long vowels (such as ā), palatal ñ, and palatal ś are indicated using diacritical marks, while cerebral (retroflex) consonants and syllabic r, for example, are not indicated.


Contents

Note on Transliteration, xi PART I

Human Agency

1. Religion: Her Ideas of His Ideas of Their Ideas . . . , 3 2. Mind Your Heads, 43 PART II

Supernatural Agency

3. Souls, Ghosts, and Shamans, 57 4. God as Supernatural Agent, 95 5. Buddhist Supernatural Agents, 137 6. Conclusion, 173 Appendix: Cognitive Processes and Explaining Religion, 189 Notes, 211 Sources and Literature, 229 Index, 281


I

Human Agency


1 Religion Her Ideas of His Ideas of Their Ideas . . .

1.1 Epidemiology of Intuitive and Reflective Ideas My aim in this book is to show how knowledge about the cognitive architecture of the human mind can help us understand the nature and spread of beliefs about both human souls and spirits and supernatural agents such as gods. Dan Sperber and others, in developing what they call the epidemiology of representations, have focused on the spread of concepts and beliefs (representations) (1985, 1996, 2006; Claidière and Sperber 2007; Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004).1 Epidemiology studies the ecological patterns of phenomena in populations—in medical epidemiology, pathological diseases; in psychological epidemiology, people’s beliefs and desires. As cultures consist of a differential distribution of representations among individuals, the psychological and the cultural are not so much two different “levels” as measures of the spread of representations (Sperber 2006; see also Pyysiäinen 2005c, in press). Culture thus serves as a kind of “precipitation of cognition and communication in a human population” (Sperber 1996, 97). I will discuss the ontology of the mental and the cultural in section 1.2; here I only wish to emphasize that my analysis by and large focuses on the psychological mechanisms that constrain the spread of concepts of and beliefs about supernatural agents (see Boyer 1994b). Such constraining means that beliefs about supernatural agents are not arbitrarily created in minds. The architecture of mind (see Anderson and Lebiere 2003) instead shapes beliefs, thus creating cross-culturally recurrent patterns. This implies that not all concepts

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and beliefs have an equal potential for becoming widespread. The most successful representations in cultural selection are those that “match” people’s mental architecture, in that an existing “slot ” corresponds to the form of the representation in question. This makes it possible to connect the representation with information stored in one’s mind and to make inferences from it. Representations such as “God is angry” are cognitively cheap, in that it does not take much effort to make inferences from them, because human minds have evolved to make inferences about other agents’ beliefs and desires in particular (see Levinson and Jaisson 2006; Nichols and Stich 2003). “God is the ground of being ” is a cognitively costly representation because it does not immediately trigger any automatic inferential system in a person’s mind; it thus is more difficult to spread. Sperber and Wilson’s (1988) relevance theory yields the following prediction: (a) When the processing costs of two interpretations are equivalent, an inferentially richer interpretation is favored ( b) When the inferential potential is the same, the less costly interpretation is favored (Boyer 2003c, 352) This means that cognitively costly representations are at a disadvantage in cultural selection: they are either ignored or transformed into simpler forms (Sperber 1996). To use Barrett ’s (1998, 611) example, “A cat that can never die, has wings, is made of steel, experiences time backwards, lives underwater, and speaks Russian” is a representation that cannot survive in oral transmission without being distorted (see also Ward 1994). After a few retellings, a story about this cat might be transformed into a story about an immortal cat, for example. Memorizing the whole list of the cat ’s properties puts a heavy load on working memory and thus leads to a simplification of the representation. It also is not possible to memorize the representation of the bizarre cat as an entity that belongs to some familiar category and then to deduce the various properties of the cat one by one on the basis of this category membership (see Boyer 2001; Sperber 2000b). There simply is no natural cognitive category corresponding to this cat. This argument only holds for orally transmitted representations. For example, even though I had forgotten Barrett ’s exact characterization of the imaginary cat, I was able to check the list of the attributes in the journal article where this bizarre feline lives just as Barrett once imagined it. Or not quite so, because it is only the marks in ink that are preserved unchanged; the mental representations these marks trigger in readers’ minds vary. We all imagine the cat slightly differently. Verbal communication is not a process of copying ideas from one mind to another, as it were. Instead, it is based on an active construction on the part of the reader or listener (Sperber 2000b; Sperber and Wilson 1988). Extremely complicated ideas (or instead their material tokens) can be stored in books and on computers, but they are part of culture only insofar as

religion: her ideas of his ideas of their ideas . . .

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they are part of cognitive causal chains connecting material causal processes such as visual perception with semantic contents (Sperber 2006, 153 –61). In other words, ideas in books are part of culture only on the condition that there are persons who read the books and thus represent the ideas in their minds. This challenges the traditional view of “world religions” and “religions of the book ” as abstract entities that resemble Plato’s “ideas” (see chapter 2, section 3). “Hinduism,” “Buddhism,” “Christianity,” or “Islam” do not exist somewhere outside of human minds which supposedly can only imperfectly reflect the “true Hinduism,” “true Buddhism,” and so forth. Individuals can of course have ideas about “true Hinduism,” but they are ideas in minds, not abstract extramental entities. Several persons can also have “shared” ideas of a “true religion,” in that their ideas more or less resemble each other, but not in the sense of many minds somehow partaking in one and the same extramental idea (chapter 2, section 1). Naturally, persons can also have radically idiosyncratic (“heretic”) religious ideas. Psychologist Justin Barrett (1999) coined the expression “theological correctness” ( TC) to refer to a continuum the endpoints of which consist of intuitive ideas easy to process in fast “on-line” reasoning and highly reflective ideas that are cognitively costly and need institutional support (Barrett 1998; Barrett and Keil 1996; Tremlin 2006, 75). While our everyday intuitions about religious concepts occupy the first end, the other end is typified by theological and scientific ideas. As theology is normative, it is easy to understand TC as referring to something that persons should believe although they do not (Slone 2004). However, this may be misleading because “heresies” are not necessarily cognitively cheap and all officially accepted ideas are not necessarily cognitively costly. Instead, I conceptualize the TC continuum on the basis of the nature and amount of cognitive effort involved, without implying anything about the normativeness of the ideas in question. It is here that the discussion gets complicated; I present the more technical details in the appendix. I have used the so-called dual-process theories to develop conceptual tools for describing the continuum of TC more broadly, on the basis of cognitive effort involved, not on the basis of correctness versus incorrectness. By so doing, I aim to accomplish two things: first, to provide a richer and more adequate description of the representation of supernatural agency in the traditions analyzed, and second, to be able to explain why and how everyday concepts of supernatural agents develop to more reflective ones. My analysis is cognitive, not historical. I try to show what kinds of cognitive resources are needed for mentally representing supernatural agents and how humans’ mental architecture channels the conceptual evolution of representations of supernatural agency. I focus on certain conceptual problems that emerge in religious thinking about supernatural agents and try to show how the ways these problems have been treated can be explained with reference to humans’ mental architecture.

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human agency

All thinking naturally takes place in time and in social and cultural situations. I have chosen to focus on the cognitive features of agent representation and have kept references to sociocultural environments to a minimum. I do so not because cognition is somehow more important or essential but because a single volume cannot address both. I focus my analysis on an interesting and important part of what is going on in social and cultural reality. Sociality refers to systems of more than one individual. Cognition is the link that connects individuals in a social system and makes culture possible by stabilizing information in interpersonal communication (see Jaisson 2006; Sperber 2006). The human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others and to think what others might be thinking about is a cognitive capacity. Thus, although I focus on the cognitive aspects of religious traditions, I also suggest some ways for analyzing the noncognitive components of cognitive causal chains could complete the analysis (see Sperber 2006, 161 –62). To briefly summarize the argument in the appendix: humans use two different reasoning strategies that have been variously labeled intuitive and reflective, spontaneous and rational, and so forth. If we want to avoid misleading connotations, we can just speak of the A- and B-systems (Pyysiäinen 2004c) or systems 1 and 2 (Stanovich and West 2000). These systems can be differentiated on the basis of the neural processes involved, the cognitive mechanisms involved, and the kinds of contents processed. When cognitive scientists of religion speak of “intuitions,” they mean certain kinds of basic concepts and beliefs, usually without specifying the mechanisms that support them and help differentiate them from nonintuitive ones (Barrett 2000, 2004b; Boyer 1994b, 2001, 2003b; Pyysiäinen 2001b; cf. Sperber 1997). One exception to this is Tremlin, who discusses dual-process theories at some length (2006, 172–82). Social psychologists have long known that humans seem to have two different reasoning strategies they apply in differing kinds of reasoning tasks, and neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have made progress in differentiating between two types of neurocognitive mechanisms supporting these strategies. However, the kinds of phenomena that are typically studied within the social sciences often involve both automatic and controlled processes (Bargh 1994, 3). Thus, real-life religious concepts (as distinct from imaginary examples) can hardly be completely intuitive or reflective. Instead, each type of process makes a differential contribution to the cognitive processing of particular religious concepts in particular contexts. The two strategies can be roughly distinguished by such criteria as speed, amount of emotion involved, type of motivation, type of information consulted, form of reasoning employed, and amount of “extracranial” scaffolding needed (see chapter 2, section 2.1). The intuitive A–system is responsible for fast, associative, and emotionally colored thinking with purely practical goals, using innate information and information derived from the environment through analogical reasoning. It operates reflexively, not reflectively, drawing inferences


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and making predictions on the basis of temporal relations and similarity. It employs knowledge derived from personal experience, concrete and generic concepts, images, stereotypes, feature sets, and associative relations, relying on similarity-based generalization and automatic processing. It serves such cognitive functions as intuition, fantasy, creativity, imagination, visual recognition, and associative memory. Some authors also argue that it is a subsymbolic pattern-recognition system that relies on connectionist, parallel distributed processing. The A-system thus supports what is often called “everyday thinking,” which, in contrast to reflective or scientific thinking, proceeds from the immediate experience of individuals; aims at short-term, practical efficacy, not at creating general theories; seeks evidence and not counterevidence; makes use of individual cases as evidence; personalizes values and ideals; makes use of abductive inference; and presents arguments in the form of narratives (Denes-Raj and Epstein 1994; Epstein 1990; Epstein and Pacini 1999; Epstein et al. 1992). The reflective B-system serves such cognitive functions as deliberation, explanation, formal analysis, and verification. It seeks logical, hierarchical, and causal-mechanical structure in its environment, using information from language, culture, and formal systems. It is a rule-based system capable of encoding any information with a well-specified formal structure and relies heavily on external memory stores such as books and pictorial representations. It thus seems to work by computing digital information syntactically in some kind of “language of thought ” (Fodor 1975; Paivio 1986; cf. Fodor 2000a). Highly reflective B-system reasoning leans on rules, conventions, and databases that often take time to learn and master. As it is not possible to hold all relevant knowledge in mind and to consult it while performing mental operations, external memory stores and “scaffolding ” are needed (Clark 1997). Thus, the nature and amount of empirical information and institutional support available to a person also has an effect on her or his reasoning strategy (see Giere 2004; Giere and Moffatt 2003; see also chapter 2, section 2.1 here). Although individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas and to engage in various forms of reasoning (Neisser et al. 1996; see also Miller and Penke 2007), the distinction between intuitive and reflective reasoning does not reduce to a difference in intelligence or between types of minds; it is instead a difference in contexts and motivations (see Pyysiäinen 2004c). Reflective reasoning is used in different kinds of context and for different purposes from intuitive reasoning. There thus seem to be two different cognitive strategies based on different kinds of cognitive mechanisms with a more or less distinct neural realization. Reasoning about supernatural agents can be more or less intuitive or reflective, not simply intuitive or reflective. The two systems can contribute in differing degrees to inferences made. The relative cheapness or costliness of mental representations thus is based on the relative amount of reflective (B-system)

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versus intuitive (A-system) processing. Consequently, representations are more or less cheap or costly in terms of the cognitive resources needed, although no simple way of quantifying cognitive costliness seems to be available ( but see Barrett 2008; Sperber 2005). I use the term “costliness” in opposition to the term “relevant ” (Sperber and Wilson 1988): processing a costly concept or belief spends so much of one’s cognitive resources that persons are more or less likely to interrupt the processing and try to find alternative means of achieving the same benefits with a lower cost. As such, cognitive costliness is a relative and not an absolute measure. I substitute the more widely studied distinction between intuitive and reflective thinking for the more narrow idea of TC. When I want to emphasize that certain religious ideas are officially accepted doctrines, I speak of “prescribed” ideas, not of “theologically correct ” ideas, in order to avoid confusion. I do not mean that it is a defining characteristic of either prescribed or costly ideas that people do not really “believe” in them (cf. Slone 2004). I mean that the functions of costly ideas are different from those of more intuitive representations (see Pyysiäinen 2004c). When we study real-life religious traditions, we meet a whole spectrum of representations from intuitive and idiosyncratic to prescribed and costly. We encounter the former ones especially in interview materials and experimental data and the latter ones in theological treatises especially (see also Wiebe 1991). The challenging task of a scholar of religion is to somehow relate the two to each other. Historically, the costly prescribed ideas seem to develop on the basis of more intuitive ones (Pyysiäinen 1997, 2004d). When “theologians” (as they might be called—of whatever tradition) try to solve problems of coherence and consistency, they develop ever more abstract systems with no empirical constraints. As the price of the apparently increasing rationality of beliefs, it becomes increasingly difficult to make folk-psychologically relevant inferences from theological concepts (Boyer 2001, 320 –22). In my effort to describe the human cognitive structure that affects some of the ways this development unfolds, I will focus on everyday conceptions of souls and spirits, “Christian” conceptions of God, and “Buddhist ” conceptions of supernatural agents. My aim is to show that the concept of agency is the key to understanding the role of representations of supernatural beings in human social systems. This means, for one thing, a rethinking of the old dichotomy between “Tylorianism” and “Durkheimianism” in anthropology of religion.

1.2 Strange Bedfellows: Tylor and Durkheim Viewing religion as a system of beliefs and practices related to gods and other supernatural beings is currently not, perhaps, the most popular way of understanding religion. It is often argued that such an approach to religion is


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mistaken, ethnocentric, and obsolete. After all the linguistic, rhetorical, and whatever “turns” the social sciences have gone through, it may seem foolhardy even to try to revive such an old-fashioned view of religion. The supposed antagonism between the (neo-)Tylorian emphasis on spirit beliefs and the Durkheimian emphasis on social functions continues to be an important dividing line in the study of religion (see Pyysiäinen 2001b, 25– 76; Stocking 1995; Strathern and Stewart 2007). Philosopher Michael Levine (1998, 37) has said: “given the dominant view in religious studies which sees religion as a cultural system (Geertz 1973), it is a mistake to see gods as essential—even when present in a system.” Nonetheless, beliefs about souls, spirits, ghosts, gods and demons are found everywhere and seem to form a recurrent pattern within and across cultures, quite irrespective of what philosophers and theologians happen to consider important. Whether my colleagues regard belief in supernatural agency as part of (true) “religion” or not, I argue that beliefs about supernatural agents form a widespread phenomenon that can and should be studied as an integral part of folk traditions (see Lawson and McCauley 1990; McCauley and Lawson 2002, 13–16; see also Boyer 1994b, 19–34; Pyysiäinen 2001b, 1–5; Spiro 1968). While Tylor emphasizes the content of religious beliefs ( belief in spirits), Durkheim argues that it is the functions of beliefs that should define religion. Underlying the Durkheimian view is the often implicit view that, although religious beliefs may testify to the “rich tapestry of human folly” (Boyer 2001, 2), they are promulgated primarily to serve some important function in society. But even if that is granted, it hardly means there cannot be additional reasons for the persistence of religion (Hinde 1999). Even within the functionalist frame of reference, we can still ask why precisely certain kinds of belief serve a given function. Content and function may not have an arbitrary relationship, and “Tylorianism” and “Durkheimianism” need not be regarded as mutually exclusive (see Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007). I argue that religious beliefs can function in societies the way they do because “the social” is based on the notion of agency (section 1.5.1 here). Tylor (1903, 1:424–25), the first to lecture in anthropology at Oxford (beginning in 1893), found religion in adoration of idols, sacrifice, or belief in a supreme deity. For him, the minimum definition of religion was belief in spiritual beings. Such belief seemed to appear among all “low races” of which there was any evidence available. Although it was possible that humans had lacked religion at some point in evolution, no evidence of this had survived. Thus, it was better to admit that there was no way of deciding either way. Tylor (1:425–27) called belief in spirits “animism”—a term he adopted from Georg Stahl (1659–1734), who regarded animism as a scientific version of the idea of the soul as the vital principle.2 Animism included two ideas that together formed “one consistent doctrine”: first, individuals had souls capable of continued existence after death, and second, spirits formed a hierarchy of spiritual

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beings that were in control of events in the material world and human life both here and hereafter. This doctrine led to the observed attitudes of reverence and propitiation. Simple animism characterized tribes “very low in the scale of humanity” but ascended to and persisted in “the midst of high modern culture,” in a deeply modified form but with unbroken continuity (see also Radin 1957, 192–253). Spirit beliefs originated in the attempts of “primitive man” to explain two things: what made the difference between a living and a dead body,3 and what were the “human shapes” that appeared in dreams and visions? The “ancient savage philosophers” inferred that every man had a life and a phantom. Both were closely connected with the body: the life enabled the body to feel, think, and act; the phantom was a representation of the live body in the mind. Both could also be separated from the body. From this, the primitives concluded that life and body belonged to each other, being manifestations of a single soul. As they were thus united, the result was the idea of a ghost-soul that could animate any physical form ( Tylor 1903, 1:428–29). The conception of a human soul thus served as a model on which humans framed ideas of all kinds of spiritual beings, “from tiniest elf that sports in the long grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the Great Spirit ” (2:110). Tylor emphasized that the natives of Australia, for example, were “a race with minds saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities.” The same held for African and American natives: despite the lack of organized religion, these peoples had beliefs about supernatural beings. Tylor (1903, 1:423) therefore reproached Sir Samuel Baker for having ignored published evidence when he argued at the Ethnological Society of London in 1866 that the most northern tribes of the White Nile were without a belief in a Supreme Being, had no worship, and lacked “even a ray of superstition.”4 Likewise, J. D. Lang had denied the existence of any religion among the aboriginals of Australia but reported them to have beliefs about evil spirits as well as of divinities. In the same vein, W. Ridley had reported that the aboriginals of Australia had traditions about supernatural beings but denied true religion to them ( Tylor 1903, 1:418–19). Tylor ’s basic idea was that all spirit beliefs and their related practices hid some real meaning, no matter how “crude and childish”; the explanation was that a reasonable thought had once given life to practices that now looked like “superstitious folly.” Even Christianity was somehow related to ideas that ran back to the very origins of human civilization (1:421). “Civilized men,” however, found it extremely difficult to animate nature. Such beliefs were only “survivals” from the dawn of humanity. This idea of survivals was related to Tylor ’s erroneous conception that some peoples had a longer evolutionary history than others and thus were “more evolved” or more advanced. We realize today that it makes no sense in evolutionary terms to imply that some peoples have traveled faster in evolution; evolution has no predetermined general goal, and many cultural


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developments are merely constrained by biology, not directly driven by it (see Korthof 2004; Richerson and Boyd 2005). By survivals, Tylor meant old customs and beliefs that survived in later stages of cultural development because of mere ancestral authority (1903, 1:70 – 71). Superstitions, for example, were survivals, though not all survivals were superstitions (children’s games, for example). This idea only makes sense against the backdrop of Tylor ’s and others’ ideas of the time about a hierarchical scala naturae and a predetermined progress toward what was considered to be higher forms of culture. To be a survival, it was not enough for an idea or a practice to be old; it had to be somehow misplaced in its current context. For Tylor, a sure sign of such misplacement was that the survival seemed somehow foolish or erroneous by his lights; it had been rational in its original context but had become obsolete in the modern context because of cultural progress. Such an idea of a unilinear religious development has nothing to do with the biological theory of evolution, however. When Tylor (1:vii) gave formal credit to Darwin and Spencer, granting that his own work was arranged on its own lines and came scarcely into any detailed contact with the work of “these eminent philosophers,” he had in mind Spencer ’s social Darwinism more than the evolutionary theory of natural selection operating on random variation (see Sharpe 1975, 53–58). Durkheim’s view of religion has often been regarded as a welcome alternative to Tylor ’s (see Anttonen 1992, 1996a,b; Douglas 1970, 1984; Stocking 1995, 82–83, 97–98, 162 –63, 361). Although Durkheim also was interested in the most primitive form of religion, he focused more on structure than on development. Notwithstanding some recent claims to the contrary, he was negative about the evolutionary theory of his time because it seemed to threaten the autonomy of his new discipline of sociology (see Gans 2000; Schmaus 2003).5 Durkheim’s Les règles de la méthode sociologique was a polemical text; even he himself did not follow too strictly its principle of explaining “the social” only by the social (as opposed to the psychological). In Le suicide, for example, the social consists of mental representations, and psychological arguments are even more prominent in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Lukes 1977, 227–28; Pyysiäinen 2001b, 63– 70, 2005d).6 Durkheim’s basic idea was that religion should be defined only as a symbolic expression of the reverence persons had toward the group ( la société ). Although science could help reveal the psychological mechanisms behind apparently meaningless ritual acts, this was not an explanation of the ritual. Only the participants’ belief in the power of the ritual to raise spiritual forces could be psychologically explained; the objective value of the ritual was based on the fact that the group was regenerated by it. This fact called for a sociological explanation (1925, 496–97, 1965, 389–90). Whether supernatural agents were involved or not was quite inconsequential; actually, the primitives did not even have the idea of the supernatural—because they had no idea of the natural

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(1925, 34, 118–22, 1965, 39–40; cf. Arbman 1939, 27). I have elsewhere tried to show in detail that here Durkheim errs: all people all over the world have intuitive expectations about the ordinary course of events, together with ideas that violate these intuitive expectations (Geary 2005; Pyysiäinen 2001b, 55– 74, 2004d, 39–52, 81–89, 2005d). Moreover, the “regeneration” of the group is a cognitive act, consisting of persons’ mental representations of other persons’ mental representations; what he called “collective consciousness” thus is shared knowledge and can be studied from the cognitive psychological perspective (see Pyysiäinen 2005f ). Belief in supernatural agents forms an obvious recurrent pattern in various cultural traditions. As some of these beliefs help people express, process, and justify their central values and norms, we can try to combine the Tylorian and Durkheimian legacies in explaining how beliefs about supernatural agents are used in organizing a society (see Boyer 2000b, 2002; Pyysiäinen 2005f ). Typical examples of supernatural agents are gods, spirits, ghosts, angels, demons, and so forth. The category of supernatural agents may seem so heterogeneous that one may well ask whether it is a genuine category at all. Some might want to claim that it is a pseudocategory just like “mysticism,” “ritual,” or even “religion” itself (see, e.g., Fitzgerald 1996, 1997; Penner 1983). I think this view is overly pessimistic. If we can find some theoretical depth to the ideas of agency and counterintuitiveness, the idea of supernatural agents might be operationalized for research. We need a theoretical frame of reference in which the various emic distinctions between different kinds of supernatural agents are seen as subdivisions within the general, etic category of supernatural agency. Using concepts at a mediating level between cultural particulars and the general category of supernatural agents, we may then conceptualize the various recurrent patterns within that category.

1.3 There Must Be Somebody Out There I use quite consciously the expression “supernatural agents” instead of “supernatural beings.” By agents, psychologists and philosophers mean organisms whose behavior can be successfully predicted by postulating conscious beliefs and desires (Dennett 1993, 15–17) or entities whose behavior is caused by their mental states (Bechtel 2008, xii). I use the concept in the sense of an organism to which animacy (liveliness, self-propelledness) and mentality (beliefs and desires) are (correctly or incorrectly) attributed. I follow Barrett (2008) in distinguishing between two components of agency: animacy and mentality. The domain of animacy is characterized by such things as self-propelledness and goal-orientation: organisms tacitly postulate animacy for other organisms when they feel that those organisms move by themselves and seem to be moving toward some goal (see Boyer and


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Barrett 2005). When one also attributes to the organism a conscious intention and begins to simulate its mental states or to try to theorize about its beliefs and desires, one moves on to “mentalizing ” or “mind reading ” (Nichols and Stich 2003). This ability is often called a “theory of mind” (ToM), in the sense of folk-psychological theories about other minds (Carruthers and Smith 1996).7 I distinguish three overlapping cognitive mechanisms that contribute to agentive reasoning. The first is hyperactive agent detection (HAD, Barrett 2000): the tendency to postulate animacy—this mechanism is triggered by cues that are so minimal that it often produces false positives, for example, we see faces in the clouds, mistake shadows for persons, and so forth. Second is hyperactive understanding of intentionality (HUI): the tendency to postulate mentality and to see events as intentionally caused even in the absence of a visible agent. Third is hyperactive teleofunctional reasoning (HTR): the tendency to see objects as existing for a purpose.

1.3.1 Agency Barrett (2000) coined the acronym HADD ( hyperactive agent detection device) to refer to the cognitive processes that help us recognize agents (actually, animacy) and distinguish them from nonagents. This mental “device” is hyperactive or hypersensitive, in that under certain conditions, it is triggered by very minimal cues.8 We see faces in the clouds and detect predators in rustling bushes because such ambiguous perceptions easily trigger the postulation of agency. According to Barrett, a normally functioning HADD is hyperactive by its very nature—hyperactivity is not something exceptional. From an evolutionary point of view, this is plausible, insofar as the costs of false positives that an overreacting detector produces are lower than the benefits it brings (Atran 2006). The following most common direct cues for agency have been suggested (Blakemoore et al. 2003; Boyer and Barrett 2005; see Heider and Simmel 1944): 1. Animate motion that has as its input such things as nonlinear changes in direction, sudden acceleration without collision, and change of physical shape that accompanies motion (e.g., caterpillar-like crawling) 2. An object reacting at a distance 3. Trajectories that only make sense if the moving entity is trying to reach or avoid something, which leads to goal-ascription 4. An entity appearing to be moving by conscious intention to an apparent end result (intention-ascription) 5. The experience of joint attention (for which we develop a capacity between nine and twelve months of age) These cues trigger the feeling or intuition of agency spontaneously and automatically, in the sense that this intuition can neither be rationally controlled nor initiated or terminated at will (see Bargh 1994; Pyysiäinen 2004c; see

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the appendix). However, I suggest that the first three cues only trigger animacy assumptions, while the latter two trigger HUI. It may also be misleading to call HADD a (single) “device,” as several systems contribute to the perception that one is facing an agent (see Boyer and Barrett 2005). Once people start reasoning about the beliefs and desires of a postulated agent, they use mind reading: the capacity to make inferences about the beliefs and desires of others and to explain their behavior on that basis (see Carruthers and Smith 1996; Frith and Frith 2005; Nichols and Stich 2003; Premack and Woodruff 1978; Saxe and Baron-Cohen 2006; Tomasello et al. 2005; Tremlin 2006, 75). Mind reading is often understood to be innate—not a learned ability but rather something triggered in the course of normal development (Leslie 1996; Wellman and Miller 2006, 28). It has been seen as an innate modular algorithm, (e.g. Leslie), as an innate body of knowledge (e.g. Pinker and Sperber), and as modular in all three senses of the concept of a “module” (Baron-Cohen) discussed in the appendix (see Gerrans 2002, 308). It can also be understood to be based on a nonmodular conceptual competence ( Wellman et al. 2001; see Yazdi et al. 2006). The standard psychological test for ToM is the so-called false belief task ( Wimmer and Perner 1983). In this test, children are shown a sketch in which a boy called Maxi first puts a chocolate bar in container A. Then, without Maxi’s knowing, his mother moves it to container B. The subjects are then asked where Maxi would look for the chocolate bar when he returns. Children around three years of age tend to say (incorrectly) that Maxi would look in container B (where the bar was hidden). Only in the fourth year does the tendency appear to say that Maxi would look in container A. It thus seems that younger children cannot understand that Maxi remains ignorant of his mother hiding the bar in container B. These results have been obtained in many replications of the experiment and across many variations of the original design. Scholarly opinions differ on what these results really tell about the ways children think (see Baron-Cohen 2000; Baron-Cohen et al. 1985; Fodor 1992; Perner 1995; Wimmer and Perner 1983).9 Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith (1985) used the same task to test autistic children’ ability to impute mental states to others. They tested twenty autistic children, fourteen children with Down syndrome, and twentyseven clinically normal preschool children. Two dolls were used, Sally and Anne. First, Sally placed a marble in her basket, and then left the scene. Anne then transferred the marble into her own box. When Sally returned, the experimenter asked: “Where will Sally look for her marble?” Children with Down syndrome as well as normal preschool children answered correctly by pointing to the basket where Sally had put the marble. The autistic group consistently answered by pointing to the box where the marble really was; the autistic children did not seem to get the difference between their own and the doll’s knowledge. In the authors’ words, they “failed to employ a ToM”—a failure


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consisting of an “inability to represent mental states” (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985, 43). Autism thus might seem to involve a lack of a ToM. The inability to make inferences about what other people believe to be the case in a given situation prevents one from predicting what they will do (Baron-Cohen 2000; BaronCohen et al. 1985, 39; see Carruthers and Smith 1996, 223– 73; Frith 2001). However, failure in the test does not necessarily indicate a lack of a ToM, because having a ToM does not necessarily require the ability to reason about false beliefs (Bloom and German 2000; see Wellman et al. 2001). Reasoning about false beliefs is just one way of using ToM (see Stone 2005). Philip Gerrans and Valerie Stone also argue that there is no hardwired ToM as a dedicated module at all and that belief attribution is not supported by a domain-specific, modular mechanism (see appendix). Instead there is interaction between such low-level, domain-specific mechanisms as tracking gaze and bodily movement, joint attention, and so forth and higher-level domain-general mechanisms for metarepresentation, recursion, and executive function. The output of the lowlevel mechanisms serve as input for the higher-level, domain-general processes (Gerrans 2002, 306, 311; Stone and Gerrans 2006a,b). Perner et al. (2006), as well as Saxe et al. (2006) present neuroscientific evidence for the view that in the right and left temporo-parietal junction of the brain there is a specialized, domain-specific neural mechanism for reasoning about beliefs. Inhibitory control of mental contents, together with response selection, is mediated by domain-general mechanisms, while the domainspecific mechanism of the temporo-parietal junction is only recruited for processing beliefs. And reasoning about beliefs is faster than following domaingeneral rules in reasoning about other things than beliefs (Saxe et al. 2006; see Saxe and Baron-Cohen 2006). Leslie et al. (2004, 2005) argue that ToM is a partly modular learning “mechanism” that only “kick-starts” the attribution of beliefs and desires. Just as color vision provides us with color concepts, ToM introduces belief and desire concepts. Reasoning about the contents of beliefs takes place through a selection process (SP) with inhibition. Developing slowly from the preschool period onward, SP acts by selecting a content for an agent ’s belief and an action for the agent ’s desire. In everyday thinking, taking a belief to be true is the default, so success in the false belief task requires an ability to inhibit the default attribution and to select the erroneous belief for the character looking for the hidden object. The mentality of organisms that ToM processes is very early on understood as separate from the physical body. Kuhlmeier et al. (2004), for example, show that five-month-old infants apply the constraint of continuous motion to inanimate blocks but not to persons. They thus do not seem to view human agents as material objects. In the experiment, twenty infants watched a film in which a woman was standing on a stage that contained two large red screens separated by 1.21 meters. The woman then went behind the first screen; her

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identical twin sister in identical clothing had been hiding behind the second screen and now emerged from behind it. What the infants saw was a woman moving behind a screen and then suddenly emerging from behind the other screen without being visible in the space between the two screens. The infants revealed that they were not surprised by this apparently miraculous event, although they were surprised when they watched mere physical objects (as distinct from humans) behaving in the same way. ( They exhibited surprise by looking longer at the action they were witnessing.) This suggests that they do not consider agency to be constrained by the physical body. Even as adults, people do not feel themselves to be bodies but instead feel that they occupy bodies (Bloom 2005, 191, 2007; Merleau-Ponty 1992; see Bronkhorst 2001, 402). Routinely, people spontaneously attribute their own agentive properties to the homunculus called the “self,” which is not merely the sum of a set of lower-level, “dumb[er]” homunculi (Nichols and Stich 2006, 9–10). To the extent that the agentive properties are detached from the physical body, it is perfectly natural for people to have intuitive beliefs about disembodied agents such as spirits. However, disembodiment does not mean a complete lack of bodily form; mentality may instead be attributed to various forms of “subtle” or otherwise nonstandard bodily forms.

1.3.2 Intentionality There are also indirect cues that lead people to interpret an event as intentionally caused even when they do not perceive an agent. Hyperactive understanding of intentionality produces an automatic conclusion that an event or structure must have been caused or designed by an intelligent agent, even when no trace of an agent is evident (Barrett 2004b, 34). For example, normally, when one sees an artifact, one knows that it must have been designed and made by an agent, even though this agent is not present and one does not know her or his identity (see Czachesz 2007, 86). This kind of reasoning contributes to beliefs about supernatural agency when it is extended to such cases as, for instance, seeing the image of Jesus falling off the wall right at the moment when someone says something blasphemous. The coincidence of the words uttered and the picture falling creates the feeling that the falling was intentionally caused, despite the fact that no one is present and one has no idea of the mechanism by which an agent could have caused the picture to fall (see Atran 2002a, 59 –63; Bering 2006; Bering and Parker 2006). Bering (2003) suggests that there may even be a specific cognitive mechanism devoted to processing apparently intentional events (“existential meaning”) in the absence of a physical agent. Such inferences are fast and automatic intuitions (see the appendix). The low-level intuitions about agency are dedicated to combining perceived movement with the perceiver ’s reflective ideas of agency and free will. When


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action consistently follows prior thought and when apparent causes of action other than somebody’s thought are excluded, we have the experience of volitional action. Volition, in turn, presupposes an agent. Torsten Nielsen (1963) showed in the 1960s that when subjects were asked to put one hand in a box and draw a straight line with it while looking into the box through a tube, they could be fooled into believing that the experimenter ’s hand seen in the box through a mirror was their own (which they did not see). When both hands drew a straight line, the subjects perceived the alien hand as their own. When the experimenter ’s hand drew a curve to the right, the subjects still experienced the hand as their own, and now perceived it as making involuntary movements. Similarly, Ramachandran and colleagues arranged an experiment in which a subject with an amputated arm was asked to put his real arm and what he experienced as his phantom limb in a box with a vertical mirror in the middle; the reflection of the real arm then appeared in the mirror where the phantom would have been if it were real. When the subject moved his real arm, he felt he was moving his phantom limb. Then the experimenter put his arm inside the box so that it appeared in the place of the phantom. Observing his real arm and the experimenter ’s arm in the box made the subject feel as though his phantom arm was moving (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1999, 46–48; see Wegner 2002, 40 –44). Wegner (2002, 44) thus argues that one can think movement is intentional by watching any body move where one thinks one’s own body is. But there are also cases in which one perceives a movement as guided by an intentional will not one’s own. When the picture of Jesus Christ suddenly falls off the wall, the default explanation is not necessarily that one did it oneself (although this is possible). One can come to think that the movement is intentional by combining one’s perception of it with a representation of an invisible agent. Wegner (2002, 44) suggests in passing that the experience of another ’s movement as willful is mediated by the so-called mirror neuron system in the brain. This system mediates such intuitive reasoning as, for example, feeling disgust when witnessing someone drink a glass of milk with a face contracting in an expression of disgust. It cannot mediate such reflective ToM reasoning as in, for instance, trying to figure out what gift would please a foreign colleague (Bargh 1994, 3; Keysers and Gazzola 2007). Mirror neurons were first found in monkey brains in premotor area F5 and parietal area 7b. They are called mirror neurons because they are activated during both the execution of purposeful, goal-related hand actions (grasping etc.) and the observation of similar actions performed by conspecifics (see Gallese et al. 1996; Rizzolatti et al. 1988; Rizzolatti et al. 2000). A mirror neuron system has also been found in the human brain (although no special type of neuron seems to be involved). Implicit, automatic, and unconscious simulation processes establish a link between an observed agent and the observing agent, thus making imitation possible (Bremmer et al. 2001; Gallese and Metzinger 2003; Hari et al. 1998).

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It has been suggested that social cognition is based on the mirror neuron system, which mediates observations about other agents’ apparently intentional behavior (see Hurley 2008a). When two agents interact socially, the mirror neuron system is activated and creates a shared neural representation (Becchio et al. 2006, 66 –67). It thus helps people understand the intentions of others and to relate them to their own (see Gallese and Goldman 1998; Gallese and Metzinger 2003; Gallese et al. 2004). In being restricted to motor processes and intuitions, though, the mirror neuron theory alone may not be sufficient to account for social cognition (see Bargh 1994; Hurley 2008b; Keysers and Gazzola 2007). Social cognition also involves complicated reflective processes related to understanding of intentionality. Recognizing consciously goal-directed action involves recognizing intentionality in three senses: intention recognition, attribution of intention to its author (HUI), and understanding motivation behind the intention (HUI, HTR) (see Becchio et al. 2006). Intentionality as the mark of the mental is usually understood as “directedness” or “aboutness” (Brentano 1924; Dennett 1993, 67, 1997, 66; Husserl 1950a,b). Mental states are beliefs about the world, desires for things, and so forth ( Wellman and Miller 2006, 34–35). Following Jaakko Hintikka (1975), I argue that it might be better understood as intensionality, however (see the appendix, section 2.1). Intensionality relates to such things as meanings, properties, propertybased relations, and propositions. When we describe a set intensionally, we list the properties the members of the set have. We may, for instance, try to list the various gods of the religions of world using the following formula: {x:x is a god}. An extensional listing, in contrast, is made by just listing the members: {Allah, Quetzalcoatl . . . Zeus}. These two lists are extensionally equivalent but intensionally distinct. This distinction is based on the fact that terms and expressions have an intension or meaning (Sinn) and an extension or reference (Bedeutung ) (Frege 1966). For example, someone’s beliefs about the Evening Star are not necessarily beliefs about the Morning Star, because the person in question may not know that these two are the same planet.10 The terms have different intentions but the same reference. Mere extensional concepts are not enough for conceptualizing agency because agency is defined by the mental act of directedness (instead of mere reactivity, Leslie 1994). The idea of intentionality as intensionality brings to the fore what seems to be crucial in intentionality in a psychological sense. According to Hintikka, “a concept is intentional if and only if it involves the [logically] simultaneous consideration of several possible states of affairs or courses of events.” Intentionality as intensionality thus means that for an act to be intentional, it must involve a conscious choice made between several alternatives (1975, 195; see also 212–13, 1982). Intentionality as intensionality means that intentional systems involve the consideration of possible worlds as logically alternative scenarios (2006a, 21–24, 2006b, 557–58; see Dennett 1993, 122, 174– 75). Thus, ToM depends


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on the ability for counterfactual reasoning about contrastive states of affairs or courses of events (see also Buller 2005a, 194). Directedness is involved, but in an intensional sense: a mental state is directed toward something, but with the awareness that it might just as well be directed toward something else. In intentionality, as distinct from mere reactions, a course of action is selected from among multiple mentally represented alternatives. If mind reading or ToM operates through a selection process with inhibition, understanding intentionality as intensionality fits it much better than the idea of intentionality as simply directedness. For example, understanding another ’s beliefs and desires in the false belief task involves precisely consideration of possible worlds as logically alternative scenarios. This entails understanding that the mind is a representational device and that there is no reason that all represented propositions should be true (Perner 1993). One has to be able to metarepresent another ’s beliefs, that is, to embed them in one’s own beliefs, as in “I believe that ‘she thinks that he is wrong.’ ” Valerie Stone (2005) argues that it is precisely the ability of metarepresentation that enables children to succeed at explicit false belief tasks: the child must be able to understand that various agents represent the location of the chocolate bar in various ways. According to Bering, it is around six or seven years of age that children become capable of understanding such third-order intentionality in which “he thinks that she believes that he wants,” for example. At that point in their development, they are also able to regard random events as symbolic and declarative of a supernatural agent ’s mental states (Bering and Johnson 2005, 134–36).11 Degrees or orders of intentionality is an idea of Dennett (1993, 243–46). It has been argued that normal adult humans are capable of fourth- or fifth-order intentionality (when no external memory stores are used) (Dunbar 2003, 170, 2006, 171– 72). “I know12 that John wants Mary to understand that Bill believes that Linda loves him” is an example of fourth-order intentionality. Such metarepresentation of intentional attitudes requires a capacity to understand recursive13 structures (Stone 2005; see Hintikka 1975). To the extent that we are interested in how ToM works in social cognition, only embedded mental states count, not mere embedded observed facts. For example, the sentence “John says Mary to claim that Bill wrote her that Linda sent him a love letter ” is not a case of degrees of intentionality. Even an autistic person incapable of mind reading might be able to understand this sentence as reporting four interrelated facts. The recursive embedding of metarepresentations seems to be an exclusively human capacity; apes, for example, do not understand recursive structures, though the evidence here is somewhat ambiguous (Dennett 2006, 111; Dunbar 2003, 170). Premack and Premack (2003, 149–53), however, claim that chimpanzees are only capable of first-order intention ascription and that even this requires much conscious effort from the chimp, whereas a ten- to twelve-month-old human infant does this spontaneously. Human social cognition starts where the chimpanzee’s cognitive ability ends. As Tomasello and

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Carpenter (2007, 122) observe, “from a very early age human infants are motivated to simply share interest and attention with others in a way that our nearest primate relatives are not.” Joint attention, which is one of the low-level inputs of ToM, starts to develop in human infants as early as nine months, when the learning child begins to look at an object and at the parent, trying to draw the adult ’s attention to a shared object (see Moore and D’Entremot 2001; Tomasello and Carpenter 2007; Tomasello et al. 2005). Sperber (1997) argues that recursively metarepresenting a belief within another belief can provide a validating context for the embedded belief. It is then accepted as true because of certain second-order beliefs about it (Boyer 1994b, 120; Sperber 1996, 69– 70, 89–97). To the extent that these secondorder beliefs seem compelling, the first-order belief embedded in them is also plausible.14 In, for example, “ ‘Jesus is our redeemer ’ is true because it says so in the Bible,” “Jesus is our redeemer ” derives its plausibility from the validating embedding “It says so in the Bible” (see Pyysiäinen 2003c). Metarepresentation thus makes it possible to make inferences about propositions with an undecided truth-value—as in, for instance, “ ‘If it was John who stole my wallet,’ then he should be arrested.” Here the judgment of John being guilty must be temporally suspended in order to make a provisional inference (see Cosmides and Tooby 2000, 59 –60; Pyysiäinen 2003c; Sperber 1996, 71– 73). It is important to distinguish between what Sperber calls “halfunderstood” propositions and propositions with an undecided truth-value. It is possible to generate conditional inferences from premises with an undecided truth-value, but it is not possible to do so from incomprehensible premises. These can only be used as quotations that receive a meaning from the validating context in which they are metarepresented. Failure to understand the nature of metarepresentation leads to accepting all beliefs as one’s own (see Sperber 1994, 2000a; Pyysiäinen 2003c). A psychiatrist may, for example, entertain the metarepresentation “Joe believes ‘I am Jesus.’ ” If she is not able to use the metarepresentation “Joe believes,” then “I am Jesus” becomes her own belief (see Corcoran et al. 1995; Frith 1995). Metarepresented beliefs are decoupled from reality, and their semantic relations are suspended, in the sense that one cannot directly reason from “Ann believes ‘John is a spy’ ” that John really is a spy (Cosmides and Tooby 2000). This would only follow in the case that the metarepresentational context is automatically validating. For a Christian believer, the metarepresentation “It says so in the Bible” often is such a validating context, for example (Pyysiäinen 2003c). It is beliefs about beliefs that validate beliefs.

1.3.3 Teleofunctional Reasoning Humans are prone to see things as existing for a reason or purpose. This tendency to view entities as existing for a purpose may derive from children’s early


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emerging ability to think that there are hidden intentions behind everything and to interpret agents’ behavior as goal-directed (Johnson 2000, 188, 208; Kelemen and DiYanni 2005, 6). Children’s understanding of how agents use objects as means to achieve goals may provoke a rudimentary teleofunctional view of entities: agents’ intentions are understood as being intrinsic properties of the objects themselves (Kelemen 1999a,b; Kelemen and DiYanni 2005, 6). There is experimental evidence for a “promiscuous teleology”: British and American elementary schoolchildren are prone to generating teleofunctional explanations of the origins and nature of living and nonliving natural entities and endorsing intelligent design as the source of both animals and artifacts (Evans 2000, 2001; Kelemen 2004; Kelemen and DiYanni 2005). Kelemen and DiYanni (2005, 7) point out that this view about purpose does not necessarily derive from agentive intuitions. Teleo-functional reasoning may also be an independent characteristic of causal reasoning. However, Asher and Kemler Nelson (2008) provide evidence for the interpretation that three– and four–year-old children can adopt the intentional stance (Dennett 1993) and do understand the true functions of artifacts to be the designed functions. It thus is also possible that intuitions about purpose and design and intuitions about agency derive from a common source. Lewis Wolpert (2007, 27–33, 67–82) argues that all causal reasoning in humans derives from the manufacturing and using of tools that typify the species, not from social interaction (cf. Dunbar 1993, 2002, 2003, 2006). The making of first tools created a new kind of selection pressure, to which causal thinking is an adaptation: the making of tools required an ability to understand the ideas of means and ends and of causality and intentionality. Although nonhuman primates can distinguish the animate from the inanimate, they do not view the world in terms of intermediate and often hidden underlying causes, reasons, intentions, and explanations. ( They understand animacy but not mentality.) Wolpert neither develops this idea carefully nor contrasts it in detail with competing accounts. It does not have to be incompatible with, for example, Dunbar ’s view of human sociality as having provided the selection pressure for the large neocortex of our species. Tool use and social interaction are not two mutually exclusive phenomena but seem to have developed together. Thus, we can see Wolpert ’s idea as an important addition or qualification to other arguments that may be able to help explain beliefs about supernatural agents. The hyperactivity in HADD, HUI, and HTR means that they produce many false positives: people perceive agents where there are none, ascribe intentionality to events and structures that are purely mechanical, and use teleofunctional reasoning to explain the natural world. As natural-born tool users, humans see intelligent agency and design everywhere. As humans are the prototype of an agent, humans attribute at least some humanlike features also to the agents HADD postulates (Boyer 1996c; see Guthrie 1993; Richert and Barrett 2005).

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However, supernatural agent concepts are not derived from these false positives. First, ambiguous perception and overextended attribution of intentionality and design in themselves do not contain enough information for forming a persisting agent concept. Second, the supernatural agent concepts of religious traditions are abstractions from a large number of individual mental representations that are communicated among persons. Therefore, we cannot explain these concepts only by referring to ambiguous individual perception; we have to explain why they have become widespread in populations (see Barrett 1998, 617, 2004b, 41, 43; Boyer 1994a,b). The notions of HADD, HUI, and HTR can help explain why certain kinds of supernatural agent concepts are easier to adopt than others; this ease then explains, partly at least, why these concepts are found all over the world both in ancient and modern times. Because there is a natural place for these concepts in the human mind and in human practices, they are contagious and have become widespread (Barrett 2004b, 33–39). Mind and culture thus are not so much two different levels as the endpoints on a scale from individual to public and “shared” (see Sperber 2006). The folklore scholar Lauri Honko (1962, 93–99) tried to explain the actualization of traditional beliefs in casual encounters with the spirits by referring to the psychology of perception; we can now try to do much the same with the help of cognitive and developmental psychology and evolutionary theory. That effort may turn out to have far-reaching consequences for the study of religion and culture. The next thing for me to do with this purpose in mind is to provide some criteria for calling some concepts counterintuitive.

1.4 Out of the Ordinary 1.4.1 Intuitive Ontology and Counterintuitiveness Animacy, mentality, and teleology are, of course, not all that the human mind processes intuitively. Some of the basic domains of intuition are enumerated in the list that follows (see Barrett 2000, 2008; Boyer 1994b; Keil 1979, 1996; Sommers 1959). We intuitively understand that things exist in space and time; some things also have physicality and solidity, and some of them belong to the folk-biological domain of living kinds (plants and animals). Animacy is a mediating category between folk biology and mentality, in the sense that it is a subcategory within folk biology and may be the basis on which mind reading has developed: the idea of beliefs and desires in a way completes the understanding that something is goal-directed. Social position, for its part, is the domain of such social relationships as “being someone’s father ” or “being the king,” and so forth. Such phenomena as cooperation and reciprocal altruism require one to have intuitions about the kind of social relationship they entail. Finally, we must add the category of time—though temporality is a neglected theme


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in cognitive neuroscience—because humans experience everything as existing in time and have intuitions about temporal relationships such as “before” and “after ” (Lloyd 2002, 2004, 260 – 73, 310 –25). basic domains of intuition Spatiality: Location in space Physicality: E.g., liquids Solidity: Natural objects, artifacts Living kinds: Plants and animals Animacy: Liveliness, goal-directedness Mentality: Beliefs and desires Social position: Social relationships Events: Events and acts Temporality: Everything exists in time The systems of HADD, HUI, and HTR, though triggered by domainspecific sensory or conceptual inputs, probably must also consult such other systems as the physicality module, for example (Carruthers 2006, 6). The mind can be viewed as a collection of modular reasoning systems, but the modules are only functionally specified systems, not encapsulated entities; they can even share parts with each other (see Barrett and Kurzban 2006; Carruthers 2006; the appendix). Although the problem of modularity is far from being solved, I will use “methodological modularity” as a reasoning strategy ( leaving the question of evolution somewhat open; see the appendix and Panksepp 1998, 2007). For example, it is obvious that a face-like arrangement of two dots and a straight line has the power to trigger the idea of a face; one simply fills in the gaps in perception, drawing from a tacit and domain-specific database. As facelike arrangements thus reliably trigger the idea of a face and not something else, some kind of functional modularity is the most economical explanation. But as modules are not encapsulated, some face-like arrangements might fail to trigger the idea of a face in some persons under some circumstances. Interestingly, we can also manipulate the concepts and images triggered in the mind, creating new concepts that do not respect the boundaries of an “intuitive ontology” (Boyer 1994a,b, 2007). In this way, we create what Boyer calls “counterintuitive” representations. In my previous writings, I have thus suggested that the notion of “supernatural agents” be replaced by the concept of “counterintuitive agents.”15 I am now forced partly to change my mind, because spontaneous attribution of agency to physically unidentified sources does not seem to be counterintuitive (see Atran 2002a, 65; Barrett 2004b, 77–88; Bloom 2005, 2007; Lindeman and Aarnio 2007). The HADD, HUI, and HTR model actually imply that people perceive disembodied agency as a natural category (see Barrett 1998, 617). Yet it is also possible to form counterintuitive representations of agency by adding some extra features or by denying something

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that is natural (as shown by the plus and minus symbols in the following list). Moreover, it is not always clear in practice whether a representation is or is not counterintuitive. The cross-domain formation of counterintuitive representations is presented in “Counterintuitive Combinations” below. Counterintuitive representations are formed by tacitly assigning the represented entity to an intuitive ontological category, while recognizing that it contains elements that contradict intuitive expectations concerning that category. Typical intuitive ontological categories are persons, animals, plants, artifacts, and natural objects (Boyer 1994b, 101, 1996c, 84, 1998, 878, 2000b, 198, 2000c, 280). Boyer claims that a catalogue that uses these basic intuitive ontological categories and includes only breaches of physical and cognitive properties associated with those categories virtually exhausts cultural variation in this domain (Boyer 2000a, 103; cf. Franks 2003). combinations of counterintuitive representations category Spatiality Physicality Solid objects Living kinds Animacy Mentality Social position Events Temporality

possible violations (–, +) – Location of a nonexisting thing + Spatiality and mentality – A liquid that is nowhere + A liquid that understands – Solid object that is nowhere + Artifact with mentality – Plant or animal without physicality + Plant or animal with high-level mentality –Animacy without spatiality + Animacy with mentality (without spatiality) – Mentality without spatiality or biology (+ Omniscience) – Denial of intuitive relationships + Adding a relationship (“son of God”) – Intuitively expected event does not take place + Intuitively not to be expected happens – Immortality (no death) + Immortality ( boundless afterlife)

This is not an exhaustive list of intuitive domains or of all the possible violations of intuitive expectations; it is meant merely to convey the general idea. I will try to provide some flesh for the bare bones here. For spatiality, it is difficult to find an example of a representation of an existing thing that yet is nowhere; it is difficult or impossible to separate mere “existence” from “existing somewhere.” A combination of spatiality and mere animacy might be represented by the idea of the will-o’-the-wisp, for example ( Thompson 1955–58, 3:131).


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When we combine spatiality, animacy, and mentality ( but without biology), we get the typical idea of a ghost as a mist-like, animated entity (see Simonsuuri 1999; 2:419–81; 3:289). The angel of the Lord who appears to Moses “in flames of fire from within a bush” (Exod. 3:2) also counts as an example (cf. Wyatt 2005, 13–17). A solid object that is nowhere comes close to being a contradiction in terms. Perhaps a layperson who asks where the space-time of scientific cosmology exists is trying to represent something like a solid object that exists but is nowhere ( because there is nothing outside of the space-time). In folk traditions, such an idea is unknown. On the other hand, natural objects and artifacts that have mentality form a recurrent theme in folk traditions. Examples range from magic wands and amulets to things such as the image of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland, which is believed to work miracles (Cruz 1994). Some related examples might be cases of physicality and animacy (without biology). A case in point might be the Arthurian sword, embedded in an anvil that was in turn embedded in a great stone, with the words “Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England” (Malory 1998, 8). The idea here seems to be that the sword was somehow alive yet only something physical, without biology. The category of living kinds includes, for example, invisible plants and animals or animals capable of miraculous transformations (see Thompson 1955– 58, vol. 3). Another kind of example is animals that talk or think like humans. Animacy without spatiality may be difficult to find, but nonspatial animacy combined with mentality might be represented in certain very abstract conceptions of God: God exists but is nowhere. Such representations also exemplify mentality without spatiality (but mentality without animacy is difficult to conceive). Another example is “pure consciousness” understood as a kind of “knowledge by identity,” or knowing something by virtue of being that something (Forman 1990, 1993). In Buddhism, we find the idea that the supposed objective support of cognition (vijñānālambana, roughly: material things) is “nothing but idea” (vijñaptimātratā) or “mind only” (cittamātratam) (Samdhinirmocanasutra 8.7–9). The idea of the Buddha before he was born (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 143) exemplifies mentality without biology, as does Paul’s idea of a resurrection body: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God . . . the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (1 Cor. 15:50 –52). An interesting question is whether it is possible to add something counterintuitively to mentality. Boundless mentality, such as omniscience, may or may not count, depending on whether a category violation really is or is not involved. Social positions can also be counterintuitively represented, as when people imagine someone to be the child of elves, of an evil spirit, or of God ( Thompson 1955–58, 5:140 –83). I remain undecided on whether this really is a case of counterintuitiveness.

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Counterintuitive events are typified by miracles such as a man walking on the water, a dead person rising physically from the dead, and so forth (see Pyysiäinen 2002a, 2008b). Finally, there are violations of temporality such as immortality. This can be conceived of as either a denial of biological death or as adding life to the condition after death. This is usually regarded as a violation of intuitive biology, but in addition, the temporal dimension is here represented counterintuitively. Exceptional longevity and a very fast growing up also belong to this category. The buddhas, for example, supposedly take on the semblance of being old, even though in reality they have overcome old age (Mahāvastu 1.133). Everything that contradicts category-specific, intuitive expectations is counterintuitive, but counterintuitive is not the same as false, funny, or deluded. Just as people’s everyday intuitions do not necessarily describe reality correctly, counterintuitive concepts need not necessarily be erroneous. They merely violate one’s intuitive expectations. In modestly counterintuitive representations, one minor “tweak ” has either added a counterintuitive feature or deleted an intuitive one.16 The idea of a cat that talks, for example, is counterintuitive in the sense that we do not normally expect animals (and not just cats) to talk. Representations are “cognitively optimal” when one counterintuitive feature makes them attention-grabbing while the retained intuitive features make them easy to process in mind (Atran 2002a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004; Barrett 2004b; Boyer 2001; Norenzayan and Atran 2004). A familiar example of a cognitively optimal representation is the idea of an otherwise ordinary statue that yet hears prayers. Having the agentive capacity to hear is a violation of expectations in the artifact category. The idea of a statue that hears prayers from afar would involve two violations (an artifact hears and hearing from afar) and thus be massively counterintuitive (Boyer 2001, 86; see Atran 2002a, 95–107; Atran and Norenzayan 2004, 722). Boyer and Ramble (2001) as well as Barrett and Nyhof (2001) found in that when subjects had to recall lists of items and events they had read about in the context of a short story, their recall was better for modestly counterintuitive representations than for intuitive ones. Modestly counterintuitive representations also survived best in artificial transmission to others over three “generations.” Boyer and Ramble’s experiments carried out in France were replicated in Nepal with Buddhist monks and in Gabon with laypersons with very much the same results. In addition, Anders Lisdorf (2001) shows that in Roman prodigy lists from the first three centuries BC, 99 percent of counterintuitive representations were cognitively optimal. Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan’s (2004, 721–23) experiments seem to suggest that modestly counterintuitive representations are initially not recalled any better than intuitive ones but in the long run degrade at a lower rate (162; Norenzayan et al. 2006). Atran and Norenzayan also argue that when


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counterintuitive representations complement bodies of intuitive information, they help people recall chunks of intuitive information better (2004, 157–59; Norenzayan et al. 2006). Atran (2002a, 105) observes that in laboratory experiments, the nature of the task may make subjects pay special attention to nonnatural representations and intuitive representations thus lose their privileged status. When counterintuitive representations are not presented in the context of an exciting, science-fiction-like narrative, intuitive representations are recalled the best (Norenzayan and Atran 2004, 159). Studies conducted by Lauren Gonce, Afzal Upal, and colleagues seem to confirm that when subjects are presented mere lists of concepts, without a narrative context, they indeed recall intuitive representations better than modestly counterintuitive ones. Modestly counterintuitive representations are better recalled when the narrative context creates an expectation for counterintuitive concepts that persons thus may experience as intuitive. As different types of discourse activate different kinds of background knowledge, persons can, for example, expect the attack of aliens in a science fiction movie but not in such real life situations as, for example, listening to the radio news (Gonce et al. 2006; Tweney et al. 2006; Upal 2005; Upal et al. 2007). Gonce et al. (2006) showed that massively counterintuitive concepts have the poorest recall in both immediate and delayed recall conditions, regardless of the presence or absence of context. There were no significant differences in the recall rates of intuitive and modestly counterintuitive concepts except that after a one-week delay, subjects recalled modestly counterintuitive concepts presented in a narrative context significantly better than the intuitive ones (also Barrett and Nyhof 2001). Context also seems to play a crucial role in item recall. In real life, concepts are usually embedded in a context, and it is in this context that their counterintuitiveness is evaluated (Gonce et al. 2006; Tweney et al. 2006). Think of the following embedding of the counterintuitive concept of a “flying cow ”: “Looking through the kitchen window, I saw the flying cow. The twister had lifted the animal 50 feet above the ground” ( Tweney et al. 2006, 486). One who reads only the first sentence is led to interpret the flying cow as a modestly counterintuitive concept, whereas the second sentence provides a context in which the flying cow becomes an intuitive concept. Thus, context can make an apparently counterintuitive concept intuitive. But even when counterintuitiveness is retained, a relevant context can make it something to be expected. Actually, Boyer recognized this all along. Persons can simply become so routinized in using some counterintuitive concepts that their counterintuitiveness is no longer consciously recognized (Boyer 1994a, 394, 1994b, 120; Sperber 1994, 62). This fact also helps explain why people often regard their own religious beliefs as perfectly natural while regarding those of other faiths as “superstitious” (see D. Martin 2004; Pyysiäinen 2004d, 90–112). Violations of intuitions

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immediately strike one as odd, when one has not had the chance to get routinized in processing them. On the other hand, getting routinized in one type of counterintuitiveness might also make it easier to accept other counterintuitive claims as well; there is experimental evidence that persons who score high on tests of paranormal beliefs are prone to accept confusions of core ontological assumptions (that is, counterintuitiveness) as quite natural. Confusion between basic ontological category boundaries distinguishes between superstition and skepticism better than, for instance, intuitive (versus reflective) thinking or emotional instability (Lindeman and Aarnio 2007).

1.4.2 Counterfactuals and Counterintuitiveness Counterintuitive representations presuppose the ability to form counterfactuals, in the sense of contrastive representations of states of affairs: “ What if f instead of c?” or “Maybe f instead of c” (see Garfinkel 1981; Ylikoski 2001). Boyer has recently suggested that each cognitive module, especially the mind-reading one, has an inbuilt capacity to produce counterfactuals within its domain.17 Modules would thus not work in a reflex-like manner but instead allow for reflective reasoning and alternative scenarios.18 Either this capacity is inherent in the modules, or counterfactual thinking is a domain-general mechanism that has access to any type of mental contents (see McNamara et al. 2003; Revlin et al. 2003). The fact that we use counterfactuals more readily in mind reading, as compared to intuitive physics and folk biology, could then be explained by either the nature of the modular computational processes of mind reading or the fact that domain-general counterfactual reasoning is easier to apply to data about beliefs and desires than to physical or biological data. (McNamara et al. 2003 used solely counterfactuals from the domain of folk psychology.) It seems that imagination and counterfactual thinking cannot be accounted for by such processes as off-line simulation of experience, or the embodiment of knowledge gained through practice (see Barsalou et al. 2005, 20 –22; Grush 2002). A better candidate is the received view in cognitive science that conceptual knowledge is somehow transduced from sensory representations of experience in the brain. In contrast to the various sensory modalities (vision, audition, etc.), conceptual knowledge is amodal and represented in the form of abstract symbols that can be manipulated. The problem here is that so far no account of the possible mechanism of this transduction has been specified. Yet the capacity to recombine concepts arising from components of experience and to imagine counterfactual scenarios seems to require some such transduction (cf. Barsalou et al. 2005, 17). Counterfactual reasoning is also partly responsible for the production of counterintuitive ideas, although counterfactuality is by no means the same as counterintuitiveness—contrary to what the vocabulary of Atran and Norenzayan (2004) seems to suggest (cf. Barrett 2004a). Counterintuitive representations


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require counterfactuals because such representations involve a what-if contrast. Counterintuitiveness violates intuitive expectations and thus creates representations of the type “It should be A, but it seems to be B” or “It could be B instead of being A.” As the examples quoted show, it is not always easy to categorize counterintuitive representations because all necessary information is not always available. The angel in the burning bush, for example, seems to have animacy and spatiality, but we do not know for sure whether he also has mentality because this is not said. Maybe he had physicality, too? And many cases do not quite fit the Boyerian scheme (see Thompson 1955–58). What about cases such as a dog vomiting gold, oil bursting from the ground when a saint is made bishop, and flowers bursting from a saint ’s mouth when he speaks, for example (1:391, 5:456)? It thus is neither possible nor meaningful to try to catalogue all different supernatural agent representations in the world’s religious traditions. Instead, I try to describe in the following chapters in more detail the case examples of Finnic and related soul conceptions, the Jewish-Christian God, and buddhas and bodhisattvas, attempting to show how cognitive structures shape thinking about supernatural agents. Apparently, some odd combinations are easier to process in mind than others and thus are more contagious and easy to spread. Some are modestly and some massively counterintuitive, but some may be quite intuitive. A combination of spatiality and animacy, as in a cloud that chases you, naturally triggers HADD; yet apparently nothing much follows unless HUI is triggered, too. When that happens, mentality is attributed to the spatial entity, which results in a concept of a ghost (Barrett 2008). But some ghosts may also have physicality in the sense of solid boundaries. Persons may attribute animacy to physical objects, as in the case of a solid object that hovers unsupported in midair; but in this case things get far more interesting when animacy is accompanied by mentality as well (e.g. Strong 2004, 141). This seems to be the case with all kinds of amulets, magic wands, and so forth. Weeping statues and bleeding icons also belong to this category. A more intriguing example comes from the narrative motive of a dead evildoer’s coffin being so heavy that no one is able to lift it (see Simonsuuri 1999; Thompson 1955–58, 2:440). The idea here seems to be that it is the sins the dead person committed that make either the corpse or the coffin heavy. To the extent that sins are past actions that are heavy, this is a case of transferring physicality to an abstraction. On the other hand, this is also a case of abstractions making a physical object heavy. Mentality without spatiality is the most intriguing category. It seems that disembodied agency is not counterintuitive; on the other hand, it does not indicate pure mentality but refers to beliefs about souls leaving and reentering bodies at will (see Cohen 2008). Agency is independent from the body, in the sense that mentality directs the body and can be separated from a specific

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biological body; this in no way entails the idea of mentality as not being located anywhere or in any shape. For example, the soul is impenetrable to other souls, and possession can only be imagined as a replacement of one agent by another (Cohen 2008). For example, in a study by Kuhlmeier et al. (2004), small children seemed to regard it as intuitive that an agent can move from one place to another without the body being visible to them. This does not in any way show that adult humans have intuitive representations of mentality without spatiality. Such representations are completely lacking in folk traditions. The idea instead is that individual mentality can assume different guises. Thus, mentality without spatiality is counterintuitive, whereas mental causation in the physical world is not. Stripping mentality of physicality ( but not of spatiality) produces the idea of disembodied agency, which is not counterintuitive (contrary to, e.g., Boyer 2003b). It is possible to see event structures as manifesting agency and intentionality even when nothing like an agent is perceived (Atran 2002a, 64 –65; Csibra 2003; Csibra et al. 1999; Gergely and Csibra 2003). Barrett (1998) actually argued many years ago that not all supernatural agent representations are counterintuitive. God, for example, is not necessarily a human with some counterintuitive property or properties; he may instead fall into a category of his own (see 617; Barrett 2004b; Barrett et al. 2001). Counterintuitive representations need not necessarily be understood as within-category anomalies; they may also be understood as combinations of features from different categories and thus to form a new category (see Franks 2003). When HADD, HUI, and/or HTR are triggered, giving a false positive, three alternative supernatural explanations are available: the triggering event was caused by (1) a natural agent acting from afar, (2) a present but invisible and intangible agent; or (3) some impersonal force or very abstract kind of agency. The first alternative is represented by beliefs in telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and the like; as well as the example of a picture miraculously falling off from the wall. Examples of the second are beliefs about gods, spirits, and other supernatural agents. Third would be a “numinous” force or a very abstract agent such as “the ground of being ” (see Otto 1958; Tillich 1955, 25).

1.5 Agency and Cooperation 1.5.1 Religion and Cooperation The social realm emerges from individuals reasoning about the reasoning of others; this is often called “social cognition” or “social intelligence” (see Baron-Cohen et al. 1985; Bless et al. 2004; Kunda 2002). Social neuroscience studies the neural correlates of social cognition (Baron-Cohen 2005; Cacioppo


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and Berntson 2005; Cacioppo et al. 2002; Saxe and Baron-Cohen 2006). Social cognition thus is something HADD, HUI, and HTR make possible through recursion and degrees of intentionality. Supernatural agents are a natural part of social systems thus conceived. When one thinks of the many pages that have been written about religion uniting people into a moral community (especially Durkheim 1925), it is not particularly surprising to learn that some anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers now claim that it is precisely religion that has helped reciprocal altruism to evolve (e.g. Bering 2006, 456; Bulbulia 2007; Johnson 2005; Johnson and Bering 2006; Johnson and Krüger 2004; Sosis 2003; Sosis and Alcorta 2003, 2005; Wilson 2002; see Bulbulia 2004; Irons 2004; Shariff and Norenzayan 2007).19 Ferren MacIntyre (2004), for example, argues that religious affiliations have acted as a kind of “kinship surrogate” that helped our ancestors to develop cooperation among large groups of nonkin. In the “standard model” of the cognitive science of religion (Boyer 2005a, 4– 7), however, religion is instead a by-product based on “runaway” evolutionary processes extended beyond their initial domain (1994b, 294). Evolution has built certain structures and mechanisms of mind that are adaptations to certain Pleistocene conditions; religion is made possible by these structures and mechanisms, although they did not originally develop for this purpose (Atran 2002a; Boyer 2001; see Pyysiäinen 2006a). Underlying this discussion is the debate on adaptationism in evolutionary biology and sociobiology. Gould and Lewontin (1984) once argued that one must not mistake the fact that some structure is used in some particular way for the evolutionary cause of its existence. They use the term “spandrels” for a structure that merely follows from the existence of some other (evolved) structures, without itself being an adaptation. “Exaptation” refers to new roles played by evolutionarily old features that are adaptations in the strict sense of the term. Adaptations in this sense are features that are selected to perform their current function (Gould 1997; Gould and Vrba 1982). In the standard model, religion is either a spandrel or an exaptation (see Saler 1999). “Religion” is a vague term and refers to such a wide variety of phenomena that it cannot possibly be a biological adaptation (Kirkpatrick 2006). What is known as religion instead is based on evolved adaptations that have been adopted for new tasks (Sperber ’s proper and actual domains [1994]). Two features of religion are especially important here: beliefs about “full-access agents” (Boyer 2001, 150 –60) as helpers in decision making, and rituals as a means of creating frequent encounters between individuals. By full-access agents I mean agents that have an unlimited access to other persons’ minds: they are omniscient in the sense that they know all mental contents there are to be known (150 –60; Bronkhorst 2001, 408; see Barrett et al. 2001; Knight et al. 2004).

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In the adaptationist view, representations of full-access agents have directly helped reciprocal altruism to evolve because they can help one view things from others’ point of view (cf. Boyer 2002) and can make systems of moralistic punishment possible (see Richerson and Boyd 2005, 204–5, 231). Representations of full-access agents help in strategic decisions: as these are often difficult to make because people do not believe their strategic information is perfect or automatic (Boyer 2001, 155), they consult full-access agents for advice. In addition, a decision is sometimes difficult to make because the issue at hand is relatively trivial or no alternative stands as out as superior. Should I buy this or that gift for my wife? Your place or mine? Finally, some decisions are difficult to make because too much is at stake. Should I go for the operation when the risk of paralysis is 50 percent? Should we try to bust the terrorists at the risk of losing the hostages’ lives? It has been shown that in making risky decisions, people take three things into account: their own need to arrive at the most satisfying decision, the expected outcome of a decision, and variability in the expected outcome. People tend to avoid options with high outcome variability, irrespective of whether information about probabilities is available or not. When their own need is greater than the expected mean outcome of the options, people tend to prefer ambiguous options with a high variance (Rode et al. 1999). Often people voluntarily give up the privilege of using free will to decide, letting someone or something else decide on their behalf. For example, when people want to avoid taking a stand and giving reasons for their decision, they may flip a coin. A decision may seem so important that no one wants to take responsibility for making it, so a soothsayer or an astrologist might be consulted, or God might be requested to give a sign (see Dennett 2006, 132–33). A plethora of divination methods and related systems exists. Dennett (133, 398) refers to Wikipedia’s list of eighty different methods from astrology and haruspicy to nephomancy (divination by clouds) and numerology. The principle here is that if you pass the buck, pass it to something that cannot duck the responsibility in turn (133). Because divination only explicates a predetermined course of events, it is impossible to put the blame on anybody when the end result is an unwanted one. It all happened because it was determined to happen. As humans are a social species, their decisions are also affected by what they think others will decide. The prisoner ’s dilemma thought experiment exemplifies the relative difficulty of reasoning about how another ’s choice should affect one’s own decision making. The prisoner ’s dilemma illustrates the kind of mathematical game theory that came to be used in analyses of human judgment and decision making in the 1940s and 1950s (see Simon 1959). Imagine two players in a game, Kate and Allie; all they have to do is to say whether they prefer to cooperate or defect (i.e. not cooperate). The reward each


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one then gets depends on the other ’s choice (see Axelrod 1990, 7–11; Hamilton 1964, 15; Trivers 2002, 23–24). If Kate decides to cooperate and also Allie decides to cooperate, both get 3; If Kate decides to cooperate and Allie decides to defect, Kate gets 0 while Allie gets 5; If Kate decides to defect and Allie decides to cooperate, Kate gets 5 and Allie gets 0; If Kate decides to defect and also Allie decides to defect, both get 1. Thus, defection pays either 5 or 1, while cooperation pays either 3 or 0. It always pays to defect if one thinks that the other will cooperate; it also pays to defect if one thinks the other will defect (Axelrod 1990, 9). Although mutual cooperation yields 3 for both, an individual player always does better by defecting whether the other one defects or cooperates. Cooperation thus is costly and an act of altruism in the biological sense of the term (Jansen and van Baalen 2006; Shanahan 2004, 64– 72). If we view Kate and Allie as a group, the best net result comes when both cooperate, while both defecting yields the lowest payoff. The other options give almost as good a net result as mutual cooperation (i.e. 5). This is called a dilemma because, from an individual player ’s point of view, it is always better to defect, although mutual cooperation yields a higher mutual reward (see also Nowak and Sigmund 1994). Cooperation can emerge when persons interact an indefinite number of times; once cooperation emerges, it also persists effectively (Axelrod 1990, 10, 21). The emergence of cooperation necessitates that individuals gain a reputation based on how they interact with others and that cooperators can be recognized by some tag (Jansen and van Baalen 2006). Semmann et al. (2005) show experimentally that building a good reputation with cooperative behavior is rewarded in future social interactions both within one’s own social group and in other groups. Cooperative behavior is regarded as an honest signal, irrespective of direct personal benefits gained in the past ( but cf. Klein et al. 2002). Reputation gained can then be a driving force for selfish individuals to cooperate in public goods situations. Cooperation, however, requires that interaction between partners is frequent. In larger groups, this necessitates hierarchical organization that helps concentrate interactions so that everyone need not meet everyone else, because important decisions on cooperation are made by groups’ representatives (Axelrod 1990, 130 –31). Others then obey and imitate (see Richerson and Boyd 2005, 114–26). There is a vast literature on the prisoner ’s dilemma and the possibility of finding an “evolutionarily stable strategy” for cooperation (Maynard-Smith 1982); a good candidate for such a strategy is the so-called tit-for-tat, a strategy of first cooperating and then copying what the other one does (Axelrod 1990, 27–54; Nowak and Sigmund 1994; Nowak et al. 2004). Things get more complicated when the players do not act simultaneously but alternate roles over

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time (Nowak and Sigmund 1994) and when reciprocity is indirect, in the sense that one helps others in the hope that someone else might then help oneself in the future (Alexander 1979, 49–51; Nowak and Sigmund 2005). The prisoner’s dilemma thus exemplifies how the understanding of intentionality functions in making strategic decisions. By strategic decisions I mean decisions whose subject matter triggers social cognition (see Boyer 2001, 152). Searching for your lost keys, for example, does not necessarily trigger the understanding of intentionality; but if you suspect that someone may have stolen them, you are immediately led to think that someone may be trying to take advantage of you. Reflecting on this then presupposes the application of the understanding of intentionality. Evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides (1989) has put forward the argument that what has come to be known as “cheater detection” is a modular cognitive capacity. She suggests that humans have a special cognitive module that performs the calculation required to ascertain whether someone is trying to cheat. Cheating here means violating a deontic conditional (if–then rule) related to social exchange. Deontics here refer to peoples’ intuitions of what is permissible (Bucciarelli and Johnson-Laird 2005). For example: “If you accept a gift, then you must give something back.” Such mutual provisioning of benefits can be modeled as a repeated Prisoner ’s Dilemma (see Cosmides and Tooby 2005, 591). Cosmides and Tooby think that the mere understanding of intentionality, or a general reasoning mechanism, is not enough for cheater detection: there must be a special-purpose mechanism, a cheater detection module, that is an evolved biological adaptation (Cosmides 1989; Cosmides and Tooby 2005). “The human mind must include inferential procedures that make one very good at detecting cheating on social contracts,” as she puts it (Cosmides 1989, 196). This is because, from an evolutionary point of view, cheaters could easily invade any group of altruists if they could go unrecognized (see Axelrod 1990; Maynard-Smith 1982, 10 –27). Cheating and detecting cheaters would thus have evolved in a mutual arms race of sorts. Because of the computational limits of the human mind, the problem cannot be solved by a domain-general mechanism but instead presupposes a special-purpose mechanism that is triggered automatically (Cosmides 1989; Simon 1955, 101). Cosmides used the Wason selection task, in which the subjects are shown four cards, each of which has either the letter E or K or the number 4 or 7 printed on it. The rule “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other ” is given; the subjects have to decide which cards they must turn over to find out whether the rule is true. The correct answer is the cards E and 7. Yet most subjects also turn over the card with the number 4, which cannot reveal anything about the rule. But when the letters and numbers are replaced by something concrete, the subjects perform much better. If the rule is “Whenever I go to London, I take the train” and the cards display the


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words “Train,” “London,” “Car,” and “Oxford,” the subjects perform very well. Phil Johnson-Laird (1983) argues that this is because persons reason using mental models, and meaningful words make it possible to rely on models, unlike mere letters and numbers. Cosmides (1989) used such conditionals as “If a person is drinking beer, then he must be over 20 years old.” Evaluating this rule involves checking whether a person who accepts a benefit has satisfied a precondition the social group has imposed for receiving the benefit. Cosmides also used similar examples from culturally alien contexts to rule out the effect of background knowledge. And she used a type of switched conditional to show that the subjects did not react merely to the logical features of the task. The subjects seemed to focus merely on whether someone was taking a benefit without paying a cost (“content effect ”). Many scholars have pointed out that the extant experiments do not establish the content effect or the supposed modularity of cheater detection.20 The debate is partly muddled by the different senses in which researchers use the concept of a module (see Barrett and Kurzban 2006; the appendix). Philip Gerrans (2002, 311), for example, invites us to imagine a man who has come home late explaining to his wife that he has been working late. Then his wife discovers lipstick on his collar. Now, “could there be a module which represents all and only the information required to realise that someone does not normally get lipstick on the collar while working late?” However, this seems more like a case of lying than of cheating in the sense of violating a deontic conditional (if–then rule) related to social exchange. “If you work late, you will not get lipstick on your collar ” is not a deontic rule. If there is a rule that says “If you kiss a woman, then you must not be married to someone else,” then the example might be a case of cheater detection. But how realistic is it to think that the wife’s suspicion would really follow from abstract reasoning based on such a general rule? The process actually looks more like an emotional intuition (see Panksepp 2007). I leave open the question about the existence of a cheater detection module, although I do share Robin Dunbar ’s (2006, 177) skepticism toward the specifics of this idea. (And Gerrans’s counterargument fails because no one ever claimed that signs or indices of cheating in themselves form a modular database.) Yet cheater detection as such is crucial in human societies because the most important element in the environment for humans is other human agents. A great portion of the capacity of our big brains is dedicated to processing social information. ( Whether this is the explanation of the original growth of the cortex or not, see Dunbar [1993, 2002, 2003]; cf. Sterelny and Griffiths [1999, 247–50].) In large groups, cooperation and coordination of action are very important and require many kinds of cognitive operations, such as numerical quantification, time estimation, delayed gratification, analysis and recall of reputation, inhibitory control, and so on (Stevens and Hauser 2004, 60), not

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just cheater detection (see Tomasello et al. 2005). Cooperation, however, introduces the free-rider problem: cheaters try to get benefits from cooperators without paying the cost, which leads to the development of various precautionary systems for ruling out the possibility of cheating. There is an arms race between cooperators and free riders in developing hard-to-fake, costly signals of commitment by which to recognize cooperators and also ways of faking such signals (Atran 2002a, 114 –40; Irons 2004, 779–81; Richerson and Boyd 2005, 193–95, 211–13; Sosis 2003; Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999, 328–32). As an example of costly signals of commitment, imagine that you want to become a member in the mafia and therefore will have to kill somebody to prove that you are serious about becoming a member. By this act, you will become a “made man” who has sold his heart and soul to the mob (see Dickie 2004; Teresa and Renner 1973). Killing here is a costly signal of commitment in the sense that anyone who commits a murder must be serious in his wish to become a member. By the same token, killing makes one committed to the group, in the sense that there is no going back once you are as guilty as all others. Yet betrayal and ratting have always taken place in organized crime, along with the muchvalued “respect ” ( Teresa 1975). A similar dynamic works in religion, in the sense that failing to signal commitment can often be fatal (as in witch hunts, excommunication, etc.). According to Richerson and Boyd, reciprocal altruism can develop in small groups of a few hundred members where either benefits accrue to kin or it is possible to learn to recognize cooperators and cheaters; in larger groups, a system of moral punishment can emerge when persons engage in one-time, anonymous interactions. Punishing those who refuse to cooperate always has some cost and rarely benefits the punisher; yet this tendency apparently can spread through group selection: groups with moralistic punishment can outperform other groups (Boyd et al. 2003; Richerson and Boyd 2005, 198–99). Moralistic punishment occurs when mechanisms of weak21 reciprocal altruism are overextended to moral punishing of anonymous strangers because of some proximate causes.22 Human sociality and cooperation thus is based on the understanding of intentionality: it is this capacity that enables us to think of what others think of what we think. Large groups of people can “share” beliefs and desires and also attribute them to agents that are not immediately present or even are not known to exist. Thus, human sociality cannot be separated from the understanding of agency; therefore, the Tylorian and Durkheimian perspectives on religion must be complementary rather than contradictory. Beliefs and desires can be attributed to supernatural agents individually, as in John thinking that God wants him to marry Lisa, or in Asanga believing that the Buddha wanted to teach the way to the ending of suffering. However, often such attributions are also shared, in the sense of being collectively attributed to supernatural agents: I believe that you believe that we believe that the Devil


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tries to corrupt our morals. Often such collective attributions take place in a ritual context and are accompanied by an understanding of the group as an ordered whole that seemingly has a mentality of its own; shared knowledge makes it seem as if the group has a mind of its own (cf. Durkheim’s “collective consciousness”). “The greatest of artificial persons, politically speaking, is the State,” as F. W. Maitland (1901, 131) once put it. Groups, of course, vary greatly in the extent to which they are regarded as coherent, entity-like units. An arbitrary group of people walking near each other on a sidewalk is normally not perceived as a single meaningful unit. But groups such as a military platoons or religious sects are likely to be regarded as coherent units rather than as mere aggregates of individuals. The degree to which a collection of persons are perceived as being bonded together in a coherent unit is referred to as “group entitativity” by Lickel et al. (2000, 224). Entitativity here refers exclusively to the perceptions of people rather than to any objective assessment of groups. Entitativity affects persons’ mental representation of the group. When groups are perceived to be high in entitativity, people process information about them in much the same way as information about individuals. In addition, entitativity influences the degree to which persons perceive the group as having potency as a causal agent (224). The studies Lickel et al. report provide consistent evidence that perception of interaction, common goals, common outcomes, group-member similarity, and importance of the group were strongly intercorrelated and also highly correlated with perceptions of group entitativity (241).

1.5.2 Rituals Ritual is a category of very heterogeneous activities that have only one thing in common: a specific, ritual mode of behavior (Boyer 1994b, 188–91). Rituals, as typically studied within anthropology and comparative religion, are social events in which socially important information is published: a new member is born to the community, a man and a wife are joined together in marriage, someone dies, and so on (Pyysiäinen 2004d, 136–37). In preliterate cultures without mass media, rituals have been the only or at least a very efficient method for such publication. Moreover, because humans’ cognitive mechanisms for handling information about social relationships are tacit and intuitive, the ways changes in social position are brought about have an aura of magic around them (see Boyer 2001, 229 –63). How and when exactly does one become an adult? When does a marriage really begin? With adulthood and marriage not being biological categories, there is no natural answer to these questions. People are dealing with social conventions and have to decide what the correct answer is in each case. Rituals help mark the point in time when a social change occurs. But when people repeatedly see their cultural elders associate a given ritual with a given social effect, they are conditioned to think

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that rituals are actually essential for certain social effects, causally producing the desired result (254). Changes in social status are often ritualized (Honko 1979; van Gennep 1977). Such rites of passage involve representations of supernatural agents because rituals deal with changes in how persons understand and define certain social relationships and because such understandings are precisely the kind of thing that triggers representations of full-access agents (Boyer 2001, 155 –60, 2002). This is because persons must represent ideas of the ideas of several other persons and because fifth-order intentionality is about as high as humans can get without some external memory stores. However, it is not necessary for social cognition to operate stepwise, representing every intermediate link separately; the limits of working memory can be overcome by some sort of chunking. Even long lists of meaningless symbols can be memorized if they are packed into a meaningful whole. When this whole is easy to remember, it is then possible to derive the symbols from it through inference.23 In the domain of social cognition, in most cases it is enough to be able to represent four orders of intentionality; the rest comes for free, as it were (Cargile 1970). Think of John emailing Linda and Bob: “Shall we meet for lunch at Browns at 1 p.m.?” Linda then emails back: “Suits me.” Now John knows that it suits Linda, but Linda does not know that John knows. Thus, John decides to email Linda: “Okay, at Browns at 1 p.m.” Now John thinks that Linda knows that he knows that the lunch suits Linda. But Linda may be uncertain of whether John now is assured that she has received the confirmation. So she emails John: “Okay with me.” Now Linda thinks that John knows that she knows that John knows that the lunch suits her. Theoretically, this chain could be continued forever because it is always possible to ask “But does the person know that I know that . . . ?” And once Bob joins the exchange, things get still more complicated. Yet sane persons usually stop at the stage where John emails an “Okay” as a reply to Linda’s message saying that the lunch suits her (see Perner 1993, 252–53). The further orders of intentionality are presupposed to be contained within the initial ones. The same holds for relationships involving several persons. We use such shortcuts as “Everybody wants,” “Most people know,” “It is rumored that,” and so forth. It is neither necessary nor possible to go through all iterated embeddings. I suggest that concepts of supernatural agents are used as a handy way of representing collective knowledge (see Boyer 2002). Instead of representing endless chains of orders of intentionality, people in a way combine the various links into a single supermind that knows everything there is to be known about mental contents. Therefore, knowing what a full-access agent such as God knows is equivalent to having all necessary strategic knowledge. Rituals, for their part, provide opportunities for individuals to come into frequent contact and thus may facilitate the evolution of cooperation. The situation is somewhat different in small-scale communities as compared to


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large-scale societies (see Whitehouse 1995, 1996a,b, 2000, 2002, 2004). In small communities, people usually know each other personally and have ample opportunities to meet. Rituals may only help strengthen persons’ commitment to the group emotionally. When men engage in such dangerous activities as hunting and especially warfare where the coordinated action of the group is essential, it is necessary to prepare boys for lucid cooperation through painful and scary initiation rituals in which a solidary group is formed (Boyer 2005a, 15–16). From an evolutionary point of view, the function of the large, solidary groups in which humans typically live most probably is protection from other human groups (Alexander 1979, 222–24). The initiation rituals that create the required solidarity tend to be emotionally arousing, while their frequency is low (see Whitehouse 2004, 105– 119). In modern societies, something similar is observed in the training of various kinds of special units within armed forces, such as the British SAS and the American Delta forces, for example (see Darman 1994; Horsfall 2003; Qirko 2004b). The creation of solidarity through emotional arousal was also the question on which much of Durkheim’s (1925) theorizing about religion focused (see Pyysiäinen 2005f ). However, in larger societies we meet the problem of creating opportunities for frequent encounters between individuals, rather than tying persons emotionally together. There is neither the necessity, nor the possibility for everyone to identify with everyone else emotionally. Yet it is necessary to create a more abstract sort of feeling of solidarity and commitment to common goals among individuals who can never even meet with each other. What is important is not emotionally intense personal relationships but the sheer frequency of ritual displays of commitment to a “shared” doctrine (see Pyysiäinen 2001a; Whitehouse 2004, 87–104). Dennett ’s metaphor of passing the buck also applies to religious rituals (Lawson and McCauley 1990). In a typical rite of passage, for example, the priest can pronounce a couple man and wife because he has been ordained by the bishop. The bishop is authorized to do this because another bishop has ordained him; the other bishop had the authority because a third bishop had ordained him, and so on. The chain of ordinations is not endless, however; it ends in Jesus Christ ordaining Peter as the first bishop. With Christ being one with God, the chain of rituals ends in a counterintuitive agent as the ultimate foundation. A counterintuitive agent does not need authorization from anyone. An otherwise endless chain of reasons thus is broken by introducing something beyond which it is impossible to go. McCauley and Lawson (2002) also argue that in religious rituals the supernatural agent is either the actor or patient of action (special agent v. special patient rituals). In special agent rituals, human agents mediate superhuman action. The fewer the mediating ritual links between the human mediator and the superhuman agent, the more important the place of the ritual in its particular religious tradition. Special agent rituals are performed only once for anybody,

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because what the gods do is done once and for all. The effect is “superpermanent” (McCauley 2001, 130 –33; McCauley and Lawson 2002, 120 –22).24 Special agent rituals involve relatively high “sensory pageantry” and thus also high emotional arousal (as compared to the special patient rituals of the same tradition). Ritual systems are balanced when there are both special patient and agent rituals.25 Whitehouse (2004, 38) criticizes Lawson and McCauley’s (1990) theory of religious rituals, claiming that there are many rituals in which supernatural agents play no role at all. He presents as an example the rainmaking ritual of the Orokaiva. This ritual is a technical procedure and does not involve any representations of supernatural agents. But this is simply because the ritual does not deal with any changes in the social positions of persons. It is not a religious but a magical ritual, in the sense that it is meant to bring about a change in the natural world by some counterintuitive means, not a change in the social position of persons and/or their status in a counterintuitive reality by using some natural means (see Pyysiäinen 2004d, 90 –112). From Lawson and McCauley’s point of view, it does not bring about a change in a religious world (also McCauley and Lawson 2002). It is only a technique of manipulating the natural world. I thus hypothesize that representations of supernatural agents are a necessary element only in rituals that are meant to induce a change in the “shared” knowledge of the group and when the change takes place by a transferring of an individual from one social position to another. Furthermore, not only rituals but also the basic concepts and beliefs of a religious tradition form chains that are ultimately grounded in the beliefs and desires of supernatural agents (Pyysiäinen 2001b, 90 –91). For example, in the proofs for the existence of God, God is the ultimate grounding. Thus, William Ockham argued in the fourteenth century that “there would be an infinite regress if among the things that exist there were not something such that nothing else is prior to it or more perfect than it ” (Quodlibet 1, q. 1, a. 2, 3; see chapter 4, section 4.1.5 here). Like ritual acts, the beliefs and desires of supernatural agents must also be made known to humans by other human agents. Doctrines form the same kinds of chains as rituals, in the sense that, for example, Frank says that Daddy says that the priest says that the Bible says that God made us in his image. The Bible is the word of God and thus stops the chain (Pyysiäinen 2001b, 230 –31). Regarding the various kinds of human mediators—prophets, mediums, priests, gurus, and so on—cognitive anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse (1996a) argues that we cannot properly conceptualize such religious leadership without taking the temporal dimension into account. Leadership tends to develop over time into differing forms, perhaps even following a fixed pattern. In Whitehouse’s example from Papua New Guinea, an involuntarily possessed man first became a medium, then a prophet, and then a divine, regal figurehead. At first, his brother interpreted the revelations of the possessed man, but later the brother himself became “a holder of the key” to the transcendental realm and


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the related “cargo.”26 Still later, the possessed man underwent a gradual apotheosis into a kind of deus otiosus who was withdrawn from the public life. Thus, the types of mediation of supernatural agency vary, and types of social situations can make one type of mediation more relevant than another. Slavery, for example, may make beliefs about zombies especially salient; prophets typify societies undergoing change and renewal; and priests represent a monotheistic God in a rigidly hierarchical society. If we conceptualize this developmental trajectory in terms of degrees of agency, then at the one end of the continuum there is the zombie, an animated organism that yet lacks mentality and intentional agency of its own ( being “remote-controlled” by its master, Davis 1986); at the other end are the most direct human(-like) manifestations of supernatural will, such as God incarnated in a human being.

Summary 1. Agency consists of animacy (liveliness, self-propelledness) and mentality ( beliefs and desires). 2. Humans have immediate experience of their own agency and also attribute agency to others whose behavior shows regular patterns.

figure 1.1

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

Regular patterns in natural events easily trigger intentional interpretations, and humans postulate that they exist and happen for a purpose (“promiscuous teleology”). Abstracting agency from observed behavior entails that agency is immaterial and controls the body. It also extends beyond the body and outlives it. Immaterial agency also opens up a truly interpersonal perspective: I can think of what others think of me thinking of them (etc.). Shared knowledge thus consist of persons’ ideas of others’ ideas (etc.). Agency can also be (counterintuitively) transferred to natural objects and artifacts. E. B. Tylor ’s idea of religion as belief in spirits can be combined with Durkheim’s idea of religion as the social glue that ties a group of people together into a moral community; there can be no “collective consciousness” without individuals who represent each other ’s mental states. In rituals, shared knowledge is “published” and an imaginary community created (“doctrinal” religions), or the emotional commitment to a smaller group is strengthened (“imagistic” religions).

2 Mind Your Heads

2.1 Mental, Public, and Cultural Representations As I emphasized in the preface, my aim is not to write yet another “ history of God” (see Lovejoy 1960, 4–5). I focus on the agentive properties of supernatural agents and on their relationship with the domains of intuitive physics and folk biology. By supernatural agent representations I mean the concepts, ideas, images, and beliefs persons have about supernatural agents. These are mental representations. Texts, paintings, works of art, uttered words, and so forth are extramental, “public” representations (Sperber 1996, 32). In studying representations of supernatural agents, we have to take into account that public representations both express and trigger mental representations (see Sperber and Wilson 1988). Texts or uttered words as such do not mean anything; they are mere configurations of ink on paper or patterns of sound waves (Bechtel 1996, 128; Ruhlen 1994, 40; Sperber 1996, 43, 75, 83). Philosopher John Searle (1995, 78–82, 156) goes so far as to argue that only biological brains are capable of intentional states, that is, states that are “intrinsically ” and naturally about something. My thoughts about Marilyn Monroe have intrinsic intentionality, whereas the written sentence “I love Marilyn Monroe” has only “derived” intentionality: its intentionality derives from my intrinsically intentional states. Yet it remains somewhat mysterious what exactly in the brain makes the brain naturally inclined to intentional states or consciousness (see Churchland 1995, 187–226; Clark 2005, in press; Thompson 2007; Thompson and Varela 2001).

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Scholars such as Andy Clark and David Chalmers take the opposite position and argue that the mind actually extends beyond the brain and the bounds of an individual (Clark 1997, 2005, in press; Clark and Chalmers 1998). Clark (2005, in press) observes that, for example, a notebook serves exactly the same function as a neuron or neural population in making possible such tasks as remembering the location of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In reply to Adams and Aizawa’s earlier criticism (2001) that neither the notebook nor the neurons alone can do the remembering, Clark emphasizes that letters in a notebook can trigger mental representations the same way neurons do. But, interestingly, he says that whether these letters as such, intrinsically and without a reader, have intentional content is “a harder question.” Clark then sidesteps this question with a thought experiment concerning Martians whose biological routines store bitmap images of printed words that they can later access via bitmap signals sent to their visual cortices. This, however, is wide of the mark, because Adams and Aizawa never claimed the brain to be the only locus of intrinsic content in principle. Their claim is that for the time being, it is a contingent fact that only the human brain has intrinsic content. It thus is not a counterargument to say that we can imagine cases of derived content being found in the mind (see Aizawa and Adams 2005). Most important, even if all intentionality is derived from derived intentionality, it still matters in which way the derivation is made (see also Sterelny 2004). Although the intentional contents of mental representations are derived, mental representation differs from extramental, in that mental derivation of content is dynamic and (partly) in the conscious control of the organismic system (agent) in question. Such control is made possible by mechanisms such as working memory, attention, conscious awareness, and emotions. These, in turn, relate to the fact that as biological organisms, human agents are entities that move around, need to find food, need to avoid predators, and need to reproduce. Whereas public representations are mere passive memory stores, mental representation is a dynamic process. Neurons are not passive like configurations of ink on paper are. Dynamic online motor control enables an organism to adjust in its environment through sensorimotor feedback, which then forms the basis for imitation and simulation of both real and imagined movements and cognitions of others (Gallese and Metzinger 2003; see Pyysiäinen 2008). It thus is easy to agree with Dan Dennett (1997, 66– 73), who points out that written sentences do not have intrinsic intentionality. One cannot know what the sentence “Our mothers bore us” means and what it is about without asking the person who wrote it. However, Dennett goes on to argue, the author ’s intentionality is every bit as derived as that of the written sentence. The brain derives whatever intentionality its parts have from the role these parts play in the larger system (see Lewis 1972). Adams and Aizawa (2001, 48), however, argue that cognitive states must involve intrinsic, nonderived content (see Clark 2005, 4). It is not merely a cultural convention that a state in a human brain is

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part of a person’s thought, whereas letters, numbers, and so on mean what they mean only by virtue of social conventions. Adams and Aizawa (53) thus argue that it is a matter of contingent fact that the processes that mediate nonderived representations “occur almost exclusively within the brain.” In my view, mental contents are “derived,” but the important thing here is that such derivation is a dynamic process that can only take place in certain biological organisms,1 most notably humans.2 Humans’ embodied central nervous system has the capacity to use the external environment to produce conscious mental contents. This capacity does not belong to individual neurons or even the brain as such; it belongs to organisms with a particular type of central nervous system. The ( human) brain is an important and unique link in cognitive causal chains (Sperber 2006), although the brain alone cannot do anything. Mental representations arise in the interaction of embodied brains with the environment ( which also includes other brains), but this in no way makes the distinction between mental and public representations irrelevant. When people study religious texts, they reason from public representations to mental ones. They are able to do so with some degree of reliability because the public representations are expressions of mental representations and because humans have independent, psychological evidence about mental structures. Cultures as “precipitations of cognition and communication” (Sperber 1996, 97) can, in principle, be approached from two different points of view that I will call Platonic and Aristotelian. The former view of culture is analogous to Plato’s view of “ideas,” in that culture is understood to exist as a transcendentallike, independent realm. Culture is a “uniquely human phenomenon independent of the laws of biology and psychology ”; although the social scientist holding this view neither denies nor asserts that the laws of heredity also apply to mental phenomena, he “does deny that the laws of heredity can contribute to his understanding of cultural phenomena—phenomena that are in no respect hereditary but are characteristically and without exception acquired” (Murdock 1932, 200–202). Culture is something more than the sum of psychosomatic qualities and actions, and it cannot be “wholly understood in terms of biology and psychology ” (Kroeber 1948, 8–9). Much of human nature “is merely culture thrown against a screen of nerves, glands, sense organs, muscles, etc.” (Leslie White, quoted in Degler 1991, 209). Even the human nervous system has been called a “cultural product ” (Geertz 1973, 50), and the anthropological concept of culture has been called equivalent to the concept of gravity in physics in its explanatory power (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963, 3). In this view, since cultural phenomena are not reducible to multiple individual representations, individual variation is not important. Members of a culture “share” its cultural ideas, in that they somehow have access to cultural ideas that exist independently from individual minds (cf. Boyer 2001, 35–36). In what I call the Aristotelian view, cultural ideas have only an immanent existence. Much as Aristotle’s categorial “essences” only existed in individual

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members of the category, culture only exists insofar as there are individuals who realize it (Boyer 1994b; Sperber 1985, 1996, 2006). Cultural ideas are “shared” in that there is such overlap in individual minds that we may regard different ideas as versions of each other. It is not necessary to presuppose any original “master ideas” behind this variation (see Honko 1996, 4). This model thus is based on what Mayr (1976) called “population” thinking in biology, in contrast to the pre-Darwinian “typological” thinking: culture is an abstraction based on a certain overlap in cognition and communication; as such, no culture has a clear boundary or essence (see Day 2005; Pyysiäinen 2005c). Cultural ideas are versions, not copies, of each other. One makes inferences from what others do and say, often also trying to approximate in one’s own behavior what one perceives (Richerson and Boyd 2005; Sperber 2000b). In communication, people do not simply transfer representations from mind to mind; communication instead involves active inference and reconstruction by the receiver (Sperber and Wilson 1988). “Sharing ” thus is similarity between mental representations. Cultural objects can trigger similar representations in various persons’ minds only on the condition that these persons already share some common knowledge. A picture of Jesus, for example, triggers very different representations in Finnish Lutherans, Japanese Buddhists, and Indonesian Moslems. Typically, in what I call Platonic explanations, one first observes that group A and group B differ from each other in some respect; then one postulates some x in A and some y in B to account for the difference. The x and y can be cultures, worldviews, belief systems, or some other form of entity-like abstractions. Moreover, x also explains why there is similarity among the members of group A; y explains why there is similarity among the members of group B. What is suspicious about this is that one first infers x and y from observed differences between A and B and then uses x and y to explain these differences. The explanandum thus is manipulated always to fit the explanans (Boyer 1990, 1994b; Turner 2003; Ylikoski 2003, 322–23). This leads to problems because x and y can explain differences between groups only insofar as they can also explain similarities within the group (see Pyysiäinen 2004d, 220–21). Yet the similarities depend on a contrast ( Ylikoski 2003, 324). Finnish culture, for example, is defined in contrast to Swedish, Russian, and other cultures. What separates Finns from Swedes is also what unifies Finns as Finns. Let us call it x. But what separates Finns from Russians is something different from x. Let us call it y. Both x and y must at once unify Finns as Finns (i.e. constitute Finnish culture). As they, are different things, however, Finnish culture receives two different identities. Since such contrasting can be continued ad nauseam, Finnish culture is continuously redefined, so it does not have any such unity as was presupposed. For Finnish culture to be homogeneous, the within-group similarities should be identifiable and explainable without any comparison to other cultures. But this is not the case,

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and the idea of unifying entities such as cultures, worldviews, and so forth becomes suspect ( Ylikoski 2001, 324). This problem need not lead us to dispose of the concept of culture; it is only the explanatory use of such concepts that is problematic. Explaining stability and change with reference to culture is especially difficult. The heart of the problem is in that the explanandum and explanans are too close to each other, as it were—are not independent from each other. Culture concepts may have some other uses, however ( Ylikoski 2003). For example, if Finnish culture is whatever Finns do, then some behavior x that is characteristic of Finns cannot be explained as being caused by Finnish culture (“Finns do x because it is part of Finnish culture”).3 Such concepts as “culture,” “tradition,” and so forth are causally impotent, in that they include nothing over and above the various facts that are grouped under them. Concepts such as “culture” may have a use if they are properly detached from the explanandum: being part of Finnish culture is a meaningful property if not everything Finns do is defined as part of Finnish culture. We need this detachment. “Culture” can be thought of as a placeholder for the effects of the cultural selection of concepts, beliefs and customs. The claim “The Finnish culture underwent a change in 1960’s” is a generalization over many lower-level changes that can be identified separately. It is, however, often useful to have also the higher-level explanation (see Ylikoski 2001, 87). A focus on the cultural selection of representations thus means studying patterns of derivation of intentional content. In other words, we study how and why, given certain initial conditions, persons tend to end up with the same kinds of mental representations over and over. Some of these representations may be innate intuitions, in that they emerge very early in the developing child, irrespective of the specific culture in which she is born, and are often below conscious awareness (see Elman et al. 1998, 22–35, 360–61). We do not have to think that they emerge irrespective of culture, just that they emerge irrespective of the variation that exists among the world’s cultures (see Pyysiäinen in press). The point is only that it does not matter in which particular culture one is born. Barrett (2003) makes a distinction between nativists (such as Bering), who focus on how individuals’ cognitive machinery of “produces” intuitive ideas and behaviors that may then receive augmentation from explicit ideas learned from culture, and epidemiologists, who are not necessarily interested in the origins of concepts and beliefs. Epidemiologists try to explain the distribution of representations in populations. Widespread ideas are typically such that people can easily adopt them because people can enrich them with their intuitions. When many persons acquire, store, and process an idea several times without much distortion or change, we have culture (Boyer 1998; Sperber 1996). We do not need to agree on any specific number of persons or the minimum time required for this to happen (Pyysiäinen 2005c, 291–92). We can say that a cultural trait must last approximately two years or longer (time ≥ Δ 2) and that it

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must be shared by several persons (persons ≥ Δ 2).4 Let us now mark “for how long,” p, and “how many,” x. A set of representations and practices forms a cultural pattern when { p ≥ Δ 2 & x ≥ Δ 2}. It thus is not possible to say exactly what counts or does not count as a cultural pattern.

2.2 From Unit-ideas to Recurrent Patterns It is not always easy to decide whether a representation belongs to innate intuitions or is cultural in the sense of being acquired in communication (see Sperber 1997); the boundary between innate concepts and cultural information that evokes and enriches them is by no means clear (see Barrett 2003; Boyer 2003a). We cannot explore the innate and the cultural independently from each other (see, e.g., Fodor 2000a; Griffiths 2002; cf. Laurence and Margolis 2002). It is more a question of which end we choose to approach representations from, as Barrett (2003) argues. Some representations and cognitive operations are so far removed from innate intuitions that they call for a different type of analysis. Whitehouse (2004), for example, argues that religious ideas are cognitively costly, not optimal, and that their persistence thus requires strong external, cultural support. An even better example is science. Scientific concepts and beliefs can only spread with strong support from public representations in external memory stores. To an extent, some theological concepts and beliefs are similar to scientific ones in the sense of being second-order theory of religion and thus cognitively costly ( Wiebe 1991). The epidemiological models have so far had little to say about this kind of representation (see Pyysiäinen 2004c). Liénard and Boyer (2006, 823), for example, argue that collective rituals are “generally not ‘engineered’ in the sense of a deliberate process.” Instead, variants of collective rituals that include cues activating the hazard precaution system (see Boyer and Liénard 2006) survive better in cultural selection. This is probably true of spontaneous transmission; in literate cultures, however, written, codified instructions also guide the performance of rituals. It remains to be explored whether this actually changes the nature of rituals or textual traditions merely reflect facts of spontaneous transmission. In this study, I will try to explore both codified theological conceptions of supernatural agents and the more spontaneous, actual conceptions, which we can find described in surveys and ethnographic reports (see Pyysiäinen 2004b). I can then analyze how these two relate to each other. Methodologically this means approaching representations of supernatural agents both on the basis of theological representations as found in texts, on the one hand, and data and reports more directly reflecting persons’ actual representations, on the other hand. Much as scholars in the Annales school of historical writing and in the research tradition of history of mentalities tried to

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delineate long-term historical structures by paying attention to material culture and mentalities (see Dosse 1994; Revel and Hunt 1995), I will try to explicate the long-term cognitive structures that help explain certain recurrent patterns in supernatural agent representation. We should not merely infer these structures from texts and then use these structures to explain the texts, in a circular fashion. Instead, we need to independently establish the existence of the cognitive structures in the light of experimental psychology and cognitive science. We can then use this knowledge to explain what sorts of mental representations and cognitive mechanism might underlie the various textual traditions. The cognitive effects of literacy and the use of texts as external memory stores has been much discussed (Donald 1991; Goody 1986, 1987, 2000; Pyysiäinen 1999). Writing has been assumed to be an important aid of memory that greatly contributes to the emergence of systematic bodies of knowledge, such as theologies (Goody 2000; Pyysiäinen 2004d, 160– 71; Sperber 1996, 56– 76). Writing enables guilds of religious specialists to develop general truths that are meant for all (Boyer 2001, 278). It helps decouple words and ideas from particular contexts and create the idea of fixed dictionary meanings; people thus become able to generalize beyond specific contexts and concerns. Literacy may not change the human mind radically, but it certainly provides a new and powerful tool for storing information; by the same token, it also generates the ideal of an immutable, coherent, and complete system of thoughts (Pyysiäinen 2004d, 147– 71; Sanderson 2008). It is actually an old idea that research should try to capture the obvious overlap in the world’s cultures and to explain recurrent themes. The well-known but little studied ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), for example, argued in the 1870s that ethnology should try to reconstruct the elementary ideas (Elementargedanken) common to all humans; this was to be done on the basis of the collective representations (Gesellschaftsgedanken) as they appeared in the ideas of various ethnic groups (Völkergedanken). The psychic unity of humankind was expressed in slightly differing forms in the varying cultures of the world. Ethnology was to study the social realm, which was “a mental realm created through interaction and linguistic intercourse,” providing a kind of “statistics of thought ” (Gedankenstatistik ) for a scientific psychology that was supposed to study collective consciousness (Koepping 1983, 29–36). Yet Bastian hardly ever outlined any of the supposed elementary ideas (Koepping 1983, 37). Bastian’s views were criticized by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) and his followers, who emphasized the diffusion of cultural innovations through cultural contacts (see Koepping 1983, 60–68). Yet Bastian seems not to have been a simpleminded nativist of his day; he accepted the stimulating ( but not creative) role of the environment. Thus, he anticipated in a way the later view of cognitive structures as channeling the spread of culture (see Atran 2002a). The historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy (1960, 3–4) argued that the history of ideas differed from the history of philosophy in that it was concerned with

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“unit-ideas.” Breaking individual systems into their unit-ideas, the history of ideas reveals that most philosophic systems are “original or distinctive rather in their patterns than in their components.” The number of distinct philosophical ideas is limited, and the apparent novelty of many systems is due to the arrangement of the constitutive elements, not to the elements themselves. The unitideas—for example, the three ideas related to the “principle of plenitude” that Lovejoy studied in his book—extend their influence over long periods of time. However, Hintikka (1981b) argued that the principle of plenitude is not one idea but a conglomeration of ideas, whose implications are not independent of its conceptual and theoretical environments. Therefore, Lovejoy’s whole methodology is questionable. As practitioners of the discipline called “memetics” have recently presented arguments very similar to Ratzel’s and Lovejoy’s, one might be tempted to say that the idea of some kind of unit-ideas is itself a unit-idea (see Atran 2002a, 236–62; Laland and Brown 2003, 197–239; Sperber 2000b). At any rate, the problems with memetics show that it is important to specify on what grounds a partition of ideas into basic elements is made, as well as what purpose it is supposed to serve. Whether we are concerned with a “statistics of ideas” or the operation of long-term mental structures, the crucial thing is the differential distribution of ideas: why some (types of) ideas are recurring and influential. A simple-minded memeticist would explain this with reference to the structure of ideas themselves, whereas a more realistic approach is to seek the explanation in the natural inclinations of the human mind (Atran 2002a, 241–43; Sperber 1985; cf. Laland and Brown 2003, 228–32). Why some ideas become widespread is explained to some extent by the ways the human mind works. Thus, instead of referring to some kind of unit-ideas, I will try to capture important overlap in the ways supernatural agents are represented (see Lovejoy 1960, 4–5). Thus, we do not need to postulate fixed units with an essence; population thinking makes it possible to focus on overlap in sets of representations instead of fixed categories. We explain this overlap with reference to basic cognitive processes and the similarity of environments.

2.3 The Illusion of “World Religions” Scholars of comparative religion have been in the habit of classifying and typologizing “religions.” One major category is the so-called world religions, although scholars have not been able to decide which religions precisely should be included in it and by what criteria. The paradigmatic representatives are Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism; often also Confucianism, Taoism, and Shinto are included (unless they are simply grouped together as “Chinese,” “Japanese,” or “East Asian religions”). Sometimes even Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Sikhism are mentioned in this context. The “world

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religions” are also called the “great ” religions of the world, although no one seems to know why and in what sense they are supposed to be greater than others (Masuzawa 2005, 2). I find such classification as problematic as Tomoko Masuzawa does, but for different reasons. Masuzawa (2005, 108–20) argues that the concept of a “world religion” derives from nineteenth-century Dutch attempts to distinguish between ethnically or nationally specific religions (Dutch Volksgodsdiensten) and world religions (Wereldgodsdiensten). The Catholic theologian Johann Sebastian von Drey first made this distinction in 1827; he distinguished between Christianity, which supposedly was free from all national boundaries and open to all humanity, and various national religions. In 1876, C. P. Tiele adopted the term Wereldgodsdiensten as the basis of his classification of religions, translated into English as “universalistic religious communities.”5 Tiele is said to have soon discarded this notion, though it was more a matter of simple relabeling. Pierre Chantepie de la Saussaye then reaffirmed the distinction between universal and national religions in 1891, albeit wishing to give Drey’s original theological idea a more scientific application (see Wiebe 1999). Masuzawa asks “what right ” we have to divide religions in this way and to try to distinguish “the West from the rest,” basing her argument on a criticism of “Orientalism” (2005, 2, 20, 110; cf. Schmidt 2006). For me, this is not a question of rights but of reasons and arguments. Underlying the phenomenological attempts at distinguishing between types of religion is the highly questionable implicit view that categories are defined by an inner essence and that the various features the members of the category share are caused by this essence (see Day 2005). The essence is something postulated on the basis of observed cues; the essence itself is not observable. Yet it is referred to as an explanation for the traits observed in members of the category. The essence is also understood to permeate an individual organism entirely, being equally present in all its parts (see Ahn et al. 2001; Boyer 1993; Gelman and Hirschfeld 1999). In many cases of insufficient information, such essentialism can help predict the behavior of organisms in a cognitively cheap way, even though the assumption itself is literally false. But things can go wrong. “Religions” are not natural kinds and have no clear boundaries (see Boyer 1993). As generalizations about “Hinduism,” “Christianity,” and so forth are only based on a certain overlap in individuals’ behavior, not on individuals sharing the same essence, these generalizations do not hold true for every individual member of the category of “Hinduism.” Although scholars of religion have at times warned against generalizing statements such as “the Hindus believe” and “Moslems think,” it has been difficult to avoid such language because we often need some conceptual means of describing things at the populational level. Thus, we can still hear statements about what Buddhists believe, Hindus do, and so forth, as if Buddhism and Hinduism were monolithic. Official teachings and doctrines are (pre)supposed to reflect the essence of the religion in question, while

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individual believers are thought to have various kinds of more or less inaccurate views about true religion. For a social and behavioral scientist, this is a completely arbitrary choice, however. Instead of defining the True religion, we want to study everything that actually goes on in a given tradition. Written theologies are not exhaustive catalogs of the beliefs of the members of a group and thus cannot be used as indicators of what those subscribing to the religion in question actually believe (Barrett 1999; Boyer 1994b). Theological doctrines are instead artifacts that serve as cues directing people’s inferences; being exposed to some official theological formulations triggers mental representations that are more salient than others to start with. Although we can often predict more or less accurately what kinds of ideas people will end up entertaining after being exposed to certain teachings, there are no necessary links between these ideas and the theological stimuli (Boyer 1994b, 260–61). The actually represented ideas do not mechanically follow from the perceived stimuli; they are brought about by an active inferential process in the mind (see Sperber and Wilson 1988). Individuals’ actual religious thought and behavior thus is not based on making applied deductions from theological systems. Categories such as “founded religions” (vs. “ethnic” religions) and “religions of the book ” are equally problematic. Only rarely is a religion simply founded by one person. Some religions can also be classified as either founded or ethnic, depending on one’s interpretation of the facts. Some think Judaism was founded by Moses, while a historically more accurate view is that it is an ethnic religion. “Religions of the book ” have canonized scriptures, but such holy books never provide an exhaustive description of the believers’ beliefs formulations of which often are for the most part orally transmitted (see Graham 1987). Monotheism is often distinguished from polytheism, although it is not always clear what counts as monotheism and whether certain subservient supernatural figures, such as Jesus or the Virgin Mary, count as additional gods. Finally, the category of “religion” itself is a vague one, and all attempts at “defining” it are actually quite beside the point (see Boyer 1994b, 29–34; Martin 2008; Pyysiäinen 2001b, 1–5; Wiebe 2008). Why should we try to define religion? Whether we think we cannot study it before we have a definition of it or we think the ultimate goal of studying it is to arrive at a definition of it, no serious work can be done along these lines. Religion can and has been studied without a definition of it; conversely, arriving at a satisfactory definition would not stop further research because a mere definition really tells us nothing of great interest. We do not study “religion” as a defined concept but rather as what individuals actually do and say. Thus, when I, for example, refer to Christianity or Buddhism, I do not mean to imply that they form coherent wholes. These are just words we use to identify certain “precipitations of cognition and communication” that do not have any fixed boundaries or strict internal homogeneity (an essence). I will

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explore them by analyzing both folk conceptions and prescribed ideas about supernatural agency, trying to describe the cognitive trajectories from spontaneous folk beliefs to reflective theology.

Summary 1. Supernatural agent representations are mental concepts, ideas, images, and beliefs; texts, paintings, works of art, uttered words, and so on are extramental, public representations expressing mental representations. Public representations also trigger mental representations. 2. In studying religious texts, we reason from public representations to mental representations, using experimental data about human cognition as a guide; we then use mental representations to explain the public representations in the texts. 3. Shared knowledge means that different ideas in individual minds are regarded as versions (not copies) of each other. 4. This study focuses on recurrent patterns in the ways supernatural agents are represented in differing traditions. 5. Traditions, cultures, and religions are abstractions based on the observed overlap of mental and public representations; they are not classes with an essence and clear boundaries. Thus, being a “Buddhist,” for example, does not mean that one merely repeats the “Buddhist doctrine” like an automaton. On the contrary, “Buddhism” is an abstraction based on observed overlap of individuals’ behavior with their beliefs.


II

Supernatural Agency


3 Souls, Ghosts, and Shamans

3.1 Soul Beliefs In this section, I begin with the views of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) on folk beliefs about “souls.” I try to show that the kinds of beliefs he talked about were not mere narrative fantasies but an expression of a “folk psychology of souls” (cf. Bering 2006): a common, everyday way of conceptualizing agency. One could illustrate these types of belief with almost any folk tradition of the world; I use examples here from ethnographies of Finno-Ugric peoples because Wundt ’s ideas have been important in this area of research.1 Wundt tried to systematize beliefs about souls using existing ethnographic materials and Tylor ’s and Bastian’s theorizing; many later scholars occasionally refer to Wundt ’s work, but he often goes unrecognized. This is understandable: he had no robust theory but only made general observations about soul beliefs, some of which can ultimately be traced back to Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptualizations and elaborations of folk intuitions. Currently, cognitive scientists and cognitive developmentalists in psychology are mapping the same territory, albeit looking at things from a different angle. A whole family of concepts such as soul, spirit, person, I, me, and self all represent attempts at conceptualizing different aspects of human agency. Focusing on representations of types of soul, of dead agents, and of spirits that can enter and leave bodies, I will explore traditional forms of these conceptualizations.

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3.1.1 Phenomenology of Souls “Soul” is the generally used English translation of the Greek psuchē and the Latin anima. In the Western philosophical tradition, conceptions of soul are closely related to the philosophical analysis of emotion that Plato first introduced and Aristotle elaborated. In the Republic, emotions and desires are “movements of the soul”; the soul is divided into three parts: the reasoning ( logistikon), the spirited (thumoeides), and the appetitive (epithumētikon). Reasoning is a specifically human ability, and ideally it should govern the entire soul; the spirited part is the seat of emotions; the appetitive part pursues immediate sensual pleasures (Knuuttila 2006, 2– 7). Aristotle argued that the soul was not a separate substance but the “form” of the body; there were no disembodied mental phenomena, even though cognitive acts did not reduce to bodily changes (Knuuttila 2006, 44). Souls distinguished a living body from an inanimate body, every soul being realized in a physical body, not in mere dead matter. Plants had “nutritive” souls ( liveliness), animals had “sensitive” souls (goal-directed movement), and only humans had the intellect that allowed them to think (Aristotle, De an. 429b–430b, 434a– 435a; Frede 1995, 96; Nussbaum 1995, 9). Aristotle appears to be a functional “modularist,” preferring to regard souls as capacities rather than parts or levels (Knuuttila 2006, 44). As similar, albeit vaguer distinctions between types of soul occur in folk conceptions all over the world, Aristotle may be said to have systematized and elaborated crossculturally recurrent intuitive ontological assumptions (see Thompson 1955–58, 2:492–517). Wundt was one of the forerunners of modern social psychology; he established the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. He emphasized that soul concepts should only be studied on the basis of collective representations as found in language, myths, and customs (“folk psychology ” or Völkerpsychologie).2 Introspective experimentation could yield information only about perception and simple emotions, not about “higher ” cognitive processes (see Kusch 1999, 10 –254; Taves 1999, 259– 62, 307). According to Wundt (1906, 1–94), the concept of soul appeared in two very different forms: the body-soul (Körperseele) was a characteristic of the body, while the free-soul or psyche was identified with breathing (Hauchseele) and one’s shadow (Schattenseele). Wundt then asks the reader to compare his presentation to that of Tylor (1903, 423ff ). For Wundt, beliefs about the body-soul were the older ones. The body-soul was responsible for such properties of a living body as feeling, mental representations, and thinking and was divided into several different “soul organs” (Organseele) (2–40). The psyche, manifested as the breath-soul or spirit and as shadow, was not constrained by the bounds of the physical body, which it could temporarily leave. In death, when the body stopped breathing, the soul left the body for good and flew away—through an open window, for example (40 –94). Wundt is not very explicit about his sources, but occasionally

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he provides references to the works of Bastian, William Robertson-Smith, Tylor, and others. The material gathered and classified by Tylor (e.g. 1903, 1:434– 67) is especially apparent in the background. The basic division Tylor and Wundt made between the body-soul and the psyche is known in comparative religion in various versions; it has been especially important in the ethnography of Finno-Ugric peoples and Siberian shamanism. According to the Finnish linguist Heikki Paasonen (1909), in the Finno-Ugric Urzeit ( before the split of Finnic languages and Ugrian languages such as Hungarian), the living person was believed to have both a spirit or “ breath” (Ger. Atem) that made the body alive and a soul.3 The most common name for “breath” was the Ostyak (Hanti) word lil, deriving from a Proto-FinnoUgric root (> Hungarian lélek, Lappish lievl, Estonian leil, and Finnish löyly, which currently refers to the steam that comes from the hot stones in the bathhouse stove when water is thrown on them [Karjalainen 1918, 23]).4 The soul was a ghost (Gespenst) or a shadow that could temporarily leave the body (Paasonen 1909). K. F. Karjalainen (1918) took up this theme in his book on the religion of the Ostyaks and Voguls (the Khanty and Mansi), whom he referred to as “the Yugraic peoples” ( Jugralaiset). The book was published a year before Karjalainen’s death. In the beginning of the book, he pointed out that as a living person was observed to breathe, the breath as a kind of a vital force (Finn. elämän voima) was supposed to leave the body on the moment of death. The vital force, when conceived of as a separate being, could be called a “ breath-soul” ( henkisielu). In addition to the breath-soul, there was the ghost- or shadow-soul ( haamu- eli varjosielu). Thus, the fact of death was the cornerstone of all soul concepts (20). Karjalainen said it was common understanding that in the beliefs of primitive peoples the soul was threefold: there was a body-soul, a breath-soul, and a ghost-soul. This trinity was not found among the Ostyaks and Voguls, however. The body-soul was not divided into separate soul organs, and the breath-soul and ghost-soul were not originally identical. For these peoples, the soul was twofold: breath separated a living person from a dead body; this breath-soul covered both the body-soul and the breath-soul that Wundt observed. It was accompanied by the ghost-soul ( henkisielu or hahmosielu).5 Karjalainen thought we should regard these views not as “doctrines” but as vague and even mutually contradictory ideas that developed over time (1918, 23; see also Severi 1993; Thompson 1955–58, 2:492–517). According to Karjalainen, the breath-soul ( lil, śān, šōn) was understood as a force that appeared as visible or invisible steam that emanated from the body and could even move to another body. In certain contexts, this belief had developed into a belief about a separate entity that had an individual essence. It was accompanied by beliefs about the hahmosielu as a kind of a homunculus and a necessary part of a living person. Yet it had its own identity and could also live

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outside the body. Karjalainen said that Paasonen showed that this conception was common to all Finno-Ugric peoples. In the Western areas, it was called is, from which the Finnish word itse (“self ”) derived. Eastern Ostyaks called it ilt (“shadow, mirror image”). Normally, losing one’s ilt could cause illness, but a sorcerer ’s (noita) ilt could travel in the upper and nether worlds without the sorcerer falling ill (1918, 24–30; Pentikäinen 1985, 133−35). Both Paasonen and Karjalainen were linguists: they studied religious and traditional beliefs as part of the study of language. Paasonen studied the Mordva, Khanty, and Mari languages and published four volumes of Mordvan narratives. His dictionary of Mordvan dialects was published posthumously, as late as 1990 –99. Karjalainen spent four years (1898–1902) among the Hanti (Ostyaks) and published two collections of their texts, as well as a dictionary of the Ostyak language. Uno Harva (until 1927 Holmberg), whom Mircea Eliade, for example, often cites, also used linguistic arguments and studied the same materials; he, however, was primarily a scholar of folklore and religion and is said to have turned Finnish folklore scholarship into comparative religion (Anttonen 1987, 11, 50, 2007; see Znamenski 2007, 32–33). Harva dealt with ideas of soul in his published doctoral thesis, presenting his materials in an order he believed reflected the various stages of development and the geographical-historical spread of ideas (Harva 1913, 15). He (1) questioned the applicability of Tylor ’s animistic theory to the oldest religious representations of the most primitive peoples (Naturvölker ). He referred to Stadling ’s (1912, 8) claim that researchers had established the fact that the conception of soul as an independent being only belonged to later phases of development (see also Durkheim 1925, 34, 1965, 39–40). Harva argued that according to the most primitive conception, the soul was a property of the physical body, which it could not leave. Harva then provides a footnote, asking the reader to see Wundt (1906, 1–46) on primitive conceptions of the soul; he does not, however, refer to Wundt in his later works (Harva 1913, 1–2, 8–9). Harva (1913, 1–9, 1993, 250–52) made the familiar distinction between two different soul concepts: the spirit or breath (Ger. Atem) was the vital force that made an organism alive, while the soul (Seele) was the object of “actual soul belief.” The Turkic peoples (the “Altaic family,” Harva 1933, 171) believed that everything that breathed had a spirit and that in death the spirit departed the body, evaporating like steam.6 As a vital force, the spirit could also be attributed to everything that grew or was powerful, including even such things as sharp knives.7 Harva claimed that the spirit was not regarded as an independent being and that cases in which the spirit was clearly considered to be separate from the body had to be explained by cultural contacts with other peoples. The soul, as distinct from the spirit, usually left the body before the spirit departed in death. It was also called “form” or “figure” (Aussehen, Form; Finn. hahmo), “mirror image” (Spiegelbild ), and “shadow ” (Schatten). The soul could travel


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apart from the body when the person was asleep or ill. In such cases, the soul represented the conscious self and was an independent, knowing, willing, and feeling being ( Wesen). In cases of serious illness, the soul seemed to be split into two, because the sick person might be conscious while her or his soul yet was outside the body. For Harva, belief in personal souls thus was a later development that followed the belief in impersonal forces that people could control in a mechanical manner (Harva 1916). Beliefs about the deceased (Finn. vainajat) and gods also belonged to this later developmental stage.8 As the shaman, for example, was dealing with personal souls, he was not a magician, and shamanism thus belonged to the later, animistic stage of religious development (see Anttonen 1987, 114–16). Thus, Harva departed from his teacher Kaarle Krohn’s (1915) idea that only beliefs about the deceased (vainajat) reflected the original FinnoUgric religious tradition, while all other elements of folklore testified to syncretism due to Christianization. Harva’s teacher, the folklore scholar Kaarle Krohn complained in his report on Harva’s doctoral thesis that Harva had not been able to free himself from “theorizing ” and that the theories of the historians of religion had flawed his work. Harva generalized from observations on one Finnic people to another, completing the argument by his personal opinions based on unsound linguistic speculation and presupposing that the borrowing of a word from another tradition also testified to the borrowing of a concept. Older strata in belief systems thus were reconstructed on the basis of mere linguistic similarities á la Friedrich Max Müller (see Anttonen 1987, 112–14; Masuzawa 2005, 207–44). Krohn was a folklorist who had continued his father ’s, Julius Krohn’s, work in developing the so-called “geographical-historical” or “Finnish” method for the study of folklore. Its basic idea was that cross-culturally recurrent types and motives of narratives were to be explained by cultural contacts and borrowing, not by the psychic unity of humankind (see Krohn 1894; Krohn 1971). Krohn argued that oral traditions as documented in the field were the only proper sources for the study of folkbeliefs; linguistic speculations in the abstract should not be accepted (Anttonen 1987, 44). The disagreement between Harva and Krohn thus reflects the more international debate between Bastian and his psychic unity thesis in contrast to Ratzel’s anthropogeography. The Finnish debate may also have been one between linguists such as Karjalainen and E. N. Setälä, on the one hand, and folklorists such as Kaarle Krohn and Antti Aarne, on the other hand (see Martti Haavio’s remarks quoted in Anttonen 1987, 85; Setälä 1915). Anttonen (1987, 131), following Albert Hämäläinen, points out that in his main work, Altain suvun uskonto9 (Religion of the Altaic Family, 1933), Harva was influenced by international discussions within the history of religions and of Ratzelianism in particular. This may be so, although Harva does not refer to Ratzel or even explicitly discuss his methodology. Similar ideas had previously

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been presented by Julius and Kaarle Krohn, however. Anttonen (1987, 132–33) also argues that Harva’s criticism against Tylorian-Wundtian ideas may have been inspired by the papers read at the 5th Congress of the History of Religions in Lund, Sweden, in August 1929. Some of the short contributions, published in 1930, discussed soul beliefs and took a critical stance on Tylorianism. Secretary of the Congress and Professor of the History of Religions at Lund, Martin Nilsson (1930, 97), for example, wrote: “A true concept of the soul does not exist among the primitives, or even at higher levels of culture. What exists is a bunch of associations that emerge at some point and then assume a definite form, although they are loose and dubious.”10 Anttonen (1987, 132–33) suggests that when Harva wrote that neither the Turkic-Mongolian nor any other “primitive” peoples (Naturvölker) had any explicit doctrine of the soul, only ideas with an associative connection, he was leaning on Nilsson’s view. Harva argued that as primitive thought (ursprüngliche Denken) does not represent educated thinking, we would go wrong if we followed Tylor and projected our own learned concepts of soul onto primitive peoples (1993, 252–53). Anttonen also shows that Nilsson had urged Harva to participate in the conference but for some reason Harva did not accept the invitation. He, however, had a copy of the proceedings in his library. Yet Harva does not mention the conference or Nilsson’s paper in his book at all. The idea that folk conceptions do not form a theology, doctrine, or philosophy, is actually a very general one and was already entertained by Karjalainen (1918, 23), for example. Harva lists Karjalainen’s book in his bibliography but does not refer to it in the section on conceptions of the soul. Neither does he mention Paasonen or Wundt. Most of the references are to Russian travelogues, books and articles (Harva 1993, 250 – 79). In his earlier book on Finno-Ugrian and Siberian mythology, Harva does mention Paasonen and Karjalainen, but not in connection with the dualism of the soul (Harva 1927). Wundt is not mentioned at all. One thus gets the impression that Harva presents the classification of souls as his own finding, partly based on his own ethnographic fieldwork. The influence of Nilsson and the conference must therefore remain speculative. It is true, though, that ciriticism against Tylorianism was in the air, so to speak. Although Harva maintains that folk conceptions do not form a theology, his methodology did not allow for a genuinely individual and situationist analysis of folk beliefs. Instead, he uses heterogeneous sources and makes harmonizing inductive generalizations about what “Lapps,” “Buryats,” and so forth believe as a folk, as though various peoples had unitary “worldviews” or “ belief systems” (to use more modern labels, see Pyysiäinen 2001b, 143–58; Ch. 2.3.). Such categorization is problematic because it basically operates on the emic level, occasionally translating terms into more etic language (see appendix). But as the underlying assumptions on which the classification rests are not properly spelled out, no agreement about the nature of the soul conceptions has


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been achieved among scholars. It is difficult to bring order to the great variety of beliefs and concepts by a mere inductive approach. Yet phenomenologists of religion have tried to elaborate the classification of souls presented by Tylor and Wundt into a realistic system (see “Types of Soul” below). Ernst Arbman (1926, 1939), for example, argued against Wundt that the division between the body soul and psyche belongs to the earliest phase and that the idea of psyche is not derived from the idea of a body soul. Historian of Native American religions, Åke Hultkrantz (1953, 18–36), then, bases his own classification of souls on Tylor ’s and Arbman’s work. He argues that we are not here dealing with two functions of a single entity but rather with two different souls the ideas of which are equally old. The idea of the free-soul is based on the fact that we have memories and dreams about other persons. The idea of the life-giving body-soul, for its part, is based on the observation of persons being alive, both bodily and mentally (Hultkrantz 1953, 23–25; cf. Severi 1993). Hultkrantz (1953, 26) thinks that the idea of an evanescent free-soul has been used to explain the liveliness of the body by associating it with breathing. The idea of the breath-soul has thus become a meeting place between the two earlier soul concepts and has made possible the later development of a homogeneous concept of the soul. Ivar Paulson (1958, 18–19, 206–19, 223–354), extending Hultkrantz’s typology, divides the body-soul into a “life-soul” ( lebensseele) and a “self-soul” (Ichseele) and divides the free-soul further into a “double” (Doppelgängerseele) and a “fate-soul” (Schicksalsseele). The various types of soul are shown in the list.

Types of Soul Wundt Arbman & Hultkrantz Paulson

Body-soul Life-giving-soul Body: life-soul, self-soul

Free-soul/psyche Free-soul Free-soul: double, fate-soul

Although these classifications are problematic (as I discuss later), they have one advantage over Harva’s position: beliefs about souls are not denied to the so-called primitives. Inspired by Marett ’s preanimism (see the following section), Harva thought that in the most primitive forms of religion, natural objects were seen to have power (animacy in my terminology) but not a soul that would have been separate from the body (mentality, in my terminology). (I will question this view in section 3.1.3.) We can see that Harva’s claim about Tylorians, that they were trying to force “our learned concepts” on the primitives, is mistaken once we recognize that Tylor ’s soul concepts actually reflect folk psychology quite closely (cf. Strathern and Stewart 2007, x). The Western concepts of soul were not invented by Aristotle de novo or only introduced by medieval Scholastics. They are deeply rooted in human intuitions.

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3.1.2 Language and Cognition As scholars of folklore have often emphasized, folk traditions are not a homogeneous mass; we should analyze the form and function of different folklore genres to determine what aspects of culture and cognition they testify to. Folktale (Märchen), legend (Sage), and myth (Mythe) were first differentiated by Jakob Grimm in his Deutsche Mythologie, but this distinction was not really used, let alone elaborated, until in the latter part of the twentieth century. Bronislaw Malinowski (1984, 96–148), for example, distinguishing in 1948 between three types of narratives on the Trobriand Islands—kukwanebu, liliu, and libwogwo—argues that these are emic terms whose meaning exists only in the Melanesian language. Yet he also explains that liliu corresponds to “myth” or “sacred tales,” kukwanebu to “fairy- or folktales,” and libwogwo to “legends.” Such classification has since been analyzed and developed by William Bascom (1965), C. Scott Littleton (1965), and Lauri Honko (1968), for example (see Briggs 2002, 1–14). One solution to the problem of comparativism is the Krohnian attempt to explain everything in terms of cultural contacts and borrowing; but this approach fails to explain why some concepts and beliefs are more contagious than others. Harva, for his part, seems to have thought that similarities might be explained by the linguistic-cultural unity of the Altaic family. As Krohn pointed out, Harva was not really an ethnographer but rather based his arguments on textual sources and linguistic data (Anttonen 1987, 77). The leading idea of Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker was that there existed an Altaic “family ” (suku) of languages, and that the Finno-Ugric languages belonged to the Altaic languages (the “Uralic-Altaic ” language group; Harva 1993, 5–11). This linguistic connection implied that these peoples’ ways of thinking were similar, too.11 Harva thus reasoned from words to concepts, presupposing that language directly revealed something about thinking, which is problematic. There is no isomorphism between verbal language and cognitive processes (see Pyysiäinen 2004d, 9–11, 20 –23). The cognitive science of religion rests essentially on the realization that thinking is neither carried out in nor determined by verbal language alone, although language is important in thinking. Cognitive science thus can help us disentangle linguistic and cognitive processes and build a more solid frame of reference for a comparative analysis of conceptions of the soul. When we shift attention from the mere reconstruction of emic categories on the basis of linguistic expressions, we may be able to better understand the nature of the conceptions of the soul. Then we no longer explore these conceptions as something “ancient,” “heathenish,” and alien to us.12 Harva’s basic idea of an “Altaic religion” shared by the Uralic and Altaic peoples is also suspect on linguistic grounds. In the nineteenth century, most linguists came to reject the idea of a Uralic-Altaic language group; the idea of


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the Altaic family of languages survived much longer and only recently has been rejected by some linguists (see Ruhlen 1994, 12). Linguists have found it hard to reconstruct relationships above the level of language families ( phyla); there is no commonly accepted single tree linking all known (five to seven thousand) languages; see Oppenheimer 2003, 2006; cf. Ruhlen 1994). Languages change rapidly, and often it is not possible to draw a sharp line separating a language and a dialect, for example. Swedish and Norwegian are considered to be two distinct languages, but they could just as well be regarded as dialects of a single language, for instance. Some linguists think that it is not possible to measure the rate of relatedness between any two or more languages; others think that it is possible to develop a chronology based on such assumptions, as the probability of a word losing its original meaning stays constant over time (Cavalli-Sforza 2001, 133–38). Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues, who have used the principal component analysis (PCA) to study the prehistory of human populations statistically, have produced a genetic tree of the human species that is strikingly similar to the corresponding linguistic trees (Cavalli-Sforza 2001; CavalliSforza et al. 1988; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1993; see Ruhlen 1994, 31–35). However, these researchers’ method suffers from insufficient and problematic samples, leading to a circularity of their argument: when the populations studied are identified based on geographical and ethnic (and thus also linguistic) criteria, it is no big surprise that there is overlap in the two trees. While PCA is a good method of displaying genetic distance and different genetic gradients and vectors graphically, it does not allow for the dating of these components as genetic events or inferring the direction of gene flow in migrations. A more reliable method is phylogeography—based on the prehistory of individual mitochondrial DNA molecules and their mutations (instead of whole populations). This method has recently allowed scholars to show that there was only a single dispersal of modern humans from Africa via the coastal route through India and Southeast Asia and Australasia. Modern humans lived in East Africa over 160,000 years ago, and about 85,000 years ago, a group crossed the mouth of the Red Sea and proceeded toward the Indian peninsula; approximately 50,000 years ago, a population coming from the Levant reached Europe (Macaulay et al. 2005; Oppenheimer 2003, 2006, xix, 289–93, 490–96). There are important differences in the linguistic and genetic classifications of human populations; Finns, for example, are genetically European, although their language is Uralic (Cavalli-Sforza 2001, 116). This casts serious doubt on Harva’s way of equating between language and ethnicity.

3.1.3 Animatism and Animism Harva seems to have accepted R. R. Marett ’s (1914) preanimistic view in arguing that religion probably emerged from the worship, without belief in souls,

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of natural phenomena, departing from the “manistic ” view of the veneration of the dead as the ultimate source of religion (from Lat. manes, “spirits of the dead”). Herbert Spencer expressed this view (1891), and Kaarle Krohn represented it in Finland (1915). Anttonen (1987, 85) thinks that Harva simply realized that the manistic theory could not explain all empirical evidence, but there seems to be more to it (cf. Anttonen 1987, 114). It is hardly the case that Harva simply studied the evidence; it is more likely that his own theoretical orientation directed him to read the evidence in a particular way. For Marett, animism was “the spirit-doctrine . . . at a stage of its development when it is as yet very largely, if not wholly, untrue” (1936, 101). The earliest phase was preanimism (or animatism), in which natural objects were seen as animate; without that, the idea of a personal soul could not have arisen. Supernaturalism was an “attitude of mind dictated by awe of the mysterious, which provides religion with its raw material,” apart from animism, souls, and spirits. Startling manifestations of nature were treated as powers without assuming the agency of spirits (1914, 1–2), which in my terminology amounts to postulating animacy without mentality. Later, Marett (1920, 82) argued that, despite the enormous change science had brought Western civilization, underlying primitive magic was a natural tendency that was very difficult to overcome. When the conditions were unfavorable to the predominance of the scientific temper, the lurking tendency to superstition would reveal itself. Here Marett was more correct than he may have realized (see Atran 1990; Bloom 2007; Keil 2003; Kitchener 2002). Marett also saw, very perceptively, that the special function of Tylor ’s comparative method was to testify to a unity in difference “amid an endless diversity of outer circumstance” (Marett 1920, 81). It is the unity, the recurrent patterns, that the cognitive perspective is also meant to explain. The folk conceptions of soul are not mere exotic beliefs but an integral part of human everyday life and of folk psychology, that is, the type of reasoning everybody uses when not engaged in scientific or philosophical reflection (see Nichols and Stich 2003; Pyysiäinen 2004b; see Mithen 1998). The very term “soul,” among other factors, seems to have misled scholars to think that we are necessarily dealing with something religious or theological. However, we should distinguish between soul terms as mere conceptualizations of agency and their religious and counterintuitive elaborations. As I have shown, agency is normally understood as something separate from the physical body, and as being responsible for the body’s rational action. Infants also seem to view agency as separable from the physical body, a tendency that continues in adulthood in the spontaneous feeling that I am not a body; I instead occupy a body. As natural-born dualists, we humans separate agency from the body, think that “we” direct the movements of “our ” bodies, and feel that “we” are going to outlive the body (Bloom 2005, 2007; see Bronkhorst 2001). We should thus regard the various conceptions of the “soul” as


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perfectly natural, culture-specific ways of conceptualizing these panhuman intuitions. When these intuitions are expressed in an alien language and terminology, we can easily be misled into thinking that people believe there are separate imaginary entities corresponding to each and every soul term—leading us to speculate about the proper classification of souls. Although scholars have at times warned against presupposing that the conceptions of souls form a coherent doctrine, most scholars have not been able to completely free themselves from thinking that the various soul terms are names of separate imagined entities. Cognitive science now provides an etic vocabulary in which it is easier to distinguish between the explanans and the explanandum. The soul terms can be thought of as placeholders for that something to which people attribute agentive properties. It is not the nature and qualities of this something that are important but its functional role: even though no specific entity corresponds to the word “I,” for example, this word serves a necessary function in human understanding of personal agency. In using words such as “I” and “she,” people refer not merely to material bodies but also to agents that have beliefs and desires. The varying soul terms represent attempts at connecting beliefs, desires, and other seemingly immaterial mental states with the body. The self-propelledness of the body, intentionality, and cognitive states that define agency (Leslie 1994) seem to be basically the things that the various soul conceptions also cover: the body-soul, as the vital force, accounts for the self-propelledness of the body; the self-soul-aspect of the body-soul accounts for intentional action (persons act, not merely react); the free-soul explains cognition and one’s feeling that one is not one’s body. The souls then are—by way of association—connected with the more ethereal aspects of the body, such as breathing and the shadow. Such “subtle bodies” (or “spiritual matter,” see Kenny 2007, 63) in a way mediate between the bodily and the mental as separate categories. The intuitive, dualistic concept of soul consists of a combination of mentality and/or animacy together with spatiality (and possibly physicality). What is counterintuitive is animacy and mentality without spatiality. Attributing a human soul to an animal is probably also counterintuitive (see, e.g., Briggs 2002, 316; Harva 1993, 258– 64). That is, although the separation of mentality from a particular body is not as such counterintuitive, the subsequent transference of the soul to an animal body may be. Marett and Harva thought that there was a stage in the development of the human species on which humans could only represent the idea of animated bodies but not of disembodied souls. Some primates are capable of understanding and postulating animacy (and have HAD), without an understanding of mentality and intentionality (HUI/ ToM), and even chimpanzees understand intentionality but not shared intentionality, but this is not what Marett or Harva had in mind. They were clearly speaking of homo sapiens ( whereas Guthrie

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[2002] seems to suggest the existence of an understanding of animacy but not of mentality in some members of the genus homo). Knowing how important and all-pervasive hyperactive mentality attribution is in modern humans, it seems doubtful that early humans would have consistently attributed only animacy, say, to natural objects such as stars and planets, and never mentality to natural objects. Although humans may have lacked doctrines and narratives about souls, they must have had intuitive ideas about minds and most probably also projected them on solid objects, much as they do today. Otherwise, even a rudimentary form of religion would not have been possible. When I say that conceptions of the soul have made possible conceptions of supernatural agents, I am not presenting a historical argument. I am especially not speculating when and in what form religion once emerged. What could be reasonably discussed is when the kind of mind that makes religion possible emerged (Boyer 1994b; see Donald 1991; Mithen 1998). Here I only want to argue that there can be no representations of supernatural agents unless there are intuitive representations of animacy and mentality (“soul” concepts). (In the next chapter, I explore beliefs about souls of dead agents in more depth.)

3.2 Dead Agents Skeptics have sometimes challenged religious belief by asking what if there is an afterlife but no god, or a god but no afterlife (Hitchens 2007, 156). This is a bit misleading, however. In fact, in some cultures, people have beliefs about souls or spirits in the “hereafter ” without beliefs about gods other than the ancestral spirits themselves (“manism,” shamanism); likewise, people can have beliefs about gods without much interest in the afterlife of individuals, as in older Judaism or in the ancient Vedic religion. Nonetheless, the ideas of an individual afterlife and of gods still tend to develop together in religious history (Pyysiäinen 1997).

3.2.1 Souls of the Dead Paasonen (1909, 4) argued that “when a man dies, no essential change in the soul’s relationship with the body takes place.” As the soul was independent from the body, the death of the body did not affect the soul. Spencer ’s “manistic ” view of religion was based on the same belief in the independence of the soul from the body. The soul beliefs led to ancestor worship and to totemism and thus were also the basis of beliefs about gods. Spencer wrote in 1870: The rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors, who are supposed to be still existing, and to be capable of working good or evil to their descendants. . . . The savage, conceiving


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a corpse to be deserted by the active personality who dwelt in it, conceives this active personality to be still existing, and . . . his feelings and ideas concerning it form the basis of his superstitions. Everywhere we find expressed or implied the belief that each person is double; and that when he dies, his other self, whether remaining near at hand or gone far away, may return, and continues capable of injuring his enemies and aiding his friends. (1891, 106– 7) This view seems to reflect more general human intuitions; Krohn (1915, 40 –47, 58, 248), without mentioning Spencer, also argued that the veneration or worship of the dead was common and influential around the world and helped explain shamanistic practices better than mere beliefs in nature spirits. In Finland, manism was the earliest form of religion, later replaced by the worship of the great God Ukko and then by Christianity. Krohn explained that in old Finnish folk beliefs, the dead functioned as guardians and helpers for their relatives who in a way owned them. The dead helped create a feeling of relatedness among relatives and thus could hold together a clan or a folk. All this necessitated the belief in life after death, as well as in the ongoing interaction between the living and the dead (see Jauhiainen 1999, 73–124). The fact that various tools and items were placed in the coffin with the corpse testified to the belief that life went on in the hereafter much as in this world and that the dead if unsatisfied with their fates might come to haunt the living. People have fed the dead and tried to please them in order to prevent possible harm caused by restless souls (see Harva 1993, 364–86; Pentikäinen 1969; 1990, 27–31; Thompson 1955–58, 2:440 –44). Finnish folk tradition, as documented in the folklore archives of the Finnish Literature Society, includes many narratives about the dead haunting the living.13 One typical type is that of the “walker at home”: a dead person keeps appearing at his or her home in the form of a ghost until getting what he or she is looking for (also Briggs 2002, 197–229; Thompson 1955–58, 2:419–81). As one informant put it: “It is like this with the dead: when they walk, one has to ask for their cause. Once you know what their concern is, they will no longer walk ” (quoted in Simonsuuri 1999, 73). The dead who come haunting typically have themselves done something wrong or have been victims of the evil deeds of others. Once the wrongs have been somehow compensated, the haunting stops (see 73–144). In this way, dead agents serve as a means of expressing the basic values of the society. Values and norms are also reflected in beliefs about “placeless souls” (Finn. sijattomat sielut, Ger. Arme Seele), dead who are haunting because of not having been properly buried or having been the victims of some misdeed. These include abandoned, unbaptized children; murder victims; and suicides (Pentikäinen 1968, 1969). Krohn thought that the ancestors of Finns had believed that the dead lived in their graves as though in small houses and that the graveyards were

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regarded as communities of people living underground. The first person to be buried in a graveyard became its guardian spirit (Finn. haltia). In the earliest phase, the dead were fed and cared for until the corpse was totally decomposed.14 When the body had completely moldered, also the soul was believed to have ceased to exist. In addition to this view of the dead as living in their graves there is also the alternative conception, according to which the dead existed in a specific place called Tuonela (“The place of the dead”) or Manala (“The place underground”) (Krohn 1915, 52– 66).15 This was originally a vague idea of a shadowlike afterlife without any distinction between good and bad destinies; only under Christian influences were the postmortem destinies of good and bad individuals separated. Tuonela had previously also been understood as the nether world into which the shaman journeyed during his or her trance (Pentikäinen 1990, 32; Siikala 1994, 124). Harva (1993, 353) pointed out that the Altaic peoples had no ideas of sin and its punishment in the hereafter before contacts with Christians and Moslems. Yet he opined that the belief that some of the dead go to heaven and some to the nether world may be relatively old. One’s destiny after death was determined, however, not by the character of one’s own conduct but by the way one died. If one was struck by lightning for example, one went to heaven. A violent death was natural; a death that followed a disease was unnatural. Among the Altaic peoples (and in any preliterate societies), death from an illness was usually understood as due to dead relatives coming to take one with them to the Totenreich. It was usually through violent death that one could go to heaven (361– 64). The idea of family graveyards as “villages of the dead” typifies the earlier research in Finnish folk belief. Scholars have emphasized that the ideas about Tuonela that are expressed in epic poetry and laments reflect Christian influences and that graves and graveyards (kalmisto) were originally in the vicinity of a house or the village. The dead were a natural part of the life of the community, and their bonds with the old family were only gradually weakened. As the dead were given offerings—their rightful share of everything consumed by the living—graveyards developed into cultic places ( hiisi ). These were transformed into unholy places at cultural peripheries only after the advent of Christianity ( Talve 1979, 205– 6; cf. Anttonen 1996a, 116–23; Siikala 1994, 119). Folklore scholar Anna-Leena Siikala (1994, 118–31) argues that the villages of the dead were never a part of the old Nordic hunting cultures and that grave burial replaced cremation only during the period of the Crusades. She points out that in shamanistic cultures, the dead are never believed to dwell in their graves near the houses; they are instead understood as freesouls existing in the nether or upper worlds where the shaman travels in a trance state. The idea of a specific realm of the dead as a place apart from graveyards (etävainajala) was preserved in the Balto-Finnic culture area in the Iron Age (500 BCE to c. 1000 CE). Grave burials with various kinds of items


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placed in the grave with the corpse then became common in Eastern Finland in the eleventh century. In northern Finland, especially among the Sami, people’s corpses have often been left where they died in the wilderness, or taken to an uninhabited island. This was partly because of the permafrost, which made it difficult to dig a grave.16 By the eighteenth century, Christianization had turned this habit into the institution of temporary burial: the corpses were left in the wilderness as before but in the summer were taken to a Christian graveyard (Pentikäinen 1990, 35–43, 1995, 208–13). The many narratives about the dead that keep on haunting until their bodies are properly buried in the graveyard thus are products of the Christianization of the folk tradition (see Jauhiainen 1999; Simonsuuri 1999). Although it is often difficult to distinguish the pre-Christian and Christian elements in folk beliefs, we can be certain that the pre-Christian beliefs were based more on spontaneous intuitions, while the Christianized view of the hereafter was more coherent and systematic. In it, death has become something abstract as the emphasis has shifted from dying to what follows after it. It seems to be a common development in many traditions—as in ancient Judaism and the Vedic religion of India, for example—that in the earliest phase, beliefs about death and afterlife are not important and speculations on them are kept to a minimum. Only when religious specialists start to systematize beliefs into a doctrine does one’s fate in the hereafter become a target of speculations. Even such nouns as the Finnish Tuonela and kalma (death) or the Swedish död (“death”) originally referred to a dead body; the meaning then shifted from the dead to death in the abstract (Krohn 1915, 59– 60). This fact gives some support to Boyer ’s (2001, 228) remark that religion may be more about dead bodies than about death. It is necessary to do something with the corpse, which is made difficult by the fact that one can treat the body neither as a mere natural object nor as a feeling and thinking person. In some sense, it is both; in another sense, it is neither. This tension leads to ritualized behavior in the funeral (see the appendix). Thus, an immediate feeling, more than rational reasoning, dictates the ways corpses are treated. There is no “reason” for the practice of putting tools and other small items in the coffin with the corpse; it is rather done because of a vague feeling that something like that must be done. This feeling derives from the fact that social interaction among persons is largely governed by emotions; when a person dies, relatives and friends still have the same emotions toward her or him; the emotions cannot just be switched off by the power of reason (see LeDoux 1998; Panksepp 1998). The emotions continue to govern people’s behavior toward the dead person. They treat the dead very carefully and remind themselves of what he or she might have wanted, needed, or wished to happen after dying. Humans just cannot help doing this.

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In this perspective, it seems that the view of the dead as free spirits whose existence is not constrained by the bounds of the grave is more natural than the idea of the dead living in their graves. This view also receives support from experimental psychology. Psychologist Jesse Bering (2002) tested eighty-four students with different kinds of beliefs about an afterlife, including nonbelief. The subjects were read two stories about a person who dies. Then their beliefs about the possible afterlife condition of the dead person were probed. Those who regarded death as the final end should have thought that no mental or bodily states continue after death; those who believed in reincarnation should have thought that all states continued. But this did not happen. Subjects who had religious beliefs of some kind thought that such psychological states as desires and thoughts continued after death and such psychobiological states as thirst, illness, and auditory perceptions were much more unlikely to continue. Even the subjects who saw death as the final end thought that desires, emotions, and thoughts were significantly more likely to continue after death than the more bodily states. The subjects thus clearly had some background intuitions about an afterlife that were not reducible to their explicit beliefs adopted from culture. Bering and Bjorklund (2004) conducted further experiments on both children’s and adults’ views of death and dying. Even small children understand that biological processes cease at death; this is realized as early as four to six years of age, although the understanding of it is more solid at six to eight years. In another experiment with subjects two to twelve years old, the youngest were equally likely to think that both cognitive and psychobiological ( being hungry, sick, etc.) states continued after death; the oldest were more likely to believe that cognitive states such as knowing and wanting continued. In a third experiment, older children and adults were more likely to state that both biological imperatives and particular psychological states ceased at death while epistemic, emotional, and desire states continued. In the first experiment, the kids watched a puppet show in which a grumpy alligator ate up a baby mouse, and then were asked whether they thought the mouse was still alive. Those who agreed that it was dead were then asked a series of ten questions on such issues as whether the mouse still needed to drink water, whether it would grow, whether it would get sick, and whether its eyes and ears still worked. In the second experiment, the questions were different: four were about being hungry, thirsty, sleepy, and sick; five were about thinking, seeing, wanting, and knowing. In the third experiment, the subjects were asked several questions about psychobiological, perceptual, emotional, desire, and epistemic states (Bering and Bjorklund 2004). Bering (2002) argues that people represent the minds of dead agents on the basis of a simulation (cf. Gray et al. 2007). They attribute to dead agents such mental states as feel are necessary for personhood—states they cannot even imagine being without; one cannot imagine what being without thoughts


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or emotions is like. I do not find the simulation argument convincing. A more economical explanation is that people attribute to the dead agentive properties that are felt to be independent from the body. It is especially beliefs and desires that make an agent; these are something people postulate to agents without being able to directly perceive the mental contents of other minds. Just as people do not see how beliefs and desires pop up from the brain, they also have no natural-born intuitions about the death of the brain meaning the death of agentive properties. Moreover, as one retains one’s own emotions toward the deceased, one cannot feel that he or she is completely dead. One cannot simply delete the file for one’s loved one in one’s mind after his or her funeral. Dead agents thus are represented as existing but absent agents (see Boyer 2001, 203– 28; Czachesz 2007, 86). This is why people experience the idea of a person before birth very differently from the idea of a person after death. We do not have memories of a person before birth.

3.2.2 The Embodiment of Spirits Even when people have understood the dead as free, disembodied agents, people’s representation of their behavior has been strongly constrained by spatiality. For example, the dead haunt their former homes or the place where they died. A ghost typically is a ghost of a specific house, building, or natural place. Ghosts do not travel (see Simonsuuri 1999; Tikkala 1993). It is also difficult to draw a line of demarcation between ghosts and elves or spirits (Finn. haltia17 or tonttu,18 German Kobold, Swedish rå, vård and tomte; see Briggs 1976, 122, 2002, 175–95; Haavio 1942, 10 –13; Hall 2007; Honko 1962, 65– 66). The Finnish folk tradition knows household elves, drying-house elves and brownies, millhouse elves, cow-shed elves, and elves of various natural places such as lakes. Any given place always has only one elf that is the elf of that particular place (Haavio 1942; Honko 1962, 66– 68; see Jauhiainen 1999, 215–56; Siikala 1994, 213–23; Thompson 1955–58, 3:37–81). Also every individual person has her or his own haltia or ghost ( haamu), a kind of a double that can also be lost; in such case one falls ill or even dies. A shaman or seer has a very strong haltia. Haltia thus seems to be the same as the free-soul or Doppelgängerseele. In Haavio’s (1942, 50) opinion, it is the soul or the shadow of a person. Later, Haavio argues, contra Harva (1948, 252), that the shaman’s haltia is not his or her self but a separate being, his or her guardian in the realm of the dead (Haavio 1967, 287–90; see Siikala 1994, 215). Hultkrantz (1973, 33), however, argues that free-soul may take on the same functions as a guardian spirit, thus suggesting a link that might connect shamanistic beliefs and soul beliefs. Knowing that everyday folk-psychological beliefs do not necessarily form coherent systems, it is doubtful that one could make any generalized statements about haltias being or not being the same as one’s soul (or some variant

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of souls). We cannot say what haltias really are or are not, only what persons believe them to be, and there is no reason to suppose that such beliefs are systematic, because they are only minimally constrained by external reality. Although there are recurrent patterns in such beliefs, there is plenty of room for individual variation and conflicting views. There are conflicting views on when and how an elf is born, for example. A common belief not only in Finland but also in many other cultures is that the household elf appears as soon as a campfire is made in the woods. Some, however, say that the elf comes only when fire has been made thrice. The elf is said to be in all respects similar to the one who made the first fire. On the other hand, it is also said that only when the person who made the fire dies, he or she is turned into an elf of that place. Often it is also believed that the elf is the one who first made fire in the stove of a house. Even when that person moves away, the elf remains in the house. Some, however, believe that the elf is not the same as the first person to make fire but is only similar to this person. Sometimes it is said that when the fire is made by a man, the elf will be good and powerful; sometimes the fire must be made by a woman. All these examples are based on testimonies recorded in the folklore archives of the Finnish Literature Society (Haavio 1942, 39–47). The elf can also emerge when people have begun to construct a house; when three logs are in place, the elf appears. It can also be the first inhabitant, but the first inhabitant is, of course, also likely to be the first to make the first fire. Finally, the elf can also be considered to be the first one to have died in a house (Haavio 1942, 52– 64). Haavio emphasizes that these beliefs are centered on the idea of ownership and private property. Especially the fire motive is closely related to claims for land. In Iceland, for example, land was captured by walking a certain distance and marking the beginning and end of the route by bonfires. Fire is a sign of someone having settled in that place. The elves then maintain the defining boundaries of space that is occupied by someone; through the elf this person is present in his or her own territory even when not physically present (48–51). Haavio (1942, 72–80) claims that beliefs about elves live in a folklore genre known as “memorates,” short personal recollections of what had happened to the narrator (see Honko 1964, 1968). Memorates about elves are based on hallucinatory experiences to which some persons were more prone than others. In folk beliefs, the elf often appears when people quarrel in the house or a party goes too wild. Then the elf becomes restless. Haavio says this to testify to the fact that people experience hallucinations when they are excited and disturbed, either temporarily or more permanently. One obvious cause is, of course, drunkenness. Among other causes are fever and fear. Also suggestion can cause hallucinations of elves. In addition to hallucinations, also illusions can explain the fact that persons have seen elves. An illusion has an objective basis in perception but the


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perception is somehow biased. Still another explanation is in dreams (Haavio 1942, 80 –84). Honko (1962) has developed this model further, using psychology of perception, Sundén’s (1959) role theory, and the idea of an “interest dominance” (Interessedominanz, Nilsson [1936]). People saw elves when a dominant interest (or frame of reference) directed them to complete ambiguous perceptions in unfavorable conditions. As the elves were also regarded as having specific roles, these roles became actual in certain kinds of situations, and the experiencer then adopted the appropriate counter-role. It was through these roles that elves helped confirm the norms and values of the society. In this book, I substitute the ideas of HADD, HUI, and HTR for the psychology of perception as well as theories of the evolution of cooperation for the role theory. An important difference is in that I do not view tradition as a homogeneous pool of roles or use psychological arguments to explain perceptual processes only. It then also follows that the focus of explanation is not in the origins of the ideas about elves and other supernatural agents but in their cultural spreading. In other words, I use psychological arguments to account for the fact that some and only some concepts and beliefs are contagious and widespread; I do not use psychological arguments primarily to explain anomalous experiences and I do not try to show that beliefs about elves are based on hallucinatory experiences. Whatever their origins are, they spread because of the specific ways humans spontaneously understand the world. Most of the memorates and beliefs can be explained without presupposing any anomalous experiences; it is rather the beliefs about imagined experiences that need to be explained. In this chapter, I have offered only a few examples from a narrow cultural area of a theme that recurs all around the world (see also Hall 2007; Hopkins 1983; Lewis 1975, 127–48). I now move on to analyze soul and spirit concepts in the context of shamanism and spirit possession.

3.3 Spirits, Possession, and Shamanism 3.3.1 Shamanism and Souls Shamanism is a specific context in which soul concepts and beliefs are used to construct a social system centered on the activities of a religious specialist, the shaman.19 Some scholars maintain that there is a crucial difference between shamanism and spirit possession (Eliade 1974, 5; Winkelman 2000, 61; see Harva 1993; Pentikäinen 1998a,b). In possession, an alien spirit comes into an individual, sometimes against her or his will; the shaman’s soul is believed to willfully wander in the upper and nether worlds and to control the spirits—it is the shaman who in a way possesses the spirits, although in some cases the shaman may also become possessed (Czaplicka 1914, 169– 78, 193, 320; Eliade 1974, 5, 236; cf. Siikala 1978, 13). Anthropologist Ioan Lewis (1975, 29) points out that it is not always possible to make a distinction between a supposed

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temporary absence of soul and possession by a supernatural power. In some cultures, both ideas are entertained simultaneously. Margaret Stutley (2003, 37–38), for example, speaks of the spirits as “possessing ” the shaman. It is neither easy, nor even necessary, to try to define shamanism, however (see Hultkrantz 1973; Pentikäinen 1998a,b; Ripinsky-Naxon 1993; Siikala 1978, 303).20 The term “shamanism” was first used to denote the beliefs and practices of such Siberian peoples as the Evenki ( Tungus) and Khanty (Ostyaks), among whom the shaman enters a trance to establish a contact with the spirit world in an attempt to secure help and solve some problem. Often the problem is illness, but it can also be a social, psychological, or other problem. Not only German Romantic authors but also Finnish linguists, ethnographers, and folklore scholars then generalized this concept to refer to a specific form of religion (see Znamenski 2007). Unlike the German Romantics, the Finnish scholars knew the relevant languages and did participant observation in the field, long before Malinowski introduced the idea of fieldwork in anthropology. They were, however, inspired by the mistaken idea that linguistically related peoples were also genetically related (see section 3.1.2) and regarded shamanism as the religion of such peoples as Turks, Mongols, Sami, and the ancestors of modern Finns. Martti Haavio (1991), for example, argued that the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, included strong shamanistic elements (see Pentikäinen 1998a; Siikala 1994). Psychologically interpreted Siberian shamanism was made known in the Western academic world especially through the books of Marie Antoinette Czaplicka (1914), of Polish descent, who was R. R. Marett ’s doctoral student (and who did not visit Siberia when writing her book), and the Russian linguist and ethnographer Sergei Shirokogoroff (1999). Later, Eliade (1974) used Harva’s work extensively in his much–quoted Shamanism. Elaborating the psychological interpretation of shamanism, Eliade and Joseph Campbell helped create what has become known as neoshamanism in the Anglo-American world (see Anttonen 2007; Znamenski 2007, 1–33). The first American anthropologists typically tried to distinguish between the Siberian hereditary shamanism and the shamanism of Native Americans, in which the shamanic vocation was open to all (Znamenski 2007, 69). Paul Radin (1957, 161– 62), for example, makes a distinction between (Northern) “shamanism proper,” which is based only on the shaman’s personal tendency to “neurotic ecstasy and trance,” and societies that tolerate “individual expression” and emphasize the shaman’s personal ethical qualifications. The latter are exemplified by such democratic societies as are found in many parts of North America, as well as the highly stratified societies found in various parts of Africa and Polynesia that allow a special status for some exceptional individuals. Depending on what one considers is important in shamanism, one can find shamanism almost all over the world. To provide just one example, the Cambridge-trained anthropologists C. G. and Brenda Seligman (1911) analyzed


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shamanism among the aboriginal Vedda population of Sri Lanka. They used the word “shaman” to refer to the kapurale or dugganawa, the specialist who had the required power and knowledge to call on the spirits of the dead (yaka) and to present the Nae Yaku offering to them.21 Each shaman trained his successor, who usually was his own son or his sister ’s son. The shaman became possessed by the yaka of the dead man, who spoke through the mouth of the shaman, declaring that he approved the offering and promised to assist his kinsfolk in hunting. Possession thus was a positive thing, and the Veddas desired it for communion with the spirits. Shamans and those frequently possessed could expect to have especially good luck. Among “the less sophisticated Veddas the singing and movements of the dance soon produce a more or less automatic condition, in which the mind of the shaman, being dominated by his belief in the reality of the yaku [ plural of yaka] and of his coming possession, really acts without being in a condition of complete volitional consciousness” (Seligman and Seligman 1911, 134). The practitioners the Seligmans interrogated agreed that although they never entirely lost consciousness, they nearly did so at times. Yet they experienced no visions or hallucinations, nor did anyone claim to have seen a ghost (30, 128–35; see Lewis 1975, 133–44). It is, of course, possible to deny that the kapurale really is a shaman, but it is not entirely clear on what grounds such a distinction could be made (see Hultkrantz 1985; see Noll 1985, 445, 458). Hultkrantz (1973, 25–26) argues that among scholars, “everybody agrees that [“shamanism”] refers to religio-magic techniques and the operator of these techniques.” Otherwise, opinions differ (see Znamenski 2007). While American ethnographers tend to see the shaman as a medicine man or woman (e.g. Tedlock 2005), others stress the importance of techniques of ecstasy (e.g. Eliade 1974; see Noll 1985, 445; see Winkelman 2000, 66– 69). Anthropologist of religion Juha Pentikäinen (1998b, 61; see Stutley 2003) tries to define shamanism by the following list of features: Ecstasy techniques The hypothesis of many souls Belief in a three-level universe (see Pentikäinen 1998a, 45–50) Animals as the shaman’s spirit helpers Paraphernalia such as drums, dress, bag, mask, and so on (see Czaplicka 1914, 203–5) Much has been written about the shaman’s ecstasy and the various substances that seem to have been used to provoke “altered states of consciousness.” It is indeed possible that some kinds of ecstatic experiences have introduced novel ways of perceiving and interpreting reality, which then have spread at least in some circles because of their special nature (Sperber ’s [1985, 85] “relevant mysteries”; cf. Cardeña et al. 2000). It is, however, very difficult, if not outright impossible, to determine how exactly these experiences have contributed to the formation and spread of shamanism. Although it may be

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considered beyond reasonable doubt that some persons have had extraordinary experiences caused by drugs or ritual techniques, this does not in itself explain why and how shamanistic beliefs have become widespread and have served as organizing principles in human groups at large (see Atran 2002b). It is claimed that the basic elements of the altered states of consciousness of shamans are remarkably consistent over time and space (Pearson 2002, 93–112; Ripinsky-Naxon 1993, 82; see Cardeña et al. 2000; Noll 1985; Siikala 1978). Lewis-Williams and Dawson (1988) provide one explanation for the shamanic visions using Tyler ’s (1978) observations about entoptic phenomena (“ within vision phenomena”). These are visual sensations whose characteristics derive from the structure of the visual system alone, without any light being detected from an external source. Such percepts are not mere visual noise but have a structure that is imprinted on them by the structure of the visual system (see Marr 1982). These percepts are experienced as incandescent, shimmering, moving, rotating, and sometimes enlarging patterns that can grade one into another and combine in a bewildering way. They can be induced by a variety of means, such as electrical stimulation in laboratory conditions, flickering light, psychoactive drugs, fatigue, sensory deprivation, intense concentration, auditory driving, migraine, schizophrenia, hyperventilation, and rhythmic movement ( lewis-Williams and Dawson 1988, 202).22 Entoptic phenomena and iconic hallucinations are processed in seven different ways: replicating, fragmentating, integrating, superpositioning, juxtapositioning, reduplicating, and rotating. In a three-stage progression, subjects first experience entoptic phenomena with eyes open or closed, without conscious control. In the second phase, subjects try to make sense of the percepts by elaborating them into iconic forms. In the third stage, laboratory subjects report experiencing a vortex or rotating tunnel that seems to surround them. The sides of the vortex are marked by a lattice of squares like television screens. The images seen on them are spontaneously produced iconic hallucinations derived from memory. They are often very vivid and are associated with strong emotional experiences. Subjects stop differentiating between the literal and the analogous and assert that the images are precisely what they appear to be ( Lewis-Williams and Dawson 1988, 203–04). The shaman’s visions consist of such entoptic phenomena that are also reflected in rock art, for example. Apart from altered states of consciousness, people can also consciously use imagination to create unrealistic pictorial images. Although it might be claimed that there are no limits to human imagination, it does seem to be constrained by previous experience and the related cognitive architecture ( Lawson 2007). When psychologist Tom Ward (1994) asked his subjects to draw imaginary animals living on a planet very different from Earth, somewhere in the galaxy, this did not result in completely arbitrary drawings. The imagined creatures were rather structured by properties that typify animals on Earth. The properties


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varied across imaginary species but rarely within species (the subjects were asked to draw another animal of the same species they had first visioned and then an animal from a different species). In addition, features such as bilateral symmetry of appendages and sense organs were retained, and sense organs were placed facing the direction of the animal’s movement. To address the possibility that the subjects merely tried to draw animals that were believable and understandable to others, another set of subjects was divided into four groups: twenty-two subjects were asked to draw realistic animals on another planet (Believable); twenty-two others were instructed to use their wildest imaginations in the same task ( Wild Imagination); twenty-two others were given no special instructions (Control); and twenty-eight others had to draw a newly found and previously unknown animal on Earth. Subjects given the Control, Wild Imagination, and Believable conditions were equally likely to create animals that showed symmetry and had sense organs and appendages. However, subjects in the Wild Imagination condition were significantly more likely than those in the Believable condition to produce animals that had something unusual in their sensory systems, although also they tended to retain symmetry, at least one sense organ, and appendages ( Ward 1994). The same cognitive mechanisms also constrain the kind of imagined transformations we typically find in shamanism and other kinds of myths and folktales: princes are turned into toads, mermaids into humans, rocks into diamonds, and so forth. Kelly and Keil (1985) have shown that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in folktales as recounted by the brothers Grimm, most transformations take place within categories that are close to each other in Keil’s (1979) ontological tree, and the transformations are not total (some properties of the original category are retained). In other words, the metamorphoses are modestly counterintuitive. Thus, the number of transformations of conscious beings ( humans and gods) into members of other ontological categories decreases as the distance between the ontological categories increases. The predicted order from most to least common things that conscious beings metamorphosed into was as follows: (1) other conscious beings, (2) animals, (3) plants, (4) nonliving inanimate objects, (5) liquids or other aggregates, (6) events, (7) abstract objects.23 The relatively small number of metamorphoses into entities other than conscious beings made it difficult to determine similar patterns for other categories in Ovid. In Grimm’s tales, entities in categories other than conscious beings, nonliving inanimates, and liquids were changed most often into members of their own categories, while among animals, within-category changes were the second most common transformation. Among plants, such changes were the third most common. The overall pattern was similar to but stronger than that in Metamorphoses. In all four of the relevant categories, objects tended to be transformed into members of their own or neighboring categories rather than more

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distant categories. These results were highly significant (p < .001). Boyer (2001, 67– 68) points out that the important thing here is the amount and nature of inferences one can draw: a prince turned into a toad makes a good story when the prince retains a human mind in a frog ’s body, thus giving to the reader or listener ample opportunities to sympathize with the character and make inferences and predictions about the plot.24 A prince turned into a rock is uninteresting as such, because it is not possible to infer much about an entity that does not move around. Shamanism typically involves the shaman’s transformation into an animal form, a transformation I earlier labeled counterintuitive. This transformation is not merely a narrative motive but also seems to involve subjective experiences of transformation, related to alterations in conscious awareness produced by psychoactive drugs and ritual techniques. Pearson (2002, 98–107) has gathered evidence about the various kinds of hallucinogens that early humans may have used (and even mammals in general) to produce various kinds of distorted perceptions and extraordinary experiences. Drugs such as datura, ayahuasca, and ephedra have the capacity to change the biochemistry of the brain and trigger feelings and experiences that have been interpreted as contact with another reality. Species of the family Solanaceae have the very specific effect that the intoxicated person imagines himself or herself to have been changed into some animal, even with the sensation of growing feathers and hair. Sensations of the body melting into the background or of flying are also among the typical symptoms. In Pearson’s view, this might help explain beliefs about different kinds of animals as the shaman’s spirit helpers, although it is “cultural factors” that provide content and structure for supernatural ideology. Pearson’s argument suggests that cognitive structures channel cultural transmission and that the natural constraints of persons’ mental architecture might be changed by psychoactive drugs or techniques of mind control. If this is the case, then the cultural spread of the concepts and beliefs that spring from subjective experiences of transformation may be explained by their salience in ordinary, mundane communication: they are attention-grabbing. Extraordinary experiences do not explain the spread of beliefs; it is instead the widespread beliefs that make the shaman’s experiences comprehensible for the majority of people (see also Pyysiäinen 2007). If these experiences involve massively counterintuitive representations, they can be expected to be simplified in cultural transmission, thus being reduced to modestly counterintuitive ones. It is, indeed, difficult to find evidence of persons representing spirits as pure mentality, for example, without any spatiality, even if those who have undergone more extraordinary sorts of experiences might have perceived something like that. It thus might be argued that shamanism is an elaborated and systematized version of beliefs about spirits and possession.25 In shamanism, contact with the spirits does not take place spontaneously; it is actively sought and serves the


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psychosocial purpose of healing and maintaining balanced social relationships. By the same token, the shaman as a specialist has become the master of spirits who now serve him or her, even though the shaman’s journey is admittedly a dangerous one (Honko 1969; Siikala 1978).26 The central task of the shaman is the handling of crises threatening the normal life of the group (Siikala 1978, 15). In his Psychomental Complex of the Tungus, Shirokogoroff (1999, 250 – 65), partly following Czaplicka (1914, 320 –25), argued that when the spirits of a clan lost their master, the shaman, they started to harm people.27 In the absence of the shaman, the spirits began to invade persons and provoke harmful acts. Hunters could no longer shoot the gun, young men could not get sleep, and so on because the spirits had taken control. The Tungus called such disequilibrium produced by a sudden change of situation olon. The loss of the shaman because of death or for some other reason could trigger “olonism” as a sort of mass psychosis. Shirokogoroff called olonism a “habit ”; it was often ( but not always) characterized by an obsessive urge to imitate other persons’ speech and gestures. When people were frightened or confused, they started to imitate what they observed others doing and saying. Olonism could be stopped at any moment, if somebody was found who could take control over the spirits. However, it could also continue for long periods of time and even bring the whole clan into peril, as persons started to die from infectious diseases and undernourishment. This was above all a condition that characterizes the whole clan; theoretically, it was possible for even larger units to be affected, although Shirokogoroff had not witnessed such cases. The only way to prevent the clan from perishing altogether was to find a new shaman who could control the spirits. The shaman thus seems to play an important role in the organization of the community. Like Durkheim’s God, the shaman represents the whole of the community and its shared knowledge. Knowing the spirits and their mind is equivalent to having all strategic knowledge; the shaman thus knows the mental organization of the community and can therefore keep it in a balance. When the shaman is absent, persons try to make sense of social life by imitating each other ’s speech and gestures, thus going at the roots of social cognition. When a new shaman emerges, he or she must receive the recognition of the group. There are signs indicating that someone really has the essence of a shaman, such as an inclination to altered states of consciousness; the inferred essence is then used to explain the observable signs, and the person is recognized as a potential shaman. It is not enough for someone merely to claim being a shaman (see Honko 1969, 30 –31, 38; Shirokogoroff 1999, 274– 75). Shamanism thus cannot be explained merely by selective processes of attribution of power to some individuals; in contrast, some features of individual behavior serve as attractors, that is, intrinsically attention-grabbing traits that render certain persons more likely to be regarded as shamans (see Claidière and Sperber 2007).

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In the Siberian context, shamanhood is not a social role available to more or less anybody. The shamanic performance has been described as an actualization of the shaman’s latent role as a shaman (Honko 1969), although the concept of role does not carry much explanatory power. A more fruitful perspective might be to try to map the human intuitions that make the idea of shamanhood and shamanic performance attention-grabbing and plausible. These intuitions relate especially to ideas about spirits and HUI: people understand biological processes and inexplicable events as intentionally caused by invisible agents. Because they are intentionally caused, the only way to try to interfere with them is to communicate with the supernatural agents that have intended them and to try to influence their minds. This is the shaman’s task. Whether people believe the shaman’s soul travels outside his or her body or an alien spirit comes into the shaman’s body is a matter of emic interpretation. From the scholarly point of view, we cannot say that one or the other really happens. All we can explore is whether the soul journeying outside the body and the alien spirit coming into the body are accompanied by different kinds of changes in the organism or different kinds of social systems and practices. To the best of my knowledge, no such clear-cut typology exists (see also Cohen 2007, 28, 96; Sjöblom 2002, 140 –47). The problem is that we cannot build a coherent typology relying only on emic folk concepts that are understood in an essentialist way and terms that are taken to name categories having a core essence. Scholarly typologizing should be theoretically motivated; such typologizing, however, easily shows the vacuity of folk concepts, which are then best replaced by a scientific taxonomy. Both folk concepts and scientific concepts receive meaning from the underlying models of the world; the difference between them is in the explicit and reflective nature of scientific models in contrast to implicit folk models (Sørensen 2007, 2–3; see Quine 1969). Shamanism thus seems to be a practice in which beliefs about souls serve not only for physical healing but also for maintaining and monitoring social relationships in the group (see Siikala 1978, 319). The shaman gains special knowledge about social relationships by consulting the “spirit world” during the ritual processes. This ritual has been called a “display of healing ” because it is an elaborate ceremony resembling a play in which the shaman acts in the main role (see Honko 1969; Siikala 1978). The ritual thus serves the purpose of publishing the information the shaman supposedly gains from his or her visit to the spirit world. The shaman uses trance as a technique to consult the shared knowledge of the group that exists in the form of beliefs about what the ancestors and other spirits know and want. The shaman interprets this knowledge and conveys it to her or his public in the ritual. Thus, trance and healing in the sense of finding a psychosocial cause for an illness or a misfortune are combined and presuppose each other.


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3.3.2 Spirits and Possession Beliefs about evil spirits and witchcraft, spirit possession cults, and shamanism all share the common idea that disembodied souls exist that can leave and enter human bodies. In this section, I analyze these beliefs, focusing on two examples: the demonology of the inquisitors’ handbook written in 1486–87, the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of witches [Institoris 2007]), and an AfroBrazilian spirit possession cult. The first example comes from medieval and early modern Europe, which was plagued by witches and evil spirits. As Federico Pastore has put it, “at the end of the fourteenth century, the feeling of living in a city under siege on all sides by evil spirits who, with increasing frequency, assumed forms suited to ensnaring human beings and bringing them to perdition was widely diffuse” (quoted in Maxwell-Stuart 2007, 1). Why would that be? P. G. Maxwell-Stuart argues that Pastore may be exaggerating, at least when it comes to the general population, whose thoughts and feelings have left no trace in the recorded history. But Pastore is not exaggerating when it comes to the literate and powerful in medieval Europe. Although the very real sense of being encompassed by nonhuman hostile forces, nonmaterial entities that could penetrate human bodies, was not something new, at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a combination of factors led to people having exceptionally intense emotional reactions to the spirit world. The conviction that the Anti-Christ had been born and the Last Judgment was very near was invigorated. In the background were growing criticism of the Catholic Church (John Wyclif, Jan Hus, Hans Böhm) and various emerging anti-Scholastic movements (Meister Eckehart and devotio moderna, Beghards, Beguines), all of which culminated two centuries later in the Reformation (see Kenny 2007, 99–105). Maxwell-Stuart thus thinks that the heightened belief in evil spirits reflected a sense of “extreme danger ” and a wish to purify the Church (2007, 1–5). As Heinrich Kramer, alias Institoris, author of the Malleus, put it: “They [witches] now appear to be depopulating the whole of Christendom” (2007, 94).28 An inquisition was first established in the twelfth century to fight the heretics known as Kathars or Albigensians (see Maxwell-Stuart 2007, 6). This rather inefficient inquisition was replaced by a renewed organization in 1231. The inquisitors did not first deal with witches, who were not considered heretics but representatives of a pagan religion. It was only in 1484 that the pope allowed the burning of witches, at the request of Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Institoris (see Edwards 2003; Russell 1992, 300; Verrill 1931).29 In the Malleus, witchcraft is explicitly equated with perfidia ( betrayal of faith, as distinct from infidelitas, heathenism). The witch knows what faith implies but willfully seeks to betray it (Maxwell-Stuart 2007, 7). Such policing of a doctrinal system typifies doctrinal religiosity (see the appendix, part 3). A prosocial attitude

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and a sense of unity among a large number of peoples and nations can only be maintained through the idea of an imagined community of cobelievers, a church. In the absence of any other common denominator, it is the doctrine that is supposed to unite the members of a church. This, of course, does not imply that all members are truly created equal or that cooperation actually takes place reciprocally, following the classical ideal of suum cuique (“let each have his share”). We must take into account power. The political unity that is supposed to accompany doctrinal unity serves the interests of those in power. Mystics and reformers are not suspect because of their extremist behaviors but because they may cause political unrest (see Pyysiäinen 2004a; Taves 1999). Although this would make a hugely interesting topic of research in itself, I will confine myself to an analysis of the nature and role of evil spirits in the Malleus maleficarum. Although Institoris’s main argument may at first sight seem rather complex, it has a few basic principles that are relatively straightforward: evil spirits (demons) are really existing beings that cause harm in the world through humans whose bodies they invade. Witches are persons who let this happen by entering into a pact with the Devil.30 Maxwell-Stuart (2007) translates the Latin masculine form maleficus as “male worker of harmful magic ”; the plural malefici refers to both men and women, while malefica/maleficae is translated as “witch(es).” Much of Institoris’s discussion centers on the theme of how it is possible for a spirit to cause something to happen in material reality. Institoris argues that as every action is performed by contact, and as evil spirits have no real bodies, it seems that they cannot make the contact required for physical causation (2007, 61). Getting to know something through sense perception is based on a physical process that is irreversible: although the imagination is a treasure house of forms received via the senses (79), one cannot cause something in the external world “ by having an idea or formulating an intellectual conception and then simply giving verbal expression to it ” (72). On the other hand, it is known that spirits can move physical things in the same sense as people’s bodies are moved by their souls (2007, 79). Thus, it seems that evil spirits must somehow enter a human body and take control in order to be able to cause something in the physical reality. “Evil spirits operate through artifice and therefore cannot produce any shape . . . without the help of a second person or thing acting [ for them].” When they have such assistance, it is possible for them to produce the genuine characteristics of illness and other forms of suffering (51). But in doing this, the evil spirits must first get an approval from God, because nothing can happen against God’s will. “When they are permitted by God, evil spirits have power over physical objects and over people’s imaginative faculty.” Although many stories about witchcraft are based on pure imagination, without any factual basis, not everything is mere imagination (45). Workers of harmful magic produce real outcomes with the help of evil spirits because they have entered into a pact with them,


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and God allows this to happen (47–49). To deny this is “heretical perversity ” (49, 102). What, then, is an evil spirit, if it is not a physical entity? At least evil spirits do not reside in Hell, but live in “murky air around the earth” (Institoris 2007, 67). They make themselves bodies that have a shape, using air, which they make thicker with the aid of “coarse vapours lifted from the earth.”31 Thus, air is packed closely together to form a kind of body. It is this kind of body that evil spirits inhabit. But as they have no lungs, lips, and so forth, how can they, for example, talk? Institoris explains that when evil spirits want to make a meaning known, they do it by means of sounds that have some likeness to voices. This they do by forcibly striking the air “ bottled up in the body they have assumed.” Then they send it out syllable by syllable (139–40). Thus, evil spirits “do what they do via the intellect and the will” (Institoris 2007, 61). Moreover, the acuity of their nature allows them to do things that humans cannot (44). When an evil spirit uses a woman as its instrument, it seems that the instrument is dependent on the will of the original agent and thus is not acting of its own free will (52). Does this not free the controlled mind from all personal responsibility? Institoris replied that no such excuses must be made, because “evil spirits always work in partnership with workers of harmful magic ” (54). Although workers of harmful magic serve as only the Devil’s equipment, they have minds of their own and have made their choice by an act of free will. After they have entered into an express pact with evil spirits, they are no longer in possession of their own liberty (57). The Devil is not the direct cause of all people’s sins because people sometimes choose to sin of their own free will; indirectly, however, he is the cause of people’s sins because he persuades them to sin (78). Although human will is normally governed by God, evil spirits can confuse a person’s intellect through misleading images that the person interprets in accordance with his or her own wishes. When an evil spirit enters a body, it takes possession of the powers of the physical organs and so imprints these that an image is created; this image then affects the person’s will and intellect. Angels also can read a person’s mind and character to some extent, much as a doctor reads his patient ’s emotional state, without being able to penetrate his or her inmost thoughts. The Devil can tell what a person is thinking and feeling by scrutinizing the physical changes accompanying thoughts and emotions (Institoris 2007, 81). Thus, although evil spirits cannot penetrate the secrecies of the heart, they can try to guess what is in the mind (130). Institoris speaks often of a special kind of evil spirits, the incubi and succubi. Incubus (“lying on top”) is male, and succubus (“lying underneath”) is female. These are “morally foul spirits” that nonetheless are not impure by nature. They are full of only mindless lust, and Institoris says that the arts of magic came into being through them (2007, 61– 62). Human beings are sometimes procreated by a specific technique used by incubi and succubi (62). One

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evil spirit (an incubus) can take the place of the succubus, who then receives the semen from a human male and passes it on to the incubus. The incubus then inserts it into a human female (3, 63; Maxwell-Stuart 2007, 15). If a baby is born from this intercourse, it is more liable to witchcraft than ordinary human children are. Institoris says the incubi and succubi want to harm a person both in body and soul, so that there may come into being people who are more inclined to all of the vices (62– 63). According to Institoris, harmful magic is so often connected with the procreative power because this is the domain in humans that is most liable to be corrupted (2007, 82). Thus, for example, many men have been bewitched into such a state that they cannot have sexual intercourse within marriage. This “can really and truly be caused by the power of an evil spirit,” acting either through a witch or even without such mediation. Among Christians, however, the Devil prefers to work through witches (45). Impotence may, of course, have a natural cause as well. In such cases, the penis simply remains flaccid. If it has an erection but still cannot perform, the cause of the condition is in evil spirits (83). In another place, Institoris, however, says that evil spirits can cause an impediment to procreation—by preventing erection, by preventing the animating essences from reaching those parts of the body that will impart movement to them, or by closing the seminal ducts (148). Another thing witches can do when they have entered into a pact with the Devil is to make a man believe that his penis has disappeared. When one is so bewitched, one can neither see nor feel one’s penis. But, “in no way should anyone believe that these parts of the body are torn out by the roots”; they are only hidden by an evil spirit (Institoris 2007, 84–85, 151). Institoris illustrates this with the following story. A man who (apparently) had lost his penis approached a witch to help him get it back again. The witch instructed the man to climb a particular tree, where he would find a nest filled with penises of which he would be allowed to take any one he liked. When the man climbed up and reached for the biggest penis, the witch immediately told him not to take that one because it belonged to one of the parish priests (153). Third, some husbands have seen their wives in bed with another man, a stranger who, when they then have tried to grab a weapon to kill him, has disappeared by making himself invisible. This, of course, means that the unwelcomed guest was an incubus (2007, 144). A related theme is the idea of evil spirits substituting changelings for human babies, which Institoris views as a very real possibility (135). The cognitive framework may help us to understand a number of points in Institoris’s doctrinal reasoning. First, in the Malleus and in medieval demonology in general, evil spirits were understood as having mentality. Entities lacking mentality cannot cause anything intentionally; this much is obvious both in folk psychology and in Scholastic theology. Yet it is difficult to imagine pure mentality, without physicality or at least spatiality. It seems that in folk


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psychology, spatiality (and physicality/solidity) and mentality are endpoints on a continuum of more or less coarse or “subtle” forms, as I said in chapter 1. Other, more “subtle” bodies exist in addition to ordinary biological bodies. At some point along the continuum very subtle matter and “thickened” mentality meet. Thus, the mind-body problem is apparently solved, without giving any detailed account of how and at what point exactly mentality and physicality overlap or depart. In the Malleus, such subtle matter is represented by the idea of “thickened air ” out of which evil spirits make bodies that have shape. Insofar as they are not residing within a human body, evil spirits thus exist as mentality combined with spatiality ( but apparently not with solidity or even physicality). When an evil spirit enters a human body trying to take control, this creates a free will problem: who is responsible for the acts of the possessed body? Institoris’s view is plain and simple: when one enters into a pact with the Devil, one is no longer free to choose between good and evil; yet one acts freely in deciding to enter into the pact with the Devil (see also chapter 4, section 4.1.4). After the fatal decision, the evil spirit controls one’s body and mind. One’s own free will thus is somehow suppressed, tied, or eradicated. Although this seems to imply that after the fatal decision everything one wills is willed by the Devil, this seems more like a reflective doctrine than an on-line intuition.32 In everyday life, persons must assume that their fellow human beings do at least some things willingly and not by spirits’ remote control (see Cohen 2007). As a Christian theologian, Institoris could not think that anything would happen against the will of God. Therefore, God must let evil spirits do what they do; hence the problem of theodicy. Institoris meets it with the common counterargument that God wanted humans to have free will and this necessarily entails the possibility of sin (2007, 97). However, Institoris also says that God allows harmful magic for “a cleansing and proof of the faith of the righteous” (96). The existence of harmful magic is believed to prove the faith of the righteous in the sense that it is a means of distinguishing between those who are genuinely committed to the Church and those who are not (free riders). Because the community of believers is based on the acceptance of the correct doctrine and such acceptance can only be inferred and not directly perceived, there will never be any absolute certainty about anybody’s true beliefs. This is why “costly ” and “hard-to-fake” signals of commitment are needed (Atran 2002a). Sperber (2006, 148) suggests that some societies are characterized by beliefs about witchcraft as the cause of misfortunes, while others characteristically blame them on transgressions of taboos. It seems that only explanations referring to witchcraft tend to go with such a suspicion about the motives of others that costly signaling comes to be needed. Transgressions of taboos are usually people’s own personal actions that people use to explain their own personal misfortunes. This may be an overgeneralization, but it serves to

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suggest that concern about the sincerity of people’s commitment typifies larger, imagined communities more than small-scale communities based on personal contacts among members. One way to signal one’s commitment to the group to others is by one’s willingness to punish those whose cooperation is suspect as well as those who refuse to punish others. As punishing may be costly and yet not directly benefit the punisher, it can serve as a costly signal of being committed and thus foster reciprocal altruism (Henrich et al. 2006). The willingness to denounce alleged workers of harmful magic and to torture and kill them in most horrible ways serves as an ultimate signal of one’s own commitment. The witch hunt is a runaway process in an arms race of sorts: when someone produces a more costly signal than others, the others are in danger of becoming suspect of being noncommitted defectors. They have to develop even more costly signals, leading to a vicious circle, as happens in blood revenge, which only works when every now and then somebody is really killed ( whereas killing literally everybody who insults your relatives would be disastrous; see Atran 2002a, 131–38; Dickie 2004). Such processes become important when both the size of the social group and its geographical dispersion increase, creating large-scale doctrinal communities of nonrelated people who are only combined together by an ideology (see Dunbar 2006, 177). In medieval and early modern Europe, the gap that separated the world of the laity and biological kinship from the world of the priests—especially the religious orders, which were based on institutional pseudokinship—may also have made the witch hunt easier by making commitment to the Church seem natural (see the appendix). The monastic orders attracted young recruits from different parts of western Europe, required strict celibacy from their members, stressed obedience without question, and separated them from their families (see Dunbar 2006, 177; Qirko 2004a, 687–89). These factors have contributed to the process the Church used to defend its imagined community against the threat of defectors, attributing their supposed actions to the agency of the Devil. Persons’ beliefs that they were commanded by God and were fighting the Devil made them capable of horrendous cruelties (see Bushman et al. 2007). And no satiety signals told them when the witch trial ritual had succeeded, because the suspected witch usually had only the options of either dying or confessing (Institoris 2007, 203–54; see Boyer and Liénard 2006). One could never be sure who was being controlled by the Devil and who by God, because no empirical signal can help decide one way or the other. The process then culminated in people committing unbelievable cruelties. This is also reflected in a remark Institoris made that reminds one of Durkheim’s argument (1925, 60 – 63; 1965, 59– 61) that only religion was defined by a church (Église) and that magic was only a private matter between a magician and his client. Institoris distinguished between good Christians who


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perform miracles in accordance with the divine order and “with public harmony ” and a magician who works “through a pact into which he has entered with an evil spirit, and so is said to operate through a private contract ” (Institoris 2007, 71– 72). The opposition is viewed as being between public, common good and private interests that may endanger the unity of the doctrinal community. Evil spirits are evil because they try to destroy order and unity by promising to advance the interests of separate individuals who enter into pacts with them, thus defecting instead of cooperating. Concepts and beliefs about evil spirits are contagious because they trigger intuitive cognitive mechanisms that are dedicated to monitoring social relationships. A salient example is the central place speculations about sexuality and sexual relationships occupy in Malleus. Beliefs about changelings, for example, may derive part of their appeal from the fact that men will always have to take into account the possibility of cuckoldry and cannot be absolutely certain that their babies really are theirs (Carruthers 2006, 42; Trivers 2002, 59, 66; Voland 2007; see Miller 2001b; the appendix). A woman also has to face the possibility that her baby might be switched to another after birth, unless she can see it constantly after the delivery.33 Why does it matter so much that one raises one’s own biological child and not someone else’s (if the switch takes place immediately after birth)? This should not happen if the family is only a socially constructed ideology (cf. Jaisson 2006). Beliefs about changelings actually form a common motive in folk traditions (Briggs 1976, 69– 72; Jauhiainen 1999, 194–96) and reflect the importance of the biological relationship between parent and child. As I argue in the appendix, the theory of parental investment predicts that investing all resources in the nearest relatives pays off best in terms of reproductive success (Carruthers 2006, 42–43; Trivers 2002, 56–110; see Dunbar 1988, 217–18). We can predict that the fear of the baby being changed is the greatest in the case of the first son, but this has not been studied. In any case, it seems that beliefs about changelings reflect the fear of losing one’s own child and inadvertently having to rear someone else’s baby. This fear is what makes beliefs about changelings so salient and contagious. Beliefs about lost penises and impotence as caused by harmful magic may belong to the same family of beliefs. In Scholastic theology, sexual desire differs from other passions in that its occurrence is completely autonomous and independent from reason; sexual organs also move without the command of reason, although in their original state, before the fall, humans could control them at will, just as they can control their hands and feet, as Augustine observed (see Knuuttila 2006, 157; Wolfson 1961). If sexuality is beyond conscious control, its impediments and perversions cannot be explained with reference to a failure of an individual’s will and reason. And since biological organisms must always be directed by a rational soul (cf. Aristotle), sexual failures and perversions must therefore be caused by a soul or spirit—in this case an evil one. The

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beliefs about lost penises thus may reflect the male experience of confusion in the face of impotence that occurs against one’s will (whereas for a monk such a condition might be welcome). The idea of an incubus seducing one’s wife may have served as a way of making instances of marital infidelity more bearable: the woman was only seduced because the man was not a human. Institoris recounted an interesting case of possession (2007, 159– 61). A certain inquisitor had told him about a man who had brought his son—who was a priest outside of the religious orders—to Rome to be delivered from possession.34 The inquisitor met the two men by chance in a guest-house, and the father shared his concern about his son with the inquisitor. The inquisitor felt very sorry for the man, but in looking at the son, who behaved quite normally, he began to think that the young man could not possibly be possessed. The young man, however, told him that a certain witch had put an instrument of harmful magic (maleficium) under a certain tree, saying that he would be possessed for as long as the instrument remained there. The bad news was that no one knew under which tree the maleficium was hidden. The young man further explained that he was only deprived of his reason when he tried to take part in services or visit holy places. The inquisitor then took the young man to various shrines and tried to exorcise him. Every time the young man shrieked and wailed in a terrible manner. Whenever he passed a church and genuflected to salute the glorious Virgin, the Devil caused his tongue to stick a long way out of his mouth. The poor man heard the Devil speak through him but had no strength to resist. When he tried his best to concentrate on prayer, the Devil attacked even more vigorously by thrusting his tongue out. At some point, when the evil spirit was asked to leave the man, it replied that it did not want to come out “ because of the Lombards.” Then the young man started to list in fluent Italian “all the very worst of sexual vices” the Lombards were guilty of, although he did not know any Italian (the inquisitor did know Italian).35 A certain bishop took pity on the young man and fasted and prayed for forty days to cure him. This did the trick, and the young man was delivered and returned home rejoicing. This account very much resembles the many cases of possession by evil spirits documented within modern Christianity and popular culture (Martin 1992; Peck 1998, 182–211; see Cuneo 2002). However, in Afro-Brazilian possession cults such as the Candomblé, for example, people do not necessarily regard the spirits as evil (see Wegner 2002, 242–54). Recently, Emma Cohen (2007) has produced a lucid ethnography of a syncretistic spirit possession cult in the city of Belém in northern Brazil.36 Members of the cult maintain that bodiless spirits may temporarily possess the bodies of living people. Some of these spirits never had bodies of their own; some are the spirits of the deceased. In some cases, people regard these spirits as unwelcome intruders; in others, people warmly welcome them after weeks or months of preparation and waiting (vii). Possession is associated with medium-centered séances,


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healing and counseling, the delivery of oracles, and many other activities (132). The situation is in this respect very different from prescribed Catholicism, although this Brazilian cult has its roots in folk Catholicism as well as African traditions and Iberian folklore. As one of Cohen’s informants put it, the spirits (orixás)37 “are entidades [entities] that came to help people with whatever they needed . . . they are spirits of light who are ready to help us at the time we need them” (113). As one of the persons Cohen interviewed says, “for me the Orixás are like God for our religion. We cultivate and respect them—for me, it is as if the Orixá was a person, a god, because we really respect the orixás” (2007, 110). Or “Orixás, for me—I think they are our divinities, ancestors that were in Africa . . . and now we have the opportunity to cultivate and receive them in Brazil” (111). Again: “There were orixás that lived and afterwards, they passed to a spiritual existence [in another dimension—“se-encantaram”] and came to be cultivated. The orixás are manifestations of nature, the orixás are present in everything—in the air, the leaves, the day-to-day, in technology, even in the kitchen” (112). The common opinion among people was that the spirits really entered the body, specifically the head, and took control. It is commonly said that one “catches” or “receives” a spirit and that “spirit X is in the head of Person A.” If one is not sure whether a certain person is possessed, one asks “Who is it?” or “who is speaking.” This seems to imply that at any one moment one communicates either with the person in question or with the alien spirit. Being possessed means that one’s own personality is away or somehow lies dormant. As one of the informants explained, “I don’t know where my spirit goes, I don’t know. I only know that I switch off. I don’t remain in me.” Once when Pai was possessed, the possessing spirit spoke of him in the third person, offering an opinion, and added: “I don’t know if Pai would agree” (Cohen 2007, 123–24).38 Cohen also recounts how a certain possessed medium greeted her with a kiss on both cheeks, then returned to work with clients, and finally came back to her now being “pure” ( puro; not possessed) and without greeting her again. Cohen is certain that she was neither unwelcome nor inadvertently overlooked, because the medium greeted everyone else who had arrived. Therefore, either the possession was a fake one—which is not considered to be commonplace among the members of the community—or the medium could recall having met with Cohen, despite having been possessed (2007, 135; see Wegner 2002, 251). Cohen (2007, 129–31, 146) points out that observers’ perceptions of possession are not always straightforward and unambiguous, and that the psychological transformation of the one who is possessed is not total. As the observers cannot directly perceive the spirits entering somebody, they must infer it, just as we normally infer another ’s beliefs and desires from observable cues. However, observers do not consistently explain the behavior of one who

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is possessed by referring to the beliefs and desires of a spirit; there is instead a certain incongruity between what people say about possession and what they actually do (e.g., behave as though the person were still present in the possessed body). The observers’ understandings of the possession obviously are influenced by cognitive mechanisms of which they are not necessarily themselves aware (Cohen 2008). Cohen (2007, 133–34) argues that according to the people she studied, all behaviors and statements of the possessed were unambiguously attributable to the possessing spirits, and persons often informed Cohen about the identity of the possessing spirits. For as long as the possession lasted, the “hosts’” names were replaced by spirits’ names when talking with or about them. We might think that there is here little difference between communication with a possessed person and everyday communication, but possession communication is different in that there is only one body involved yet potentially two or more candidate agents. It happens, for example, that one and the same spirit behaves quite differently in different “hosts” and one and the same spirit can come into two different “hosts” at once. The spirit called Zé Pelintra, for example, is a nonsmoker in the head of one “host ” but a chain-smoker in the head of another. Persons occasionally comment about such contradictions that “mutual influences” are exchanged between the spirit and its “host.” Whether people really consider one instance or manifestation of the spirit to be the true one is difficult to determine through observation and direct-question interview techniques (Cohen 2007, 142, 146; see Wegner 2002, 246–50). The arguments developed in the Malleus likewise seem not to be mere doctrinal reasonings but also to have a point of contact with folk psychology. Persons seem to reason about good and evil spirits guided by the idea that mentality can leave and enter the physical body at will; yet nothing in Cohen’s ethnography seems to suggest that the spirits would be mentally represented as being completely without spatiality. Concepts and beliefs about spirits and their nature are actualized when someone is supposed to be possessed; persons do not seem to speculate on the issue of where and in what form the spirits exist when they are not in some live human “host.” No idea of pure mentality thus seems to be involved (see also Cohen 2008). Although there are also spirits other than those that come into a human body, such as the spirits of the forest and of waters (encantados),39 persons do not speculate much about their nature and location or conceptualize them as completely free of spatiality. It is believed that somewhere between supernatural (orun) and material (aiye) existence is another dimension in which the mestres, caboclos (“indigenous backwoodsmen,” non-African spirits), and encantados dwell. Families of spirits occupy their respective territories, or encantarias, in an unseen world that is somehow parallel to the material earth inhabited by humans (Cohen 2007, 9, 44–46, 55–56, 208). Thus, we again


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meet the attempt to create an intermediate category between the physical reality and agency by combining agency and spatiality but leaving out biology and maybe also physicality. Psychologist Daniel Wegner (2002, 221–35) argues that possession involves “virtual agency,” in that persons project agency to imaginary agents that are then considered to be the sources of persons’ own actions. People come to believe the imagined agents to be real just as they judge anything to be real in everyday thinking: if it seems real, feels real, and acts real, it is real. Seeming real means that there is a lot of perceptual detail. Memories with perceptual detail are judged as more likely to be correct than memories that lack them. Accordingly, in the case of possession, one can think one’s perception of visual detail means that one is possessed. Feeling real means that one’s perceptions have an emotional impact on one. Acting real refers to the perception that the imagined agent cannot be controlled. When the possessed person appears unable to control her or his body, the natural inference is that some other agent is controlling it. Thus, the way the mind works makes possession beliefs both possible and contagious. In the case of the Afro-Brazilian possession cults, these beliefs gain salience in a syncretistic sociocultural situation in which people’s beliefs have roots in differing traditions and people are cut off from the land and culture of their African ancestors. West African beliefs and rituals have been combined in this case with some American Indian traditions and Catholic folk tradition to create a new type of shared knowledge. In the following chapter, I analyze the Christian concept of God to see what kind of cognitive trajectory is involved in the transformation of mythical representations of cognitively optimal gods and spirits into a cognitively costly theological concept. I will focus on the philosophical elaboration of the same agentive properties that are represented in beliefs about souls.

Summary 1. All peoples have beliefs about various types of souls that are responsible for the liveliness of the body as well as for various cognitiveemotional functions; these are folk psychological conceptualizations of human agentive properties, not mere “mythology.” 2. Such conceptions thus cannot be analyzed merely at the level of their linguistic expressions and are not spread only through cultural contacts. 3. Beliefs about personalized spirits do not belong to more “advanced” cultures only (contra R. R. Marett). Although all peoples have beliefs about impersonal forces, humans have always been capable of

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4.

5.

6.

7.

representing personal agency as well. (But chimps might project animacy without mentality to the natural world.) Although people everywhere understand that biological bodies die, it is much more difficult to imagine the death of personal agency because it is immaterial. Souls of the dead thus are often regarded as an important part of human communities. In nondoctrinal traditions, it is difficult to differentiate between spirits of the dead and gods. Because pure mentality is difficult to imagine, spirits are often combined with something physical: a “subtle” body resembling mist, clouds, or vapor; the grave as the place where the dead agent is dwelling; the house a dead agent keeps haunting; and so forth. The belief that spirits form an integral part of the society plays a central role in shamanism (a vague category). The shaman is a specialist who maintains the social order by negotiating with the spirits and thus making shared knowledge explicit; this often happens in a ritualized drama. The shaman’s transformations into animal form may partly derive from anomalous experiences caused by the use of psychoactive drugs and ritual techniques. Beliefs about such transformations persist among common people to the extent that beliefs are cognitively optimal. Beliefs about spirit possession are based on the belief that agency is separable from a biological body. Yet there is little speculation about the nature of the spirits when they are not in a body. The possessing spirit is usually imagined to be in the head, controlling the body. One and the same spirit is imagined to behave differently in different bodies. Possessed persons seem to retain memory of things that happened during their alleged possession, however. Like shamanism, possession is used as a means of maintaining health and social order, with the spirits communicating about the shared knowledge of the group.

4 God as Supernatural Agent

4.1 From Myth to Theology 4.1.1 Gods and Supernatural Agents God is not a unit-idea. Not only have “different men [sic] . . . employed the one name so signify superhuman beings of utterly diverse and incongruous kinds” but also “beneath any one of these beliefs you may usually discover something, or several things, more elemental and more explanatory, if not more significant, than itself ” (Lovejoy 1960, 4–5). It thus is extremely difficult to specify what it is that makes an entity belong in the category of gods (Pyysiäinen and Ketola 1999). What unites all gods into a single type of being and differentiates them from other types of supernatural agent? This question has received amazingly little attention from scholars of religion. The Judeo-Christian tradition has provided an implicit prototype for god concepts; yet this tradition itself contains a variety of representations of God (Barrett and Keil 1996; Pyysiäinen 2005b; Saler 2000). Barrett points out that the theological concept of “God” may not be a “full-blown concept in the sense of providing a set of causal relations between various features of God that generate predictions, explanations, and inferences.” The God of theology is either a list of decontextualized properties such as omniscience or a set of attributes whose applicability is context-dependent (1998, 616 –17). Early evolutionary anthropologists, such as Tylor, regarded the Judeo-Christian God as the end-product of a long developmental process. L. R. Farnell (1925, 215), for example, argued in his Gifford

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Lectures that the idea of omniscience was not found “in the polytheisms of cultured peoples.” Tylor ’s somewhat dissident follower Andrew Lang,1 however, changed his mind about this soon after his first book. He had thought that “ghosts, or other spiritual existences fashioned on the same lines, prospered till they became gods” (1898, 1). Myths were partly irrational and partly rational, and in the “childhood of the human race,” with the idea of cause and effect completely missing, people had considered myths to be perfectly rational (1913, 1:7–9, 305– 7; cf. Durkheim 1925, 34, 118–22, 299, 324, 1965, 39–40, 240, 258–59). In his later works and in the 1913 edition of Myth, Ritual and Religion (published one year after his death), Lang argued that the idea of God “need not logically be derived from the idea of spirit ” and that the conception of a Supreme Being who sanctions ethics seemed to be present also in the “remote past of savagery.” Yet it appeared to have faded or even disappeared in “some conditions of barbarism.” People thus had reached “the highest religious concept ” but then more or less lost it during the process of social evolution. The highest being was neglected, while ghosts or minor gods were served and adored (1898, 2, 1901, v, 1913, 1:308, 2:1–2), Lang accepted Tylor ’s view of how spirit beliefs had originated but did not accept that all representations of higher gods were derived from these beliefs. There was no logical reason why the idea of a Maker should not be prior to the idea that there were such things as souls and ghosts (1913, 1:2–4, 310; see Stocking 1995, 50 – 63, 81–83). By such a God, Lang (1898, 173) meant “a primal eternal Being, author of all things, the father and friend of man, the invisible, omniscient guardian of morality.” The ultimate origins of beliefs about God and of the immortality of the soul were either in “actual communion with Deity ” or in an innate and intuitive “unanalysable sensus numinis” (51, 1913, 1:306). The reason anthropologists thought the most primitive savages lacked the idea of God was that anthropologists considered God to be a Spirit and thus saw God as the idea of spirit “carried to its highest power.” But if it can be shown that the idea of God does not imply the doctrine of spirit, then this idea may have existed before the idea of spirit evolved. The two “factors in religion—ghost and god—seem to have perfectly different sources” (Lang 1898, 176, 201–2). For Lang, “the savage Supreme Being, with added power, omniscience, and morality, is the idealization of the savage, as conceived of by himself, minus fleshly body (as a rule), and minus Death” (203). He is not necessarily a spirit.2 Thus, although Lang denied that God was a spirit in a Tylorian sense, he describes God as an immortal human being without a body and with superhuman cognitive (and moral ) powers. This being, however, amounts to a disembodied agent with superior cognitive powers in the exact sense of the cognitive theory. To the extent that “spirits” means disembodied agents, God is a supreme spirit.3 In what follows, I analyze Christian concepts of God, focusing on God’s nature as an agent, as well as on the relationship between cognitively costly

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and everyday representations of God. Conceptualizing agency on the basis of attributions of beliefs and desires means that I do not approach God’s “supernaturalness” as objective nonexistence; I instead start from the human point of view and the fact that God (or gods) cannot be perceived and observed in the sense that natural agents can. Therefore, it may be difficult to draw a solid line between the supernaturalness of God and that of such figures as the king in premodern Europe, for example, when ordinary folks only knew about the king what they had heard by way of rumors. We, of course, now know that kings have existed and that they thus are perfectly natural beings, whereas the existence of God cannot be established in the same way (see Stenger 2007). But for some persons under some circumstances, God and some human agents may seem equally distant. The enslaved African American plantation workers in North America, for example, regarded the most popular Northern generals and especially Abraham Lincoln as messianic figures identical to Jesus. When one unidentified black schoolboy was asked who Jesus was, he replied: “Him’s Massa Linkum” (quoted in Alho 1976, 83). Lincoln was generally believed to be a heavenly messenger who was then raised up by the Lord; as one worker in Beaufort, South Carolina, said: “Massa Linkum be ebrywhere. He walk de earth like de Lord” (141). Lincoln and Jesus were equally supernatural from this enslaved person’s point of view. The king ’s supernaturalness figures in the doctrine of the “king ’s two bodies” as elaborated by the English crown jurists of the Tudor period. They freely borrowed from the Christian doctrine of the two “natures” of Christ and the dogma of the Church as the mystical body of Christ (de Lubac 2006; Kantorowicz 1957, 7–16; Maitland 1901; see below). According to Maitland (1901, 131), the thought occurred to Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) or some other lawyer of his day that the king of England “ought to be brought into one class with the parson [“parsonified”]: both were to be artificial persons and both were to be corporations sole.”4 Even today, the monarch of the United Kingdom is a corporation sole and may possess property as monarch that is distinct from the property she possesses personally. Kantorowicz quotes Edmund Plowden’s Reports in particular to describe this idea. The crown lawyers wrote: For the King has in him two bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself ) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or accident. . . . But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the management of the public weal, and this Body utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or

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supernatural agency frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body. (quoted in Kantorowicz 1957, 7)

Or: Although he [the king] has, or takes, the land in his natural Body, yet to this natural Body is conjoined his Body politic, which contains his royal Estate and Dignity; and the Body politic includes the Body natural, but the Body natural is the lesser, and with this the Body politic is consolidated. . . . Ergo the Body natural and the Body politic are not distinct, but united, and as one Body. (quoted in Kantorowicz 1957, 9) Plowden also argued that while the natural body consisted of natural members like in all humans, the members of the body politic were the king ’s subjects; the king and his subjects thus together composed the corporation of the Crown. The king is incorporated with his subjects and his subjects with him; the king is the head and the subjects the members of the body (see Kantorowicz 1957, 13). All of this exemplifies the way agency can be supernatural even when the agent in question is natural. For the sake of simplicity, I speak of supernatural agents whenever a person or persons think or feel an agent ’s agency to be somehow detached from a biological body and cannot give a natural explanation about the mechanism by which this agency is supposed to work. From this point of view, it may not always be possible to distinguish between literally supernatural agents, such as God, and supernatural agency attributed to natural agents. A supernatural agent is (at least temporarily) invisible, acts from afar, and often has an exceptional power to interfere with peoples’ lives. Some of them, such as gods, are often represented as having full access to the contents of human minds; others are not (see also Kantorowicz 1957, 271– 72). Highly abstract supernatural agent concepts and beliefs tend to appear in religious traditions only after a long historical process of reflection, made possible by external memory stores and social institutions such as monasteries and universities. This is not to say that there is a necessary universal development from folk religion to a cognitively costly theology, and especially not to say that such cultural developments correspond to “stages” of biological evolution. I also do not aim at any kind of exhaustive historical description; instead, I use a few representative examples to show how cognitively costly elaboration of the idea of God takes place as a refinement and expansion of more intuitive ideas that historically precede the more costly ones (see Ferré 1984; McCauley 2000). There is also a dynamic tension between natural ways of thinking and cognitively costly processing, because, in the case of counterintuitive concepts, reflective thinking tends to lead to impasses that are difficult to solve.


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4.1.2 Mythical Agency in the Old Testament 4.1.2.1 gods. We can partly reconstruct the folk-religious mythical background of more reflective Christian beliefs from what is preserved in the narratives of the Old Testament, Ugaritic texts, and related documents. Although it is generally thought that even Moslems worship the same God as Christians and Jews, we may well ask what kind of continuity there actually is between the earliest Judaic beliefs and the God of modern Christian theologians and laypersons. Mark Smith (2001, 6 – 7) observes that it is by no means self-evident how one should identify an agent as being a god (Akkadian ilu) even within Semitic traditions. Listing the various figures called “divine” in the Semitic languages (Akkadian ilu, Ugaritic ‘il, Hebrew ‘ēl ) gives us not only major deities but also such phenomena as monstrous cosmic enemies, demons, some living kings and dead kings, the dead in general, images of deities, and so forth. In addition, in Akkadian cuneiform writing, special signs are used to indicate the so-called determinative; one of these signs (transcribed as dingir) means that the following word is the name of a god (see Di Vito 1993, 74–120). This sign applies not only to names of deities proper but also to many other phenomena such as stars, images of monstrous creatures, heroes of old, and so forth. What is common in all divine beings is the fact that they are considered to be somehow greater than humans yet also somehow resembling them. Another strategy would be to study the etymologies of the various appellations of gods in order to find a common core. Ilu, for example, derives from *’y/wl, “to be preeminent, strong.”5 But the relationship between etymology and meaning is often a complex one and can easily be used to support very speculative conclusions. Moreover, this does not solve the comparative problem of “God” as a universal category. A third approach might be to compare Ugaritic and West Semitic sources in order to better understand the specific nature of the god of the Israelites (as in Smith 2002). As a fourth alternative, Smith lists attempts to create typologies of gods on various grounds. In his later book, Smith tries to combine all these approaches (Smith 2001, 6–8). His work helps to illumine the early development of Judaic concepts of God but does not solve the more general problem. Theologians have often regarded the Yahweh of the Israelites as somehow unique in being the God of an ethical and exclusive monotheism, in contrast to the polytheism and “nature religion” of the Canaanites. This view does not receive much support from the historical evidence or the new analyses that accumulated during the 1990s, as Smith recognizes (2002, xii–xli) in the preface to the second edition of his Early History of God (see Wyatt 2005). First, the origins of Yahweh are partly obscure; second, historical sources do not point toward any “original monotheism” (contrary to Albright [1968]). Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian inscriptions from the ninth and eighth centuries speak of the Yahweh of Samaria, the Yahweh of Teman, and the

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Yahweh who is the god of Jerusalem and of the whole country—to him belong the mountains of Judah (see Smith 2001, 9–14). The figure of Yahweh may have originated at the southern sites of Seir/Edom/Teman/Sinai, located in the northwestern Arabian Peninsula east of the Red Sea; the cult of Yahweh was then transplanted to highland sites such as Shiloh. However, these southern sites do not seem like a probable home for a god of storm and war such as Yahweh. Evidence from Ugaritic texts, in fact, suggests that the figure of Yahweh may actually derive from those of El and Baal (see Wyatt 2005). Smith thinks all we can safely say is that Yahweh has a complex and partly unknown relationship with El (Smith 2001, 145–46, 2002, 19–31, 43–47). It seems very probable that El was the original god of the Israelites. First, the name of the Israelite people contains the element *‘ēl (Isra-el ); if Yahweh had been the original god, then the name might have been *yiśrâ-yāh. When the name of Israel came to refer to a people in the Iron I highlands (1100–950 BCE), it perhaps no longer referred to the god to whom that people was devoted. Second, biblical texts (e.g. Gen. 49:24–25) attest to Yahweh and El as different gods sanctioned by early Israel. In the Septuagint, Deuteronomy 32:8–9, for instance, presents El (Elyon) as the chief god and Yahweh as one of his five sons (also 4QDeutj in the Dead Sea Scrolls). Third, in Exodus 6:2–3, Yahweh says to Moses that he had previously appeared to the ancestors as El Shadday (Smith 2001, 142–43, 2002, 32–43; Wyatt 2005, 8–9, 88). Scholar of ancient Near Eastern religions Nick Wyatt (2005, 3–4) argues that in the so-called Elohist source,6 for example, El as the original proper name of a god has at some point been systematically replaced by the expression elohim (“gods, God”)7 because of an aversion to the name El. The earliest gods in the world’s religious traditions usually have tended to be local, in that their identity has been based on a specific cultic practice or a specified territory (see Pyysiäinen 1997; 2004d). Archaeological and historical evidence, along with cognitive theorizing, points to the conclusion that the earliest forms of religion cannot have been based on authorized doctrines about counterintuitive realities and instead involved ritual practices without any standardized interpretation (see Mithen 2004; Whitehouse 2000, 2004). Goody (2000, 105– 6) suggests that saints, ancestors, and the like belong to oral religions, whereas god beliefs of the monotheistic type belong to literate religions in which words and ideas can be decoupled from a particular context (see Pyysiäinen 2004d, 147– 71; Person 1998; Smith 2002, xxiv, 191–93). In biblical traditions, monotheism indeed first appears as a theme in texts dating from the sixth century BCE, representing an intra-Israelite development over hundreds of years (Gnuse 2000, 19–25; Smith 2002, 182–99). Monotheism is not a separate stage of religion in ancient Israel but a form of rhetoric that underscores and reinforces Israel’s exclusive relationship with its deity (Smith 2001, 9–14). We can hypothesize that the monotheistic discourse developed in a process guided by reflective thinking and supported by the cultural institution


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of scribalism, as Smith has suggested (2001, 176 – 77, 295 n. 49). He argues that the remarkable absence of mythical elements in the later texts of the Old Testament, compared to West Semitic traditions, might be due to the scribes responsible for the now extant biblical traditions either consciously censoring older descriptions of Yahweh or deleting them more as a secondary consequence of the literary processing of the traditions. The Wisdom literature especially reflects the transformation of mythic imagery into more elaborate narrative form. The legal and prophetic social criticism that emerged in the monolatrous ( but not monotheistic) cult owe much to writing (2002, 191–93).8 We need not think of the scribes as mere copyists; they may have actively helped create a fixed version of varying oral traditions (see Niditch 1996; Person 1998), hence transform, a cult-based religion into a more doctrinal one. The idea of God was removed from its cultic context and developed as an idea important qua idea. El and Yahweh were no longer tied to specific places or a single social function. Smith (2001, 143–45) suggests that Yahweh became the sole god of Israel in three overlapping stages of development. First, El was the original chief god. Second, he became the head of an early Israelite pantheon, which had Yahweh as its warrior god. Finally, El and Yahweh were identified as a single god. The merger probably took place at different rates in differing parts of Israel (see Wyatt 2005, 88); El as a separate god gradually disappeared, with Yahweh incorporating his characteristics. The peculiar Israelite monotheism then emerged when it was declared that people should worship Yahweh alone and that other gods were really nothing. The period of late monarchy (ending in 539 BCE) and exile seem to represent the period when this form of monotheism emerged (Smith 2001, 149– 66). The earliest strata of the Old Testament texts express many conceptions that resemble conceptions of a god that we find in Ugaritic literature that describes the storm-god in his meteorological procession; yet Yahweh is not personified to the same extent. In later texts, the absence of anthropomorphisms is even more salient, the emerging tradition of scribalism having put emphasis on other than mythical themes (Smith 2001, 175– 78). We may, however, differentiate between anthropomorphisms in the literal sense and having mentality (see Boyer 1996c). God walking in the Garden in the cool of the day with Adam hearing him ( literally “the sound of [him] walking,” Gen. 3:8–10) is a clear instance of anthropomorphism. God calling Moses from a bush that was on fire but did not burn up and Moses hiding his face “because he was afraid to look at God” (Exod. 3:1– 6) entails that God is animacy and mentality combined with spatiality and probably even physicality. The Garden narrative derives from the so-called Yahwist source, traditionally dated from the tenth to the sixth centuries BCE; at that time, Yahweh may have been more generally anthropomorphized (Smith 2001, 88). The burning bush narrative derives from a combination of the accounts given in the Yahwist and the

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Elohist sources. Wyatt (2005, 9) argues that the Yahwist’s account was inspired by the Elohist ’s version in the sixth century. The early version of this passage told of Moses meeting El in the desert after the flight from Egypt and El calling him from the mountain, not from a burning bush. The burning bush was an alteration meant to help harmonize this version with the Yahwist ’s (6 –17; see Smith 2001, 146 –48). In the later strata of the traditions of the Old Testament, human-like agentive properties also appear: such cognitive-emotional factors as hearing, making promises, having emotions, and so forth (see Gnuse 2000, 4– 6). The increasing power of Yahweh goes hand in hand with a less physical representation of him (see Pyysiäinen 2005b, 82). Yahweh’s nonphysicality seems to have increased, together with his elevation as the only true god; this, in turn, seems to relate to an increased awareness among the Israelites of themselves as a distinct nation (cf. Smith 2001, 175– 78; Gnuse 2000, 13–25). This gradual development was not always recognized by theologically minded biblical scholars who instead wanted to see the Israelites as interested only in history, not mythology ( Wyatt 2005, 151–88). Hans-Joachim Kraus, for example, argued in 1954 that there was no evidence in the Old Testament of the idea of a mythicization of Yahweh (cited at 153). New labels such as “religious imagination” were substituted for the concept of “mythology,” which had fallen in disrepute, especially because of David Friedrich Strauss’s 1835 book Leben Jesu (178). Such relabeling does not, of course, change anything; the cognitive perspective also helps us realize how improbable it is that the Israelite religion would have been totally devoid of intuitive elements (166). “Myth(ology)” is a vague concept, as Wyatt also recognizes, but in this context, it can be taken to refer to the fact that the Israelites and the neighboring peoples expressed their intuitions about supernatural agents in narrative form.9 A mythical god is (close to) cognitively optimal; those who deny the mythical nature of Yahweh (and El ) are looking at early Israelite religion through the lens of later theological elaborations. In the next chapters, I analyze the trajectory of this theological development, showing how Christian theologians have elaborated the mythical representation of El and Yahweh into an abstract metaphysical principle, first relying on Aristotelian concepts and later influenced by the advancement of the empirical sciences. Lovejoy (1960, 5) considers it “one of the strangest and most momentous paradoxes in Western history ” that philosophical theologians identified the God of the Sermon on the Mount with the God of Aristotle, although these two “had almost nothing in common.” I will soon show how this happened; but first, I take up the issue of God’s spirit. 4.1.2.2 the holy spirit and the church. In the older texts of the Old Testament, “the spirit of God” (rûah elōhîm/ēl ) is an invading or violent power that takes possession of people; it is considered probable that it was only in the


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exilic and postexilic period that the term rûah acquired a theological significance, although it is not possible to demonstrate a general semantic development of this term (Gentz 1986; Horn 1992, 262– 63; Tengström 2004, 373; see also Levison 1997). The word rûah, a verbal noun modeled on the infinitive, refers to “blowing ” (of the wind) and “respiration.” By analogy, it also came to mean “breathing,” “spirit,” and “life.” Its base, rwh, appears throughout the entire range of the West ( but not East) Semitic languages ( Tengström 2004, 367– 69). What seems to be instead unique in the texts of the Old Testament is that rûah is used to refer to a vital power of an individual that is not confined to the physical body (72). As a wind that blows, rûah can stand for vanity, worthlessness, and transitoriness of life, on the one hand, and for God’s action, on the other hand (Horn 1992, 262). Most often it is east wind or the sirocco, which appears in the spring and fall, inflicting damage. The “idols” are worthless and their images “empty wind.” On the other hand, they can also be said not to have rûah; they are like dead bones. Deceit and lies, like those of false prophets, are also called rûah. Wind (or breath) represents vanity because the wind vanishes without a trace and because it carries off everything insubstantial. Or as Ecclesiastes (1:6) puts it, “Round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.” Yet it is Yahweh who makes the wind blow, and the wind thus is in his service ( Tengström 2004, 374– 75, 380 –82). In the sense of “breath,” rûah is the spirit of life that distinguishes between living and dead entities; it also signifies the spatial locus of personhood “inside” an individual ( Tengström 2004, 375– 76). The noun nepeš shares with rûah the meanings “life” and “breath”; when it appears together with rûah, both should be understood to mean “soul,” “mind,” or “life.” “Soul,” “spirit,” and “heart ” (rûah, nepeš ) are also used as personal or relative pronouns. Used in the sense of “throat,” nepeš can also denote “hunger ” and “thirst,” in the sense of “desire” or “longing.” Rûah is also associated with “heart” (lēb), denoting the liveliness of the body. “Heart ” is also the seat of the intellectual functions, will, and emotions, and can also signify hidden thoughts or “mind.” “Heart ” is the seat of wisdom, whereas rûah is never used in this sense (375– 77; cf. Lauha 1983). Whereas nepeš is only rarely associated with Yahweh, rûah is regarded as given to humans by Yahweh. As Job (33:4) puts it, “the spirit of God (rûah-‘ēl ) has made me, and the breath of Shaddai (nišmat šaddai) gives me life.” This refers to Yahweh having created humans by forming Adam from the dust of the ground and breathing the breath of life (nišmat hayyîm) into his nostrils. When Yahweh takes away his breath, all living things return to dust (Ps. 104:29–30), the breath (rûah) returning to God. What gives life to all animated beings, not just humans, is God’s vitalizing spirit, shared by all humans and (other) animals (Tengström 2004, 375, 386–88). Tengström (388) observes that rûah thus refers both to the vitalizing spirit of God and to an individual’s subjective mental activity. From the cognitive point of view, it looks as if mentality could be

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subjective, while animacy is shared by all humans and (other) animals and has its foundation in God. Rûah is not used to describe God’s inner life (375). In the Septuagint, rûah is translated as pneúma 264 times; when the meaning is “wind,” words such as ánemos are also used. When the reference is to the inner forces and emotions of humans, various other words are used, such as thymós (the “spirited” in Plato) and makrothymía ( Tengström 2004, 395). The range of meanings the Greek pneúma can suggest covers entities as diverse as subterranean vapors, heavenly winds, human attitudes, and ghosts (Levison 1997, 1). Basically, pneúma (*pnewo) denotes air in movement. It can refer to wind, breath, or life, in the sense of animating power (“spirit ”); as such, it is occasionally used synonymously with psuchē, but never with noús (“mind”). Pneúma first occurs in the first century BCE in connection with the oracles of Apollo at Delphi: the priestess, known as the Pythia, sat over an opening in the earth, and when she became intoxicated by the vapors that arose from the fissure she fell into trance, which was interpreted as possession by Apollo. She then spoke in riddles that the priests of the temple interpreted (Horn 1992, 261– 62). In the Old Testament, the compound “holy spirit ” (qōdeš + rûah) occurs only in Isaiah 63:10 –11 and Psalm 51:13. “Holy ” (qōdeš) and “secular ” ( hōl ) are mutually exclusive terms (Kornfeld and Ringgren 2004, 522). Leviticus 10:10 (New International Version) says: “You must distinguish between the holy and the common ( hōl ), between the unclean and the clean,” and Ezekiel 44:23 says: “They are to teach my people the difference between the holy and the common ( hōl ) and show them how to distinguish between the unclean and the clean.” The etymology of the root qdš is still unresolved; most scholars agree with Baudissin’s thesis that qd has the basic meaning “separate, sunder ” and qdš thus means “separated, isolated, different from the surroundings.” The problem is that the notion of separating is attested largely by pr-constructions, so the meaning “separated” for qdš is then only a derived one. The word qādôš, which is formed like the adjectives of verbs of condition, qualifies ritually significant places, the people of Israel, its priests, believers, and God himself. The most frequently occurring derivative is the abstract noun qōdeš (“holiness”), which is used in the narrative of the burning bush, for example, to signify “holy ground” (Exod. 3:5). Later, qōdeš came to denote the temple as the “sanctuary ” (Kornfeld and Ringgren 2004, 523, 528, 535; see Anttonen 1996b; Lutzky 1993; cf. Choksy 2003). The holiness of the spirit thus is not simply an ethical quality; it might have originally characterized a spirit that is different from human spirits and thus set apart as approachable only in special, especially ritual, ways (see Anttonen 1992, 1996a,b). In the Septuagint, qdš derivatives are generally rendered with hágios (which first appears in Herodotus) and its derivatives. Hágios seems to be related to házomai (“stand in awe of, dread”), which Chantraîne (1968, 25–26) derives from the Sanskrit yájati (“honor with prayer and sacrifice”) (see Lutzky 1993,


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292). Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE), who tried to find the Stoic-Platonic theory of spirit ( pneuma) in the Old Testament, used pneuma theon, not pneuma hágion. For him, pneuma meant wind, air, breath, and supernatural beings. The Greek equivalent, (to) hágion (to) pneuma, is unknown in Greek literature outside the New Testament (Horn 1992, 261, 264), where it appears first in Paul’s letters—13 times; pneuma alone appears 113 times (see Horn 1992, 261). Mark (1:10) and Matthew (3:16) also use (to) hágion (to) pneuma, but only Luke and John use it as a technical term with theological significance (Horn 1992, 261). According to Luke (2:22), “the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.’ ”10 Paul says that the Holy Spirit ( hágios pneuma) spoke to our fathers through the prophet Isaiah (Acts 28:25). In other places, Paul argues that the human body is “the temple of God” or “temple of the Holy Spirit ” and that the Spirit of God dwells in it (1 Cor. 3:16, 6:19). The Holy Spirit thus is identified with God and his presence in humans. As to the idea of wind “blowing,” it can be understood as an expression of the HUI: winds are created by an invisible agent who blows. This idea can also be a metaphor or a dead metaphor, that is, a metaphor that is no longer understood as a metaphor, however. In the Old Testament, God is only once explicitly said to create the wind (Amos 4:13), although the idea of wind as an instrument of God’s action is more common ( Tengström 2004, 374, 381). The historical development toward monotheism seems to go hand in hand with a more ethical understanding of the spirit of God. The Chronicler, in contrast to the earlier Deuteronomistic History, ascribes prophetic speech to the rûah of Yahweh, for example (373). Philo argued explicitly that inspiration by God’s pneuma also was the basis of the noús (Horn 1992, 264). The idea of all life having a common root in the spirit of God has provided a good basis for abstract monotheistic theology to develop. Paul’s idea of the human body as the temple of the Holy Spirit soon grew into a doctrine of the Church as the mystical body of Christ (corpus Christi mysticum). Early fathers of the Church occasionally referred to the Church as the body of Christ. Christians were united through participation in Christ, thus becoming—in Athanasius’s words—“one body, possessing the Lord in themselves” (quoted in Kelly 1989, 404). The life and power of Christ were communicated to humans in the Eucharist, with Christ joining together many distinct spirits, making them as though a single spirit. Augustine elaborated this into the idea of the Church as the mystical body and bride of Christ. Just as an ordinary body was permeated and held together by the soul or spirit, so the Holy Spirit gave life to the mystical body. The unity of Christians was both a unity of belief and a union of love. Schism meant cutting oneself off from the mystical body of Christ, the Church. The Church was a mixed community (corpus permixtum) consisting both of true and false believers; only the good were Christ’s body in the proper sense (Kelly 1989, 403, 406, 412–15). Later,

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Protestant theologians developed the distinction between the visible Church (ecclesia visibilis) as a corpus permixtum and the invisible or hidden Church (ecclesia invisibilis/abscondita). Yet it was impossible to know who truly belonged to the invisible Church (see Härle 1989, 287–88). The term corpus mysticum does not appear in the Bible. It gained prominence with the Carolingian theologians, for whom it meant the consecrated host, not the Church (which was corpus Christi). Then around the middle of the twelfth century the meanings of the terms started to change. The doctrine of transubstantiation, accepted in 1215, emphasized that in the Eucharist, the true body of Christ (corpus verum) was present, and the term corpus mysticum came to refer to the Church. Pope Boniface VIII then dogmatized the doctrine of the Church as the mystical body in the bull Unam sanctam in 1302. According to Kantorowicz, this development coincided with the emergence of the ideas of the corporational and organic structure of the society (de Lubac 2006; Kantorowicz 1957, 194–99). Actually, these ideas are not that mystical. I have noted that humans have intuitions about the body being an animated organism driven by mentality. Humans also have intuitions and reflective ideas about others’ mentality, which leads to shared knowledge and degrees of intentionality. This, again, makes it seem as though the group has a mind of its own. Thus, when groups and societies are likened to a body, it is not merely a question of using the body as the most convenient “container metaphor.” On the contrary, likening a social organization to a body brings along the idea of the liveliness (animacy) of the body as well as the idea of the organism being directed by mentality. I suggest here that humans’ experience of the relationship between an animated body and mentality, as expressed in soul beliefs, also leads humans to think of shared knowledge and degrees of intentionality as being related to a social body much as individual mentality is related to a biological body. It thus is no wonder that the state or the king ’s power, as well as that of the Church, have been conceptualized as bodies. This is not merely a question of using the word “body ” as a metaphor; rather, people actually think of the Church as a body. Christians form a body to which the Holy Spirit gives life much as biological bodies are permeated and held together by the soul or spirit. This is reflected in a unity of belief and a union of love ( beliefs and desires). As an individual mind could not entertain mutually contradictory beliefs, the Church could only be the mystical body of Christ if there was doctrinal unity. The idea of a union of love expresses the fact that large-scale cooperation requires altruism. Augustine, however, realized that the possibility of defection was very real, even though it was not always possible to know who was a true believer and who was not. The Church thus included free riders who only pretended to be believers. It is all too easy to say the creed without any real belief in it. More costly (in time and resources) signals of commitment are needed, as I noted in discussing the witch hunt. The history of the Church shows that


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it may be wiser not to try to distinguish between true believers and defectors at all; the same history also shows that in doctrinal religion, people cannot in reality resist the temptation to do so (see also Pyysiäinen 2004a; Whitehouse and Martin 2004; the appendix).

4.1.3 Philosophical Elaboration Philosophy was introduced into Christianity very early by the fathers of the Church who had been born and raised as non-Christians and had studied Greek philosophy. Called Apologists, they flourished around 140–180. They made use of the writings of Philo of Alexandria, who expressed philosophical views in his sermons, trying to combine Judaic mythology and Greek philosophy. Harry Wolfson (1948, 3–9, 56 –57) points out that the Alexandrian Jews, such as Philo, were the only Hellenistic people who made a radically new contribution to Hellenistic philosophy by remaking it according to the pattern of their own belief tradition. In doing so, they developed what came to be known as the allegorical method of interpreting scripture. People who were unaffected by philosophy were satisfied with the traditional, literal interpretation; others, such as Philo, then tried to combine the traditional with a new kind of method, arguing that an allegorical interpretation was needed because the literalists sometimes came to conclusions that contradicted their own beliefs. In his Legum allegoriae, Philo claimed that all anthropomorphic descriptions of God had to be understood allegorically. The essence of the scriptural religion was that God existed and was one, and that the Platonic ideas and the Mosaic Law also existed. Only the latter idea was exclusively Jewish (see Wolfson, 1948, 115–16, 164– 77). In De opificio mundi, Philo then reinterpreted Plato’s view in Timaeus of the creation of the world. Philo understood Plato to have argued that there was an unlimited void that was the abode of the ideas, and within it was a limited void that Plato called a “receptacle” and “space.” In it were copies, or shapes, of the ideal four elements (earth, fire, water, air), from which Plato thought the world was created. The Demiurge (“the Artisan”) transformed these copies into the four elements, creating the world from these elements.11 Both the limited void and the copies of the four elements came to be regarded as a kind of preexisting matter (see 304–5). In Philo’s opinion, the creation of the world of ideas was described in the biblical account of the first day of creation (see Wolfson 1948, 305– 6). As there could be no eternal beings besides God, and as there could not be anything in God other than God, Philo thought that the Platonic ideas were integrated into an intelligible world of ideas (Plato’s “intelligible animal”) contained in a bodiless Nous (“mind”) or Logos (“reason”; pure mentality), which had existed from eternity as God’s thought, prior to the creation of the world, and was then created as a real incorporeal being (see Wolfson 1948, 32–38). Philo’s reasoning exemplifies the tendency to view the natural world from the tool-user ’s

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perspective, characterized by a promiscuous teleology: everything that exists is made, and the world is a material realization of a disembodied agent ’s willful design. Apologists such as Justin the Martyr considered Philo’s works to be commentaries on the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture (the Septuagint). Following his example, they presented the Christian doctrine as a philosophy, restoring the original meaning of the few philosophical terms in the early Christian literature. This was how Christianity gradually became philosophized; mythological themes and ideas presented in narratives and completely mundane everyday prose were elaborated into a grand philosophical system (see Wolfson 1961, 1, 39, 105). To give just one example, Cyril of Jerusalem, an early Church father not usually considered a philosopher, employed argumentation that can be regarded as philosophical. For instance, he defines “faith” (Gk. pístis) as an assent of the soul. In Greek philosophy, pístis was an epistemological term, not a religious one. It referred to a special kind of opinion or to the sense of a judgment of the truth of knowledge. “Assent ” (synkatáthesin) is hardly ever used in the New Testament, although in philosophy it is equivalent to pístis ( Wolfson 1961, 105– 7). The philosophical elaboration of the Christian doctrine took place first in the Augustinian-Platonic and later in the Aristotelian tradition of medieval theology (see Kenny 2007). Although such early works as Petrus Abaelardus’s (1078–1142) Sic et non and Petrus Lombardus’s (c. 1095–1160) Sentences rely heavily on authorities, a shift toward a more independent philosophical analysis took place in the transition between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Kenny 2007, 47–48; Levi 2002, 40). At that time, the large body of authoritative traditions involving complex argumentation and counterintuitive representations had introduced many new problems and contradictions. A method was needed to organize knowledge so that new true sentences could be derived from more general sentences and apparent contradictions could be understood and analyzed. The quaestio method of conceptual analysis was developed for this purpose. In it, certain sentences emerged as manifesting exceptionally difficult problems; they came to be called sophismata and were used as means of solving problems that were structurally similar to them (Kenny 2007, 98–99; Knuuttila 1981, 163– 62). The Catholic Church then came to accept the system of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) as representative of its teaching about God. Medieval Scholastic literature in general represents a large body of philosophical reasoning; its specifically religious feature is the way its the whole conceptual system is anchored on the concept of God. Although this God is highly abstract, he has a human-like mentality (although his animacy, not to mention physicality, might be questioned). The Scholastic discourse very much focused on understanding the intentionality in God’s actions; the discussions centered by and large on the nature of God’s free will and the modal concepts of “(im)possibility ” and “necessity.” The concept of God posed difficult problems


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for Aristotelian logic, which was based on an elaboration of everyday intuitions. In mundane matters, it was easy to accept the inherited idea of a “principle of plenitude,” according to which “No genuine possibility can remain forever unrealized” (see Hintikka 1981a, 58–59; Knuuttila 1981, 163, 1993a, 4; Lovejoy 1960, 52). However, with regard to God’s agency, it led to difficulties. In 1936, Lovejoy (1960) distinguished three related unit-ideas in ancient philosophy. First was the principle of plenitude (P), which derived from Plato’s Timaeus, in which the Demiurge transformed all possibilities of being into actuality (45–55). Second, from (P) could be deduced the Aristotelian principle of continuity: if there was a theoretically possible intermediate type between any two natural species, that type had to be realized (55–58). Third, Aristotle suggested the principle of unilinear gradation: the arranging of all animals in a single graded scala naturae according to their “degree of perfection” (58–59). Lovejoy thought that Aristotle had rejected (P), however. Hintikka has shown that he did not (Hintikka 1957, 1981a; Knuuttila 1981, 1993a). Hintikka (1957 69– 71) shows that modal and temporal concepts coincide in Aristotle; he endorses not only (P) but three additional principles: 1. That which is, always is by necessity. 2. Nothing eternal is contingent. 3. That which never is, is impossible (Hintikka 1957, 69– 71). Philosopher Simo Knuuttila (1981, 1993a) has amply shown that the medieval Scholastics knew and employed this kind of “statistical” or “temporalfrequency ” view of modalities. Knuuttila (1981, 199), following Lovejoy (1960), suggests both that (P) was retained because it had played such an important role in ancient philosophy—despite the fact that it contradicted the doctrine of creation—and that there was no real alternative to (P) before Duns Scotus (c. 1266 – 1308) elaborated the Nominalist approach (165– 66; Normore 2003, 129). Augustine (c. 354–430), for example, thought that in creation, God chose the actual course of history from among a set of alternatives (see Knuuttila 2001). But how could these be genuine possibilities if they were never realized? How could God be free either to create or not to create the world if all possibilities must be realized at some point in time? Unfortunately, Augustine did not develop the idea of the unrealized divine possibilities any further; in other passages, he even seems to think that all true possibilities have been realized in the actual world, or that God does not let unrealized possibilities be real alternatives for natural events (Knuuttila 1981, 199). In the early medieval doctrine of God’s omnipotence, the idea of unrealized divine possibilities was still commonly accepted, but its implications for the theory of modality were not seriously considered (224–25, 236). Aquinas, for example, follows Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) in arguing that by “God” is meant that thing than which nothing greater can be

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conceived.12 As that which exists both in reality and in mind is greater than that which exists only mentally, a perfect God must also have extramental existence (Summa theologiae I q. 2 a. 1). Theology thus is the science of an existing being, not of a mental concept that the human mind tends to produce. We can know something of God through negations ( he is unmoved, etc.) but also positively, by way of analogy. Aquinas says, for example: “when we say ‘God is good,’ the meaning is not ‘God is the cause of goodness’ or ‘God is not evil’; but the meaning is ‘Whatever good we attribute to creatures, preexists in God,’ and in a more excellent and higher way ” (I q. 13 a. 1–12). Yet “it is impossible to predicate anything of God and creatures univocally ” (I q. 13 a. 5); humans’ words only describe God analogically (equivocally). There were five ways it was possible to prove the existence of God (Summa theologiae I q. 2 a. 3; see Kenny 2007, 303–2). First, anything in process of change is being changed by something else, because a thing in the process of change cannot itself cause the change. To cause a change is to bring into being what was previously only a possibility; this can only be done by something that already is. Thus, there is a chain of changes that goes back to a first cause of change not being changed by anything else. “This is what everybody understands by God” (“et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum”). The second argument postulates a first cause of everything and is difficult to distinguish from the first argument. Third, some beings can exist but need not exist. This implies that there was a time when they did not exist. If all beings were like this, there would have been a time when nothing existed. But then nothing could have ever come into being, which clearly is not the case. Therefore, there has to be a being that must exist and that owes this necessity to no other thing. Fourth, things can be more good, more true, more noble, and so on. Something thus must be the truest, best, and noblest of all things. It is by the same token a being that is most fully in being (“et per consequens maxime ens”), because Aristotle said that the truest things are the things most fully in being. It is this that we call God. Fifth, all bodies obeying natural laws tend toward a goal. Yet nothing that lacks awareness can tend to a goal, except under the direction of someone with awareness and understanding. This is what we call God. Aquinas then describes God as characterized by the following features (Summa theologiae I q. 3 a. 1–8, as summarized in the Caramello ed.): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Not having a body (“Deum non esse corpus”) Not being a composition of matter (materiam) and form ( forma) Being one with his essence (essentia) and nature (natura) Being not only his essence but also his existence Not being in any genus as a species (“Deus non est in genere sicut species”) or as a cause (sicut principium)


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6. Lacking “accidents” (accidens) 7. Being totally one (“Deum omnino esse simplicem”) 8. Not being combined with anything A central role is played by the view that there are no metaphysical distinctions in God, including the distinction between subject and attribute (Leftow 1990). Before the Nominalist turn, most Scholastics agreed that God was identical with his necessary intrinsic attributes, such as omnipotence and omniscience, although this seems to make God an abstract object (Leftow 1990; see Cross 2005, 103–14; Wolfson 1961).13 For Aquinas, God was in a way the superattribute of his own essence (essentia) and existence. There were no distinctions in God, although the words used to describe him were not simply synonymous (Cross 2005, 103–4). Although Aquinas may at first blush seem to be engaged in extremely abstract reasoning with little point of contact with the reality of everyday thinking, we should not let this prevent us from seeing the natural folk-psychological background of his argumentation. The central theme is the relationship between the mental and the physical-biological. God is not a material body given a form by the soul (cf. Aristotle), and there are no other distinctions in him, because he has existence and an essence but nothing attributed “on top” of that essence, as it were. Thus, it is the philosophically elaborated folk theories of matter and living kinds that Aquinas wants to exclude from descriptions of God. It seems that Aquinas’s God is something like pure mentality, although this is not directly said. Yet Aquinas does not say that God lacks beliefs and desires; he only denies material properties and relationships to God. God obviously has beliefs and desires; it is because of these beliefs and desires that the universe exists, being God’s willful creation. God is the ultimate explanation on which all other explanations are anchored, the first intention that brought intentionality into the world (cf. Lawson and McCauley’s [1990] idea of ritual chains). Hintikka (1957, 77) points out the obvious when he observes that the third proof of the existence of God clearly relies on (P): the possibility of existence entails actuality at some moment of time. If it is possible that God exists, he must exist at least sometimes. But as it belongs to the concept of God that he is eternal, he thus must exist by necessity and always. There are various modern versions of this argument (Plantinga 1968, 123– 72); from a modern secularist ’s point of view, they all simply boil down to the claim that God must exist because he is defined to exist (Edis 2002, 23–27; Martin 1990, 80 –95). For Anselm and Aquinas, however, the possibility of the existence of God necessitated the actual existence, because “God exists” is either necessarily true or is false; as it is possibly true, it is possibly necessary, and what is possibly necessary is (necessarily) necessary (see Morris 1987, 179–83; on Duns Scotus’s modifications of this, see Cross 2005, 36 –39). If it is possible that God exists always, this fact

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must also be realized in actuality, because no genuine possibility can remain unrealized. Thus, the Scholastic descriptions of God are highly abstract elaborations of a belief and desire psychology, using the cognitive capacity for forming counterfactuals. God has mentality because he has beliefs and desires (the question of his animacy may be a more difficult one). God is immovable and thus cannot be said to be self-propelled or to move in a goal-directed fashion. Yet he makes things happen in the material world. Evil spirits have to invade human bodies to cause something in the material world; God obviously does not have to (although he was only able to save humans by becoming a human). His mentality does not have spatiality because he is not a composition of matter and form as humans are, being material bodies that are given a form by a soul (Aristotle). By the same token, it is very difficult to think that God has a location. It thus seems as though Scholastics such as Aquinas tried to describe God as pure mentality. The result is a concept whose relationship with the material world is a complete mystery. This makes it easy or at least possible to defend this concept against all kinds of empirical criticism; this advantage, however, comes at the cost of the relative impossibility of making empirical inferences from the concept of God. Nevertheless, people have tried to do just that with regard to God’s mentality; an important theme has been the freedom of the will and its relationship with God’s omniscience.

4.1.4 Freedom of the Will and Modal Logic Knuuttila (1981, 165, 195–98) observes that (P) was first rejected by the Nominalists (nominales) of the twelfth century, who argued that the truth-value of a proposition does not change: for example, when persons who lived before Christ believed that Christ would be incarnated, they held the same belief as those who later believed that Christ had been incarnated. The truth-value of a proposition could not change over time, propositions being temporally definite. Therefore, the statistical interpretation of modality made no sense. If a proposition was true, it was always but not therefore necessarily true. Orthodox Aristotelians condemned this view, although the later thinkers Duns Scotus (c. 1266 –1308) and William Ockham (c. 1290 –1349), among others, seem to have adopted it. Scotus is the first to use the expression “logical possibility ” ( possibile logicum) and distinguish it from the concept of real possibility (Knuuttila 1981, 231, 1993a, 143; Normore 2003, 129; see Cross 1999). “Being logically possible” means that one without contradiction can think that something takes place in at least one of a set of alternative states of affairs. According to Scotus, in order to avoid determinism, it was necessary to assume that something that existed or took place could have existed or happened differently in the same moment of time (Knuuttila 1981, 217–34, 1993a, 138–49).


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In the fourth chapter of his Tractatus de primo principio, Duns Scotus argues that the principles of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics are at odds with the idea of the contingency of the world. When something is caused contingently, its first cause must also be contingent and thus something voluntary (Knuuttila 1981, 218; Cross 2005, 55–89).14 Contingency here means, unlike in Aristotle, that at the same moment that something happens, its opposite could have happened (Knuuttila 1981, 220 –21). Scotus says: “I do not call something contingent because it is not always or necessarily the case, but because its opposite could be actual at the very moment when it occurs” (Ord. I, d. 2, p. 1, q. 1–2, quoted in Knuuttila 1993a, 143). If there is no alternative to a temporally definite event, it cannot be said to be contingent (Knuuttila 1981, 222). Such modal logical considerations have a direct application to the problem of free will. The ancient statistical interpretation of possibility went hand in hand with the view that one acted out of a free will when one acted on the basis of an inner motive, even if one could not have done otherwise in a given situation. Only when one was compelled to act by an external force was one’s action not voluntary (see Wolfson 1961, 171– 74). Freedom of the will thus did not mean that one could have done other than what one actually did. Scotus, however, says: “Hence, if we assume that the will exists at some moment only, then it wills freely and ‘it wills freely’ only because it can notwill.” The proposition “the will willing at a, can be not-willing at a” is true in the “divided sense” (sensu divisionis) (Lect. 1.39.52). The distinction between divided and composite senses derives from Aristotle’s argument (Soph. el. 166a22–30) that the meaning of a statement changed according to whether its elements were understood in the composite or in the divided sense. In the case of, for example, the sentence “A man can walk while sitting,” if one combined the words, it meant that it was possible to walk-while-sitting, as though it were possible to walk and sit at the same. But if one divided the words, the sentence meant that a man had the power ( potentia) to sit while he was walking, which was possible, according Aristotle. In this divided sense, the possibility had to be actualized at another time, however (Knuuttila 1981, 167– 68). When Scotus said that “ ‘the will willing at a, can be not-willing at a’ is true in the divided sense,” he thought that the power ( potentia) to will could actualize the logical possibility, without it being necessary that this potentia ever be actualized (Lect. 1.39.51, translator ’s comment in Duns Scotus 1994, 119). Even if the will could not will a thing and its opposite at one and the same time, it was free “in regard to opposite acts” (“Voluntas enim nostra libera est ad actus opposites”; 1.39.45).15 A standing person could, for example, will not to stand. The divided sense not only meant willing different things at different times, but also that while willing something, the will could be not willing (Knuuttila 1981, 226). Thus: “Hence, if we assume that the will exists at some moment only, then it wills freely and ‘it wills freely’ only because it can not-will” (1.39.52). The divine will, however, is infinitely more free than ours; therefore,

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it can “only have one single volition, and therefore it can will opposite objects by one single volition” (Lect. 1.39.53). Thus, throughout Lectura 1.139, Scotus developed the argument to show that the contingency of things was compatible with God’s knowledge: as a fullaccess agent, God had foreknowledge about everything; yet this did not lead to determinism (which would deprive human actions of intentionality). Natural phenomena were causally necessary, but they took place in a world that was only one of several possibilities; thus, the truths about the actual world were not conceptually necessary (unlike in Aristotelianism), and it was clearly meaningful to try to study the reality empirically (Knuuttila 1981, 223). God as the first cause did not act by necessity but was free to choose which kind of world he created (225, 1993a, 143). Nor did Scotus (or Ockham) think that future contingent sentences were known to God because the flux of time was simultaneously present to God (Knuuttila 1993a, 145). Scotus thought that God foresaw the future because he was aware of his own intentions; future events were contingent because God’s decrees about the world were contingent. Ockham pointed out that this did not help reconcile human free will and God’s foreknowledge (Kenny 2007, 309). Yet both Scotus and Ockham considered natural theology to be possible in a positive way, even though part of the Christian doctrine could only be understood by divine grace. Some of the Scholastics thus admitted that God as pure mentality was a massively counterintuitive idea.

4.1.5 The Knowability of God Moses Maimonides had argued that the only sound way of describing God was through negations. Although it had been proved that God existed by necessity and that he was noncomposite, it was thought that we could only apprehend that he was, not what he was. God thus could not have any positive attributes. Saying that God was living only meant that he was not dead, for example (Guide of the Perplexed 1.58; see Kenny 2007, 50 –53). Duns Scotus dismissed the distinction between negative and positive knowledge of God (see Mann 2003, 240 –42). Without mentioning Maimonides explicitly, he pointed out four problems with negative theology.16 First, negations could only be known through affirmations; there could thus be no simple negative concepts, negations always being parasitic on some positive concept. Yet God was supposed to be simple. Second, all negative descriptions of God were understood to be true only insofar as they denied something of God that contradicted some such affirmation that was known to be true. Our knowledge of this affirmation could not be explained negatively. Third, love of God could not be directed at a mere negation. Fourth, negations could either be substantival or predicative. Substantivally, for example, “not stone” referred to a set of objects that were not stones. Predicatively, “not stone” indicated that the subject in question either was not a stone or was not made


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of stone (Mann 2003, 241–42). We could also say that when “not stone” was understood de dicto, it referred to whatever entity had the property of not being a stone. Understood de re, it meant that there was a specified entity that had the property of not being a stone. Thus, the substantival argument saying “God is not bad” attributed to God everything that was not bad; consequently, it failed to distinguish God from other good things. If “God is not bad” was used predicatively, it presupposed a grounding in something positive (242). Scotus thought that natural knowledge of God had to consist of a positive concept that was acquired naturally and applied uniquely to God (Mann 2003, 240, 242). The fact that some creatures were wise, for example, was the basis of the natural concept of wisdom. However, when we said that God was wise, we did not mean that God had the (separate) property of being wise but that God was wisdom itself. Our natural concept of God was “quidditative,” in that it addressed the question “What kind (of thing) is God?” The quiddity of a thing explained why its essential properties were essential to it (243–45; see Ockham, Quodlibet 2, q. 4, Ockham 1991, p. 105–107). But what reason did we have to think that the naturally acquired concept of wisdom applied to God? In contrast to Aquinas, Scotus emphasized that in describing God, we were not using natural concepts only analogically; concepts such as “wisdom” applied to humans and God equally (univocally). No natural concept of God could be both simple and equivocal (Knuuttila 1993a, 141). If there was a simple concept of God, it had to be univocal. We could not both affirm and deny a concept, such as “wisdom,” of God; second, a valid concept had to be such that it did not allow one to pass from true premises of a syllogism to a false conclusion (Mann 2003, 245–47). Scotus then claimed that God had all “unqualified” perfections possible; he also possessed nothing that was not an unqualified perfection. A qualified perfection was such that it had limits: sharpness, for example, was a limited perfection because it was good only in some of the things that could be sharp. An unqualified perfection had no intrinsic limitations and did not confer limitations on its possessor. We had concepts of unqualified perfections because we found the ( limited) perfections in creatures. We then understood that these perfections were maximally ( but univocally) realized in God. In possessing all unqualified perfections, each realized to its maximum degree, God was infinite being. Infinity was here not a property of an infinite being but an “intrinsic mode” of that being (i.e. God) (Mann 2003, 247–51). Thus, natural reason could reach the conclusion that omniscient, omnipotent God existed but not such conclusions as that God was triune and a contingently acting creator. The latter understanding represents supernatural knowledge, which characteristically is not accompanied by a knowledge that one knows (supernaturally) (Mann 2003, 252– 60). In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the relationship between Aristotelian logic and divine revelation was discussed in the context of the doctrine of Trinity, for example. Robert

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Holcot (d. 1349), for instance, thought that the human intellect had been so thoroughly corrupted in the Fall that it was unable to understand divine matters without the grace of God. In his Questions on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, he admitted that although God could cause faith in some people, the articles of faith had to remain mysteries. Natural logic and the “logic of faith” did not overlap. Holcot seems to have thought that drawing inferences from revealed propositions required a supernatural logic, but he did not develop this idea further and may later have changed his position (Knuuttila 1993b, 348–49; Levi 2002, 63). William of Ockham argued in the third part of his Summa logicae (3.360.29– 32) that in the light of natural reason, the articles of faith were improbable, incomprehensible, and apparently false (Knuuttila 1993a, 152; 1993b, 351). “An article of faith cannot be proved evidently (evidens)” (Quodlibet 1, q. 1, Ockham 1991, p. 5). Our insufficient knowledge of the true nature of Trinity thus prevented us from using Trinitarian propositions as premises in reasoning. In principle, we could only understand the laws governing the alien, supernatural world of God by learning a new system of symbolic representation (see Normore 1990; Tweedale 1990). Unfortunately, it was not possible for humans to improve the natural understanding of the supernatural world; the semantic relations of the “mental language” of thinking were inaccessible (see Kenny 2007, 144–45; Knuuttila 1993b, 355–56). In the Quodlibet (2, q. 3, theses 1–2), Ockham argued that only “one who is happy in heaven and sees God” could, for example, infer that God was three and one, whereas the “wayfarer ” (viator) on earth only accepted it on faith. As Anthony Kenny (2007, 309) puts it, this point of view is a combination of “devout fideism and philosophical agnosticism.”17 Ockham’s thesis seems to have been more radical than Heidegger ’s and Gadamer ’s views of natural, verbal language as the universal medium (see the appendix and chapter 2, section 2.1). If the semantics of the language of thought were inaccessible, then the human cognitive system (thinking), as well as linguistic systems, was a fixed system that could not be looked at from outside, changed, or manipulated (Pyysiäinen 2004d, 21; cf. Knuuttila 1993b, 355–56). If a proposition could not be conceptualized in the language of mind and yet was claimed to be sound, it had to refer to a supernatural world that was totally different from the natural reality that the language of mind referred to (Knuuttila 1993b, 351, 353, 355). This is like an anticipation of Jerry Fodor ’s remark (1983, 122) that explaining the reality as a whole might require “one more neuron than, de facto, anyone will ever have.” Ockham applied his idea only to some Trinitarian formulations, but Holcot generalized it to all revealed theology: natural and supernatural discourses were totally unconnected and natural theology impossible (Knuuttila 1993a, 152–53, 1993b, 353–54). The doctrine of the Trinity thus was something a Christian had to believe without understanding it (Knuuttila 1993a, 151). From a cognitive scientific perspective, it can be


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predicted that this means trouble in the context of folk psychology. Incomprehensible concepts and beliefs may be quoted as being “true,” but it is difficult to make relevant inferences from them.

4.1.6 Reason and the Reformation Ockham’s view of revealed knowledge was clearly a case of the kind of metarepresentation Sperber speaks of: poorly understood concepts and beliefs are quoted in the validating metarepresentational context of “is true.” Here, however, it was not a question of propositions with an undecided truth-value but of propositions that were outright incomprehensible. They could be quoted as true statements, but no rational inferences could be made from them. Holcot ’s position thus resembles Protestant agnosticism, which denies natural knowledge of God and puts strong emphasis on God’s revelation. This attitude typified Luther’s thought but was perhaps best exemplified by the reformed view of Karl Barth (1886 –1968). Barth saw a deep gap between God as the foundation and religion as a vain attempt to go beyond human limits in an attempt to reach the foundation. God’s revelation came “directly from above” and was not constrained by the human capacity for knowing. This seemed to lead to the conclusion that humans cannot know anything about God, and Barth gladly accepted this. For him, the theologian’s greatest anguish was in the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of speaking of God. Compared to this, everything else was “mere child’s play ” (Moltman 1974, 199; Barth 1980, 225–38; see Tillich 1955, 1–3). “When men stretch out their hands and touch the link which binds them to God, when they touch the tree in the midst of the garden, which ought not to be touched, they are by this presumptuous contact separated from Him” (Barth 1980, 247–48; see Wilson 2007, 171–87). Scotus and Ockham, however, thought that natural theology was possible; it just had its limits. Although some aspects of God could only be accepted on faith, others could be understood by natural reason. Such a concept of God arose very much from Aristotle’s conception of the unmoved mover as the first cause and the “first philosophy ” or theology as the science of eternal substances (Phys. 260a.1–2, Met. 1026a, 1071b–1072a). The anthropomorphic God of biblical narratives is here almost completely irrelevant, the only common feature being that both Yahweh and Deus are creators of the visible world. As Thomas Morris (1987, 10) puts it: “Many philosophers who travel the high road of a priorism are a bit perplexed by their Biblicist colleagues and find the God of the two testaments something of an embarrassment.” Scholastic theology involved a highly reflective attempt at mapping the bounds and capacities of the human mind that made natural knowledge of God possible. This meant analyzing a concept that was so far removed from the intuitive concept of God that it might even be misleading to speak of “God” in this context. We have to bear in mind that in the Aristotelian theological

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tradition, theology was a “science of everything,” in that it was the foundation of a huge conceptual system that included everything there was to be known. In medieval times, people believed that Aristotle had made all empirical observations that were necessary and there no longer was any need to try to find something new about reality. Scientific inquiry (“natural philosophy ”) merely meant learning and organizing the extant body of knowledge; Scotus and Ockham were perhaps the first to realize that new facts about nature might be found by empirical inquiry, although this was more fully realized only during the Enlightenment. Alistair Crombie (1971, 1, 16 –18, 24–35) claims that it was the thirteenth-century philosophers who “transformed the Greek geometrical method into the experimental science of the modern world.” In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the practical arts’ empiricism confronted the conception of rational explanation. The “God” of the Scholastics was a concept that served as the ultimate anchor of everything in the grand scheme of Aristotelian science. But the more sophisticated Aristotelian-based theology became, the more contradictions were introduced. The gap between natural reason and doctrinal formulations widened until Scholasticism as a theological system reached a point of disintegration (Levi 2002, 65). John Wyclif (1330?–1384), an early critic of Scholasticism and Nominalism, defended philosophical realism against Scholastic “sophistry ”: anyone who believed in objective truth was by the same token committed to belief in real universals. If A resembled B in respect to C, C-ness was a property of A and B; understanding this C-ness was equivalent to understanding a universal common to A and B, namely, C-ness. As Ockham could not explain how his “mental language” was related to verbal language (Latin), Wyclif wanted to force the conversation back to the reality of sounds and ink marks, thus—in Kenny’s ironic words—“anticipating Wittgenstein’s method of philosophizing by turning latent nonsense into patent nonsense” (2007, 151–53). Wyclif was also an outspoken critic of the pope and argued that religious authority came through personal piety, not ecclesiastical hierarchy. He started a project of translating the Bible in vernacular, which was probably completed by his followers, who were known as Lollards (possibly from Dutch lollaerd, “a mumbler”). Wyclif was finally expelled from Oxford University because of his teaching that the bread and wine at Mass were the body and blood of Christ only in the same analogical sense that paper and ink in the Bible were the word of God. However, Wyclif had initiated a new movement that was to persist among not only his immediate followers but also the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia, among others (Kenny 2007, 99–102, 211–13). As Anthony Levi (2002, 65) argues, by the mid–fourteenth century it had become clear that Scholasticism was “leading to a catastrophic alienation from the properly religious function it was expected to fulfill.” Massively counterintuitive doctrines did not have the required inferential potential; it was also impossible for the


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Catholic Church to maintain unity and loyalty in the large geographical area of western Europe (see Diamond 1999; chapter 3, section 3.2 here). The Reformation thus can be seen as a reaction to the loss of relevance (understood in the Sperberian sense) of Christian beliefs. If concepts and beliefs are relevant to people to the extent that they are able to process them cognitively in the context of everyday life and without too much cognitive effort (Sperber and Wilson 1988), the Christian doctrines certainly suffered a relevance problem. As it is difficult to make practical inferences from abstract and reflective theological concepts and formulations, people are likely to abandon such processing at the outset, favoring concepts and beliefs that yield the same amount of inferences with less effort. From Martin Luther ’s perspective, for example, Scholastic theology had lost contact with ordinary everyday life, although Luther was in some respects influenced by Ockham and Nominalism and called Ockham “mein lieber Meister ” (1909, 30/2:300, lines 9–10; Gerrish 1962, 45–56; cf. Levi 2002, 66 – 67, 272). Nominalism with regard to universals such as “humanity ” also went well with Luther ’s emphasis on the individual. But although Luther did praise the wonderful powers of human reason, he considered reason to be useful only in earthly matters. It could never reach God; even to attempt anything like knowing God by natural means was preposterous. Humans were totally dependent on God and could only know anything about him through his self-revelation in Christ and the Bible. Theology had to be based on biblical revelation, and all external, metaphysical speculations rejected. Even apparent paradoxes in the doctrine, such as the fact that man was supposed to be simul iustus et peccator, had to be accepted as such (Gerrish 1962; Spitz 1985, 84–87). Inspired by Ockham and Holcot, Luther thought there was a deep gap separating natural reason and articles of faith (Denifle 1906 –9, 1:3, 609). Although truths can never contradict one another, one and the same proposition could be true in one discipline but not in another. That the Word came into flesh was true in theology but an absurdity in philosophy, for example.18 As Gerrish (1962, 52–54) puts it, “word of God and faith” was “another dialectic ” that would replace natural reason in theology. Yet we must bear in mind that in Luther, this distinction ran much deeper than in Ockham, who considered natural reason to be capable of understanding that there was a God. Luther reserved a place for natural reason only in earthly matters. Thus, to restore the lost relevance of theology, one had to go back to the very roots from which the elaborate theological concepts had arisen, (the myths of ) the Bible, and interpret the Bible literally (“grammatically ”), not allegorically (see Frei 1974, 18–37). In this regard, two contradictory tendencies were present in Luther. He wanted to restore the relevance of religion in everyday life, but he criticized the use of natural reason in religious contexts ( because it had led to nonrelevant speculation). The latter concern related to the distinction between the “worldly ” and “spiritual” kingdoms (see Braaten and

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Jenson 1998). By separating the spiritual from the social, Luther made it problematic to find the practical relevance of religion. As religion becomes purely a matter of personal experience, detached from the social reality, it is difficult to see how it can contribute to social affairs and cooperation (see Pyysiäinen 2001b, 174– 79). What unites the group of “believers” in a religious sense is the sharing of the same experience, not anything over and above subjective experience (see Pyysiäinen 2004a, 2005e). There seems to have been a long-term historical development that finally led to the modern separation of reason and religion (see Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2006; Hitchens 2007). Reason was assigned a new task within the sciences, while the concept of God became a problem that cried for an explanation. God was even said to be dead.19 While in Catholicism the highest authority always has rested with the Church and its tradition, Protestantism ascribed this authority solely to the Bible. The Bible thus became the very foundation of religion (cf. Phillips 1995; see Biderman 1995; O’Flaherty 1979). The Bible was supposed to be explained only by itself; one should not try to find any external evidence or argumentative support for biblical claims (Biderman 1995; Pyysiäinen 1999; 2004d, 160 – 71). For Luther, scripture was the most certain and comprehensible source of truth, interpreting itself (“Scriptura sui ipsius interpres”) and capable of providing judgment of all the words of all men (1897, 7:96 –97). “Scriptura per scripturam interpretanda et concilianda,” as Johan Bengel argued in 1742 (1855, 33). To study the Bible relying on some nonbiblical standards and evaluating its truth claims critically in the light of external evidence directly challenged its foundational role (see Räisänen 2000; Wyatt 2005, 165). The Bible is often treated as if it were an agent. Just as one ordinarily thought that a person herself knew best what it was she really meant when she said something, the Bible itself was the best guide to what individual passages in it meant. The Bible thus seemed to be an intentional agent and could speak to people in their different situations (see Malley 2004). The agentive properties of God were thus attributed to a physical object: God spoke through the Bible, in that the Bible was an agent representing God much as the priest represented God in rituals. The difference between Scholastic and Protestant theology seems roughly to conform to Thomas Morris’s (1987, 10) distinction between “the God of reason” and “the God of faith and history ” (see also Tillich 1955). There are those who think that the idea of God as the greatest possible being is self-evident a priori and those who are committed to an a posteriori, experiential mode of developing the idea of God. The latter build their view of God on the ideas of religious experience and revelation. What is in question here is a shift in the context in relation to which religious concepts acquire relevance in cognitive processing. The “God of reason” is relevant in the context of abstract thinking aiming at an exhaustive theoretical description of reality, apart from more practical concerns. Its cognitive


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processing requires much cognitive effort. One must dedicate much of one’s time to developing the needed personal database and learning the explicit rules of processing the pertinent sentences. This, again, requires institutions that support such activity; the Church, its monasteries, and later the universities provided the proper institutional framework for the Scholastics. The “God of history and revelation” acquires relevance in the context of personal experience, emotions, and feelings (“faith”). It serves a more directly emotional function, relates to people’s intuitions, and can be used to generate practical inferences in everyday life in an emotionally satisfying manner (see the appendix). Such intuitive thinking does not require as much external support as the reflective thinking behind the “God of reason.” As its applications are in the context of everyday life, it is little wonder that Luther, for example, was led to leave the monastery and to marry. Yet the spirit of the Reformation involves the paradox that while faith has replaced reason in matters religious, great efforts have been made to argue against “magical” and “superstitious” elements in religion and thus to make religion “reasonable.” As I will show in the next section, Protestant theology reinterpreted Christianity to fit the scientific worldview. The first steps toward rationalizing Christianity in the light of mundane concerns were taken in the critical study of the scripture that began with Renaissance humanists’ interest in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, continued with Spinoza’s theological reflections and later Strauss’s Leben Jesu, and evolved into the modern debates about the justification of historical exegesis (Frei 1974, 17–18, 51– 65, 233–44; Penner and van der Stichele 2005; Räisänen 2000). Scripture became a meeting point between faith and reason because it occupied a very special place in Protestant Christianity. Without the historical basis of the biblical texts, theological ideas would apparently be about nothing (see Pyysiäinen 2005c, 299). Therefore, it is important for theologians to anchor their systems in the historical events of the life of Jesus as described in biblical texts. At the same time, it is important that mere historical study is irrelevant from the theological point of view, because there is always a potential conflict between historical facts and the dogma. Some day, for example, historians might come to the conclusion that Jesus never actually lived. The relationship between theology and history is asymmetrical, in that theology must be anchored in history, but history read through the lens of the dogma. Consequently, the emphasis on history and on scripture as foundational have laid the Christian faith open to new criticisms based on scientific and philosophical grounds (e.g. Stenger 2007). Protestant philosophy of religion and philosophical theology are by and large post-Enlightenment reactionary phenomena, attempts to rescue the rationality of faith in the face of a continually increasing empirical knowledge of reality. Philosophers and theologians mostly try to show in what way religion is rational, not to evaluate whether it is rational; atheist philosophers, in turn, try

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to show that these arguments fail (see Martin 1990; Nielsen 1985, 1989; Stump and Murray 1999; Taliaferro and Griffiths 2003; Yandell 1999). For a “believer,” three basic strategies are available. First, one can be claimed that belief in God can stand the test of science (Swinburne 1996; see Peters et al. 2002; cf. Edis 2002; Stenger 2007). This minority view comes close to being eccentric. Second, one might claim that it is equally rational to believe (without pretending to know) that belief in God is a foundational truth as to believe that scientific truth is foundational (see Phillips 1995, xiii–xiv, 14–122). This is because the foundationalist thesis itself is not a foundational proposition. By foundationalism is meant the view that a belief is justified only if it can be rationally related to propositions that make up the foundation of all beliefs. Representatives of the so-called Reformed epistemology point out that if only self-evident or incorrigible propositions can be accepted as foundational, then we need to ask how do we know this? The foundationalist does not arrive at her or his foundationalism as a result of scientific inquiry (xiii). Alvin Plantinga (1990), for example, regards the belief that God exists as a kind of foundational belief similar to the one that other minds exist; it is based neither on empirical evidence nor on deductive reasoning (cf. Barrett 2004b, 97–105). Arguments for the existence of God thus are not needed for rational belief (see Martin 1990, 266 – 77). But as anybody or any group can claim that their belief systems are rationally justified once one accepts the “basic beliefs” of their system, the view effectively stops all rational debate (272– 76). The third alternative is to refrain from evaluating to what extent religious beliefs refer to a reality that lies beyond them. The so-called Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion claim that the distinction between real and unreal itself makes sense only within certain epistemic practices (Phillips 1995, 2000). John Wisdom (1944) observed over fifty years ago that the existence of God was no longer an experimental issue in the way it used to be, precisely because people now had better knowledge of why things happen as they do. Whereas questions such as “Do dogs think?” are partly metaphysical (conceptual ) and partly scientific (empirical ), questions about God had gradually become wholly metaphysical (188, 191–93; see Pyysiäinen 2005b, 91). Belief thus is not a question of some persons expecting something to be the case while others do not. One cannot say who is right and who is wrong. Yet the difference is not merely in the exclamations with which each party faces life. Believers and nonbelievers debate as if they are concerned with some transsensual and transscientific facts. Yet the dispute also involves feelings and thus is more like a debate over the alleged beauty of an object ( Wisdom 1944, 192, 196). In my view, this all boils down to the following: folk psychology contradicts science; religion is essentially based on folk psychology; therefore, religion contradicts science. But as folk psychology is here to stay, religion also seems to be here to stay. One may criticize religion from the scientific point of view, but science cannot replace religion or folk psychology in general.


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4.2 Theology and God in the Wild 4.2.1 Modern Protestant Theology 4.2.1.1 the doctrines. In this section, I look at theology through the writings of one individual theologian, Paul Tillich. His views are not necessarily representative of the official teachings of the Protestant churches, yet they represent well the kind of cognitively costly religious ideas that have been produced within the Christian tradition. Before discussing Tillich’s views, I will briefly outline western Christianity’s main ideas about God, as expressed in such official documents as the three ecumenical or universal Creeds of the early, undivided Church (the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and the Athanasian Creed), The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Augsburg Confession of the Lutheran churches. The latter two documents express and elaborate the views of the three Creeds (see Kelly 1989, 41–48, 223–309; Ott 1974; Pöhlman 1973). The Catholic Church teaches that “God is one in nature, substance and essence” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §200). This is based on the decision of the Council of Nicaea (in 325) that as the Son of God, Christ was of the same essence or substance (Gr. ousía, Lat. substantia) with the Father. He was also “born, not made.” In the so-called Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which may derive from the Council of Constantinople (381), belief in the Holy Spirit ( hagios pneuma, spiritus sanctus) was added (see Kelly 1989, 231–47; Ott 1974, 52–53, 59– 75; Pöhlman 1973, 146 –56).20 The Council of Chalcedon (451) determined that the relations between the three persons of the Trinity were as follows (see Kelly 1989, 338–43): In agreement, therefore, with the holy fathers, we all unanimously teach that we should confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, the same perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of rational soul and body, consubstantial [Gr. homoúsios, Lat. consubstantialis] with the Father in Godhead, and the same consubstantial with us in manhood, like us [ hómoios, similis] in all things except sin; begotten from the Father before the ages as regards His Godhead, and in the last days, the same, because of us and because of our salvation begotten from the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos [Mother of God], as regards his manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, made known in two natures [ fýsis, natura] without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures being by no means removed because of the union, but the property of each nature being preserved and coalescing in one prosopon [ person] and one hupostasis [substance]—not parted or divided into

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supernatural agency two prosopa [ persons], but one and the same Son, only-begotten, divine Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets of old and Jesus Christ Himself have taught us about Him and the creed of our fathers has handed down. (quoted in Kelly 1989, 339–40)

Here the idea of the Holy Spirit has been developed into a clearly formulated doctrine. The threefold structure is very much reminiscent of the folk conceptions of soul I analyzed in chapter 3. God as Father is free mentality that works in the world of humans as the Holy Spirit (which has also inspired the text of the Bible) and comes into flesh in Jesus Christ. Christ is a biological agent whose real self is God, while the Holy Spirit is an agentive principle that can leave and enter bodies. The Holy Spirit thus is in a sense the animating principle of the Trinity. As for God the Father, the Catholic Church “teaches that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty from his works, by the natural light of human reason” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §47). “God’s truth is his wisdom, which commands the whole created order and governs the world. God, who alone made heaven and earth, can alone impart true knowledge of every created thing in relation to himsel f” (§216). God also has a name; he is not an anonymous force (§203). We can “name God, starting from the perfections of his creatures, which are likenesses of the infinitely perfect God, even if our limited language cannot exhaust the mystery ” (§48). The classical proofs for the existence of God provide “converging and convincing arguments” that allow people to attain certainty about the truth of God’s existence (§31). “Of all visible creatures only man is ‘able to know and love his creator ’ ” (§356). “It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity ” (§356). “Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons” (§357). “The human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God’: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul” (§364). “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body ”; it is “because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter.” In a human being, the union of spirit and matter forms a single nature (§365). Every spiritual and immortal soul is created immediately by God, not produced by the parents (§366). The “desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God.” Only in God will humans find the truth and happiness they never stop searching for (§27). Humans’ whole being is being in God: “The Word of God and his Breath are at the origin of the being and life of every creature” (§703). But, as “our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting


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point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking ” (§40). God transcends all creatures and is inexpressible and incomprehensible with humans’ representations (§42). When humans listen to the message of creation and to the voice of conscience, they can “arrive at certainty about the existence of God, the cause and the end of everything ” (§46). Yet God is not only the Father but also the Son and the Holy Spirit. God’s work is mediated by the Holy Spirit, in that “the mission of Christ and the Holy Spirit is brought to completion in the Church” (§737): the Spirit prepares men and goes out to them with his grace, in order to draw them to Christ. The Spirit manifests the risen Lord to them, recalls his word to them and opens their minds to the understanding of his Death and Resurrection. He makes present the mystery of Christ, supremely in the Eucharist, in order to reconcile them, to bring them into communion with God, that they may “bear much fruit.” Just as Paul affirmed the human body to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Church as the mystical body of Christ is the temple of the Holy Spirit (§737). “What the soul is to the human body, the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church” (§797). As an invisible principle, the Spirit of Christ is responsible for the fact that “all the parts of the body are joined one with the other and with their exalted head; for the whole Spirit of Christ is in the head, the whole Spirit is in the body, and the whole Spirit is in each of the members.” In this way, the Holy Spirit makes the Church “the temple of the living God” (§797; see de Lubac 2006). The Augsburg Confession, for its part, starts with the following claim (1): “Our Churches, with common consent, do teach that the decree of the Council of Nicaea concerning the Unity of the Divine Essence and concerning the Three Persons, is true and to be believed without any doubting; that is to say, there is one Divine Essence which is called and which is God: eternal, without body, without parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, the Maker and Preserver of all things, visible and invisible; and yet there are three Persons, of the same essence and power, who also are coeternal, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”21 God thus is three persons who are of one substance, eternal and undivided. In Luther ’s writings, however, God is not so much an Absolute, existing in itself, as a person who acts in history. In his wrath, God is a hidden God (Deus absconditus), while in his grace he is the revealed God (Deus revelatus). Wrath thus is not part of God’s essence; it only means that his essence, which is love, is withdrawn (Pöhlmann 1973, 73– 75). Protestant theologians often emphasize that God’s essence is holiness and love. While holiness sets apart, love unites. Only after having experienced the excruciating holiness of God can a human being fully feel the loving grace of God (81). 4.2.1.2 paul tillich. Individual Protestant theologians have a variety of views of God (see, e.g., Wilson 2007). I shall briefly discuss one example that clearly

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exemplifies a theological reaction to the challenge of science: the views of Paul Tillich.22 They represent the costly end of the cognitive continuum and thus do not exemplify the spontaneous intuitions of Protestants; nor are they in full agreement with the teaching of the Churches. However, they reveal something about the ways reflective thinking more generally elaborates religious intuitions. Tillich’s basic idea is that God should be regarded not as a person but “as being-itself or as the ground of being ” ( Tillich 1967, 1:235, 3:235, 3.294).23 This idea appears both in his sermons (e.g. Tillich 1948) and theological works (e.g. Tillich 1967). Although there are relatively few explicit references to Heidegger in Tillich’s Systematic Theology, Tillich was influenced by Heidegger ’s (1987) philosophy of being (see Vunderink 1969). Heidegger ’s (1987) basic starting point was that philosophers had taken the concepts of “Being ” (Sein) and “being ” (seiend ) as self-evident; he himself wanted to ask the questions about Being and being themselves, not merely the philosophical questions that follow once we accept that something is in being (that is, “has being ”) in an unproblematic way. David Hopper (1968, 104–5) argues that the ontological boundaries of Tillich’s thought were already outlined his 1912 treatise Mystik und Schuldbewusstsein in Schelling ’s philosophische Entwicklung (Mysticism and guilt-consciousness in Schelling ’s philosophical development). His idea of God as being-itself thus partly arose from Schelling ’s view of the identity between the subjective and the objective and from Cusanus’s idea of the coincidence of opposites (104–29; Wilson 2007, 222).24 However, it may also be that the Old Testament idea of all beings as sharing in God’s animating power also is in the background of Tillich’s theology.25 Although the Holy Spirit is not central in Tillich’s argumentation, in the third volume of Systematic Theology he briefly discusses the concept of Spirit. In his view, Spirit (capitalized) translates the Hebrew rûah and the Greek pneuma and thus refers to the Spirit of God and its effects in humans. It is the power of life or power of animation that does not add any new part to a human individual. Philosophers with mystical or ascetic tendencies tend to separate spirit and body, giving “spirit ” the meaning “mind, intellect.” By the same token, the element of power gets lost. As “spirit ” is no longer needed in “the doctrine of man,” it has also lost its religious meaning. A new theological understanding of “spirit ” is therefore needed. To the extent that spirit is a dimension of life, beings with spirit exist but spiritual beings in the sense of spirits or ghosts do not. A transmuted psychophysical existence after death is not Spiritual (capitalized) and does not correspond to the Christian idea of life eternal. The original element of power is only retained in “spirited” as a translation of Plato’s thymoeides ( Tillich 1967, 3:21–23). In this sense, human being (Sein) is indeed God-dependent. The holiness of God consists of his unapproachable character, the impossibility of having a relation with God in the proper sense of the word (1:271, 285).


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God’s being is not the existence of a being alongside others or above others; his being is “being-itself.” God is not a being but being-itself. “Whenever infinite or unconditional power and meaning are attributed to the highest being, it has ceased to be a being and has become being-itself ” ( Tillich 1967, 1:235). Being-itself, ground of being, and power of being thus seem to be synonymous. Tillich claims that it has been known ever since Plato—though disregarded by the Nominalists and their modern followers—that “the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything, the power of resisting nonbeing ” (1:236). Instead of saying that God is being-itself, it is also possible to say that God is the infinite power of being in everything. God must be being-itself because otherwise he would be subordinate to it, which is impossible. As being-itself, God is beyond the contrast of essential and existential being (1:235–37, 242). In the Aristotelian tradition, God’s existence is derived from the world, whereas in the Augustinian tradition, the divine existence is included in God’s essence. Aquinas tried to unite these two traditions by deriving the existence of God from the world and then arguing that God’s essence and existence were identical ( Tillich 1967, 1:236 –37). Tillich accepts that there is no difference between God’s essence and existence but also argues that God is being-itself beyond essence and existence. We cannot argue about the “existence” of God because, as being-itself, God cannot be said to exist. He cannot be found within the totality of beings. It is not the case that the world is given while God must be sought in the given world (1:204–05). “It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it ” ( Tillich 1967, 1:237). True pantheism does not mean that God is everything; instead, God is the substance or essence of everything, the creative power and unity of nature ( Tillich 1967, 1:233–34, 237–38). The question of “why there is something rather than nothing ” is misleading because it suggests that being can be derived from nonbeing. Yet being is the original fact. The Greeks distinguished between two kinds of nonbeing, denoted by the expressions mèe ón and ouk ón ( Tillich 1967, 1:188; see Chadwick 1966, 46 –47; Chantraîne 1968, 692, 835). For example, when Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 215) wrote that God created the world “out of nothing,” he used the expression mèe ón, which refers to unformed matter, not absolute nonexistence (Stromata 5.89.6, 5.92.3, 5.126.2). God’s creation thus consisted in giving a form to the unformed matter.26 Around 180 CE, Theophilus of Antioch (Ad. Autol. 1.4.5) wrote that God had made “everything out of nothing [ex ouk óntoon],” thus implying a creation de nihilo (which in due course became the official doctrine). Tillich accepts the doctrine and argues that matter cannot be a second principle in addition to God and therefore must be created (1967, 1:188). Yet the idea of nonbeing is important. The “threat of nothingness” was central in Heidegger, and Tillich adopted this idea in speaking of “our threatened historical existence (“Die Bedrohtheit unserer geschichtlichen Existenz”)

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(see Hopper 1968, 99). As mortal beings, humans are threatened by nonbeing in an ultimately inescapable way ( Tillich 1967, 1:189–90). The “threat of nonbeing ” produces the “ontological shock ” in which the negative side of the mystery of being is experienced. In revelation and ecstatic experience, this shock is at once preserved and overcome (Otto’s mysterium tremendum and fascinosum) ( Tillich 1967, 1:113–14). Revelation shows our own finitude but at the same time reveals being-itself (God), which does not have a beginning and an end because it does not arise from nonbeing; as entities that have a being, humans share in this being-itself or God ( Tillich 1967, 1:189–91). Actually, everything participates in being-itself ( Tillich 1967, 1:239). The biblical assertion that God is makes the ontological question necessary because both the popular and biblical understanding is that if something “is,” it can be found “in the whole of potential experience.” But then it follows that if God can be found within the whole of reality, the whole of reality is the basic and dominant concept. If God is in reality, reality as such is greater than God. Thus, the “God who is a being is transcended by the God who is Being itself, the ground and abyss of every being ” ( Tillich 1955, 82–83). Tillich thus seems to think that God cannot be a being because the mereological sum of all beings is greater than any single being and because God is the greatest thing humans can think of (as Anselm argued). God cannot be a being, unless the mereological sum of all beings itself is a being.27 This reasoning is based on abstracting “greatness” as an attribute of God and reducing the whole idea of God to this single attribute. Yet Tillich does not simply equate God with the universe in its entirety. As being-itself, God is not the same as all existing things (their mereological sum); God is being as apart from everything that is in being ( being-itself ) ( Tillich 1948, 45). God’s being is being-itself, which Tillich seems to equate with the “ground of being ” ( Tillich 1967, 1:235). But he also writes: “God as being-itself is the ground of the ontological structure of being without being subject to this structure himself. He is the structure; that is he has the power of determining the structure of everything that has being ” (1:239). God is the ground of being that is manifest in existence (1:155–56). Such a divine act of self-revelation can only be described using symbolic concepts; “ground” is such a concept, and “God” is the religious word for it. The ground oscillates between cause and substance and transcends both, because God is not a cause in the sense of something separate from the world; in a symbolic sense, there is no difference between prima causa and ultima substantia (1:156 –58, 238). The statement that God is being-itself is not symbolic, however; it does not point beyond itself. Other theological assertions about God can be made only on this basis. This foundation is implicit in every religious thought about God; it is the theologian’s task to make explicit what is implicit and to start with the abstract and nonsymbolic statement saying that God is being-itself. After this, all that can be said of God is only symbolic ( Tillich 1967, 1:238–39).


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Tillich even goes so far as to say that anthropomorphic symbols are adequate for speaking of God religiously and nothing “is more inadequate and disgusting than the attempt to translate the concrete symbols of the Bible into less concrete and less powerful symbols” (1:242). Theology must not weaken the concrete symbols only to analyze and interpret them in abstract ontological terms. “Theology can only explain and systematize the existential knowledge of revelation in theological terms” (1:242–43). In other words, theological analysis cannot be substituted for religion. Yet Tillich’s own sermons ( Tillich 1948) clearly are constructed so as to illustrate his theology and are not philosophically “innocent.” Tillich thus distinguishes between the philosophical and religious attitudes (see Tillich 1955, 1–5). Philosophy deals theoretically with the structure of being; religion deals existentially with the meaning of being. Yet religion can only express itself through the ontological elements and categories of philosophy, and philosophy can discover the structure of being only on the condition that being-itself has become manifest in an existential experience expressed in the idea of God. Theology, for its part, can deal with assertions about the nature of being either philosophically, evaluating their truth, or existentially, struggling with them as expressions of ultimate concern on religious grounds (1:18–28, 230, 2:10). As being-itself, God is not merely passive—as the divine power “is the power of being-itself, and being-itself is actual in the divine life whose nature is love” (1:283), God is “being-itself, in the sense of the power of being or the power to conquer non-being ” (2:11). To the extent that the divine power of being is the power of life (rûah) and regarding God as being-itself is a literal description, God is the foundation of human (and animal ) animacy not only symbolically but literally. God’s mentality, however, is only symbolical: in religious language, we attribute beliefs and desires to God, but theology can show this to be merely an expression of a personification of being-itself. Thus, for Tillich, religion works in terms of everyday thinking and possibly even of HUI; theology is mere theory about religion that does not itself necessarily have a direct religious function. Yet theology must be symbolic whenever it goes beyond describing God as being-itself. Tillich, for example, tries to explain theologically the religious idea of God as a person. God is represented as a person because humans symbolize their ultimate concern in terms of human being (Sein). The symbol of a “personal God” is fundamental because an existential relation is always a person-to-person relation; humans are ultimately concerned only about personal things or the very foundation of personhood ( Tillich 1955, 29; 1967, 1:243–44). Thus, while ontology generalizes, biblical religion individualizes (39). “The God who is encountered as a person acts in history through persons and their inner experiences” (37). However, even though God is called a person and personhood involves individuality, God is a person “not in finite separation but in an absolute and unconditional participation in everything.” God is “the absolute participant ” in

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a personal relationship. Individualization and participation are rooted in the ground of divine life, and God is equally “near ” to each of them while transcending both ( Tillich 1967, 1:243–45). God’s personhood does not mean that God is a person; he is instead the ground of everything personal (1:245, 271, 285). Thus, God’s will and intellect are not to be understood as metaphysics recapitulating psychology (1:247). Tillich even argues that such omniscience as is attributed to God in some of the sayings of Jesus “transcends primitive personalism” ( Tillich 1955, 29–35, 84). The ontological view of God depersonalizes reality, and the “search for ultimate reality seems to by-pass that concrete reality in which the ultimate is personally present ” ( 39). “The God who is a person is transcended by the God who is the Personal-Itself, the ground and abyss of every person” (83). For Tillich, such a God is something that cannot be doubted; it is by making God an object besides other objects, the existence and nature of which are matters of argument, that “theology supports the escape to atheism.” The first step to atheism is “always a theology which drags God down to the level of doubtful things” ( Tillich 1948, 45). Boyer (without familiarity with Tillich’s work) presents an apparently similar argument when he writes that theology tends to lead to atheism because the more abstract theology becomes, the less inferential potential it has in everyday thought (Boyer 2001, 285; see chapter 1, section 1.1 here). However, on closer examination, Boyer ’s argument is the very opposite of Tillich’s. Tillich does not locate the problem in the abstractness of theology but exactly in its concreteness: when it is claimed that God is a concrete being, it is possible to doubt his existence in the absence of evidence. This pitfall is supposedly avoided in a theology that treats God as being-itself, because such a God cannot be doubted. Tillich also points out that in the ecumenical creeds, three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are mentioned but God as such is not called a person. God only came to be regarded as a person in the nineteenth century, following Kant ( Tillich 1967, 1:245). This is a dubious claim; nonetheless, Tillich is correct in that God is neither a fourth person in addition to the Trinity, nor is the mereological sum of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit a person. Tillich, however, overlooks the fact that the concept of God is often used as implicitly or explicitly referring to the person of the Father (especially in Eastern theology). The tension between personalism and ontology also means a struggle between polytheism and monotheism. There are three types of monotheism: monarchic, mystical, and exclusive. In monarchic monotheism, a single God represents the power and value of a hierarchy of gods. Mystical monotheism is an attempt to suppress the quest for concreteness and personhood in representations of God, although it does not completely succeed in this. Only exclusive monotheism is able to resist polytheism; an abstract transcendence develops in exclusive monotheism as the concrete god is elevated to ultimacy and universality. Yet this development is supposed to take place without the loss of the concreteness of a personal God ( Tillich 1967, 1:225–29, 235–37).


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This understanding, however, seems to contradict what Tillich says about encountering God as a person. Tillich therefore hastens to admit that the God of exclusive monotheism “is in danger of losing the concrete element ”; God’s ultimacy and universality tend to swallow his concrete character as a living God. When personal features and anthropomorphisms are removed, God seems to be reduced to the philosophical absolute ( Tillich 1967, 1:227–28; cf. Ferré 1984). Tillich (1:229) then explains that God’s transcendence is not the infinite abyss of mysticism; it is the transcendence of “the absolute command which empties all concrete manifestations of the divine.” But the concrete element cannot be simply rejected; certain mediating powers must be assumed. These are the historical person of Jesus Christ, angels, and hypostasized divine qualities such as Wisdom, Word, and Glory (see Tillich 1967, 1:146 –47). And such superhuman beings as angels are not to be understood as beings; they are “concrete-poetic symbols of the structures of being ” (1:260). But in religion, a struggle for a personal God resists all philosophical criticism. Thus, humans attribute personal characteristics to stones and stars, as well as plants and animals, angels and spirits, when they appear as symbols of human ultimate concern (1:223; 1955, 29). It is in the mediating powers that the absolutely transcendent God becomes concrete and present in time and space. As the distance between humans and God increases, the significance of these mediating powers grows, ultimately resulting in the paradox of the simultaneous humanity and divinity of Jesus. In a symbolic description of God, a segment of finite experience is affirmed and negated at the same time (1:229–30, 239–40). Tillich may be right that it is not possible to doubt the existence of God as being-itself, but this is not because Tillich’s claim is so evidently true but because it is so unclear what his thesis actually means. No one would deny that all beings are in being and thus have the property of being in being. But hypostasizing being into an entity-like something is already controversial. Then calling this “being-itself ” “God” is an argument an outsider finds extremely hard to follow. As Kai Nielsen (1985, 37) puts it, with Tillich’s talk about being-itself, “it becomes utterly unclear what, if anything intelligible, is being affirmed that a skeptic could not affirm as well.” Although Tillich claims himself to “believe in something mysterious and profound and crucial to the human condition” of which the nonbeliever has no real understanding, he seems to be incapable of articulating what this something is. Tillich’s idea is, of course, that whenever persons use the word “God” they are (for the most part) unconsciously talking about being-itself. However, this is only Tillich’s personal view; he has neither operationalized the concept of “being-itself ” nor described a cognitive (or any other) mechanism responsible for translating conceptions about being(-itself ) into religious ideas about God. Thus, Tillich offers no explicit criteria by which we can determine whether a religious idea is about being. A theologian instead just chooses to view religious

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ideas as ideas about being-itself because doing so yields interesting interpretations (see also Gnuse 2000, 1). But Tillich’s deconstruction of the idea of a personal God could just as well have led to a complete rejection of the whole idea of God. Something like this happened in the “death of God theology ” of the 1960s, which Kenneth Hamilton (1966, 45) says means “Barthianism and Tillichianism are out” (Tillich died in 1965). This new theology was represented by Thomas J. J. Altizer, Paul van Buren, William Hamilton, John Robinson, Gabriel Vahanian, and also the Jewish rabbi Richard Rubenstein, among others (see Hamilton 1966; Robinson 1963). These authors were by and large willing to continue to do theology, but they did not want a transcendent God to be part of it. Robinson, for example, wrote in 1963 that a radical recasting of the Christian message was needed. The fundamental categories of theology, such as “God” and the “supernatural,” he said, have to go into the melting if the gospel is to mean anything, because there is a growing gulf between traditional orthodox supernaturalism and the “ ‘lay’ world” (Robinson 1963, 7–8, 21–22). Following van Buren, Hamilton (1966, 17) calls these theologians “Christian atheists” (they certainly can and must be distinguished from “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Dan Denett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens). Tillich, of course, thinks that his theology can save the concept of God in the face of rational criticism based on empirical science. Tillich’s criticism is based on highly reflective thinking and scientific knowledge of natural processes. However, such thinking can lead to a change in one’s basic convictions only with great difficulty. One does not necessarily reject belief in God in the face of new evidence, because God can be endlessly reinterpreted. Beliefs about God are not due to mere rational inference: they are embedded in social and emotional contexts. Thus, radically revising belief in God is extremely costly both cognitively and emotionally. Such belief change necessitates changes in external memory stores and other types of cultural and social “scaffolding ” of persons’ mental processes: a change in one’s family, friends, work, place of living, hobbies, and so on can trigger a change in one’s religiosity from the bottom up, as it were. If nothing like this happens, only the cognitive surface of beliefs changes. Persons may redefine God at the level of reflective thinking, but their intuitive belief in God remains more or less intact (see Hamilton 1966, 42). Tillich himself seems to predict this when he separates religion from theology (see also Pyysiäinen 2003c; Wiebe 1991). According to him, the God of religion is and also should be an anthropomorphic person, although the theologian gives this a new meaning. God is an agent having all strategic knowledge and thus representing the shared information of the group. This is expressed in the doctrine of God’s omniscience. Tillich actually seems to be after something similar in his theological interpretation of God’s personhood as “unconditional participation in everything.” God is “the absolute participant ” in personal relationships, being equally “near ” to each participant in human relationships yet transcending all. God is the ground of everything personal, “the Personal-Itself,


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the ground and abyss of every person.” Therefore, God is not to be understood as a personal agent in a psychological sense, even though in religious practice God is represented this way. However, nothing in Tillich’s analysis makes impossible an alternative analysis in which actual religious representations are explained as a folk-psychological way of representing shared knowledge, not as an everyday way of talking about being-itself.

4.2.2 God in Persons’ Thinking In this section, I analyze the Christian concept of God as it appears in the data gathered in Finland by Lindeman, Pyysiäinen, and Saariluoma (2002). The European Values and World Values Surveys, which have been done since 1981 (see www.worldvaluessurvey.org/), have measured the religious beliefs of Finns as well as people in other countries. According to this data (from 2005), 26 percent of Finns regarded God as very important (scoring 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale); 21 percent regarded God as more or less important (7 or 8 points), and 17 percent considered God to be of no great importance (1 or 2 points). There is very little variation over 1981–2005, and no significant drop of belief in God was observed. (Finns are slightly below the average worldwide.) Those who say they believe in one God make up 47 percent, while 30 percent believe in some kind of spirit of life force; 7 percent say that there is no God or spirit of life force. Those who regard themselves as religious make up 59 percent of Finns; 35 percent regard themselves as nonreligious, and 3 percent as committed atheists (see Borg et al. 2007, 47–58). The Gallup Ecclesiastica Survey of 2003 measured belief in eight Christian doctrines. Those who firmly believed that Jesus is the Son of God were 37 percent; 31 percent considered it probable, 12 percent considered it improbable, and 14 percent did not believe in Jesus as the Son of God at all (5 percent said they did not know). Those who firmly believed that God created the world were 32 percent; 27 percent considered it probable, 20 percent considered it improbable, and 17 percent did not believe in God’s creation at all (4 percent said they did do not know). According to the World Values Survey 2000, 45 percent of Finns (compared to 44 percent of all Europeans) believed in life after death (Kääriäinen et al. 2003, 148– 63; 2005, 106 – 7). In Lindeman, Pyysiäinen, and Saariluoma (2002), we studied in more depth what kinds of properties persons attribute to God and how the attribution relates to religious participation. Our subjects (357 in all ) rated on a 5–point scale how much they agreed with each of seventy-eight imaginary attributes of God (1, strongly agree; 5, strongly disagree). A great majority of the subjects were members of the Lutheran church (316; there were 29 nonreligious and 11 representatives of other traditions). A factor analysis yielded five sets of attributes: omnipotence, nature, incorporeality, curious metaphors, and other gods. God was most often associated with incorporeality by all subjects, while

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associating God with omnipotency was linearly related with religious participation (Lindeman, Pyysiäinen, and Saariluoma 2002). Some of the subjects also received an open question on how they would describe God to someone who did not know anything about Christianity; these answers were not analyzed in the published results. Heiskanen (2005) later analyzed the replies of 180 subjects to this question. Heiskanen had three hypotheses, all of which were confirmed: the respondents described God more in terms of folk psychology than theology; more in terms of folk psychology than folk biology; and less using negative psychological properties than other psychological properties. Heiskanen (2005) classified the replies into 1,378 reply items (expressed by a single word or a sentence) and divided these in turn into several classes. Two independent assessors then classified the data, following the same instructions. Reliability varied in different classes between 86 and 100 (mean 94). Heiskanen (2005) says that subjects on the whole described God as a material being or thing only in that they said God was present in nature, and described God only modestly as human-like and not as having biological properties (except for two subjects who considered God to be male). However, Heiskanen seems to neglect such things as seeing and hearing, for example. Although these are cognitive phenomena, they can also be considered biological processes (or based on biological processes). As to God’s agentive properties, subjects said God “gives mercy,” “loves,” and “understands” (subject nos. 1, 4, 11, 62, 70, 95, 153, 154) or is “angry,” “punishing,” and chauvinistic (nos. 121, 196).28 Subjects also said “God sees the truth about humans and of the world” (no. 1) and “God means well” (no. 4). God is also “loving ” and “merciful,” and humans can “communicate” with God.29 “God loves every human being ” (no. 62), and “God is such that he loves and listens to everybody, and helps” (no. 153). “God is merciful and a forgiving father ” (no. 154). In some descriptions, God’s agency is vaguer, however: he is somehow “present ” even though not perceivable (nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 17, 38, 109, 112, 130, 138, 145, 170). “God cannot be seen, heard or felt, and yet he can be seen, heard, and felt ” (no. 1). Or: “God is something very vague. Even though he cannot be seen, his ‘presence’ can be sensed” (no. 3). God is “present everywhere every minute” (no. 7). God is also “a sensation, a certainty that there is some other variety of ‘spirit ’ that guards life, in addition to humans” (no. 9). “God is always present, in a human being itself, a sort of inner voice” (no. 17). One subject said that God could only be perceived by “the eyes of the soul” (no. 38).30 God is “our father in heaven who is present everywhere” (no. 112). Subject no. 130 wrote: “God is the totality of everything; all in all.” Finally, “God is everywhere. He is not some thing; he is in every place. . . . Sometimes it feels like God might be in the person sitting in the next seat in the subway ” (no. 145). In the most typical descriptions, God was associated with omnipotence and omniscience and with being the creator. God’s omnipotent cognition appears


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81 times and omnipotent acts 55 times in the data; God as creator appears 123 times (Heiskanen 2005, 27, 29). Subjects said God is omnipotent (nos. 6, 16, 36, 100, 123, 132, 133, 179, 155, 158, 197), is omniscient (nos. 57, 147, 171, 179, 195), and sees everything (nos. 147, 197).31 God is “the force that keeps life going and determines what is right and what is wrong ” (no. 23). God is “eternal; everything that is, is from him” (no. 164).”God is a force in which everything has its beginning, a kind of a foundation on which the world rests” (no. 175). One subject said God is a spirit ( henki) without physical form (no. 43). Another said God is a concept we use to organize chaotic reality (no. 54). Another described God as “something greater than humans” (no. 50). These descriptions appeared both in more personal accounts and in descriptions that clearly echoed prescribed theological vocabulary.32 One subject wrote: “God is the creator, ruler who has all knowledge and who rewards and punishes. From a less religious point of view [my italics]: God can be found in the human being herself, nature, or anywhere” (no. 20). Some others explicitly noted the difference between their own conceptions and the prescribed ones. Subject no. 7 emphasized that according to Christianity, God is the creator, and so forth. Subject no. 21 said that according to the church, God is triune. Subject no. 24 said he felt the task to be alien to himself because he did not identify with the church. Subject no. 26 said God is personal and triune but his own view was panentheistic. Subject no. 126 said he did not want to say anything because his own view differed so much from the traditional view. Subject no. 68 wrote that one has to detach oneself from a worldview in order to view the world; this is a direct quotation from a poem by Pentti Saarikoski (1983, 14), which the subject did not mention.33 Subject no. 199 said that he himself believed in “a different way.” Thus, there seems to be both discrepancy and overlap between prescribed and actual beliefs of persons. If we exclude radical dissenters who do not at all identify with the Christian tradition, the strongest overlap between prescribed and actual representations seems to be in the attribution of omnipotence, omniscience, and creatorship to God. These are the beliefs persons cite most often. Prescribed and actual beliefs thus are not insulated from each other but interact. Although the question was how one would describe God to someone who did not know anything about Christianity, it is remarkable how little effort subjects made try to help an outsider really understand God. Many subjects merely cited prescribed ideas as if they were comprehensible without any explication, describing God by listing half-mysterious attributes. Omnipotence, omniscience, and being a creator figure prominently, either because these are the concepts persons most readily associate with God in any case, irrespective of theological tuition, or because these are the best-known theological doctrines. In the latter case, we need to explain why precisely these doctrines are the most popular ones, because others are being taught as well.

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The most obvious explanation is that these doctrines are the most salient ones, in that they are easy to remember and/or serve some vital function on religious cognition. They seem to fit very well with the kind of “promiscuous teleology ” that takes the whole of reality as due to an agent ’s intentional action and reflects the tendency to see the natural world as designed for a purpose. As everything exists and happens because God wants it, the teleological design of the natural world gets connected with intentional agency. The teleology of life derives from God’s intentions and will. God is the agent whose existence people think helps make their experience of life and the world meaningful even when things seem to happen purely mechanically. This view is a natural intuition, in that it is based on spontaneous expectations that theological instruction then can enrich and elaborate. Thus, it seems to be the HADD, HUI, and HTR that make God concepts contagious. The explication of the content and meaning of God concepts seems to follow Sperber ’s prediction, in that persons are not really capable of explaining “God”; instead, they merely quote traditional attributions of God.

Summary 1. Ideas of the anthropomorphic Gods of the Israelite myths were philosophically elaborated into the idea of a triune God. We can clearly detect the folk-psychological understanding of agency in the background of reflective theology. In modern times, this kind of God has evolved into a philosophical absolute (“being-itself ”) or even into the idea of a dead God (in death of God theology). 2. What remains the same in the various representations of the Christian God is the idea of personal agency: El and Yahweh, God the Father in the definition of the Council of Chalcedon, and Tillich’s “being-itself” are all persons. God has a will and knowledge. 3. God’s omniscience means that God has full access to all possible contents of humans’ minds. God in a way represents all possible “orders of intentionality ” at once (I know that she believes that he wants that she wishes that . . .). The mind of God thus is a shortcut to the shared knowledge of a group. 4. The Church has been regarded as the body of Christ made alive by the Holy Spirit. 5. Simplified versions of official doctrines seem to live on as quotations whose real meaning people do not reflect on much in everyday thinking. People metarepresent them in the validating context of the belief “is true” without a detailed understanding of their content. Such quotations from the doctrine serve as a “protective shield” (as Dennett [2006] calls it) for more idiosyncratic understandings of the doctrine.

5 Buddhist Supernatural Agents

5.1 Buddhism and the West As I have already noted, “Buddhism” is not an essentialist category, and we cannot hope to reconstruct a coherent “Buddhist doctrine” on the basis of literary documents. Yet Western attitudes toward Buddhism have been and are to this day very much characterized by the implicit or explicit belief that the “original” Buddhism of the Buddha himself can be found in the Pali Canon and that this Buddhism was an atheistic philosophy of life, not a religion. This is partly because Western fascination with Buddhism began at the end of the nineteenth century and was intimately related to such phenomena as a growing dissatisfaction with Christian orthodoxy, a new trust in the sciences, Romanticism, and pessimistic philosophies. It was emphasized that the Buddha had been only a human being, not a god, and that therefore Buddhism was not a religion. It was a rational philosophy or a self-help psychology that revealed the ultimate causes of human suffering and helped to end it by a rigorous selfdiscipline based on insight. Buddhism supposedly was egalitarian, was antiauthoritarian, and laid emphasis on reason and personal experience. This kind of attitude was characteristic both of certain scholars and of those for whom Buddhism had a more personal appeal (e.g. Dahlke 1912; Grimm 1957; Rhys Davids 1880; What Is Buddhism? 1928; see Almond 1988; de Lubac 1952; Oldenberg 1903; Windisch 1917; Yamamoto 1967). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Theravada Buddhism of South Asia dominated Western discussions, which emphasized

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the supposed rationality and empiricism of Buddhism; new trends became prominent from the 1950s onward. Meditation, religious experience, irrationality, and even humor became the focus, and Zen Buddhism was an important source of inspiration (see Fields 1981; Kripal 2007). A central figure in this reinterpretation was Daisetz T. Suzuki, who came to be regarded as an unrivaled master of Zen (he was not; Sharf 1995, 1998). Robert Sharf (1995, 1998) has amply shown that the popular idea of “Eastern religions” as emphasizing subjective, “mystical” experience is an unfounded Western projection. For example, the mārga-texts (“path texts”) of Theravada Buddhism, often regarded by Westerners as meditation manuals, function “more as sacred talismans than as practical guides” (Sharf 1995, 241). Whether it was Theravada, Tantrism, or Zen, historical and ethnographic reports show that Asian practice has nearly always emphasized rigid ritual practice and faithful repetition of the doctrine, not any “altered states of consciousness.” As Robert Buswell (1992, 219) observes, for instance, the “testimony of Korean [ Zen] monastic community . . . suggests that a disciplined life, not the transformative experience of enlightenment,” is the most important element in this form of religion. Stephan Beyer (1973) argues likewise that in the Tibetan Tantric rites he observed, the visualization of deities always took place in a ritual context, along with rhythmic recitation of a text, which made visualization so difficult that even high-ranking incarnate lamas admitted they really could not master it (see Pyysiäinen 2006b). I cannot go into the details of the encounter between Buddhism and the West here; I offer these examples only as a reminder that the popular images of Buddhism can easily lead the scholar astray. Kenneth Livingston (2005), for example, writes in his otherwise fine article, with no references to Buddhist literature, that the “original belief systems in Buddhism” do not posit gods, angels, or other supernatural agents.” This is a gross oversimplification. And a kind of textualist bias similar to that of biblical exegesis has dominated the academic study of Buddhism: religion has been approached exclusively from the perspective of prescribed doctrinal ideas (e.g. Griffiths 1994; see Luomanen et al. 2007b). Over the past twenty-five years, however, scholars have increasingly shifted the focus toward the variety of Buddhisms that can be found in popular practices and folk beliefs (Kinnard 2005; see e.g. Gellner 2001; Gombrich 1995; Jones 1979; Spiro 1972; Strong 2004; cf. Griffiths 1994, 1–3). In what follows, I use Buddhist scriptures and ethnographic and historical studies in an attempt to describe and explain the representation of supernatural agency in Buddhism.

5.2 The Buddha in the Texts 5.2.1 Gautama Buddha Rather than giving an overview of the general development of what is known as “Buddhism” or outlining its basic teachings, I will focus only on what is

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immediately relevant from this book’s specific point of view: how supernatural agency is represented in various forms of Buddhist thought and practice. As in the previous chapters I provide contextual information only to the extent that it is necessary for understanding the central argument. We know very little with historical certainty about the historical Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, or Śākyamuni (“the sage of the Śākyas” as he is also called.1 The Buddha was born into a Śākya family that belonged to the tribe of the Pāndavas (“the pale ones”), foreigners of Iranian affinity who came to India around 800–400 BCE and are associated with the megalithic culture of Mahurjhari and Khapa in Mahārāshtra in western India. The name Śākya derives from Śaka, a common name for Iranian steppe nomads. And the father of PanduVāsudeva, the second Sinhala king of Sinhala Dvīpa, that is Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) is called Pandu or Pandurājā in the Pali texts. The king ’s father-in-law was likewise called Pandu and belonged to the Śākyas. The Sinhalas came from Gujarat, introducing agriculture, cattle-raising, and megalithic burials to Ceylon beginning around 800 BCE. The second phase of the megalithic culture of Ceylon began in 450 –350 BCE, the date also of Pandu-Vāsudeva’s rule (Parpola 1984, 450 –60, 2002a, 2002b, 247–48, 251–54; see Bronkhorst 2007, 265–68; Dīpavamsa, chaps. 9–11; Mahāvamsa, chaps. 6–10). Some scholars are willing to accept more of the Buddhist tradition as historical fact than others (compare e.g. Gombrich 1988, 21, 1990; Rhys Davids 1880; Schumann 1982; on the one hand and Bronkhorst 1993b; Pye 1979; Vetter 1988; Williams 2006, 21–30, on the other hand).2 Scholars have debated whether certain inconsistencies in the Pali Canon (known as the Tipitaka, Skt. Tripitaka, Three Baskets) reflect a development in the Buddha’s own thinking (e.g. Vetter 1996, 1988), testify to a borrowing from non-Buddhist sources (e.g. Bronkhorst 1993b), or are not inconsistencies at all (Ruegg 1989, 9 n.9; cf. 142–43) (see Bronkhorst 1993a, 1993b, vii–xii ). The traditional dating of the life of Buddha is based on the supposed year of his death and the belief that the Buddha he lived to the age of eighty (see Bareau 1953; cf. Bareau 1974a, 281 n. 2; Foucher 1949, 322–23). The so-called longer chronology dates his death in 544/3 BCE and the “corrected longer chronology ” to 480 BCE; the “short chronology” of certain Mahayana sources date his death a century before King Aśoka’s reign (273–32 BCE). The longer chronology has been shown to be based on a Sinhalese attempt to make the Buddha’s death simultaneous with the coming to Sri Lanka of Vijaya, the cultural hero of the Sinhalese people.3 Some scholars thus date the Buddha’s death roughly to 350 BCE (Bechert 1986, 39; Eggermont 1965–79, 8.57; Hirakawa 1990, 22–23, 91–93). Others still argue that the Sinhalese chronicles are the oldest and most reliable sources and that his death can be dated to 400 BCE plus or minus twenty years, as Bareau (1991, 221) puts it (see Bechert 1991; Ruegg 1999). I shall not take a specific stand on this issue here, except to emphasize that there is a gap of about three hundred years between the death of the Buddha

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and the writing-down of the Tipitaka. Friedrich Weller (1928, 161–64) argues that the testimony of the Sinhalese chronicles on this matter is a later interpolation and the writing-down of the Tipitaka may have taken place as late as in the second decade BCE. Final agreement about the contents of the Tipitaka is said to have been reached as late as the fifth century CE (Bechert and von Simson 1979, 26, 69–71; Geiger 1968, 1–2, 11; Winternitz 1972, 5–8). Linguistically, the Tipitaka consists of various strata, and parts of it have obviously been translated from another language. It thus is not a sound proceeding to lump together texts ranging from the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE as one category and treat the Tipitaka as a homogeneous whole (Chakravarti 1987, 2). There never was any original canon, and the various parts of the Tipitaka cannot always be harmonized with each other. Only a small number of texts, above all verses and stereotyped dogmatic formulas, attained a definite form at an early stage and were subsequently translated into Pali and other Middle-IndoAryan languages (de Jong 1979, 17; see McDermott 1984, 22–23; Pyysiäinen 1993, 54–71). Thus, we can make any historical claims about early Buddhism only with care (see Gombrich 1990; Norman 1990). When I speak of the Buddha, I am for the most part making no historical claims about the human person who is regarded as the founder of the religion known as “Buddhism.” Instead, I focus on how the oral and textual traditions and material culture represent the Buddha. In the textual tradition (parts of which first continued for decades or even centuries as oral traditions), the Buddha is referred to as either the Bhagava(n)t or the Tathāgata, not as “the Buddha.” In the Vedic language, bhagavat (< bhaga-) meant “possessing fortune, fortunate, prosperous, happy”; in classical Sanskrit, baga means both “wealth, prosperity” and “lord, patron,” the idea being that the master of the house gives each member his or her rightful share (see Monier-Williams 1899, 743). In the Rgveda, Bhaga is also a specific deity (Kazanas 2001, 274). As an epithet of the Buddha, Bhagava(n)t is often translated in English as “the Lord” (which is quite correct). The French specialist on the biography of the Buddha, André Bareau (1962, 1963, 1970 –71, 1974a,b, 1979), translates it into French as Bienheureux, “the happy/ beatific one.” Tathāgata means either “thus gone” (tathā + gata) or “thus come” (tathā + agata); the name can, for example, refer to Gautama Buddha’s having come into the world in the same manner as previous buddhas had, or his having gone “to the other shore,” beyond the world of suffering.4 Technically, the word could also mean “he who here has come” and could be an epithet the five ascetics gave to Gautama when he came back to them after gaining enlightenment in solitude. “Thus gone” might also be a euphemism for the fact that Gautama was dead (“late Gautama”).5 Such reasonings are an expression of an endless symbolic exegesis and as such very speculative. The word buddha appears in Buddhist texts in the context of, for example, the Buddha announcing to his first followers that he has just recently


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become a perfectly awakened one (abhisambuddha). This and some related passages are among the few in the Tripitaka in the first person singular. Yet the texts are remarkably reticent on what actually happened in Gautama’s mind at the moment of his awakening or “enlightenment.” Paul Griffiths (1994) argues that there is “a classical doctrine of Buddhahood” that can be extracted from the śāstra literature of “monastic intellectuals” dating from the third to the ninth century CE. This doctrine consists of lists of epithets and of properties or attributes of a buddha (60 –75). Griffiths is only interested in “the sentential expression of doctrine” and the “conceptual relations among ordered sets of sentences”; he wants to avoid descriptive and explanatory reductionism and seeing doctrines as only “epiphenomena of social settings or institutional arrangements” (2–5). The classical doctrine thus is something Griffiths reconstructs by harmonizing different conceptions found from texts of different schools from different periods and from different cultural settings, without paying any attention to such historical differences (xviii, 1, 3, 4, 12, 28). Griffiths wants to study the texts’ own self-understanding and treat them as systematic collections of doctrine-expressing sentences (56).6 I for my part do not want to harmonize the different views about the Buddha and buddhas; I do not aim at a strictly historical analysis either. I will instead take historically and contextually different views about the Buddha and buddhas and try to show what kinds of cognitive mechanisms might help explain their construction and functions. There is no need to presuppose a priori that these views form a coherent whole—nor do I need to explore the social context in detail, though this would be both perfectly possible and interesting. The questions I ask of my sources arise from my own theoretical perspective and entail looking at them from a particular angle. In this, there is no need to postulate any kind of “own self-understanding ” of the texts (texts, after all, are nothing more than configurations of ink on paper). I do not pretend to be studying a coherent doctrine but certain recurrent patterns in the ways people understand and have understood the nature of buddhas. What is often called the “Buddha legend” is a collection of episodes from different sources dating from different periods. The available sources on the life of the Buddha can be divided into the following groups: Fragmentary episodes in the sutras of different Hinayana schools7 Biographies or fragments of biographies in the vinaya-texts Independent biographies that end in the story of how Buddhism began Complete biographies, such as the Buddhacarita of Asvaghosa and the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya 5. Sinhalese texts, such as the Nidānakathā and three suttas of the Suttanipāta (Lamotte 1958, 718, 731)

1. 2. 3. 4.

The oldest sources are the episodes contained in the Theravada Tipitaka (see below) and in the corresponding sutras of other Hinayana schools (see Bareau

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1962, 1963, 1970 –71, 1974a). In the Tipitaka, the Mahāpadānasutta (Dighanikāya 2.1–54) relates the miraculous birth of the Buddha, his luxurious youth and great renunciation, and his awakening ( bodhi, nirvāna); the Bhayabheravasutta (Majjhimanikāya 1.16–24) and the Dvedhāvitakkasutta (1.114–18) contain the episode about the awakening; the Ariyapariyesanāsutta (1.160–75) describes the Buddha’s luxurious youth, renunciation, listening to teachers, and the awakening; the Māgandiyasutta (1.503–13) contains a dialogue in which the Buddha relates how he gave up his life enjoying sensual pleasures; the Sangāravasutta (2.209– 13) includes the episodes concerning the Buddha’s youth, renunciation, listening to teachers, practice of austerities, and Awakening; the Mahāsaccakasutta (1.237–51) tells of the youth, renunciation, teachers, austerities, and awakening; the Sukhumālasutta (Anguttaranikāya 1.145–46) contains the youth episode; the Acchariyabbhutadhammasutta (Majjhimanikāya 3.145–46) describes the miraculous birth of the Buddha; the Mahāparinibbānasutta (Dighanikāya 2.72–168) is a description of the death and funerals of the Buddha. The Suttanipāta—a text in the Khuddakanikāya, a somewhat later collection of texts in the Suttapitaka that includes some very old texts as well—includes descriptions of the Buddha’s renunciation (Pabbajjāsutta, Suttanipāta 3.1) and of his awakening (Padhānasutta, Suttanipāta 3.2), as well as the prediction that the newborn will either become a great king (cakkavatti rāja) or “go from home into homelessness” (Nālakasutta, Suttanipāta 3.11).8 The Mahāvagga, in the second part of the Vinayapitaka, contains a continuous narrative about the birth of the Buddhist community. sources for the Birth A great man’s future Youth

Great renunciation

Giving up sensual pleasures Teachers Practice of austerities Final liberation

buddha legend Dighanikāya 2.1–54; Majjhimanikāya 3.145–46 Suttanipāta 3.2 Dighanikāya 2.1–54; Majjhimanikāya 1.160 –75; Majjhimanikāya 1.237–51; Majjhimanikāya 1.503–13; Majjhimanikāya 2.209–13; Anguttaranikāya 1.145–46 Dighanikāya 2.1–54; Majjhimanikāya 1.160 –75; Majjhimanikāya 1.237–51; Majjhimanikāya 2.209–13; Suttanipāta 3.1 Majjhimanikāya 1.503–13

Majjhimanikāya 1.160–75; Majjhimanikāya 1.237–51; Majjhimanikāya 2.209–13 Majjhimanikāya 1.237–51; Majjhimanikāya 2.209–213 Dighanikāya 2.1–54; Majjhimanikāya 1.16–24;


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Majjhimanikāya 1.114–18; Majjhimanikāya 1.160 –75; Majjhimanikāya 1.237–51; Majjhimanikāya 2.209–13; Suttanipāta 3.2 Vinayapitaka 1.1–44

According to the legend, the Buddha had been striving for buddhahood through many rebirths and finally chose to be born in a particular family in the Śākya clan in northwestern India by descending from the heaven of the Happy Gods ( Tusita) into the womb of Queen Māyā. The birth of the Buddha is miraculous, and in later texts an old seer (rsi ) named Asita predicts that the boy will either become a great king (cakravartin rāja) or a perfectly enlightened being. His early life was filled with all kinds of sensual pleasures, until he saw the “four omens”: an old man, a sick person, a dead body, and a wandering mendicant. These led the youth to renounce the world. He listened to various teachers and practiced austerities but did not get rid of his anxiety. Then one day, while meditating alone, he finally attained the “perfect enlightenment ” (samyaksambodhi ), returned to the company of his fellow ascetics, and started to preach his new doctrine. Many persons reached liberation after listening to the Buddha and then joined the new order (sangha). The Buddha died at the age of eighty, and a funeral was arranged. His relics were distributed among various clans, and memorial monuments (stūpa) were erected. From my point of view, the most interesting thing is the nature of the awakening, because the whole idea of buddhahood is based on it; buddhahood, for its part, is the constitutive element of a specific category of supernatural agency. Buddhas are supernatural agents, much as gods, despite the fact that there are many differences between buddhas and gods. Buddhas differ from devas (“gods”), although both are supernatural agents.9 When the Buddha, asked whether he was man or god (deva), replied that he was not a god, angel ( gandhabba), evil spirit ( yakkha), or human but was a buddha (Anguttaranikāya 2.38–39; see Bareau 1969, 12; de Jong 1979, 27). There is also only one Buddha at a time in the world (Dīghanikāya 2.225; Anguttaranikāya 1.27–28; Abhidharmakośa 2:198). There is also a kind of an Indian version of the scala naturae, with various kinds of gods (devas) and other agents populating the three levels or dimensions of existence (dhātus, lokas, or vacaras): the world of sense pleasures (kāmadhātu), the world of material forms (rūpadhātu), and the world of no forms (arūpadhātu). The kāmadhātu consists of the four elements, humans, animals, hells, “the happy gods” (tusita), Māra the Evil One (Masson 1942, 99–113), and the four guardians of the world (cāturmahārājika). The rūpaloka includes the four states of meditation and gods with “mind-made” bodies such

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as the brahmakāyika. The arūpadhātu consists of the five “formless meditations”10 and of gods such as the brahmavihāra (Kirfel 1920, 207; Masson 1942; Dīghanikāya 1.195). Another way of representing the various dimensions of existence is the image of the “wheel of life” ( bhavacakra), a circle divided into three sections on the upper half and three on the lower half. Much as in the shamanic drum, the upper half represents the good and the lower one the bad realms or destinies ( gati ). The sections are humans, gods, giants (asuras), animals, hells, and ghosts ( preta). The pretas are spirits who suffer from insatiable and unsatisfiable appetites as a punishment for greed and avarice in previous lives. In the Vedas, the asuras were giants or “titans” who waged war against gods; they were adopted to Buddhism in the same function. In addition to these are spirits known as yaksas (Pali: yakkha), which were originally benevolent nature divinities who would protect people if propitiated; in later Buddhism, they came to be regarded as malevolent, flesh-eating demons. Most Buddhist schools agree that (re)birth to the gati happens immediately after death; in Tibetan Buddhism, an intermediate state ( bardo) is postulated between any two lives. In the bardo, the spirit of the deceased views all six destinies for up to forty-nine days and then is drawn toward any one of the six realms (Keown 2004, 23, 223, 338; Masson 1942; Prebish and Keown 2006, 14–18).

5.2.2. Nirvāna and Buddhahood There is much confusion both in Buddhist texts and Western scholarship regarding such terms as “awakening” (bodhi), “perfect enlightenment” (samyaksambodhi), nirvāna, parinirvāna, and “liberation” (vimutti) (see Norman 1994). Scholars have approached the ultimate goal of Buddhism as if it were a clearly identifiable state, condition, or experience, trying to fit different descriptions and allusions together into a coherent whole (cf. Sharf 1995, 1998). Yet the Buddhist traditions contain no clear and unequivocal explanation of what it was that made Gautama a buddha, distinguishing him from all other beings. The situation is the same as in most religions: some state, condition, or goal is regarded as the human summum bonum, whose nature and implications people keep interpreting anew in an endless process; no original meaning of the prescribed idea is ever found (see Pyysiäinen 2007). The following is what we can gather from the early passages in the Theravādin Suttapitaka. The word bodhi appears only in the Mahāsaccakasutta, where the Buddha asks himself “Could there be another way to enlightenment ” (“siyā nu kho añño maggo bodhāyati”) apart from the extreme self-mortification he had practiced already for years in vain (1.246). A more recent tradition, recorded in the Vinayapitaka, reports that Gautama had recently become a “fully enlightened one” ( pathamabhisambuddho) (Vinayapitaka 1.1). The Buddha then approached the five ascetics with whom he had practiced austerities and said: “Monks, do not


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address Tathāgata by name and by the word ‘friend.’ Monks, Tathāgata is an arahat, a perfectly enlightened one. Listen, o monks, the death-free has been found, I will instruct you, I will teach dhamma” (Vinayapitaka 1.8–10; see Dessein 2007). Nirvāna is “death-free” (amata) in that the one who has attained nirvāna is free from redying just as from being reborn (see Norman 1994, 218–20). The word nirvāna (Pali nibbāna) appears in the earliest preserved Theravadin accounts of the Buddha’s experience only in one passage in the Ariyapariyesanāsutta. In this passage, it is said that after years of vain attempts, while meditating in the surroundings of Uruvelā, the Buddha instantaneously attained “the excellent freedom from bondage, nibbāna,” which is not subject to birth, aging, illness, sorrow and suffering. At that very moment, Gautama knew: “My liberation [vimutti ] is steadfast; this is the last birth, there will be no more [re]births” (Mahāsaccakasutta 1.167; see Bareau 1980; Vetter 1996). According to the Mahāsaccaka, Bhayabherava, and Dvedhāvitakka Suttas, the Buddha’s liberation was preceded by the four states of meditation ( jhāna) and the three mental abilities (ñāna). The Buddha describes his experience after attaining the third ability this way: “When I was liberated to freedom I knew: birth is destroyed, Brahma-life lived and the task accomplished. There will be no new life” (Mahāsaccakasutta 1.17–23, 114–17, 247–49). The Ariyapariyesanāsutta is completely silent about how the Buddha reached nirvāna, and the Mahāsaccakasutta describes the awakening as a result of the four jhānas (Skt. dhyāna, “state of meditation”), which the Buddha had already practiced for years in vain. In the Tipitaka, the jhāna states are described by a traditional formula eight-six times. Four different functions are ascribed to them: they are (1) preparation for “insight ” (vipassanā); (2) preparation for the four or five arūpajhānas (“formless meditations”); (3) preparation for the “ways of living like Brahma” ( brahmavihāras); or (4) an independent way to nirvāna (Griffiths 1983, 57–59, 62–65). As to the three mental abilities (ñāna) preceding the awakening, only the ability to understand the arising and destruction of the āsavas (“influxes”) is specifically Buddhist.11 The other two are the ability to remember one’s past lives and the ability to see how all beings are (re)born and die; these abilities belong to the traditional list of six paranormal faculties (abhiññā) common in Indian sources (see Anguttaranikāya 1.254–56; Jaini 1974; Jayatilleke 1963, 437–38). The knowledge of the āsavas has been regarded as the real essence of the enlightenment as here described (Bareau 1963, 79–84; Démieville 1927, 283, 290 –91). The destruction of the āsavas seems to have been so important in earliest Buddhism that we can consider it to have been the ul timate goal. The arahat was called a khīnāsava (“one whose āsavas are destroyed”), for example. Yet the āsavas are not mentioned in the “four noble truths,” which put “suffering ” or “unease” (dukkha, Skr. duhkha) in their stead (see Norman 1990, 28, 1994, 215). K. R. Norman (29) thinks that the destruction of the āsavas may have been the

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earliest goal and were associated with jhāna-meditation, whereas the idea of dukkha as expressed in the four noble truths belongs to a later phase in Buddhism’s evolution, characterized by an emphasis on karma. Johannes Bronkhorst argues that at some point in time, the idea that the four jhānas culminate in the destruction of the āsavas got connected with the idea that insight was based on an understanding of the “four noble truths” about suffering, thirst (tanhā; Skt. trsnā) as its cause, and of the noble eightfold way as a means of ending suffering. In this way, a combination of the two alternative ideals—the destruction of the āsavas and an understanding of the four noble truths—has come to be regarded as the true description of the liberating insight (1993b, 98–103, 104–11; cf. Schmithausen 1981, 205). Yet another way of describing the ultimate goal is to say that it consists of the cessation of desire, anger, and delusions (the three “poisons”; Gombrich 1988, 64; Tilakaratne 1993, 56). This cessation is described using the Pali verb nibbāyati (“to be blown out, to be extinguished”) and the noun nibbāna (“blowing out, extinction [of a lamp, or fire]”). It is the three poisons that are extinguished, not the person or the person’s life. The one who has realized this goal is nibbuta— a word derived not from nibbāyati but from the Sanskrit word nirvrta, “satisfied, happy, tranquil, at ease, at rest.” Nibbuti (Skt. nirvrti ) means “happiness, bliss, rest, ceasing ”; the extinction or extinguishing (nibbāna < Skt. nirvāna) of a lamp is sometimes used as an explanation of such happiness. Therefore, nibbuti and nibbāna have been erroneously regarded as synonyms, and it has been thought that a person is “blown out ” like a lamp in nibbāna (Norman 1994, 221–23). The Buddha obviously was not “blown out ” when he reached the sammāsambodhi, however. Therefore, it was thought that there must be two phases in the “blowing out ”: nibbāna in this life means a “blowing out ” of the three poisons and of karma; nibbāna at death means that the one who has “blown out ” karma will not be reborn (see Norman 1994, 215). In one canonical passage (Itivuttaka 38–39), the distinction between nibbāna in this life and nibbāna at death is said to be a distinction between nibbāna with and without a “remainder ” (sa-upādisesa and anupādisesa). The exact meaning of the Sanskrit word upadhi and Pali upādi is not known (Bronkhorst 1993b, 98). Norman (1994, 215) takes upadhi to mean “acquisitions” or “belongings” attachment to which leads to rebirth. In modern Buddhism, nirvāna without remainder, or the final nirvāna, is often called parinirvāna—an interpretation that seems to be based on a misunderstanding. In the Tripitaka, parinirvāna is also used of the nirvāna of living persons, and the distinction between nirvāna and parinirvāna is only grammatical: parinirvāna refers to the “attaining of nirvāna” (Bronkhorst 1993b, 97–98; Gombrich 1995, 83 n. 14; Keown 2004, 212; Norman 1994, 216–17; Thomas 1971, 121; Williams 2006, 48–49). A disciple who has reached the highest goal under the tuition of a buddha is called an arhat (Pali araha[n]t, “worthy one”) (Keown 2004, 18; Williams


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2006, 137–38). In the sutras, it is never implied that all beings could strive for buddhahood. The word bodhisattva (“enlightenment being,” that is, a Buddhato-be) is only used of Gautama in his previous lives. The career of a bodhisattva is first presented as an alternative for the ideal of an arhat in the avadāna literature of the Sarvāstivāda school (Dīghanikāya 2.225; Foucher 1949, 148; Thomas 1971, 167–68;). In Mahayana literature, nirvāna is then associated with arhatship and contrasted with perfect buddhahood, which is beyond the dichotomy of samsāra (the round of rebirths) and nirvāna ( Williams 2006, 139). Walpola Rahula (1907–1997), a famous Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist monk who also became a professor at Northwestern University, quotes the different characterizations of nirvāna in his widely read book What the Buddha Taught; he warns that the question of the nature of nirvāna “can never be answered completely and satisfactorily in words, because human language is too poor to express the real nature of the Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality which is Nirvāna” (Rahula 1959, 35).12 Nirvāna cannot be produced; it just is. There cannot be anything after or beyond nirvāna, because nirvāna is the Ultimate Truth. If there were something after nirvāna, then this something would be the Ultimate Truth ( Tillich used the same kind of reasoning in arguing for God as the ground of being). Thus, nirvāna is a half-understood concept in a Sperberian sense; it triggers an endless series of searches in memory, and the word nirvāna is metarepresented in the validating context of “is Ultimate Truth.” The word nirvāna serves as placeholder for whatever is the Ultimate Truth, without any need for a clear definition of nirvāna (35–40). Before attaining nirvāna, Gautama had supposedly been striving for buddhahood through many lives. His 547 former lives are described in the socalled “birth stories” ( jātaka).) The verses of the Jātaka, but not the stories that accompany them, are part of the Khuddakanikāya in the Suttapitaka (see Jones 1979). The jātaka stories are old folktales whose motives antedated Buddhism and only later were adapted to Buddhist usage. The standard Ceylonese jātaka collection dates from the latter half of the fifth century CE. The popular introduction to these this collection, the Nidānakathā, was written in Ceylon in Pali in the fifth century CE. It is divided into three sections, describing the former lives of Gautama, the life of Gautama until his “enlightenment,” and the birth of the Buddhist community (Jones 1979, xii–xiv, 6; Lamotte 1958, 731–33; Thomas 1975, 41–50). In addition to the former lives of Gautama, there are beliefs about other buddhas besides Gautama. The beliefs about previous buddhas preceding Gautama may not have been part of the earliest tradition but yet must predate the split of the various schools, as the names of six buddhas are identical in the texts of the various schools (e.g. in the Buddhavamsa and the Cariyāpitaka) (Foucher 1949, 148; Thomas 1971, 167–68). Two sutras in the Tipitaka, the Mahāsaccakasutta and the Acchariyabbutadhammasutta, describe the way buddhas in general are born, without explicitly applying these regularities to

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Gautama. The Mahāsaccakasutta lists sixteen properties that characterized the birth of Vipassi Buddha; the Acchariyabbutadhammasutta lists nineteen wonderful (acchariyam) and astonishing (abhutam) features that characterize the birth of buddhas (Mahāsaccakasutta 1.237–51; 3.118–24). After the sutra period, the number of buddhas was then at some point increased to twenty-five (Gautama included), perhaps after the model of the twenty-five tīrthankaras of Jainism. In Mahayana, the idea of buddhahood was reinterpreted within a monistic ontology that denied the traditional distinction between samsāra and nirvāna. This led to the ideas of a “buddha-nature” (Chinese fo xing, Japanese busshō; probably from *buddhadhātu) and “tathāgata embryo” (tathāgatagarbha) inherent in all living beings (King 1991; Ruegg 1969). The latter idea can be understood in three different ways: (1) all beings are the interior (womb) of tathāgata; (2) tathāgata is identical with the inner essence (embryo) of all living beings; (3) the inner essence of living beings is the embryo of tathāgata (e.g. the Ratnagotravibhāga; see King 1991, 48–56; Pyysiäinen 1993, 108–10; Ruegg 1969). The tathāgatagarbha idea (Ruegg 1969) is closely related to the idea of Buddha-nature, which was appropriated by the four major indigenous schools of Chinese Buddhism, and then transmitted to other East Asian schools of Buddhism. This doctrine holds that all sentient beings already are buddha-like; they just do not realize it. Buddha-nature thus is understood both as the potential to realize buddhahood and as that buddhahood itself (King 1991). Opinions vary on the constituents of buddhahood and the relationship of buddhahood with other important metaphysical terms. That some kind of buddhahood exists is not doubted in Mahayana texts; only the conceptual formulations vary. In many Mahayana treatises, such basic concepts as buddhahood and nirvāna are even said to be “mere words and signs” and not to correspond to the Ultimate Truth ( paramārtha satya) (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 104–24). That has never meant that one would give up Buddhist practice as unnecessary for spiritual development (see Sharf 1995). Griffiths (1994, 57–75) takes the core of buddhalogical doctrine to consist of the various epithets of the Buddha and of the attributes or properties of the Buddha (guna, dharma, laksana) discussed in commentarial treatises (the śāstras). The many titles of the Buddha have been condensed into brief standardized lists of epithets, as follows following (60): Tathāgata Arhat Samyaksambuddha Vidyācaranasampanna (Accomplished in Knowledge and Virtuous Conduct) Sugata ( Well-gone) Lokavid (Knower of the Worlds)


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Anuttarah Purusadamyasārathih (Unsurpassed Guide for Those Who Need Restraint) Śāstā Devamanusyānām ( Teacher of Gods and Humans) Buddha Bhagavat In Griffiths’s view, “it is clear ” that the epithet lists represent an attempt to sketch the properties of a “maximally great ” being (65). The same motive underlies the property lists, although they come from “a different world of thought,” characterized by a systematic and detailed presentation not found in the epithet lists (66). Griffiths’s “standard list ” is found in such sources as Mahāyānasūtrālamkāra(tīkā) and Bodhisattvabhūmi (66–70, 211). The eighteen properties consist of such things as, for example, the four “immeasurable states” (apramāna), various altered states of consciousness, four kinds of specific understanding, the thirty-two major marks of a “great man” (mahāpurusa), the ten powers, great compassion (mahākaruna), and omniscience (sarvajñatva, sarvajñāna). Griffiths (70) divides these into five groups: perfections of appearance, action, cognition, attitude, and control. A buddha who manifests these properties obviously cannot be an ordinary human being. Buddhahood instead makes its bearer or realizer a superhuman agent with counterintuitive properties (Pyysiäinen 2003a). Underlying this view is the basic distinction between nirvāna and samsāra, later problematized in Mahayana. In Hinayana cosmology, the phenomenal reality is compounded (samskrta, Pali sankhata) of basic elements called dharmas.13 According to the Theravadins, there are eighty-one compounded dharmas that have the characteristics of arising, changing, and passing away (Anguttaranikāya 1.152; cf. Abhidharmakośa 1:150, 222). They are classified in three categories: (1) twenty-eight material forms (rūpa) like the four elements and the six senses; (2) fifty-two ethically good, bad, or neutral psychological factors related to the thinking mind (citta) and consciusness (viññāna); and (3) the pure thinking mind as such. All dharmas are real entities with an essence of their own (Skt. svabhāva), despite the fact that they are transitory (anitya). Behind the compounded reality is an uncompounded reality: “There is, o monks, a supranormal [abhūtam], an unborn, a not made and an uncompounded [asankhata), because, o monks, if there were not this supranormal, unborn, not made and uncompounded one would not know an exit (nissarana] from what is born, produced [bhūta], made and compounded” (Udāna 1982, 80 –81).14 The word “uncompounded” (asankhata, “not made by putting together ”) was originally coined as a negative description of nibbāna, in the same way as ajāta (“not born”); the opposition of the uncompounded and compounded realities thus parallels the opposition between nirvāna and samsāra (Bareau

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1951, 5, 18–19, 218, 250). In Hinayana sutras, nirvāna is the one and only uncompounded reality not conditioned by anything else, and not seen to arise, change, or pass away. We must take the fact that the sutras often speak of the asamskrta dharmas in the plural as only a stylistic feature, since no uncompounded dharma other than nirvāna is ever mentioned (Anguttaranikāya 1.152; Bareau 1951, 15, 31–34, 248, 250; Lamotte 1958, 675; von Rospatt 1995;). In the last two sections of the Dhammasanganī of the Abhidhammapitaka, this uncompounded is described as transcendent ( lokottara) to the world of samsāra, of which it is an “exit ” (ut[t]inna) (see Bareau 1951, 25–28; Udāna 1982, 9, 80). One way of trying to solve the obvious tension between the ideas of the Buddha as a historical human person and as a supernatural agent—who in Mahayana came to be regarded as the philosophical Absolute—is the doctrine of the three bodies of the Buddha (trikāya) (discussed later).

5.2.3. Soul and Soullessness So far, I have spoken of the Buddha in his “previous lives,” as if there were an unproblematic continuity of personhood between lives. This is not the case, for the Buddhist doctrine includes a denial of the soul (ātman). Both this doctrine as such and its implications for karma and rebirth have inspired much debate (e.g. Bronkhorst 1998; Collins 1982, 1–26; Pérez-Remón 1980; Reichenbach 1990, 127–33). To the extent that conceptions of supernatural agents are based on intuitions about human agency, the ātman question is relevant for understanding the supernatural agency of buddhas. In various non-Buddhist traditions, especially in the Upanisads, the word ātman referred to soul, in the sense of an inner essence on which personal identity was based (see Bronkhorst 2003; cf. chapter 3, section 1 here). Ātman was the immutable agentive principle that left the physical body at death and was then transferred to a new body when a baby was born. In English-language scholarship, this is often but somewhat erroneously referred to as the doctrine of “rebirth.” Ātman neither dies nor is born.15 Only physical bodies die, while the ātman is eternal; in the Upanisads, ātman is actually considered to be identical with Brahman, the soul of the cosmos. As a word, ātman refers to “breath,” and from the Rgveda onward is used as a reflexive pronoun and thus translates as “self ” (Mayrhofer 1992, 164–65; see Collins 1982, 27–40, 71–73; la Vallée Poussin 1917, 26). Another word for “soul” is jīva, which carries the meaning of liveliness but refers more to an immortal essence of a person than to the physical body. Thus, the Pali attā (Skr. ātman) is often used reflexively, as in expressions like “self-reproach” (attānuvāda), “self-guarded” (rakhitatta), and so forth (Collins 1982, 71–72). This, of course, does not necessarily and as such indicate any belief in an immutable soul. It is just a linguistic convention; so scholars sometimes argue that anattā should be translated “nonself,” not “nonsoul”


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(see Collins 1982, 96; Williams 2006, 56–62). However (as I showed in chapter 3, secton 3.1), in folk traditions it is often difficult to distinguish between self and soul because the meanings of the words overlap. What in Latinized Christian tradition is called a soul is paralleled by various folk conceptions of spirits or selfhood in other traditions. David Snellgrove (1987, 20 –22) actually argues that the early Buddhists did not know the Upanisadic concept of ātman at all, and that for them, ātman was an animistically understood entity found in trees, rocks, and so forth, in addition to humans (cf. Marett ’s animatism). The locus classicus of the Buddhist idea of soullessness (Skr. anātman, Pali anattā) reads as follows (Vinayapitaka 1.1.13–14, translated by I. B. Horner): Body, monks, is not self. Now were this body self [attā], monks, this body would not tend to sickness, and one might get the chance of saying in regard to body, “Let body become thus for me, let body not become thus for me.” But inasmuch, monks, as body is not self, therefore body tends to sickness, and one does not get the chance of saying in regard to body, “Let body become thus for me, let body not become thus for me.” [ The same is then repeated for feelings (vedanā), mental representations (saññā), mental formations (sankhārā), and consciousness (viññāna).] The Buddha then proceeds to explain that the aforementioned five constituents of an individual person (khandhā, Skr. skandhā) could not be the self (attā) because they are transitory (aniccam) and because all that is transitory is of necessity unsatisfactory and painful (dukkham) (Vinayapitaka 1.14). This is usually regarded as an absolute denial of the existence of a self ( because the five khandhas supposedly form an exhaustive description of a person). Some, however, emphasize the fact that the existence of the self is never unequivocally denied in the Tripitaka (Pérez-Remón 1980, 193; Vetter 1988, 41). Only later is the denial clearly expressed, as in for example Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa Bhāsya, a Sarvāstivādin-Vaibhāsika work written in Kashmir in the fifth century CE (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 65–66).16 Early European scholars of Buddhism were at a loss to understand such apparent nihilism (Saint-Hilaire 1996 [1860], 13–14; la Vallée Poussin 1917, 31– 32, 107, 116–23; cf. Oldenberg 1903), and the real meaning of this teaching is still under debate (Pérez-Remón 1980; Smart 1992). According to Claus Oetke (1988, 65–6), scholars have not really distinguished between whether the Buddha (or whoever was responsible for this teaching) meant to deny that experiences and states of consciousness belong to a subject, that they have “some kind of ” ([ irgend]einen) bearer, that they belong to an immaterial substance, and that a self (ātman) exists. Oetke himself thinks that the early passages of the Tipitaka did not mean to deny the existence of a self in an everyday sense of the term but merely underlined the view that there is no permanent and immutable entity that a person could identify with at all times (zu allen Zeiten)

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(89, 154; see Williams 2006, 56–62). To me, this sounds like the most parsimonious and plausible explanation. Monk Khemaka, for example, is said to have had the feeling “I am,” although he was not able to say what or where this “I” was (Samyuttanikāya 3.126 et passim). In another passage, the Buddha explains that his teaching may sound distressing to those who think “The universe is the self, I shall be that after death, permanent, abiding, everlasting, unchanging, and I shall exist as such for eternity.” When the Buddha says that such an idea is “wholly and completely foolish,” people think “I will be annihilated, I will be destroyed, I will be no more” (Majjhimanikāya 1.136–38). When the monk Vacchagotta asked the Buddha whether there was a self (attā) or not, the Buddha remained silent. Then he explained to Ānanda that if he had said that there was a self, he would have subscribed to the eternalist view; if he had said that there was no self, he would have taken the annihilationist view; and such explanations would only “have been a greater confusion to the already confused Vacchagotta” (Samyuttanikāya 4.400 –401). Thus, persons seem to have a natural feeling that an “I” exists ( because they feel they exist), although they cannot explain it. When they hear about the idea of soullessness, they feel that the Buddha is claiming that they do not exist. For them, the Buddha appears to be a nihilist who for some weird reason wants to deny an obvious fact. Moreover, as the text also mentions the idea of identity between the self and the universe, this may suggest that the Buddha (as represented in this passage) thought that the everyday understanding of the self included an inability to think of one’s own death. If “I am” is true, then this “I” is imperishable. What the Buddhist teaching, as presented in the sutras, denies are the ideas that the self is an immutable entity and that the self reduces to some or all of the khandhas. Logically, this leaves open the possibility that some kind of self exists (see Pérez-Remón 1980, 38, 85, 156–64, 195, 222–27; cf. Vetter 1988, 39 n. 8, 41 n. 10). As I see it, the most natural interpretation is that the teaching of soullessness only leaves room for an everyday feeling of “I am” and the use of the word attā as a linguistic convention; what it denies is the reflective interpretation of the self as a specific entity. However, if there is no permanent self, the idea of reincarnation seems to collapse. There simply is nothing to reincarnate. As the Buddhist teaching still seems to presuppose the ideas of karma and reincarnation, it has been one of the great challenges of Buddhist scholarship to explain this apparent contradiction (see Bronkhorst 1998). A typical Theravada response is to say that in death, the five khandhas forming an individual are somehow taken apart; then, in the new birth, they are somehow rearranged. The whole process is like a fire that leaps from one burning log to another—we could not meaningfully ask whether it is then the same or a different flame (see Reichenbach 1990, 127–33; cf. n. 2 above). This simile, however, only begs the question of the nature of the continuity (see Bronkhorst 1998, 2000, 77–97). The jātakas presuppose some kind


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of continuity between different lives; so does the distinction between nirvāna in this life and nirvāna after death. Although it is often said that realizing that there is no self brings about liberation from the round of rebirths, this really involves a contradiction. An insight into the doctrine of soullessness cannot liberate a person from the round of rebirths because to the extent that there is no self (attā), there cannot be any samsāra to be liberated from. What such an insight could do is to liberate one from the belief that there is life after death in the form of continuous reincarnation. In that case, “death-free” (amata) and “unborn” (ajāta) as attributes of nirvāna could mean that one has realized that there will be neither (re)dying nor (re)birth ( jāti ) because such things never existed in the first place. As the distinction between the two nirvānas is not found in the oldest sources, this might be a plausible interpretation. It hinges on the condition that the original teaching of Buddhism was based on a conviction that there is neither a permanent self nor reincarnation. If the more formal belief in reincarnation came from nonVedic traditions of the Indian continent and the Buddha descended from the Pāndavas of an Iranian origin, it is at least conceivable that he had not adopted this belief and it was only later included in Buddhism.17 According to Akira Hirakawa (1990, 6, 185), for example, “rebirth is not a necessary tenet of Śākyamuni’s teachings”; it is a background assumption that one can accept or reject without any important consequences for Buddhist teaching (see 187–88). This is a hypothesis I am not able to prove, but it does help solve some difficult problems. However, it introduces a new problem: if the Buddha did not believe in karma and reincarnation, why did his followers adopt this view?18 This need not be a fatal objection; we know that practically all religions have adopted new elements in the course of their evolution. The denial of a permanent self is a massively counterintuitive idea that is very difficult to retain in cultural transmission. Soullessness does not fit intuitive thinking, and even highly reflective thinking can often be used to enrich the intuition about a permanent self rather than to deny it, as has been done in Christian theology, for example. Reincarnation and the idea of self are certainly more intuitive than their denial. As Rahula (1959, 51) says, Buddhism is unique among religions in its denial of the self. In everyday Buddhist discourse, the doctrine of soullessness is actually used more as a rhetorical way of differentiating Buddhism from Hinduism than as a premise of everyday reasoning about personhood (Collins 1982, 12). The everyday idea of a permanent self, in turn, requires a belief in life after death, be it a life eternal or an endless series of rebirths. Belief in reincarnation thus is a form of intuition (and therefore relatively common even in the modern Christian West).19 The fact that the Buddhist doctrinal tradition has retained the ideas both of soullessness and of reincarnation without recognizing any contradiction is a curious mixture of intuition and reflection: the

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reflective idea of soullessness is accompanied by the intuition of continuity after death, albeit a continuity that is interpreted nonpersonally. Rahula (1959, 32–33) argues that all being is a combination of “physical and mental forces or energies” that do not stop altogether with the nonfunctioning of the body at death. “Will, volition, desire, thirst to exist, to continue, to become more and more, is a tremendous force that . . . even moves the whole world.” This force produces reexistence that is called “rebirth.” Although there is no permanent self, there is some kind of continuity that makes it possible to speak of “my” current condition being affected by “my” previous deeds and of “my” current deeds as determining “my” future lives.20 As Bronkhorst (2000) has eloquently shown, all or most of the Indian traditions are characterized by such a karmic account of life on Earth as due to agents’ intentional action. The Buddhist version of this theme seems to me an attempt at a more mechanistic account (see Prebish and Keown 2006, 20). There is no problem of free will in Buddhism, as Rahula (1959, 54) observes. Yet the idea of personal continuity has not been completely shaken off. The early history of ideas of karma and rebirth in India is partly obscure. The Sanskrit word karma (Pali kamma) means “action”; the law of karma says that persons’ past deeds determine practically every aspect of reality: the world is the way it is because of humans’ (and animals’) past deeds (Goldman 1985; Reichenbach 1990, 79). Although scholars used to look for the origin of these ideas in the Veda, this has more recently been severely criticized (Bronkhorst 1993a; 1998; Williams 2006, 11). The role of traditions other than the Vedic ones of India’s Aryan invaders in the shaping of what is known as “Hinduism” has now been recognized (Bronkhorst 1993a,b; Collins 1982, 31; Parpola 2002a,b).21 I accept as a plausible hypothesis Bronkhorst ’s suggestion that there are two principal sources for Indian “asceticism,” Vedic and non-Vedic, and that Buddhism is anomalous with regard to both (Bronkhorst 1993a,b). At an early phase, the karmic explanation of evolution and fate only belonged to the non-Vedic tradition (although Bronkhorst [1993a, 94] thinks that belief in rebirth determined by one’s actions was part of early Buddhism). Vedic asceticism developed independently out of the Vedic sacrifice. The vānaprastha ascetic lived the life of a sacrificer, with some additional restrictions and mortifications; the samnyāsa was an aged sacrificer who renounced the world, “interiorizing ” his sacrificial fire (Bronkhorst 1993a, 43–65). Non-Vedic asceticism came in two forms: elimination of all action and insight in the true nature of the self (ātman). Both relied on the idea that the actions one performed determined one’s fate in the round of rebirths. Representatives of non-Vedic asceticism were known as śramanas, while the Vedic ascetics were referred to as brāhmanas (see Karttunen 1997, 55–64); śramanas renounced the world for good at a relatively young age. This tradition is represented by Jainism, for example, but its ideas also appear in the Upanisads, despite the fact these texts are considered to be part of the Veda (Bronkhorst 1993a, 60 –61 et passim).


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Śramanas developed truly extreme forms of self-mortification, including voluntary starvation to death, for example. The Jains in particular were famous for this kind of behavior. The underlying idea was that because action as such tied one to rebirth, the way to salvation was inaction and complete immobility, quite literally. By stopping doing anything, even moving, one could not only prevent the accumulation of karma but also somehow reduce already accumulated karma (Bronkhorst 1993a, 1993b, 26–53; 2001, 380 –81).22 Bronkhorst (2001, 408) argues that these and all similar practices can be explained by an “ascetic instinct,” a feeling that one’s true self is something immaterial and clearly different from the physical body, which is alien to the true self. To the extent that the experience of disembodied agency is a human universal, it is evident that imagining oneself as an immaterial owner of a body cannot as such lead to extreme forms of asceticism, however (see Bronkhorst 2001, 414). We are instead dealing with some kind of runaway process in which the experience of disembodied agency is for some reason unnaturally heightened, leading to extreme behaviors. An alternative reaction in the same situation was the idea that liberation was attained by realizing that one’s self (ātman) was identical with Brahman, without actually stopping all action. Although Buddhism shared features with other śramanic movements, it rejected both of the foregoing views: self-mortification was not needed, and ātman carried no deep metaphysical meanings (Bronkhorst 1993b, 1–30, 2001, 385; see Williams 2006, 11–15; Gombrich 1992). To understand this, we need to look more closely at the ideas of karma and rebirth. According to the law of karma, everything that is or happens is determined by the actions of beings in such a way as to reward or punish them. This happens either mechanically or through some kind of divine intervention (theistic schools). But we may well ask what exactly is the mechanism that mediates between a deed and its reward or punishment (Reichenbach 1990, 79–80). Karma is strictly individual, and goodness and badness are properties of deeds of isolated individuals. This raises the problem of the moral status of collective formations: how can the moral quality of actions of individuals determine the nature of social and cultural forms (Halbfass 1991, 299–300)? Is the state or nature of the entire universe at any given time t due to some kind of averaging of the effects of the deeds of billions of individuals? If so, then there is no simple cause-effect relationship; the consequences of any deed r of an individual A depend on what many other persons are doing at the same time. As there are millions of persons performing billions of actions every minute, it is quite impossible to calculate the effects of any deed without some kind of chunking of information. As Bronkhorst puts it (2000, 51), “it would be a daunting task to give ‘mechanical’ explanation of karmic retribution without falling victim to teleology.” In the Indian traditions, dealing with this problem has been very much avoided.

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Moreover, to maintain that a given event, for example an earthquake, happened in order for a given individual A or group Z to receive a punishment is to attribute intentions to natural events, thus explaining them teleologically, which is problematic. There were also attempts at nonteleological explanation in classical Indian philosophy (Bronkhorst 2000, 4, 8). According to Bronkhorst (17–21), the Nyāya and Vaiśesika psychology explain human behavior nonteleologically, for they consider the soul to be motionless by its very nature; humans only learn to repeat or avoid behaviors through experience in a “behaviorist ” manner (Bronkhorst 1993b, 61–62, 2000, 17–21). To me, this sounds more like a blank-slate empiricism that allows for a gradual development of goal-directedness.23 The Vaiśesikas ran into trouble in trying to explain karmic retribution. They developed an explanation saying that activities led to virtue (dharma) or sin (adharma), which stuck to the soul. Because souls were omnipresent, virtues and sins could exercise influence on all kinds of things at the level of the smallest possible entities (2000, 31–35). Nonetheless, the Vaiśesikas were led to reject atheism with regard to a creator and assigned a central role in the retribution of karma to God (Īśvara). God creates Brahmā, who then knows the effects of the deeds of living beings and creates everything according to the nature of the deeds of persons. The price of this argument is that God cannot have any freedom of will (Bronkhorst 2000, 37–38). Later, the Vedānta philosopher Śankara (eighth century) put it thus in his Brahmasūtra Bhāsya: “For it is proper that He, who controls all, brings about the fruit in accordance with their actions for those who have acted, while ordering creation, preservation and destruction” (quoted in Bronkhorst 2000, 50). Thus, understanding how the myriads of mechanical processes work in karmic retribution is made easier by positing a single mind, God, in which all information is (49–53). Such Buddhist authors as Vasubandhu and the Yogācāra philosophers also discussed the problem of goal-oriented action and karmic retribution (Bronkhorst 2000, 77–93). Early Buddhism met this problem by refraining from speculations about the nature of the self and deconstructing the idea of an isolated individual. There is no idea of a free will, for everything is always conditioned by something else (Rahula 1959, 53–55). This idea is expressed in the doctrine of “dependent coarising ” (Skt. pratītyasamutpāda, Pali paticasamuppāda).24 Scholars have sometimes understood this formula as a causal chain in which causes and effects follow each other serially, the first two components representing the past, components 3–10 the present, and the rest the future (e.g. Jurewicz 2000, 81). There are, however, differing versions of the pratītyasamutpāda in the texts, and it seems that no strictly serial order is implied; there is no first cause ( Tilakaratne 1993, 41; see Collins 1982, 103–10, 203–5; Rahula 1959, 52–55; Williams 2006, 62–72). As Rahula (1982, 54) interprets it, this doctrine means that “the whole of existence is relative, conditioned and interdependent.” There is nothing absolutely free or independent in the world, including the self.


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The solution the Buddha or early Buddhists offered was based on the formula of dependent coarising ( pratītyasamutpāda),which takes ignorance or nonknowledge (avidyā) as the cause from which the whole phenomenal world arises. According to the Buddhist scholar Asanga Tilakaratne (1993, 39), the paticcasamuppāda is “what the teaching of the Buddha is all about.” Joanna Jurewicz (1995, 2000) argues that the pratītyasamutpāda actually parallels, link by link, the cosmogonical myth of the Rgveda (especially in 10.129; see Brereton 1999, 260). In it, ātman as the primeval man ( purusa) existed before there was existence (sát) or nonexistence (ásat); “that One” (tád ékam) was born by the power of heat (tápas), and when this self-cognizing Absolute “breathed without wind through its inherent force,” a cognitive process was initiated and the world born (see Brereton 1999). In the Buddhist formula, the presupposition of ātman is questioned, and the end result of the whole process—birth, aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, suffering, grief, and depression—is deemed unsatisfactory (duhkham). The Buddha thus ironically criticizes Brahmanism.25 If Jurewicz’s interpretation is correct, this is not merely a diagnosis of human suffering but also a sarcastic critique of Vedic cosmogony: the world does not arise from any kind of pure agency ( Tilakaratne 1993, 41). That idealistic view is gravely mistaken because the world is in a state of constant flux (see von Rospatt 1995); what is regarded as the cognizing subject is not anything separable from this flux. This subject is the product of the same natural processes as everything else, at once an end-product and a cause. If early Buddhism really represented such “empirism” and “realism,” then we have to explain why some kind of idealism emerged in Mahayana, especially the school of Yogācāra, or Vijñānavāda (“mind-only”) as it is also called. Vasubandhu, for example, describes in his Abhidharmakośa Bhāsya how deeds as mental events bear fruit. Even such material things as mountains and continents are the result of living beings’ deeds. As a Buddhist, Vasubandhu could not take recourse to the idea of a creator God in trying to explain the mechanism by which karma operates, though. Both deeds and the “series” that led to their fruition were mental, but the fruition itself was not exclusively mental. In his Vimśatikā (a Yogācāra work—see Pyysiäinen 1993, 65–66), however, Vasubandhu adopts an idealist position and thinks that the “impressions” (vāsanā) of deeds enter into the series of consciousness (vijñānasāntana), and fruition takes place there. In other words, everything happens in the “mind only” (vijñaptimātratā, cittamātratā) (Bronkhorst 2000, 67–73; see Hirakawa 1990, 189–96; Pyysiäinen 1993, 120 –24). The Lankāvatārasūtra explains this doctrine using the simile of a hare’s horns (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 110 –20). Nonexistence is a relational concept receiving its meaning from its opposite, existence: “Long and short, etc., exist mutually bound up; when existence is asserted, there is non-existence, and where non-existence is asserted, there is existence” (Lankāvatārasūtra 1932, 49). Thus, a hare’s horns are nonexistent in reference to, for instance, a bull’s

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horns: “The non-existence of hare’s horns is asserted in reference to their existence (on the bull . . .)” (48). And yet Mahayana ontology takes all extensions of verbal expressions to be nonexistent: “but really a horn itself has no existence from the beginning ” (48). Thus, no-existence loses its relational counterpart and becomes meaningless. Neither being nor nonbeing can be predicated on anything. Thus, “all things are devoid of the alternatives of being and non-being and are to be known, Mahāmati, as the horns of a hare, a horse, or a camel” (47, 55, 64). Therefore, “of neither existence nor non-existence do I speak, but of Mind-only which has nothing to do with existence and non-existence” (133). Both other Buddhists and Western scholars have often taken this affirmation of “mind-only” as a garden-variety idealism. Doing so, however, leads to the dilemma of having to choose between solipsism and the view of an absolute mind (as in Vedānta); both ideas are at odds with the doctrine of anātman. Lindtner (1986, 250) cites the (Madhyamaka-)Ratnapradīpa, in which Bhavya argues that if the “mind-only” doctrine is correct, then when a person sees, for example, a jar, he or she should also perceive the mental contents of all living beings. In other words, living beings should have an “intuition” (abhijñā) of other minds ( para-citta). This, however seems to bestow to the mind an absolute position as the basis (see Wood 1991, 261–62). Thomas Wood (1991, 191–92) argues that from a philosophical point of view, absolute idealism is conceptually implied in the Vijñānavāda doctrine but the Vijñānavādins denied such an implication as non-Buddhist. Another possibility might be that the Vijñānavādins only wanted to argue that rational agents do not have any unmediated access to external reality. All perceptions and mental representations are constructed by the mind (citta); this need not necessarily imply that nothing exists outside of the mind (cf. Niiniluoto 1984, 89, 2002, 88–91; Murti 1980, 315, attributes such a position to Śankara). The mind instead is a construction that arises from material processes in accordance with the pratītyasamutpāda. For example Vasubandhu in his Trimśikā actually argues that the essence of “mind-only” is nonmind (acitta) (see Wood 1991, 49–60). Thus, Buddhist authors can be said to have tried to develop an account of causality that does not take recourse to teleology, absolute idealism, or God. Nāgārjuna (first centuries CE), representing the Madhyamaka school, even wrote a formal refutation of the existence of “God” (Īśvara), the Īśvarakartrtva nirākrtih.26 According to Nāgārjuna, God cannot create the world because what is nonexistent cannot be made existent, as there can be no point of contact between existent and nonexistent. Second, no thing has an essence (svabhāva); everything arises from something else in the way the pratītyasamutpāda describes. This makes the idea of God as the first cause impossible. Thus, the Indian ideas of karma and reincarnation are based on the intuitions of disembodied agency and a “promiscuous teleology”: the agentive principle or self wanders from body to body, and its deeds determine everything


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that is or happens in the world. The problem of mental causation, especially in its collective aspect, is then solved by either invoking a god who mediates between the intention behind a deed and its “fruit ” or adopting an idealist position. Either a god makes things happen in accordance with the intentions of living beings or the effects of mental causation are interpreted as being mental, too. Early Buddhism may have represented a radically different alternative in which teleology was replaced by a mechanical causation and, possibly, without belief in reincarnation. Yet the Buddhist views concerning the agency of the Buddha are interesting from the religious point of view, because they postulate a specific type of supernatural agency.

5.3. Embodied Buddhahood 5.3.1. The Three Bodies Especially in the śāstra literature, it is emphasized that only a single body, the “essential body” (svābhāvikakāya) belonging to all buddhas, really exists. According to Griffiths (1994, 81, 134), the three different bodies are actually three different functions of a numerically single entity: the first is the Dharma-body, which is the “basis” or “support ” (āśraya) of the “apparitional body” (nirmānakāya) and the “body of communal enjoyment ” (sāmbhogakāya) (e.g., Samdhinirmocanasūtra 10.1; Ratnagotravibhāga, 1966, 289–90, 324; Mahāyānasamgraha 10.1; cf. Lankāvatārasūtra 1932, 51–52; see Lamotte 1958, 689–90). The idea of the Buddha’s Dharma-body is based on the fact that the Dharma of early Buddhism was not just a set of Buddha’s teachings; it was instead the “original Absolute of Buddhism” that somehow embodied nirvāna (Rosenberg 1924, 82; Takasaki 1966, 26). Much like the eternal speech (vāc) underlying the Vedas, which was not produced by human agency (it was apauruseya; see Padoux 1990), the Buddhist Dharma is a set of ideas that exist in eternity, irrespective of whether they are cognized by anybody (see Gombrich 1992, 165). The Buddha’s authority was based on his immediate relationship with this Dharma (Gombrich 1988, 33, 71). Thus also the Buddha’s first converts “saw the Dhamma, attained the Dhamma, knew the Dhamma” and even “plunged into the Dhamma” ( pariyogālhadhammo) (Vinayapitaka 1.12). In the Samyuttanikāya (2.25), we read: “Whether, o monks, tathāgatas will appear or not appear this nature of things (dhātu), this conditioning by Dhamma (dhammatthitatā), this orderliness based on Dhamma (dhammaniyāmatā), this dependent nature of things (idappacayatā), just stands.” The monk Kassapa is said to be entitled to regard himself as the Buddha’s own son and to be born of his mouth and of the Dharma because as a teacher, the Buddha has a Dharma-body and a Dharma-nature (dhammabhūto) (Samyuttanikāya 2.221; also Mahāsaccakasutta 3.195).27 In another passage, we read about a certain

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monk who had for a long time wanted to see the Buddha face to face. The Buddha told him that there was nothing to see in his vile body; he who sees the Dhamma sees the Buddha, and he who sees the Buddha sees the Dhamma (Samyuttanikāya 3.120). The Dharma-body is the Buddha as he (she, it?) really is, not as he appears. It is whatever is ultimately real; and thus the Buddha is actually “homologized with everything there is,” as Griffiths puts it (1994, 148; 147–80). This equivalence of the Buddha’s body and his teachings is explicitly established in the Dhammakāyassa Atthavannanā, a much later Theravada text.28 By identifying stages of the Buddhist path with parts of the Buddha’s body, this text explains that the Buddha’s body and his teaching are the Dharma-body (dhammakāya). The contents of the text are arranged according to the following scheme (Coèdes 1956, 255–56, 260 –61; see Reynolds 1977, 385–86). the buddha’s body and the doctrine The mental ability of omniscience Nibbāna The fourth jhāna The mental ability to attain the thunderbolt (vajirasamāpattiñāna) The visual fixation on the blue meditation object (nīlakasina) The most excellent divine eye, eye of knowledge, all-seeing eye, Buddha-eye, Dhamma-eye (dibbacakkhu-paññācakkhusamantacakkhubuddhacakkhu-dhamma cakkhu) The divine ear The mental ability of a converted Buddhist (gotrabhū; see Rhys Davids & Stede 1972, 255) The knowledge of the fruits of the path and liberation (vimutti ) The knowledge of the thirty-seven wings of enlightenment Mundane and supramundane mental abilities ( lokiyalokuttarañāna) The knowledge of the four paths The knowledge of the four truths The irresistible knowledge The mental ability to obtain unequaled liberation (anuttaravimokkha)

= head = hair = forehead = the hair between the eyebrows (unnā) = the eyebrows = the eyes

= the ears = the nose

= the cheeks = the teeth = the lips = the canine teeth = the tongue = the jaw = the neck

buddhist supernatural agents The knowledge of the three properties of things The knowledge of the four subjects of self-confidence The seven limbs of enlightenment The capacity of the ten powers The knowledge of the net of mutual dependencies The five powers of the five faculties The four perfect efforts The ten paths of meritorious action The four bases of supernatural power Psychic mastery of moral practices Remorse Knowledge of the eightfold path The four applications of mindfulness

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= the throat = the arms = the chest = the stomach = the navel = the buttocks = the thighs = the legs = the feet = the sanghātī-robe = the robe (cīvara) = the inner garment (antara vāsaka) = the belt

In the Prajñāpāramitā literature of Mahayana, “Dharma-body” is often replaced by the “perfection of wisdom,”29 with which the Buddha has an intimate connection (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 132–37).30 The manifestation of the ultimate reality before human eyes in the person of the Buddha is only due to the Buddha’s “skill in means” (upāyakauśalya; Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 622). The “skill in means” is an important concept in Mahayana Buddhism and has made it possible to explain why the Buddha does many things that yet lack all reality. He merely accommodates his behavior according to what is proper in the world of unenlightened beings (Pye 1978). In Mahayana treatises such as the Ratnagotravibhāga (1966, 213), the Buddha’s Dharma-body is identified with the absolute reality so that the whole phenomenal reality is reduced to it. Thus, “the Tathāgata is the highest Absolute Essence” and “reaches up to the limit of the space,” and his life lasts as long as the utmost limit of the world. In this sense, the “multitudes of living beings” are said to be included in the Buddha’s wisdom ( buddhajñāna), and the Buddha’s body is said to “penetrate everywhere” (1966, 184, 197, 304; Mahāyānasamgraha 2.33.1, 10; 2.33.2, 20 –21). In the Lotussūtra, the pervading quality of the Buddha’s Dharma is described with a simile comparing it to a rain-cloud (dharmameghā) that pours rain on all beings alike (1968, 118–27; see Pye 1978, 43–47). It is said: As the rays of the sun and moon descend alike on all men, good and bad, without deficiency (in one case) or surplus (in the other); So the wisdom of the Tathāgata shines like the sun and moon, leading all beings without partiality (1968, 136).31

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In his Dharma-body, the Buddha also is omniscient, in that his mind does not construct mental representations of phenomena; everything is directly reflected in the mind of the Buddha just as it is (Griffiths 1994, 151–55, 168). The śāstras use words such as nirvikalpa (“nonconstructive”) and ādarśajñāna (“mirror-awareness”) to describe the nature of the Buddha’s awareness (164). Griffiths quotes the Mahāyānasūtrālamkāra: “Bodhisattvas who are free from construction [kalpanāmātram] and who see all this (sc. the entire cosmos) just as has been described, as nothing but construction, are said to have attained awakening ” (1994, 155). The Buddha in his Dharma-body appears in various imaginary worlds in his “body of communal enjoyment ” (sambhogakāya). This word is usually translated as “body of enjoyment ” but Griffiths (1994, 127–28) adds “communal” as a translation of sam-. The idea is that there is always a multitude of bodhisattvas listening to the teaching of the sāmbhogakāya and “enjoying ” it in way analogous to the way one enjoys a meal. Only highly advanced practitioners of the path can see the the sambhogakāya, in a heavenly realm called a buddha-field ( buddhaksetra). These fields are mere mental images (vijñapti ) produced by the needs of living beings, without having any referents in external reality. Strictly speaking, it is not necessary that the teacher be a buddha; bodhisattvas can also appear in a sāmbhogakāya (127–37). The Buddha’s actions as a human person in worlds such as the human one are always actions of an apparitional body (nirmānakāya). Yet the Buddha in his nirmānakāya can also appear in any form and in any destiny in the world, for example as a “hungry ghost ” ( preta) (Griffiths 1994, 90 –91). The Buddha’s actions in the nirmānakāya have three characteristics: first, the absence of intentions or volitions (cetanā, abhisamskāra) as causes of action; second, the absence of any effort (yatna, ābhoga) or deliberation involving constructive or analytical thought (vikalpa) guiding action; and third, the absence of any possibility of wrong action (103–4). The Buddha always does everything right completely spontaneously, not reflecting on different alternatives. Although, different buddhas with different names exist, only one nirmānakāya is in the world at a time. As there are numerous different bodhisattvas gathering merit that will eventually lead to full awakening, there must be several nirmānakāyas. And because the actions of a buddha in his nirmānakāya cannot bring everybody to awakening, and the Buddha yet always achieves his ends, there must be several nirmānakāyas. Finally, because the awakening that produces a buddha in his nirmānakāya can only be based on the fact that a bodhisattva has gathered merit under the guidance of a buddha, there must have been an innumerous number of buddhas but not any original Buddha (ādibuddha) (Griffiths 1994, 120 –21). The traditional thirty-two major and eighty minor bodily marks of a Great Man (mahāpurusa), that is, a Great King (cakravartin rāja) or a religious leader, belong to the nirmānakāyas of buddhas, not to their “essential being ” (e.g.,


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Dīghanikāya 2.16–19, 169–99, 3.58–79, 142–45; Ratnagotravibhāga 1966, 344– 49; Lankāvatārasūtra 1932, 12, 68; see Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 551–52 [Astadasasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra in Gilgit manuscript]). The thirtytwo marks are described in, for example, the Lakkhanasuttanta (Dīghanikāya 3.142–45), the Pañcavimsatisāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 657–64), the Astadasasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 583–87), and the Bodhisattvabhūmi (quoted in Griffiths 1994, 99–100). This idea is a Buddhist adaptation of old folk beliefs and may have been influenced by the statues of the Buddha that were first made in northwestern India, in Gandhāra, at the beginning of the Christian era (Bareau 1969, 13–14; Gombrich 1988, 124; Lamotte 1958, 479–86; Thomas 1975, 219–22; Waldschmidt 1967, 227). Among the thirty-two marks are such things as firmly placed feet, thousand-spoked wheels on the soles of feet, long fingers, web-like hands and feet, a sheathed penis, body hairs pointing upward, golden skin, forty even teeth, a long and thin tongue, a voice like Brahma’s, blue eyes, and a head like a turban (usnisaśīrsa).32 Thus, we find here a line of reasoning similar to that found in the Christian sources I analyzed in chapter 4: besides a natural body “subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or accident,” the Buddha has a body “utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to” (to apply quotations from Kantorowicz [1957, 7] in a new context). No idea of borrowing or travel of narrative motives can explain this similarity. It instead seems that there is a recurrent human tendency to treat social organizations and ideologies as agents because this is a cognitively economical way of making inferences. People say “the Church wants” or “the Bible says,” as if these two entities are agents with beliefs and desires. It would be cognitively costly to reduce abstract entities such as the Church or the Bible to various individuals’ beliefs and desires. In most cases, the cognitive costs of such mental operations would far exceed the possible benefits. The natural connection between agency and some kind of bodily form has the effect that treating an abstract entity as an agent also brings along the idea of a body. Within the Christian tradition, the Church is the mystical body of Christ, and the Bible embodies the word of God and the person of Christ. Now we find a similar line of reasoning in the Buddhist tradition. The Dharma as the Buddhist teaching is viewed as an agent, and this, then, brings along the idea of the bodily form of the Dharma. The Buddha’s body is used to give the Dharma a form; in addition, it is also used as a “scale-model” of the cosmos. The agency of buddhas is exceptional, in that ultimately ( paramārthatam), buddhas do not have beliefs or desires. There is no active mental construction in the mind of a buddha; everything is reflected in a buddha-mind just as it is, without distinctions (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 104–24, 137–39). Thus, the buddhas also do not wish for anything; they know that everything happens just as it happens. Therefore, buddhas do not have to reflect on several alternatives or make

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choices. Buddhas are not beings separate from the rest of the reality but the only thing that is real. Yet buddhas are understood as being immanent rather than transcendent.

5.3.2. Images and Relics So far, I have mostly analyzed prescribed ideas in Buddhist texts, although the jātakas, for example, represent folk beliefs rather than official doctrine. However, a number of anthropological studies from Buddhist countries convey some idea of the actual (v. prescribed) beliefs of living Buddhists (although there are practically no experimental studies). One central topic in literature has been the alleged “syncretism” of South Asian Buddhism: people identify themselves as Buddhists yet also worship many Hindu deities and have animistic beliefs (see Gellner 2001). Gombrich (1995, 54–57) argues that this is actually not a case of syncretism, because the Hindu gods have been part of Buddhism from the very beginning. Their existence was never denied, although they are not considered to be important from the human point of view. It is possible for humans to be reborn as gods, but eventually gods must be reborn as humans in order to attain liberation from suffering. There is thus a division of labor between the Buddha and the gods: gods might be able to help in worldly matters, whereas only the Buddha can teach the way to ultimate liberation (see Obeyesekere 1966). Yet most Theravada Buddhists, monks included, think that it is practically impossible to attain nirvāna; they only aim to gather such merit or good karma (Skt. punya) as ensures a better rebirth. For a person with good karma, it will then be possible to attain nirvāna when a new buddha comes to the world (Bunnag 1973; Gombrich 1995, 19–20; Prebish and Keown 2006, 21–22; Spiro 1972). People venerate not only the Hindu gods but also the Buddha images. The worship of the Buddha image was actually modeled after South Indian Hindu temple worship, which was modeled after the court ceremonial (Gombrich 1988, 146). The veneration consists of offering of flowers and food, burning of incense, and recitations in Pali (see Gombrich 1995, 134–38, 140 –50). The prescribed interpretation is that it is only the intention of the worshiper that counts, not the offerings as such, ex opera operato (138–39). The Theravada doctrine is clear: the Buddha is dead and no longer active in the world; yet in moments of crisis some individuals may pray to him. Gombrich (1988, 120) regards this as a “spontaneous outburst of emotion” that is then denied as soon as one’s mind is calm (see Gombrich 1995, 139). From the cognitive point of view, we are interested precisely in how such automatic cognitive-emotional processes work (see the appendix), not merely in finding out what the prescribed ideas are (“real Buddhism”). Gombrich (143) also acknowledges that the emotional attitude brings about a “break-through” to the cognitive level, because the Pali verses recited in offering food to the


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Buddha image clearly address the Lord (Bhante Bhagavant) as if he were alive. And Gananath Obeyesekere (1966) argues that Sri Lankan Buddhists “intellectually” recognize that the Buddha is dead yet “emotionally” feel that he is somehow present in his relics. The prescribed ideas of Buddhism thus seem to be costly in such a way that they cannot be consistently applied in everyday situations. Relics and the Buddha images are ritually treated as though the Lord were present in them, although the prescribed idea is that he is dead. Gombrich (1995, 134) argues that the statues are “sacred objects” and points out that their manufacture is the prerogative of the subcaste of painters (sittaru) only. Today, others may also make Buddha statues—there is even mass production—but usually others do not paint the eyes; without the eyes, the statue is only an ordinary object, not in any sense sacred. As soon as a sittaru paints the eyes, the image becomes sacred. This fact is no mere coincidence; eyes have a special capacity to trigger animacy assumptions, and they play an important role in mind reading: it has been experimentally shown that in following a conversation, people focus their gazes on the eyes of the speakers and the spaces between their faces (von Hofsten 2007; von Hofsten and Gredebäck 2007). In the case of the Buddha images also, it is the eyes that trigger the feeling of the presence of the Buddha’s agency. According to Gombrich, the custom of offering food to the Buddha image emerged rather early, in the form of offering food and drink to an image or casket (cetiya) containing a relic (Gombrich 1995, 143). The veneration of relics was actually a Buddhist invention originally (Gombrich 1988, 123). After the images receive offerings of food, it is afterward given to either dogs or Tamil (Hindu) beggars. The situation thus is very different from the Hindu custom of offering food to gods and then happily consuming it together with the others who are present. And there are statues of Hindu gods in many ( but not all) Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka; in some, the gods even receive food offerings (while in others they are mere decorations); part of this food is then returned to the worshiper. This does not happen to the food offered to the Buddha; no self-respecting Buddhist would touch it because it is the property of the sangha (monks), from whom laypersons are not allowed to take anything (Gombrich 1995, 140 –44). The monks themselves do not need the extra food, of course. To the extent that the food is given to the Buddha by the sangha and the food yet remains the property of the sangha, the sangha seems to be the embodiment of the Buddha and the Dharma. It also seems that the Buddha images—like the crucifix—effectively trigger animacy assumptions and agentive inferences. These intuitions are then used to guide the veneration of images, although this partly contradicts the prescribed doctrine. The Buddhist veneration of relics is particularly interesting because it was unheard-of in India in the centuries following the death of the Buddha, as Monier Monier-Williams (1889) and Jean Przyluski observe (quoted in Strong

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2004, 15; see also Bareau 1963, 122). In “Hinduism,” corpses and remains of bodies were regarded as impure and polluting, not as objects of veneration. However, Gregory Schopen (1998, 261) opines that relics are not associated with death at all, so taboos of pollution do not apply to them. This argument somewhat begs the question, because not being impure and not being associated with death are aspects of the same problem. Why are relics not connected with death? First, relics are always the remains (or personal belongings) of extraordinary individuals whose remembrance does not fade away within five generations; their agency lives on in their works and achievements. It seems that such remembering is crucial in relic worship: when an individual’s agency continues after his or her death, people connect his or her animacy and mentality with something physical so as to make his or her presence more concrete. Pure mentality is too costly to process cognitively. Relics thus serve, partly at least, the same function as various kinds of subtle bodies of spirits: they embody mentality, which is difficult to imagine apart from all spatiality and physicality. Connecting agency with relics is made possible by the kind of implicit (or even explicit) essentialism in which an agent ’s personal essence as a whole is supposed to be present in every part of him or her, also including such extensions of personhood as various kinds of personal belongings and artifacts, such as works of art, made by him or her. And a single bone of a saint can be believed to be equivalent to the presence of the saint, for example; thus, the bodily remains of the saint, however small, can work the same kinds of miracles as the saint himself or herself. A relic contains the essence of the person whose relic it is, and the agency of this person continues in the relics. In the case of the Buddha, the extension of his agency is, of course, the Dharma. Thus, in addition to body relics and contact relics, there are also Dharma relics, that is, such embodiments of the Buddha’s teachings as the sutras, for example (Strong 2004, 8–9). And he who sees the relics sees the Buddha, as the Mahāvamsa puts it (quoted in Strong 2004, 9). Buddha, Dharma, and Dharmabody are more or less interchangeable. Second, the purity of the relics is related to the fact that mostly bones are used as physical relics, never rotting flesh. John Strong sees the enshrinement of relics as a kind of a second burial in which clean bones are put in the reliquary, much as only the clean bones are buried in double burials. Yet this does not mean the end of agency but its continuation. In this sense, relics indeed are not associated with death but with life. In India, this kind of attitude toward the life of an individual seems to have been a novelty introduced by the Buddhists. And the burial of non-Buddhist ascetics, who were considered to have been liberated from samsāra, was exceptional, in that they were entombed, not cremated (Bareau 1979, 71–2; Bronkhorst 2007, 268); often a tumulus was also made (Strong 2004, 16). We can only speculate about the possibility of this being related to the belief that the liberated one was not going to return to


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a new body, so he needed an alternative physical connection with physical reality (note that liberation was not necessarily identical with death, because death was only a gateway to a new life). Whether people felt that the spatial location of those “Hindu” ascetics who were liberated from samsāra was a problem or not, it certainly became a problem in Buddhism. Where the Tathāgata is after his death is one of the traditional questions never answered by the Buddha.33 In India, the bodies of Buddhist monks were always cremated and not buried. If the self was also considered perishable, then it truly became a problem to explain where a dead agent was, if not reborn. The idea of complete annihilation is simply too counterintuitive to become widespread. As the memories of the dead continue in people’s minds and as pure mentality is difficult to imagine, memories of the dead are connected with something physical or at least spatial, like the grave, for instance (Nilsson 1930, 90). In the case of the Buddha, the images and relics serve this function. The origins of relic worship are described in the Mahāparinirvānasūtra, a text found in the Tipitaka (about one hundred pages), in Sanskrit versions, and in Chinese translations (see Bareau 1970 – 71, 1974b, 1979). It contains the following account of the Buddha’s death. When Cunda the goldsmith offers to the Buddha a meal of sūkaramaddava, the Buddha becomes ill and predicts that he will “enter parinirvāna” (i.e. die) the following night.34 He says that no one is to blame Cunda, who only did what was necessary (Dīghanikāya 2.126–36). A bit later, the Buddha tells how his body should be treated after his death. The monks should not worry about the funeral.35 Many brāhmanas, ksatriyas, and householders will worship the body of the Tathāgata. His funeral should be like that of a wheel-turning king (cakravartin rāja’s): the body should be wrapped in a new cloth and then in carded cotton wool and then again in a new cloth, with five hundred layers of both cloths altogether. Then the body is to be put in an ayasāya tela-doniyā (“oil vessel of iron”) and covered close up with another ayasāya tela-doniyā. Then a funeral pyre of all kinds of perfume should be built and the body burned and stūpas erected at the four crossroads. Whenever somebody places garlands or perfumes or paint or makes a salutation there, he shall gain profit and joy (Dīghanikāya 2.141–42). The last words of the Buddha were “O monks, I say to you: all phenomena are bound to destruction, strive conscientiously!” (Dīghanikāya 2.155–56). After this, the Buddha went through the four meditative states ( jhānas) and the four formless meditations back and forth. From the fourth jhāna, he entered parinirvāna ( parinibbāyi ), which here means that he die (Dīghanikāya 2.156). The preparation for the Buddha’s funeral took six days; on the seventh day, the citizens of Kusinara tried to carry the corpse outside the city gates, but the body was too heavy to lift. This was because the Mallas (a clan) wanted to carry the corpse through the southern city gate, whereas the gods (devatānam) wanted

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the Buddha to be carried through the north gate, then back to the town, and then through the eastern gate to the shrine of the Mallas called Makutabandhana (Dīghanikāya 2.159–60). The Mallas were not able to set the funeral pyre alight, however. Only when Anuruddha and five hundred monks arrived and paid homage to the Buddha did the funeral pyre catch fire—by itself. When the body was burned, neither soot nor ash was seen; only the bones remained. Then streams of waters came down from sky and extinguished the pyre. The Mallas worshiped the bones for seven days. Different clans then claimed the relics of the Buddha for themselves; the Mallas decided to divide the bones into eight so that all got their share (Dīghanikāya 2.163–67). This is how the relic worship is legitimated in the textual tradition. Thus, the actual practice of worship has a legitimation in “canonical” literature, although this creates a certain tension in Buddhist doctrine. Some Sanskrit Buddhist texts, such as the Avadānaśataka, hold that relics can help persons embark on the path of arhat-ship, while some Theravadins argue that relics cannot guide anybody to the Buddhist path, although in Sinhalese practice, for example, they are important (see Gombrich 1995). Mahayanists often claim that relics can even be the equivalent of living buddhas (Strong 2004, 48). In actual practice, the Buddha, understood to be dead, is felt to be immanent in his relics, which is a kind of a folk-psychological explanation for the feeling of the Buddha’s presence (Gombrich 1995, 124; Obeyesekere 1966, 8).

5.3.3. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas The Mahāvastu of the Mahāsamghika-Lokottaravāda school is a “ bridge work ” between Hinayana and Mahayana, written in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and containing “much mythological enthusiasm but little intellectual penetration” (Pye 1978, 60; see Pyysiäinen 1993, 59–61, 66). It emphasizes the complete transcendence of buddhas. Thus, one of the fourteen ways a bodhisattva of the third stage can “lapse and fail” is by teaching buddhas to be of this world ( lokasamatāye deśenti ) (Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:75– 76). Yet “there is nothing in the Buddhas that can be measured by the standard of the world, but everything appertaining to the great seers is transcendent ( lokottara)” (Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:125). This idea consistently guides the presentation of the Buddha’s life in the Mahāvastu, starting with the description of his immaculate conception and birth.36 According to this text, the birth of a buddha is due to certain cosmic laws: the bodhisattva is born virginally and by the strength of his own karmic merit.37 Thus, he is uncontaminated by any “worldly” qualities from the beginning. The Buddha is a transcendent light of the world and comes down from heaven to earth in order to enlighten humans who have become blind: “Desiring to enter the womb of Queen Māyā in the form of a noble lotuswhite elephant, he,


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the light of the world, left the realm of Tusita[-gods], and came down to earth to raise up the people whom he saw were wanton and blind and who had succumbed to doubt and unrighteousness” (Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:77– 78). The Buddha is then born in a “mind-made” body (manomayakāya) from the right side of his mother, yet without piercing that side (Mahāvastu 1949– 52, 1:117–18, 174, 2:18). The Buddha deliberately chose a mother who had ten months and seven days of life left, because she must not make love after the birth of a Buddha (2:3–4). The Buddha here is no longer a man who became a buddha but a buddha who became a man. Consequently, he must have been in an ultimate sense perfect in every way, even before his enlightenment (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 144). The Buddha’s transcendent quality is described in a passage inserted en bloc, beginning with the conduct, root of virtue, walking, standing, sitting, and lying down of the Buddha, all of which are said to be transcendent ( lokottara). The same holds true of his body, wearing of the robe, eating, and teaching (Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:132). Despite being transcendent, the buddhas still appear to be ordinary mortals, since they accommodate themselves to the world. They practice the four postures of the body even though they feel no fatigue; they bathe, clean their teeth, and wash their feet even though no dirt is ever found on them. This washing is “mere conformity with the world.” The buddhas put on robes as a “mere conformity with the world” since no cold wind could harm them. For the same reason, they sit in the shade even though the sun would not torment them, take medicine though they are never ill, and eat food though never hungry. They also take on the semblance of being old even though in reality they have overcome old age. The buddhas remain in the world for a certain span of time, though they could immediately leave it if they wished (Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:132–33). Bareau, following Przyluski (1918–20, 11:515–26, 13:365–429, 15:5–6) argues that for his first followers, the Buddha was only a human being. Only during the Maurya period (322–185 BCE) did he become equated with a wheel-turning king, was he raised to a “functional god” of sorts, and did he become the object of religious veneration (Bareau 1962, 32–33, 1963, 361–62, 1969, 1974b, 288, 1979, 2, 64, 72– 73). Whether or not Bareau’s view of the first followers’ attitude toward the Buddha is correct, he is certainly correct about the veneration of the Buddha deriving from a period at least as early as the Mauryan. This development was followed in Mahayana by the emergence of beliefs about various kinds of “celestial and cosmic” buddhas (in addition to the buddhas who had preceded Gautama and who had been worshiped from the Aśokan period onward [Reynolds and Hallisey 1987, 327–28]). The number of celestial buddhas is infinite in principle, and many of them are named in Buddhist literature; mythological and devotional traditions have only developed in a few cases, notably in the case of Amitābha (“boundless light”), whose cult originated in northwest India or Central Asia (Reynolds and

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Hallisey 1987, 328; see Getty 1962). Amitābha (also called Amitāyus, “Boundless Life”) rules over his “Pure Land” paradise, described in the short and long versions of the Sukhāvatīvyuha, translated into Chinese in the second century CE, as well as in the Amitāyurnidhyānasūtra (Amstutz 1977, 1–25; Getty 1962, 37–42). The cult of Amitābha (Jap. Amida) became important in China and Japan, but there is little evidence of it having been widespread in India ( Williams 2006, 185–87). In addition to such cosmic buddhas, there are also bodhisattvas, “enlightenment beings” traditionally interpreted as beings who postpone their own (pari )nirvāna in order to stay in the world and teach others, out of compassion. This view, of course, depends on the belief that the final goal is reached only in death. Moreover, as the Mahayanists emphasize that the nirvāna of buddhas is beyond the dichtomy of samsāra and nirvāna (see Pyysiäinen 1993, 104–24), the Buddha’s attainment is called a “nonfixed nirvāna” (apratisthitanirvāna); thus, there is not really a nirvāna to be postponed, and the Buddha is not, of course, regarded as inferior to the bodhisattva ( Williams 2006, 139). The bodhisattva ideal was developed within Mahayana as an alternative to Hinayana exclusivism: anybody can strive for buddhahood by taking the vows and then cultivating the six perfections ( pāramitā). The spiritual way of the bodhisattva, divided into ten stages or levels ( bhūmi ), is long and hard. At first, the Mahayana bodhisattvas were a group of people, not celestial beings. But early Mahayana also embraced a number of cults centered on particular sutras some of which described the Pure Land of Amitābha and the means of being reborn there. In due course, certain advanced bodhisattvas were associated with Pure Lands and the idea emerged of “Buddha-fields” ( buddhaksetra) as places to be reborn in or to be visited in meditation (Griffiths 1994, 129–33; Keown 2004, 38, 43–44; Williams 2006, 176–91). This is the way the historical Buddha’s agency has been extended since his death. His bodily presence (animacy) continues in the images, relics, and sacred texts, while his mentality is represented as the Buddha-idea (“buddhahood,” Buddha-nature, tathāgatagarbha). This Buddha-agency is not restricted to the historical Buddha but has been elevated into an absolute principle that governs the whole of reality. In Mahayana doctrine, the possibility of personally realizing this ideal is, in principle, open to everybody in the career of the bodhisattva. This view of the ultimate goal actually being within the reach of everybody is expressed by various kinds of paradoxical claims. It is argued, for example, that the bodhisattva should understand that the uncompounded cannot be made known through the exclusion of the compounded, or the other way around (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 94; Nāgārajuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 7.35). Therefore, “that entity which is the sign of something conditioned is neither other than the inexpressible realm, nor not other (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 647),” and “nirvāna is neither an existent thing nor a non-existent thing ” (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā


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25.10). “The Bodhisattva . . . neither discriminates Samsara as Samsara, nor Nirvana as Nirvana. When he thus does not discriminate, they, i.e. Samsara and Nirvana, become exactly the same” (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 650). According to the Samdhinirmocanasūtra, “the mentioned things are of two sorts: the compounded and the uncompounded. However, the compounded is neither compounded nor uncompounded; and the uncompounded is neither uncompounded nor compounded” (1.1). Thus, “It is said from the highest view-point that the Phenomenal Life itself is Nirvāna, because (the Bodhisattvas) realize the unstable Nirvāna (apratisthitanirvāna), being indiscriminative of both (the Phenomenal Life and Nirvāna)” (Ratnagotravibhāga 1966, 219–20). So: “worldly convention is not one thing and ultimate truth another. What is the Suchness [tathatā] of worldly convention, that is the Suchness of ultimate reality” (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 529). This view was put to practice in Zen Buddhist meditation as it is described in the famous kōan collections Mumonkan and Hekiganroku, for example (see Pyysiäinen 2006b). The conclusion is formally similar to Luther ’s simul iustus et peccator argument: the ultimate goal is not something distinct from everyday life but something that is present all the time. This is an almost literal description of a supernatural mind as being the sum of all worldly knowledge. This idea has been elaborated on the basis of the historical Buddha’s agency, which has been extended beyond all physical limits and yet connected with the physical reality through the Buddha images and relics.

Summary 1. Buddhism involves supernatural agents such as spirits (yakkha), giants (asura), gods (devas), bodhisattvas, and buddhas. 2. Buddhas are regarded as omniscient, in that they do not have to actively construct mental representations of phenomena; instead, everything is directly reflected in the mind of a Buddha, just as it is. 3. In certain “Hindu” schools, the ideas of karma and rebirth may have resulted from a runaway reasoning process based on “folk-genetic” explanations of the observed fact that offspring resemble their parents. Problems involved in explaining all states of affairs in the world as based on the past actions of isolated individuals were often solved by postulating a God who directly saw the merits and dismerits of individuals and then fixed the future correspondingly. In Buddhism, both the ideas of an immutable self and God were rejected, and all things and events were thought to arise from purely mechanical processes (the pratītyasamutpāda).

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supernatural agency 4. As the Buddha’s mentality has been regarded as living in the doctrine, the natural relationship between mentality and embodiment has brought along the idea of a Dharma-body of the Buddha. 5. Sacred texts, like to the bodily relics of the Buddha, are also called Dharma-relics. Both relics and the Buddha images are a means of representing the presence of the Buddha’s agency after his death. Although the official doctrine is that the Buddha is dead, believers emotionally feel that he is present in his relics. The official doctrine cannot penetrate everyday thinking; for the layperson, the doctrine of soullessness, for example, serves as a means of expressing a departure from “Hindu” philosophies. In this way, intuitions can be given a Buddhist identity without a detailed understanding of the doctrine.

6 Conclusion

6.1 Agency In this book’s two introductory and three analytical chapters, I have first developed a conceptual framework based on cognitive scientific research on human intuitions about basic ontological categories and the ways certain representations counterintuitively violate their boundaries. I have then focused on the category of agency that consists of animacy ( liveliness, self-propelledness) and mentality ( beliefs and desires). Two things about agency have been of special interest: first, the relationship between agency and physical bodies, and second, the processes involved in making inferences from other agents’ mental states. It might be argued that it is part of human intuitions that agency always comes with a biological body. There are no human-like (or hominid-like or maybe even primate-like) bodies without agency and no agency without a biological body. Or not quite so. There are exceptional beliefs about zombie-like bodies that are at least in some sense animated yet lack mentality. (In Haiti, for example, zombies are believed to be remotely controlled by the sorcerer.) We also find a variety of beliefs about agents that do not have ordinary biological bodies. Ghosts, for example, have only an ephemeral body that resembles clouds or mist. The God of Christian theologians is an agent that has beliefs (called “knowledge”) and desires (called “will”) yet lacks a physical body. Moreover, we also find beliefs about solid objects like statues and amulets having agentive properties such as hearing prayers.

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Transferring agency to a solid object violates intuitive ontology and thus is counterintuitive. Denying agency to a human-like body also seems to be a violation of intuitive expectations. Denying an ordinary body to an agent is a more complicated case. Paul Bloom argues that disembodied agency is actually an intuitive idea: one feels that one is an owner of a body, not a being identical with the body. Thus, people feel it as completely natural that agency can be separated from the body, just as happens at death. The question arises, then, whether ideas of ghosts and spirits are also something natural rather than counterintuitive. The question is difficult because personal agency is a much more elusive category than, for example, solid objects. It seems that people intuitively postulate agency to account for certain kinds of event structures, irrespective of whether a physical body as the locus of agency is perceived or not. Yet I argue that the idea of agency triggers intuitive expectations of some kind of bodily form. People cannot imagine pure mentality. Thus, although agency is imagined as something that is not identical with the body, it is not completely separable from embodiment either. It instead is a principle that is responsible for commanding and guiding the body. Souls, for example, can leave and enter bodies, yet they are imagined as flying around in the form of insects or birds, or in some other physical form.

6.2 Soul Beliefs My starting point has been E. B. Tylor ’s and Wilhelm Wundt ’s ideas about various peoples’ soul beliefs. Wundt thought that the oldest soul beliefs concerned what he called a “body-soul” (Körperseele), which was responsible for such properties of a living body as feeling, mental representations, and thinking. It was divided into several different “soul organs.” The “free-soul” or “psyche” was identified with breathing (Hauchseele) and one’s shadow (Schattenseele). It was not constrained by the bounds of the physical body, which it could temporarily leave. In death, when the body stopped breathing, the soul left the body for good. Wundt ’s classification was known to many researchers who studied the soul concepts of North-American Indians and the various Finno-Ugric peoples in Finland, Russia, and the Soviet Union, for example. Although Wundt is often mentioned in passing, classifications similar to his are usually presented as based on independent research (e.g. Uno Harva-Holmberg). A lively debate followed, as scholars tried to establish a reliable classification of types of souls. Ernst Arbman, for example, argued against Wundt that the division between the body-soul and psyche (“free-soul”) belonged to the earliest phase of development and that the idea of psyche was not derived from the idea of a body-soul. Åke Hultkrantz cited Arbman in arguing that we are not dealing with two functions of a single entity but with two different souls the ideas of

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which are equally old. The idea of the free-soul (“psyche”) is based on memories and dreams about other persons, while the idea of the body soul is based on the observation of agents being alive, both bodily and mentally. Ivar Paulson extends Hultkrantz’s typology by dividing the body-soul into a “life-soul” (Lebensseele) and a “self-soul” (Ichseele); the free-soul is further divided into a “double” (Doppelgängerseele) and a “fate-soul” (Schicksalsseele). However, doubts have been raised about people having a unified concept of the soul. Harva, for instance, argued that the peoples he had studied did not have any explicit doctrine of the soul, only ideas with associative connections. He warned scholars not to follow Tylor and project their own “learned concepts” of soul onto primitive peoples. From the cognitive perspective, these “soul concepts” are folk-psychological conceptualizations of agency. It is striking how the soul concepts correspond with the various aspects of agency as scholars describe them. Leslie divides agentive properties into mechanical, actional, and cognitive ones. Agents are self-propelled, act teleologically in pursuit of goals, and have cognitive capacities such as thinking and remembering. Of these, the mechanical properties correspond to the liveliness and self-propelledness for which the body-soul is responsible; actional properties correspond to the embodied emotional and cognitive functions that the body-soul bestows on the body; finally, cognitive properties correspond to the free-soul, which is not constrained by the body. In addition to the souls of live human beings there are also souls of the dead and other kinds of spirits. Beliefs about evil spirits, as found in the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of witches) of 1486, by Heinrich Kramer (also known as Institoris), offer an example. Institoris said that evil spirits made themselves bodies that had a shape, using air, which they made thicker with the aid of “coarse vapors lifted from the earth.” This is a kind of a subtle body, somehow transcending the difference between materiality and spirituality as people know them. Another example I discussed was that of some more modern beliefs about ghosts in the Finnish tradition as well as in Afro-Brazilian spirit possession cults. Ghosts are souls of the dead that appear to the living in one form or another. In spirit possession, they invade living bodies and speak through them. There are also spirits that do not come into a human body, such as the spirits of the forest and of waters (encantados) in the Brazilian spirit possession cults; persons do not speculate much about their nature or location, however. Families of such spirits occupy their respective territories (encantarias) in an unseen world that is somehow parallel to the material world that humans inhabit. Guthrie argues that people tend to see human-like but nonhuman beings everywhere because evolution has programmed humans to postulate agency on the basis of minimal cues—because it is better to mistake a coiled rope for a snake than the other way around, for example. Boyer points out that the HADD (see chapter 1, section 1.3.1) can be adaptive, on the condition that people are

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capable of swiftly discarding false positives. Actually, despite his use of the term “hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agent detection device” (HADD), it may be only animacy detection that is hyperactive. When one sees faces in the clouds and so forth, it is a question of inferring the presence of an animate being; one does not necessarily make any assumptions about the beliefs and desires (i.e. mentality) of this being (in some cases this may happen, though). The reverse may also happen: thinking of what someone else might be thinking about at a given moment may trigger a feeling of the presence of that person. In such cases, ideas about mentality trigger animacy assumptions. However, when people start to make inferences about the beliefs and desires of agents, they use mind reading, also known as “mentalizing ” and ToM. Being able to embed one intentional state within another in a series and thus, for example, to think about what another person is thinking about a third person who thinks about what I am thinking is a unique capacity of humans (Dennett ’s “orders on intentionality ”). Humans can also make inferences about the beliefs and ideas of absent or even imaginary agents: if such-and-such a person or being exists, then he or she might think thus-and-so in this or that situation. Because agency has only a loose connection with bodily form in humans’ minds, they can postulate all kinds of agents whose agency is not constrained by ordinary physical boundaries. Gods are among such beings.

6.3 Gods In many cases, it is not possible to distinguish between spirits and gods. For example, the Orìshas of the Yoruba religion (discussed in chapter 3, section 3.2) are both ancestral spirits and divinities under the high God Olorun or Olódùmarè. The word vodon (> “Voodoo”) in the Fon language of Benin and Togo means both “god” and “spirit ” (Davis 1986, 11). And the Japanese word kami in the Shinto religion refers to both spirits and gods, such as Amaterasu. The devas of Indian religions can be seen as gods, demigods, spirits, or some other variety of supernatural agency, depending on which deva one is speaking of. Īśvara (“Lord”) comes closer to the Christian God in being a creator. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between supernatural agents and supernatural agency. I quoted Ernst Kantorowicz’s classical study The King ’s Two Bodies to show that under certain conditions, it is possible to regard a natural agent ’s agency as supernatural, in that it is both detached from all ordinary physical constraints and given a new kind of embodiment in social institutions. The king ’s “body politic,” for example, could not be seen or handled and consists of “Policy and Government.” It was also understood to be “utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities.” For an ordinary peasant, the king or queen was often an invisible but extremely powerful agent, almost comparable to God. Although from our modern, scholarly

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point of view there is a world of difference between a king and God, for many persons in bygone ages this has not been so. I have therefore used the concept of “supernatural agent ” as applicable in all cases of supernatural agency, even if the actual agent is natural from the objective point of view. Only gods are supernatural from the objective point of view. The idea of gods is basically an idea of agency without ordinary bodily constraints; often this is supplemented by one more relaxation of constraints: the mind of a god is like a one-way mirror-window, in that god sees what humans are thinking of but humans cannot know the minds of gods. The human intuition seems to be that even though the mind is nonphysical, it is impenetrable to other minds, at least partly: only I know what I really think. The minds of gods are thus also impenetrable, even though the human mind is not impenetrable for gods and other supernatural agents, such as buddhas. There may also be ignorant gods, but usually the role of a dummy is reserved for evil beings such as the Devil or the Buddhist Māra. The relative or absolute omniscience of gods cannot be due to their incorporeality, because the human soul is also often understood as transcending bodily boundaries; yet it is not omniscient. Instead, some sort of omniscience is an inherent characteristic of the minds of supernatural agents. Both Bronkhorst (2001) and Boyer (2001), apparently independently of each other, have observed that omniscience should not be understood literally; instead, the omniscience of supernatural agents means that they know the contents of other minds and the moral value of human deeds. These exist in the mind of a god. Thus, the idea of gods is very much an idea of free agency with full access to strategic knowledge (as Boyer calls it). The idea of god would simply not be possible without the human capacity for mentalizing and postulating minds on freely acting agents. It is in this sense that the ideas of souls and of gods belong together, as Tylor once suggested. Mentioning Tylor should not mean forgetting Durkheim. Religion is also a social phenomenon, and this fact becomes obvious in the omniscience of gods. The idea of a god who knows all minds comes close to Durkheim’s “collective consciousness” and the view that gods are representations of a group’s central values and norms. I predicted that the shared knowledge of a group would be difficult to represent because of the huge amount of recursive embeddings: I know that she knows that he knows that we know what they know, and so forth. Some kind of chunking is needed; the varying points of view must be somehow combined. Humans do this by imagining a supermind that in a way contains all other minds. Knowing the mind of a god equals knowing everything directly, instead of the more cumbersome way of representing such chains as “his ideas of her ideas of their ideas . . . of my ideas.” I have examined the God concepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition. From a historical point of view, there is a development from mythological narratives to philosophically elaborated doctrines of God. Although the anthropomorphic

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gods of Semitic myths had physical features and a spatial location, the Christian God gradually grew into a philosophical Absolute that yet has a will and knowledge. The Scholastics tried to explain how it is possible for God to know everything, including the future, without human agents losing their free will and without the kind of determinism in which everything happens by necessity. It was also a challenge to explain how God could have freely chosen to create or not to create the world, because the ancient modal theory, (P) (see chapter 4, section 4.1.3), said that all genuine possibilities must be realized at some point in time. The emergence of Nominalism among the Franciscans in the fourteenth century introduced a new kind of modal logic. For the first time, the idea of a purely logical possibility was suggested (first by Duns Scotus). Something could be logically possible without ever actually having happened. Now it was also possible to think that one acted out of free will when it was logically possible for the person in question to have chosen otherwise. Thus, God’s possibilities increased hugely, as his actions were no longer temporally constrained. Yet, on the other hand, Nominalism shifted the emphasis from universals to individuals. “Humanity,” for example, was a mentally constructed abstraction based on the existence of multiple individually existing human beings. It did not exist as an abstract universal. By the same token, the Aristotelian view of the world and the sciences became inadequate. Aristotelianism in theology and natural philosophy had meant that a scholar ’s task was only to learn what was already known, based on the observations made by Aristotle, and to systematize this knowledge. The ideas of empirical study of the natural world and of new discoveries did not exist. With Nominalism and the Enlightenment, this changed. God became an unnecessary hypothesis in natural philosophy, although scholars by and large still believed that God existed. Such Scholastics as Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and Robert Holcot had argued that some theological propositions were outright incomprehensible and could only be accepted on faith. In the Reformation, this attitude was extended to all of theology, and natural reason was confined to earthly matters only. It soon became difficult to see what kind of role religion actually could play in everyday life. Whereas Scholasticism by its extreme abstractness had largely destroyed the everyday relevance of religion, Protestantism gradually did the same thing by distinguishing the “spiritual dominion” from the “worldly” one. Various anti-Scholastic movements such as the devotio moderna, the Beghards, and the Beguines, as well as Pietism within Protestantism, were reactions to this loss of relevance. I have used Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, which yields the following prediction: (a) When the processing costs of two interpretations are equivalent, an inferentially richer interpretation is favored; ( b) when the inferential potential is the same, the less costly interpretation is favored.

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Cognitive costliness means that the amount of time and resources it takes to process a costly concept or idea in mind is greater than the benefits achieved. To the extent that persons try to maximize the cost-benefit relationship, abstract theology is always at a disadvantage compared to simpler forms of religious reasoning (“folk religion”; see Pyysiäinen 2004b; Martin 2004b). I have called theological ideas “prescribed” in contrast to the intuitive, “actual” ideas of persons. Actual ideas do not usually form any coherent doctrinal system; the recurrent patterns we find in them instead derive from the natural inclinations of the human mind, most notably the tendency to use agent-causality as an explanation for things that happen and the concomitant “promiscuous teleology” (Deb Kelemen’s expression). In the Christian traditions, this is expressed in ideas of God deciding on each and everyone’s fate as well as that of the whole world. Things do not happen merely mechanically and by chance; they instead follow a preexisting plan and God’s will. This was also apparent in subjects’ written responses to the question “How would you describe God to someone who does not know anything about Christianity?” In their responses, subjects most often described God as an omnipotent and omniscient creator and maintainer of the world and of human life. The natural world thus has been designed for a purpose: everything exists and happens because God wants it to. According to the prescribed doctrine, God is pure spirit; persons may also cite this doctrine in everyday attempts at trying to describe God, although it is hardly possible in practice to imagine a completely bodiless agent. In theology, God as pure spirit acts in the world through Christ. With the death and resurrection of Christ, the Church itself became the material component of God’s agency: the Church is the “mystical body” of Christ. The Church as an institution is understood as an agent whose mentality is from God and animacy is from the Holy Spirit. Thus, God’s agency consists of the same three components as human agency: liveliness (Holy Spirit), teleological action (Christ), and cognition (God the Father). Christ also joins together “many distinct spirits,” thus making them as though a single spirit (Augustine). The unity of Christians was seen as both a unity of belief and a union of love; schism and heresy consisted of cutting oneself off from the mystical body of Christ. In this way, the ideas of God and Christ helped represent the recursive structure of shared knowledge: I believe that you believe that I believe that we believe, and so forth. This also implies that one’s agency is not only individual; to the extent that personal agency is partly independent from the biological body yet also receives its individuality from the body, the disembodiment of agency means a partial blurring of the boundaries of individuality. The question of the location of dead agents received two different answers in the writings of the New Testament, for example. The dead are imagined as in their graves, waiting for the day of resurrection; yet death is imagined as an immediate entry into either heaven or hell. When a dead agent is represented as a ghost, he or she is often

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believed to dwell around the grave or the house (see Pyysiäinen 2007). When the emphasis is on the dead agent ’s absence rather than presence, he or she is often understood as being merely “somewhere there” or “with God.” According to Paul, for example, living Christians were “in Christ,” while after death they were “with Christ.” Agency continues after death, but it is imagined as stripped of from the more bodily aspects of perception, cognition, and experience (see Bering 2002).

6.4 Buddhas An obvious alternative to a continued disembodied existence is the kind of rebirth or reincarnation we find in “Hinduism.” It is not a qualitatively different option from, for example, the Brazilian spirit beliefs. In spirit possession, disembodied spirits come temporarily to an adult human body; in rebirth, a spirit or soul comes to a body at birth and stays there for as long as the body lives. What remains the same is the idea that an agentive principle can leave and enter bodies. The idea of endless chains of reincarnations may actually be a kind of folk genetics gone wild—the observation that children resemble their parents and other relatives having led to the idea that certain characteristic traits are somehow transferred from elders to offspring. Before scientific genetics, people had no idea of the mechanism of such inheritance, although the fact that the offspring resembled their parents was too obvious to have gone without notice. Even in cultures where there are no clearly articulated views about continuous reincarnation, we can find such customs as, for example, naming a child after a dead relative or a famous saint, thus bestowing on the child some of the properties of the relative or saint (or the name is given because the child is already believed to have the properties of the relative or the saint; see Pentikäinen 1990). Reincarnation thus is not an arbitrary “doctrine” but an intuitive idea that keeps reappearing in various cultures despite the theologians’ warnings against it. In India, the idea of rebirth has been accompanied by the idea of karma: everything that is or happens is determined by the actions of living beings or by the intentions behind the actions of living beings. Yet it is very difficult in practice to explain events by karmic causes because one is always dealing with multiple variables. Many events that take place affect many persons at once, which makes it difficult to point out the exact links between karmic causes and effects. Karma is usually regarded as something belonging to an individual; yet if a hundred persons are killed by an earthquake, they all have the same cause of death ( broadly speaking). Does this, then, mean that they all had exactly the same kind of bad karma? How is one to analyze the causes and effects in such collective events? Moreover, if it is maintained that the earthquake happened

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in order that a given individual (or a group of individuals) receive a punishment, intentions are attributed to natural events. Certain Indian traditions have tried to avoid such promiscuous teleology and to provide a mechanical account of karma—but this has turned out to be difficult, though. An easy solution has been to postulate a god who knows the effects of the deeds of living beings and creates everything according to the nature of their deeds. The Vaiśesikas, for example, assigned a central role in the retribution of karma to God (Īśvara). It was God who read the karma from persons’ intentions and assigned them their deserved fates. The price of this argument was that God could not have any freedom of will. He was merely a passive record keeper. Thus, the ideas of karma and reincarnation are surprisingly similar to the Christian idea of divine rewards and punishments. The similarity also extends to the problem of free will: if the deeds of human individuals are to have a moral value, individuals must have the freedom to choose between good and evil. This, then, implies that God cannot be omniscient, because God knowing at time t1 that person X will commit an act Z at t2, makes it necessary for X to do Z. In Indian discussions, God’s passivity has not been a central problem, however. Authors have been more interested in developing an account of karma than in saving the freedom of God. In Buddhism, the formula of dependent coarising ( pratītyasamutpāda) serves as an alternative explanation. It is possible that it was once meant as a critique of the cosmogonical myth of the Rgveda. It is not from ātman as the primeval man ( purusa) that the whole world has arisen; instead, the whole phenomenal world arises from ignorance (avidyā). Birth, aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, suffering, grief, and depression are “unsatisfactory” (duhkham) and arise because of ignorance. What is regarded as the cognizing subject (ātman) is not anything separable from the continuous coarising of phenomena; the ātman is as conditioned as anything else. Even though the idea of reincarnation is part of Buddhism as it has come to be known to us, it is very difficult to combine rebirth with the ideas of dependent coarising and the nonexistence of a permanent and immutable “self ” (ātman). The five constituents of an individual (skandhas) are taken apart at death and then recombine in a new birth in a way that is determined by the individual’s karma; postulating any other continuity between the two lives is against the doctrine of soullessness (anātman). Therefore, I have ventured to speculate that rebirth may not have been part of the earliest Buddhist doctrine. We will never know if this is true; but this option would certainly make the Buddhist doctrine more coherent. It also helps solve the problem of promiscuous teleology: everything that happens can be explained mechanically and without the idea of God. Some later Buddhist authors have chosen another way of solving the problem and have taken recourse to idealism. In the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda school, the problem of mental causation was solved by arguing that the “impressions”

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(vāsanā) of deeds enter into consciousness (vijñānasāntana) and bear fruit in the mind only. In other words, the karmic consequences of actions are something we imagine. This leads either to solipsism or the idea of some kind of supermind encompassing all individual minds (Boyer ’s “full-access strategic agent ”), but the Yogācārins did not want to adopt either. I have raised the possibility, therefore, that the real point of the “mind-only” doctrine was more epistemological than ontological: one can only have knowledge about one’s own mental contents, but this is not to deny the existence of an external reality. Prescribed doctrines are one thing, the actual beliefs of persons another. Although an intellectualist and textualist tradition has dominated Buddhist studies, there have also been a number of attempts at mapping the beliefs of living Buddhists. They show that although the prescribed doctrine is that the Buddha is dead, in actual practice he is emotionally felt to be present in his relics and images. This is a distinction not simply between cognitive and emotional representations, as has been suggested, but between prescribed and actual ideas. Folk psychology is not devoid of cognitive elements, and reflective thinking is not entirely free of emotion (see the appendix). In the Buddhist doctrine, the Buddha’s continued presence is conceptualized as the Buddha’s body being identical with the Dharma (dharmakāya). The Dharma (the texts) is also regarded as a type of relic of the Buddha. The relics and images of the Buddha thus are the physical form in which ideas about the continued presence of the Buddha’s agency lives on.

6.5 Supernatural Agents Beliefs such as these are culture-specific versions of the cross-culturally recurrent pattern of a “promiscuous teleology”: the tendency to see things as existing and happening for a purpose. This phenomenon is based on the cognitive mechanisms of HAD, HUI, and HTR (see chapter 1, introduction to section 1.3). These cognitive mechanisms channel the spread of beliefs about supernatural agents; supernatural agent concepts are contagious because they resonate with an innate tendency to view more or less everything in teleological and intentional terms, and because they help process recursive orders of intentionality (“We know that they know that we know that they know ” and so on all the way to “God/the Buddha knows”). Humans do not consciously use supernatural agents as a “symbol” of the group (cf. Durkheim); instead, humans spontaneously and intuitively attribute the group’s shared knowledge to a kind of supermind. It is because of this tendency that the various culture-specific forms of supernatural agent concepts are contagious and easy to spread. They give a form to a vague intuition. The various types of natural and supernatural agency can, in principle, be mapped in a Cartesian coordinate system in which the x-axis describes

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the degree of mental activity from zombies to omniscience and the y-axis the degree of embodiment from ordinary biological bodies to a lack of body. Humans are placed somewhere near the origin (O) on this plane. The various kinds of spirits and demons are embodied to varying degrees and can also be more or less intelligent. A z-axis is needed to express the fact that, for example, the embodiment of a given spirit may be understood differently at times t1, t2, and so on. Thus, we get a three-dimensional space where different types of supernatural agents can be located. If we give numerical values to the degrees of mental activity and embodiment of particular types of agency, we can use algebraic equations to describe the location of types of agency on the coordinate system. My two main points here are, first, that the various kinds of supernatural agents in the world’s religious traditions are comparable across cultures because the cognitive mechanisms of HAD, HUI, and HTR sustain a crossculturally recurrent pattern of perception and reasoning. Second, representations of supernatural agents, in that they are related to the need to understand the ways others understand the minds of others, are intimately linked with the organization of human societies. Gods typically have more or less open access to all beings’ mental contents, thus transcending the world of a single human individual. Gods are typically not used to advance only the worldly interests of separate individuals; they instead relate to the common good of groups (see Pyysiäinen 2004d, 90–112). As Heinrich Institoris put it in his Hammer of Witches, good Christians perform miracles in accordance with the divine order and “in accordance with public harmony”; a magician operates through a private contract and works “through a pact into which he has entered with an evil spirit ” (2007, 71– 72; see Durkheim 1925, 60–63, 1965, 59–61). Gods therefore relate to the human goals that are transcendent, while spirits are related with those that are immanent and purely practical. Gods’ access to agents’ mental contents thus is limited; people often consider evil spirits even more ignorant and foolish than an average human. Even though God and spirits are clearly distinguished in Christian theology, this is not so in all other traditions. The distinction between an all-knowing God and mere spirits seems to be a feature of the kinds of doctrinal religion that are characteristic of large populations. In these, the coordination of the norms, values, and other forms of shared knowledge becomes important, and people’s commitment to them is ensured by making the abstract community more concrete through public rituals that engage with gods as either agents or patients of actions. In smaller communities, it is not necessary make an effort to create the group through doctrine and rituals, so rituals aim instead at an emotional arousal that strengthens the mutual solidarity among the participants, who all know each other personally. Such rituals tend to focus more on spirits (e.g. ancestors) than on gods, and more on emotional arousal than on doctrinal unity.

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6.6 Delusion or Delight? I have touched on the recent debates on the (ir)rationality of religion (Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2006; Edis 2002, 2007; Hitchens 2007; Stenger 2007), in which a very long process of rational elaboration of mythological ideas is today coming to a logical end (see chapter 4, section 4.1.6). While gods and other supernatural agents are an integral part of everyday thinking in folk religion, rational reflection has consistently led to the view that ultimately the nature of supernatural agents is beyond human reasoning powers. Before the emergence of science, this was not particularly problematic, because everyday theories of natural phenomena are very static, and because Aristotelian natural philosophy was not concerned with new empirical findings. Thus, a relatively open place was reserved for God at the fringes of human imagination. However, with the emergence and incredible success of empirical science, it became no longer clear what kind of God really could be postulated “beyond” the grasp of human understanding. First, human understanding has penetrated to unforeseen new areas, and second, scientific knowledge keeps growing and approximating truth more and more closely in an unending process (see Niiniluoto 1984, 1987). There are now two options: either God’s nature can be scientifically studied or God is completely beyond scientific inquiry. Theologians are usually wise enough to discard the first alternative, because it is easy to see that it leads to a dead end: science cannot find God1 (Stenger 2007; cf. Swinburne 1996). Thus, it becomes necessary to claim that God is somehow beyond the reach of science. This, however, leads to the following argument: 1. Whatever is part of the empirical reality is not God; whatever is not part of empirical reality is God ( because God cannot have rivals); 2. Scientific inquiry into the empirical reality increases humans’ knowledge and understanding of the empirical reality; 3. Scientific knowledge keeps on approximating truth; 4. Therefore, scientific inquiry increases our knowledge of what God is not. Note that if the ancient (P) is not valid, and all possibilities are not necessarily realized, scientific knowledge can grow forever (Niiniluoto 1984, 86). If God is “beyond” the reach of science and the scientific view of the world keeps changing, then our understanding of God must also change. This, of course, is something theologians have always denied because there is supposed to be only one, and a complete, “revelation.” It does not help to argue that God is immutable and eternal and science has certain a priori limits beyond which it can never grow. First, the existence of such limits would have to be shown empirically (which has not been done), and second, scientific knowledge

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already has grown, so God is understood differently in 2008 from, for example, 1008. Thus it seems that science can approximate truth about God in the same way it approximates truth about the empirical reality; the odd thing is that it is the natural sciences, not theology, that approach God (without assuming anything about God’s existence). Theology is only reactionary. When knowledge and understanding about physical reality in this way constrain religious imagination, growth of scientific knowledge always narrows down the range of possible interpretations of religious concepts. The concept of God must be constantly reinterpreted, and this is precisely what has happened in the course of history. It might also be argued that religious concepts are mere metaphors or a kind of mental imagery with no reference in the material world (see Munz 1959; Wisdom 1944); so religious concepts cannot be used in making inferences about things and events in the world as ordinarily perceived. Yet it is precisely such inferences that make religious concepts useful and important. If inferential potential is lost, religious concepts will either be dumped in the trash bin of history or radically reinterpreted. Dawkins and the “new atheists” recommend the first alternative; modern theologians such as Tillich the latter. However, the El and Yahweh of the Old Testament texts have so little in common with Tillich’s God as “being-itself ” that it may not be entirely clear what is lost when God is denied. Some theologians have even tried to develop ideas about the death of God (e.g. Robinson 1963) and about religion as mere fiction (Kliever 1981). But as any cognitivist would predict, such ideas are not terribly contagious; people do not easily adopt them because they do not have much inferential potential in everyday life. What about atheism, then? Dawkins (2006) argues that religion is a dangerous delusion, and he seems to have acquired many followers. Durkheim also argued that religion was a form of delusion, illusion, or hallucination (délire).2 His point was, first, that mental representations are not based on pure perception; people perceive everything through the lens of “the social” and thus add a meaning to sense data and project their own sentiments and feelings onto external objects. Nearly all social representations are illusory in this sense; religious beliefs are only one particular case of this general law (Durkheim 1925, 295–304, 321–25, 1965, 237–44, 255–60). Durkheim’s second point was that the illusory nature of religion has to do with the fact that the “believers” are not aware of the way the social affects them. God or “the social” affects persons “through mental pathways.” Although this pressure is real and has objective meaning and value, its nature is not correctly understood by the “believers,” who, for example, imagine themselves to be transported into an entirely different world in religious experience. What is this but délire? Durkheim asks. The intensity of religious life implies a psychical exaltation that obviously is reminiscent of an illusion. Thus, when the primitives ascribed the cause of religious ecstasy to an external power appearing

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in the form of a plant or an animal, they were wrong only about the name of the cause (sur la lettre du symbole), not about its existence. The exaltation is real, and it is caused by forces outside and superior to the individual, that is, “the social.” Religion is illusory, but this illusion is well founded (Durkheim 1925, 294–304, 320–25, 1965, 236–44, 255–60; see Pyysiäinen 2005d). Dawkins’s thesis is more radical, although he, like Durkheim, thinks that we can “only understand religious behavior once we have renamed it” (Dawkins 2006, 174). Dawkins asks the reader to think of the moth that flies into the candle flame and dies. As the moth seems to do this deliberately and on purpose, we may well ask why. Scholars might get so fascinated about this fact that a new discipline emerged: the study of self-immolation behavior in moths. Yet we can only understand this self-immolation behavior after we have renamed it, because it is quite meaningless to ask, for example, why moths commit suicide. We should instead ask what the nervous and perceptual system of a moth is like and how it leads the poor moth to fly to the flame. The answers will consist in a purely mechanistic explanation. The moth as a species has evolved in an environment without any candles; the only night lights they have seen have been the moon and the stars. Because the moon and the stars are at optical infinity, the rays coming from them are parallel and can be used as compasses. The moth’s nervous system makes possible a rule of thumb saying: “Steer a course such that the light rays hit your eye at an angle of 30 degrees.” In this way, the insect finds its way back home (Dawkins 2006, 172– 73). Now, we can say that the moth flies to the candle flame because its nervous system has been designed by natural selection to steer the insect toward light coming from a 30-degree angle. Because the candle is not at optical infinity, the rays of light are not parallel but diverge like the spokes of a wheel. The nervous system applying a 30-degree rule will steer the poor moth, via a spiral trajectory, into the flame (Dawkins 2006, 173). What was called self-immolation behavior is only a by-product of a nervous system designed to do something completely different. Interestingly, this is precisely what the standard model in the cognitive science of religion (Boyer 2005a) claims: religion is only a by-product of evolved cognitive mechanisms (e.g. Barrett 2004b; Boyer 1994b; Pyysiäinen 2001b). Thus, we may well ask how “natural” religion really is, if it really is only a by-product of evolved cognitive mechanisms (cf. McCauley 2000). What does it actually mean for religion to be “natural”? And does such naturalness really mean that religion is immune to all kinds of scientific criticism and will of necessity persist in human cultures until the end of time? I doubt it. I recall that Boyer once replied to a journalist ’s question that saying that the world would be a better place without religion is like saying that the world would be much better without gravity. Wishful thinking just cannot change the facts. Even though Boyer was speaking as a scientist and not as a defender of religion, I do not think this analogy is entirely valid. Whereas gravity is an empirically necessary feature of the physical conditions on earth, religion is

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not. Religion is a by-product of certain cognitive capacities (a “spandrel”), and one can, in principle, live without it just as one can live without an appendix, for instance. Yet having an appendix is at least as natural as being religious. In Europe, the traditional, institutional forms of religiosity have actually been declining for quite some time. Yet “spirituality” and new religious movements prosper (see e.g. Ketola 2008). This might actually be taken as a proof of the naturalness of religion: religion persists even when its institutional support is withdrawn. Some cognitive scientists of religion, indeed, think that religion is natural, while science is unnatural, and that religion will persist even if science does not (McCauley 2000; see Wolpert 1994). Therefore, we should not ask, for example, why North Americans are so religious; the real question is why Europeans are not (see Barrett 2004b, 107–18). I agree that for the time being, religion seems to persist in some form or another; but to the extent that its naturalness is “derived” rather than “intrinsic,” religion is not a necessity in the same sense as gravity. The mechanisms of mind obviously can also be used to criticize religion. Although folk psychology may be here to stay, religion—as far as we can distinguish it from nonreligion—does not have to be part of it. Although it is utopistic to expect that scientific thinking could simply replace folk psychology, it certainly is possible to allow more room for critical reflection on folk beliefs. Science certainly can and should challenge religious beliefs; there is no reason why one aspect of reality should be a priori excluded from the purview of science. As Ted Peters puts it (without necessarily sharing my views), “there is no ‘science free’ zone today where theology can proceed with its business untrammeled by the caleidoscopic pictures of reality projected by the various sciences” (2002, xii). This is not simply a plea for a higher level of education. Increase in education and reflective thinking does not at all necessarily lead to an abandoning of supernatural beliefs (see Lindeman and Aarnio 2007). As we have seen, reflection can also be used to enrich and embellish counterintuitive and supernatural beliefs. All kinds of social, cultural, and personality issues have an effect on how reflection is used. In addition, it is not that easy to tell religion apart from everything else. Although the “new atheists” tend to use the word “religion” as if there were a general consensus on what belongs to religion and what does not, this really is not the case (see Geertz 2004). Thus, in the future, reflective thinking could be used to transform religious concepts and beliefs in such a way that we would hardly continue to recognize them as religious, even though violations of intuitive ontology would still remain (see Markusson 2007). In my view, using reflective thinking and the best scientific evidence to continuously reevaluate all kinds of cherished beliefs is far more important than vigorously attacking an imagined totality (a quasi agent of sorts) called “religion.” If “religion” as we know it withers away some day, this will be a by-product of other changes—just as religion once emerged as a by-product.


Appendix Cognitive Processes and Explaining Religion

A.1 Dual-process Theories and Modularity A.1.1 Intuitive and Explicit Processes The cognitive science of religion very much rests on the rather vague distinction between “intuitions” and “reflective beliefs” (Barrett 1999, 2004a). While it is true that people seem to use two different types of reasoning, a spontaneous and intuitive one, and a reflective and systematic one (Ch. 1.1.), it is not altogether clear how this distinction actually should be drawn (cf. Pyysiäinen 2003b,c, 2004c; Tremlin 2005, 2006, 172–82). Simply put, intuitive cognitive processes seem to be fast and easy, whereas reflective processes take time and effort (see Anderson and Lebiere 2003; Sperber 1996, 89–92, 1997; Stanovich and West 2000). It is, for example, easy to recognize faces, whereas higher mathematics gives most people a hard time. Computers work in the opposite way: face recognition or reading handwriting is relatively difficult to program, but even a simple pocket calculator outperforms humans in computing tasks. Since around 1990, the so-called dual-process theories explaining this dichotomy have probably been the most popular large-scale theories in research on social cognition (Deutsch and Strack 2006). Scholars have differentiated between two types of neural pathways, cognitive mechanisms, and mental contents; examples follow. • Automatic v. controlled processes (see Kokinov 1997; Sun 2002, 16–18); • Intuitive v. analytical thinking (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1987); • Subconceptual v. conceptual processes (Smolensky 1988);

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appendix • Intuition and implicit learning v. a deliberative, analytic strategy (Lieberman 2000); • A reflexive v. a reflective system (Lieberman et al. 2002); • Associative v. rule-based systems (Sloman 1996, 1999); • “Mindless top-down” v. “mindful bottom-up” processes (Moskowitz et al. 1999); • An experiential or intuitive v. a rational mode of thinking (Denes-Raj and Epstein 1994; Epstein and Pacini 1999; Epstein et al. 1992; Simon et al. 1997); • An effortless processing mode that works through associative retrieval or pattern completion in the slow-learning system elicited by a salient cue v. a more laborious processing mode that involves the intentional retrieval of explicit, symbolically represented rules from either of the two memory systems to guide processing (Smith and DeCoster 2000); • Implicit v. explicit cognition (Holyoak and Spellman 1993); • Intuitive v. reflective beliefs (Cosmides and Tooby 2000; Sperber 1997).

Important differences between these dichotomies notwithstanding, this list as a whole describes distinctions that characterize the two systems of reasoning I have labeled the A- and B-systems (Pyysiäinen 2004c) and Stanovich and West (2000) have labeled systems 1 and 2. The distinction between these two systems seems to run somehow parallel to the distinction of “cognitivism/functionalism” versus “connectionism” in cognitive science. According to the cognitivist/functionalist view, sensory experience is somehow “transduced” into amodal symbols that are stored in the brain and can be retrieved and manipulated at will (see Barsalou 1999; Barsalou et al. 2005). In this view, behavior regulation takes place through various kinds of algorithms that resemble computer programs. Electrochemical impulses travel along neuronal pathways much the way electric current travels on silicon chips. Different tasks require different kinds of computer programs: we use Word for writing text, Excel for computing, and Photoshop for creating images, for example. The human mind is a similar set of different programs (“modules”) for such tasks as face recognition, agent detection, cheater detection, and so forth. These programs unfold in development and are “triggered” by the proper input, thus being by and large independent of developmental processes (see Pinker 1998, 27–31; cf. Lickliter and Honeycutt 2003b, 822–24). An alternative to cognitivism is the kind of connectionism that emphasizes the fact that some cognitive tasks may not involve rule-based processing at all; they are instead handled by constraint-based, parallel distributed processing that is working to optimize, not maximize, performance (see Elman et al. 1998; Prince and Smolensky 2004; Tesar and Smolensky 2000). Connectionism emphasizes that the brain guides behavior without performing abstract computations on fixed mental representations within a language-like structure. Whereas in Fodorian functionalism almost all concepts are regarded as being innate (see Laurence and Margolis 2002), connectionism does not require the “nothing more from something less” principle. The so-called neural nets show cumulative learning to be possible with only a minimal initial bias (Churchland 1989, 1995; Elman et al. 1998; Goldblum 2001).1 Whereas older dual-process theories merely assumed two different routes to judgments, a new family of dual-system models invokes two mental systems, as in Deutsch and Strack’s (2006) reflective-impulsive model (RIM), for example. In this model, social

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cognition and behavior is a function of a reflective system (RS) and an impulsive system (IS), each operating according to different representations and computations. Although the two systems serve different functions and have different conditions for optimal functioning, they operate interactively. My A-system is responsible for fast, associative, and emotionally colored thinking with purely practical goals, receiving information from innate, biologically instantiated dispositions and from the environment through analogic encoding. It is a subsymbolic pattern-recognition system that seems to rely on connectionist, parallel distributed processing.2 It operates reflexively, not reflectively, drawing inferences and making predictions on the basis of temporal relations and similarity. It employs knowledge derived from personal experience, concrete and generic concepts, images, stereotypes, feature sets, and associative relations, relying on similarity-based generalization and automatic processing. It serves such cognitive functions as intuition, fantasy, creativity, imagination, visual recognition, and associative memory (see esp. Pyysiäinen 2004a; Sloman 1996). The A-system also is largely responsible for what is known as “common sense,” or “everyday thinking.” In contrast to scientific thinking, everyday thought proceeds from individuals’ immediate experience; it aims at short-term, practical efficacy, not at creating general theories; it seeks evidence and not counterevidence; it makes use of individual cases as evidence and personalizes values and ideals; it makes use of abductive inference; and its argumentation often takes a narrative form (Denes-Raj and Epstein 1994; Epstein 1990; Epstein and Pacini 1991; Epstein et al. 1992). The B-system is a rule-based system capable of encoding any information with a well-specified formal structure and works by computing digital information syntactically. It thus needs to rely on external memory stores and cultural communication. Inferences are carried out in a “language of thought” that has a combinatorial syntax and semantics. The rule-based system thus looks for logical, hierarchical, and causalmechanical structure in its environment, operating on symbol manipulation. It derives knowledge from language, culture, and formal systems, employing concrete, generic, and abstract concepts. It serves such cognitive functions as deliberation, explanation, formal analysis, verification, ascription of purpose, and strategic memory (see especially Pyysiäinen 2004c; Sloman 1996). Such complex mental processes as those the social sciences study can hardly be either purely automatic or purely controlled; they instead are combinations of features of each (Bargh 1994; Deutsch and Strack 2006, 170). Yet the distinction between two different systems of reasoning has been successfully applied in the study of judgment and choice in the context of economic behavior, for example (Kahneman 2002, 2003a,b). Economic theory used to be dominated by the conception of humans as selfish and rational maximizers of utility (see Simon 1955, 1959, 1978). In 1950s, Herbert Simon presented the competing idea of “limited rationality,” and in the 1980s new evidence of it began to accumulate. Guth et al. (1982) introduced the “Ultimatum” game and showed experimentally that in low-income countries, people will choose to punish others for an unfair offer rather than accept a small amount of money. The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman provide more experimental evidence to support the claim that persons frame problems to be solved in different ways that the rational choice models cannot account for. Kahneman then developed the idea of “bounded rationality” (in a number of publications that earned him the Nobel Prize in

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2002). Rationality has bounds because tacit and often emotional intuitions intrude on people’s calculating inferences (Kahneman 2002). These bounds also exist in religious reasoning. Those who see the mind as “massively modular” (see below) tend to think that certain tasks are intuitive and easy because they relate to distinct domains about which all humans have tacit knowledge. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (2002, 146), for example, refer to such ability to routinely solve predefined problems as “dedicated intelligence.” It is distinguished from “improvisational intelligence,” which helps solve novel problems for which one does not have tacit intuitions (cf. Kanazawa 2004; see Neisser et al. 1996; see Miller and Penke 2007). The modularity thesis is not without its problems. As a colleague once ironically put it, some seem to think that we know for sure that the mind is modular; what we do not know is what modularity actually means (see Carruthers 2004, 2006; cf. Woodward and Cowie 2004). A.1.2 Modularity of Mind As early members of the genus homo lived in exceptionally stable conditions during the Pleistocene epoch (about 1.6 million to ten thousand years ago), the adaptive problems they had to face remained the same generation after generation. This may have made possible the evolution of domain-specific cognitive adaptations such as social intelligence, cheater detection, and mating preferences. People did not have to think in the modern sense of the word; instead, they could rely on evolved responses that were automatic and modular (Kanazawa 2004; see Johnson 1987). Later, in the face of rapid ecological changes, cognitive plasticity came to be favored, and the so-called general intelligence evolved, either as a modular adaptation (Kanazawa 2004) or as an emergent by-product of modular abilities (Cosmides and Tooby 2002). This is a very important distinction; flexibility in the face of environmental variation seems to be a specifically human (but poorly understood) trait (Alexander 1979, 94–98; Kitcher 1990, 282–88). The crucial issue then becomes in what ways intuitions and general intelligence interact. There are basically two types of intuitions: those acquired through routinization and those that are “innate” (see Bjorklund 2003, 837; Pyysiäinen 2004c). Innate intuitions supposedly are processed by innate cognitive “modules” (in a sense a new version of Durkheim’s “categories”). Routinization, for its part, may be due to explicit or implicit learning, or a mixture of the two. Because persons are not, for example, born with a chess module up and running, becoming a grand master in chess must be due to explicit learning. Modularity, then, is the outcome of a learning process, not its prerequisite (see Buller 2005a, 155; Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994, 5–20; Karmiloff-Smith 1992, 165– 73; Simpson et al. 2005). Implicit learning refers to acquisition of knowledge that by and large takes place independently of conscious attempts to learn and without much explicit knowledge about what has been acquired (Reber et al. 1999). Learning thus can lead to domain-specific skills that are independent from general intelligence or other specialized skills. Evolutionary psychologists argue that most intuitions are evolved adaptations and as such modular,3 while other scholars either deny this or even reject all evolutionary considerations in the case of the human mind.4 While the modularity of perceptual and affective processes is generally accepted (Fodor 1983), the modularity of cognitive

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processes is under debate (see Carruthers 2006, 3; Gerrans 2002). The debate is difficult partly because of the vagueness of the concept of a module. There are at least three basic alternative ways of defining an evolved cognitive module (Gerrans 2002, 307; cf. Craver 2007, 217–21): 1. The human brain consists of distinct neural mechanisms dedicated for solving well-specified problems such as cheater detection, face recognition, and so forth. 2. Cognitive specializations are algorithms individuated by their computational (but not physical) architecture. 3. Humans have domain-specific bodies of innate knowledge. The first alternative is problematic because evolutionary psychology has been isolated from neuroscience and is based almost exclusively on behavioral measures, ignoring neurophysiology and genetics (see Lickliter and Honeycutt 2003a,b; Panksepp and Panksepp 2000; Woodward and Cowie 2004; cf. Sperber 2005); only recently has the importance of neurophysiology been recognized. In Sperber’s words: “the true modularist is interested in ‘boxes’ that correspond to neurologically distinct devices” (2005, 57). A module thus should have a distinct history in the ontogeny of the brain. Biological adaptations are always produced by an environmental selection pressure acting on genetic variation. Thus, for a cognitive function to be an adaptation, it should have a genetic basis. Yet genes can only have an effect on a function by affecting the physical structure of the organism performing the function. Therefore, cognitive modules could only be shown to be adaptations by showing how certain brain structures have been selected for in evolution (Buller 2005a, 85, 200). As Panksepp and Panksepp put it, “without a strong linkage to neuroscientific research, evolutionary psychology has no credible way of determining whether its hypotheses reflect biological realities or only heuristics that permit provocative statistical predictions” (2000, 109; cf. Atran 2005). The second alternative—cognition is based on modular algorithms—best captures the central tenet of evolutionary psychology. Peter Carruthers (2006, xii), for example, defines a module as a functionally distinct processing system of mind, whose operations are at least partly independent of those of others, and the existence and properties of which are partly dissociable from the others. This is a controversial idea (see Edelman 1992; Carruthers 2006, 3). The third alternative leaves room for the idea of domain-general mechanisms processing information that is stored in domain-specific databases (Buller 2005a, 127–200; Gerrans 2002, 307 n. 2; Samuels 2000). We may thus distinguish between representational and computational modules, in that representational modules are mechanisms for storing symbols, while computational modules are mechanisms for processing symbols in a modular fashion. Representational modules are domain-specific bodies of data, while computational modules are domain-specific mechanisms. These two may also interact (Samuels 2000; Simpson et al. 2005, 12–15). Representational modularity means that perception and storage of information takes place in a modular fashion. In computational modularity, the computations on symbols in the brain are also based on modular algorithms that are evolved adaptations.5 Just as humans do not have any general-purpose biological organs but instead have separate organs such as the liver, heart and so on, all serving specific functions, the mind is divided into functionally different units (see Sperber 2005, 54–57).

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As Tooby and Cosmides put it, a “psychological architecture that consisted of nothing but equipotential, general-purpose, content-independent or content-free mechanisms could not successfully perform the tasks the human mind is known to perform” (1995, 34). But training and experience can extend the domain of a module far beyond its original limits, as Boyer and Barrett (2005) observe. Sperber thus suggests that we differentiate between the proper and actual domains of a system. By the proper domain is meant the things the system evolved to represent; the actual domain consists of things that are represented by the system at any given time after the system has evolved. These two do not always completely overlap. It is possible to extend the actual domain by training and experience and thus to create artificial “superstimuli” that have superb power to trigger a given module (Sperber 1994; Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004). A picture of a car with a human-like, smiling face, for example, readily triggers the “ToM module,” in addition to mechanical reasoning (see Guthrie 1993). Sperber and Hirschfeld (2004, 45) predict that ideas that at once trigger two separate intuitive systems may be especially salient. Another example is the ability to read. This is a very demanding cognitive task, for many reasons. Healthy humans learn with considerable ease to recognize, within a fraction of a second, a pattern of light on the retina as a word, irrespective of the position, size, case, or font in which the word is printed (Dehaene et al. 2005). It even “deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are; the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae.” Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues have identified the left occipito-temporal sulcus as the brain area that systematically identifies visual letter strings. This “visual word form system” plays an important role in informing other temporal, parietal, and frontal areas of the identity of the letter string, thus making semantic access and phonological retrieval possible (Dehaene 2005; Dehaene et al. 2005). Although this neural system does not seem to be strictly modular, it nevertheless exemplifies the way an existing neural system is adopted for a new use. The invention of symbol systems such as the alphabet and Arabic numerals relies on an extended range of cortical plasticity unique to humans; small changes to functionally specified brain areas in other primates suffice to adapt these regions to a new cultural domain (“recycling” of preexisting brain circuitry; Dehaene 2005).6 There is, indeed, much plasticity in the human brain. Not all neural connections of the cortex are genetically determined. Brain mechanisms are not built in accordance with rules but result from a “proliferate-and-prune” process of overproduction and subsequent death of unnecessary neurons (apoptosis) (Buller 2005a, 197–98;7 see Changeux 1985; Edelman 1992; Panksepp 1998, 61– 79). The brain builds itself in ontogenetic interaction with the environment (see Lickliter and Honeycutt 2003a,b). Only the general structure is genetically controlled, while many areas of the cortex have much plasticity in the ways they help their owner adapt to the environment (Buller 2005a, 132; Deacon 1998, 193–224; Kujala, Alho, and Näätänen 2000; Panksepp and Panksepp 2000). The human brain starts to develop about twenty-five days after conception, growing at the rate of 250,000 cells per minute. This continues until birth, with cell production taking place differently in the evolutionarily older parts of the brain (the midbrain and the limbic system) than in the more recent, cortical part. In the older parts, newly formed cells are simply added by pushing existing cells outward; in the cortex, cells “migrate” to their final destination through a long and winding path. Some time after birth, the brain’s development takes a different form: the neurons and synapses that

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are not needed start to die. An adult brain thus is sculptured by gradually subtracting extra neurons and neural connections. The kinds of environmental stimuli the developing child is exposed to play a crucial role in shaping the neural circuitry of the cortex. Patterns of innervation from sensory receptors are projected on more and more remote brain structures, so that even the circuits that have almost no direct connection with sensory receptors yet are shaped by sensory perception (Buller 2005a, 131–35; Changeux 1985; Edelman 1992). As there is no genetically encoded developmental program responsible for the functional roles of different cortical circuitries, the idea of hundreds of genetically encoded cognitive modules becomes suspect. It might instead be the cortical plasticity that is an adaptation. There is continual reorganization in the brain, and most cognitive processes are not isolated from each other. Neural circuits may be domain-sensitive, but they are not encapsulated. This concerns the neocortex in particular; the older parts of the brain seem to work differently and to contain more rigidly dedicated systems (Buller 2005a, 135–43). The newer theories of modularity actually reject Fodor’s (1983) old criteria for modularity, emphasizing that there may be different degrees of encapsulation and modules may even share parts with each other.8 A modular system is turned on by a specific kind of information yet may need to consult also other systems. Face recognition, for example, may require consulting naïve physics but is not turned on without its proper input. Modules are isolable function-specific processing systems, all or most of which are domain-specific. Most (but not all) of them also are domain-specific in their input conditions. Although some modules are genetically channeled, many are constructed through learning (Barrett and Kurzban 2006; Carruthers 2006). Carruthers (2006, 150–210) argues that it is unlikely that the primate mind would have been so changed in evolution that its modular architecture would have been swept away. Nor is it plausible that the human mind is only the end-product of an increase in processing power. Instead, new modules have been added, especially the modules for ToM, language, and for dealing with social norms. To the extent that the evolutionarily older parts of the human brain process spontaneous and unreflective behavioral responses and emotions (the so-called affect programs), the question becomes how the cortical processes interact with these more basic processes. Higher brain areas surely are not immune to subcortical influences. The lower areas, however, produce affect responses blindly: the fear system, for example, is triggered at the sight not only of a snake but also of all coiled shapes, such as hoses, ropes, and so forth. It is only cortical processes that can mediate such reflective thoughts as “Silly me, it was only a rope!” In emotional turmoil, bottom-up processes take over, overpowering top-down processes (Buller 2005a, 143; LeDoux 1998; Panksepp 1998, 300–306). It has therefore been argued that evolutionary considerations of the brain and cognitive functions should always begin with the subcortical structures, where homologies among mammals and specifically human modules are found. The cognitive modules that supposedly emerged in the Pleistocene may actually reflect our multimodal capacity to conceptualize world events and to relate them to primitive affects related to fitness concerns (Panksepp and Panksepp 2000, 110–11). As the debate on modularity is related to the one on adaptationism, it may be illuminating to consult Peter Godfrey-Smith’s (1999, 186) division of adaptationism into

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three types (see Shanahan 2004, 152–69). Empirical adaptationism claims that natural selection is a ubiquitous force and helps explain almost all important questions of biological variation; explanatory adaptationism claims that apparent design of organisms tells about their adaptedness to the environment and that explaining this is the core intellectual mission of evolutionary biology; methodological adaptationism says that the best way for scientists to approach biological systems is to look for features of adaptation and design. I thus suggest that we distinguish between empirical, explanatory, and methodological modularity, in that empirical modularity refers to the massive modularity of mind as a fact, explanatory modularity claims that the best way to explain human cognition is to explore its modular structure, and methodological modularity suggests that we study cognition as if it were modular (although it may be found not to be). I think that such methodological modularity has been successful in the study of religion because it has guided scholars to look for the individual cognitive processes that make religion possible, instead of treating religion as a single entity–like whole (e.g. Boyer 2001; see Day 2005). Whether cognitive processes really are modular in some delicate and uneasily explicated manner is of little consequence for the study of religion. What is more important is the way affects interact with higher cognition. It is not enough merely to study the functional roles of religious concepts in thinking and behavior (see Lewis 1972) because these roles seem to be partly determined by emotions that yield themselves to neurophysiological explanation (see Panksepp 1998, 2007). I will return to this from a methodological point of view in section A.2.2. Here I want to emphasize that religious belief and behavior may in some sense resemble such things as fear of flying, for example. Although religious belief is defended by rational arguments, it may actually be based on the fact that persons just feel that way; rational justification comes afterward (Anselm’s fides quarens intellectum). Similarly, merely knowing that flying an airplane is safer than walking on the Madison Avenue does not remove the fear of flying, because the fear is not based on a lack of statistical information. It is deeply rooted in affective brain processes beyond conscious control. It just feels that way. The same seems to hold for religious belief. Thus, the information-processing approach to cognition needs to be supplemented by what Panksepp (2007) calls “energetic dynamics.” He points out, for example, that the human social brain arises from a set of innate emotional tendencies shared by all mammals. Emotions such as fear, rage, seeking, and lust are even premammalian. Prosocial feelings, for example, arise from dynamics of genetically provided instinctual systems, and social experience is mediated by opioids in the brain. Play releases opioids into the brain, leading to increased play and satisfaction (“social comfort ”). In autistic brains, there is an overabundance of opioids and thus no need for social interaction. In various kinds of addictions it seems to be the other way around: drugs are used to compensate for the lack of natural opioids. It is thus possible that affects or emotions exercise an influence on higher cognition through the link of (modular) intuitions. Edmund Rolls (2007), for example, argues that emotions, by and large produced by rewards and punishers, are adaptations enabling genes to specify goals for action. This leaves room for much cognitive and behavioral flexibility. Genes code for emotions, and emotions guide us toward rewards, while higher cognition guides the choices between various alternative ways of achieving

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the rewards. To the extent that religion is intimately linked with social cognition, it seems to be driven, at least partly, by the affects related to social experience. There is, for example, experimental evidence that persons who have been induced to feel disconnected from other humans report stronger belief in supernatural agents (Epley et al. 2008). To further study this necessitates various kinds of experimental designs; it has not been possible for me to explore this idea here on the basis of historical materials. In the next section, I move on to provide some theoretical foundation for an explanatory approach to religion.

A.2 Explaining Religion A.2.1 Studying Religion from Outside Anthropologists distinguish between emic and etic concepts and respective anthropological approaches. In its most simplified form, this dichotomy boils down to the distinction between the concepts of the people studied and scientific or scholarly concepts (Harris 1968, 571, 575, 1990, 50; see Headland 1990, 15). However, Kenneth Pike (1971), who coined the concepts of emic and etic, wanted to develop a formal model for analyzing units of behavior in different cultural contexts. Pike’s book was published in the same year as Malinowski’s diaries, which, as Clifford Geertz put it (1993, 55–56), revealed that anthropologists had no special capacity to think and feel like true “natives” and that the ideal of an empathetic understanding of other cultures had to be reconsidered. Pike’s emic-etic distinction came in handy in that situation. Geertz (57–58), for example, pointed out that focusing only on the emic aspect leads to speculations about an illusory identification with the people studied, while a one-sided emphasis on the etic aspect leads to abstract jargon with no clear connection to the materials studied. Pike originally coined the emic-etic distinction as a behavioral analogue to the distinction between phonemics and phonetics (Pike 1971, 323–43. 1990b, 65; see Keating 1999; Nespor 1999). A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit that can be used to express a difference in meaning; phonology studies how different phonemes are used to differentiate between different word meanings. Phonetics, for its part, studies all the different phonemes in various languages, irrespective of meaning. Thus, phonetics is the necessary basis for phonology: the way speakers use different phonemes to express meanings in individual languages can only be studied using phonetics to identify different phonemes. Pike thought that human behavior consisted of “behavioremes” and “utteremes” as building blocks analogous to phonemes. Therefore, human behavior, just as language, could be studied either from an emic or an etic perspective. The scholar identifies the smallest meaningful units in any cultural context by starting from an etic understanding of the structure of human behavior. There is no direct access to the emic aspect, without the mediation of an etic perspective, because all the emic units we use are our scholarly reconstructions (Pike 1971, 1990a, 30–31). There is thus no absolute dichotomy between the scholars’ and the “natives’ ” perspectives; instead, the latter is reconstructed on the basis of the former. In the present study, “soul,” “God,” and “buddha” are emic concepts reconstructed from the etic perspective of comparative religion. “God,” however, is problematic because

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it can be used both as an emic concept, denoting the god of Christianity, and as an etic concept, in the sense of a general label for a type of beings (“gods”; see Pyysiäinen and Ketola 1999). The concept of “supernatural agent” and the cognitive mechanisms of agent representation are understood from an etic perspective, of course. I do not intend to view beliefs about supernatural agents simply from the point of view of the believers themselves. My approach is comparative and explanatory, not interpretive and local. In the background of this choice figures the more general issue of the proper way to understand and explain human behavior. Some philosophers argue that in the human sciences, it is not legitimate to use concepts that are unfamiliar to the people studied. It is not legitimate to say that X did Y because of Z, if X does not know or understand Z. Peter Winch (1958, 95–108, 127, 1970), for example, argues that as social life supposedly consists entirely of concepts and ideas, a social scientist can only study social life at the explicit conceptual level. If social life is not studied from within, trying to grasp the way people understand their existence, it is reduced to the purely physical aspects of behavior (but cf. Bhaskar 1998, 134–35; Martin 2000; Pyysiäinen 2004d, 1–27). This, in turn, is unacceptable for an antireductionist who does not want to reduce social life to something that it allegedly is not. In religious studies, reductionism is a notorious scarecrow; its basic function seems to have been to keep unwanted approaches away from the field, rather than to help analyze ways of explaining religion (see Idinopulos and Yonan 1994). Antireductionists claim that reductionist approaches lead to a misrepresentation of religion as a phenomenon, while reductionists often argue that antireductionists are only trying to defend religion, not study it scientifically (see Wiebe 1999, 2005; cf. Gothóni 2005). As I have argued elsewhere, much confusion has been caused by not keeping separate the two different questions: (1) reduction in the sense of explaining intentional religious behavior from a nonreligious, third-person perspective (naturalist reductionism), and (2) reduction in the sense of intra- and interlevel theory reduction (theory reductionism) (Pyysiäinen 2004d, 67–80, 2004e; see Craver 2007, 3 n. 2). The logic that underlies naturalist antireductionism can be criticized by elaborating further the counterargument, the basics of which I have presented elsewhere (Pyysiäinen 2004d, 71– 74). Antireductionists typically claim that insofar as scientific explanations do not embody what is subjectively and religiously important in religion, they are somehow incomplete as scientific explanations. Because scientific descriptions and explanations are made from a third-person perspective, they do not grasp the richness of subjective experience. And because they thus leave something out of the picture, they are incomplete. The inescapable incompleteness of scientific explanations of religion, then, means that religion always escapes scientific analysis. This line of reasoning can be illustrated with an analogous example from philosophy of mind. Frank Jackson presents the following “knowledge argument” against physicalism (Jackson 1982, 1986). He invites us to imagine Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist who has lived all her life in a black-and-white room, watching a black-and-white television, and reading books without color illustrations. By these means, she has acquired all possible physical information about vision and color that there is. The moment she is released from the room, she will not only see things she has never seen before but also learn something new about the world and visual experience that she did not know before

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(if we ignore the unfortunate fact that her neuronal pathways would by that time be atrophied for good). Jackson thus concludes that physical information about subjective experience is incomplete and physicalism false. The point is that Mary will gain new factual knowledge about seeing colors in general, not just that she acquires a new kind of subjective experience (Jackson 1982, 132; 1986). However, although subjective experience thus seems to bring along new knowledge, the argument fails to show why this knowledge should be something extraphysical.9 It might just as well be only a matter of new neural activations. Antireductionist arguments in the study of religion are implicitly based on the same kind of reasoning. We could imagine a completely nonreligious scholar, Muriel, who has never had any religious feelings, although she knows everything there is to be known intellectually about religion. If God then kindled a religious feeling in her heart, she would for the first time have a subjective experience of what it is like to be a believer. It thus seems safe to conclude that Muriel would learn something new about religion and that her previous third-person knowledge would have been incomplete. Three problems remain, however. First, although the new subjective experience might bring something new to Muriel’s previous knowledge about religion, a sense of understanding is not necessarily the same as actual understanding, and personal experience is not an argument. A new experience may help create new hypotheses, but there is no necessary link between an experience and understanding; the sense of understanding is only a fallible indicator of actual understanding. Moreover, knowing an increased number of facts about a phenomenon does not necessarily lead to a better understanding (Ylikoski 2008; see Keil 2003). Second, “religion” and “religious experience” are wide and nebulous categories (see Proudfoot 1985; Taves 2008). The analogy to color vision may well be quite misleading. It is very difficult to say what one actually lacks in lacking religious experience and feeling. Opinions differ widely among philosophers of religion as well as among religious “believers.” Would it really be easier to understand Theravada Buddhism if one were a Calvinist? Does being a shaman help one understand Judaism? I doubt it. Or if the claim is that some kind of general religiosity (whatever it might be) helps one understand whatever religion, then we are no longer talking about seeing things simply from the point of view of the “believer.” Third, it is not clear whether the antireductionist claim is that (1) the scholar as a person should be religious, or that (2) (also) the explanations the scholar provides should be religious. If the claim concerns the person of the scholar, we have two options. Either the person’s religiosity has nothing to do with her or his science, or it somehow extends its influence on the explanations she or he puts forward. In the first case, religiosity is obviously inconsequential from the scholarly point of view. The second option brings us to claim (2): explanations of religion are incomplete as long as they do not somehow embody religiosity. This, however, means that the explanation should actually replace the explanandum. This leads to a difficult situation. Claiming that explanations of religious behavior should also serve as a substitute or surrogate of religious practice implies that the scholar should provide religiously relevant scientific answers to religious questions, which may turn out to be a difficult combination. Although it is possible to both have a religious motivation for one’s scholarly work and gain religious rewards from it, it is difficult to say how this should actually

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change the scientific practice and in what sense such religious science would be superior as science. Not only is there a legitimate place for a nonreligious study of religious behavior but also mixing these two introduces serious new problems. However, antireductionists sometimes refer to Brentano’s idea of intentionality and Husserl’s phenomenology, the basic claim being that the study of religion explains or interprets religious intentions in themselves, “bracketing” all their empirical constraints (Brentano 1924; Husserl 1950a,b; see Dreyfus 1982a,b; Føllesdal 1982; Kusch 1997). Brentano (1924, 1:124–28) argues that all psychological phenomena (and they alone) are characterized by the fact that they refer to a content: the objects toward which mental acts are directed somehow reside in the mind itself. These phenomena are grasped by understanding, in contrast to explanation (Hintikka 1975, 192; see chapter 1, section 1.3.2). Husserl (1950a) takes the task of phenomenology to be the study of what “appears” in subjective consciousness, without any attempt to ground immediately given phenomena on anything that would explain them. The “intentional objects” of consciousness should be studied irrespective of whether or not anything in external reality corresponds to them, and irrespective of the processes that gave rise to them (perception, hallucination, etc.).10 The object of analysis is pure consciousness, apart from the factual world; in the “eidetic” reduction, facts are reduced to their “essences” (see Kusch 1997, 241–43). Thus, trying to found epistemology on psychology or on any natural science is “nonsense” to Husserl; the natural sciences only lead us to senseless skepticism by making the laws of logic relative (Husserl 1950a, 20–21, 35–36). This is because Husserl thinks that logic, which cannot be derived empirically from the human constitution, can never be considered from outside—all inquiry already presupposing logic (Haaparanta 1995, 157–59; cf. Kusch 1989, 2–3; van Heijenoort 1967).11 The problem is the same as with Durkheim’s categories: are they simply given or do they arise from experience? Yet Husserl considers language (unlike logic) to be merely a calculus that can be looked at from outside, changed, and manipulated, whereas for Heidegger and Gadamer, language is the “universal medium” whose semantic relations are inaccessible to us (Kusch 1989, 1997; see Hintikka and Hintikka 1986). Thus, phenomenologists of religion can argue that the relevance of religious data must be judged not in relation to the “believer’s” point of view or to a scientific theory, but in relation to a religious intention’s “inner structure” (Utriainen 2005; Kamppinen 2001). Religious intentions are objects of study in their own right, not merely insofar as they tell something about something else (brain, society, culture, etc.); the scholar describes the religious intention as it appears to him or her in the variable data, without postulating any foundational essence to religion (Utriainen 2005). Scholar of religion Terhi Utriainen thinks this leaves us with two alternatives: a never-ending reworking of our understanding of religion by providing ever new phenomenological descriptions of different religious situations, or a search for a final truth by “implanting religion (or at least the precondition of religion) to the natural constitution of the human animal” (47). It is misleading, however, to oppose reworkable phenomenological descriptions to the final truth of a naturalistic approach. There is no final truth in science (e.g. Niiniluoto 1984, 1987, 2002). Explaining religious thought and practice in the light of the biological and psychological capacities of the human species that make religion possible

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in no way means a search for general laws or immutable essences (see Bhaskar 1998; Halonen and Hintikka 1999; Hintikka 2001). The idea of an essence is contrary to a basic principle of evolutionary theory: emphasis on populational in contrast to typological thinking. Thus, the concept of religion (in the singular) may also be altered and redefined in the course of exploration, even though religion is studied within an empirical frame of reference (see Pyysiäinen 2001b, 1–5; Day 2005). And yet religion can be conceptualized from a coherent perspective, as is not the case for the kind of phenomenology that conflates data and theory.12 (How can one claim that only pure religion should be studied if religion is whatever one decides to call religion?) A.2.2 Explanatory Pluralism and the Study of Religion Reductionism can also refer to what philosophers of science call theory reduction (see Bechtel 2008, 130–35), which is based on the view that reality presents itself to us in hierarchically ordered layers or levels, starting from micro- and macrophysics and proceeding through chemistry, biology, and psychology to culture (Pyysiäinen 2004d, 24).13 It is usually thought that all macrolevel causal powers are somehow inherited from lower levels in some noncausal manner. The levels are differentiated on the basis of their relative complexity. The higher levels are more complex, in that they involve more complex causal mechanisms and we thus have to include more variables in our explanations. The altitude of a level of analysis is directly proportional to the complexity of the systems it deals with. The altitude of the level is also inversely proportional to the size of the domain of events in question: psychology, for example, is a higher level than biology and deals with only some of the phenomena within the realm of biology. In addition, the age of the relevant phenomena decreases from the bottom up: the lower the level, the longer its phenomena have been around in the world (McCauley 1986, 1996, 2007; Ylikoski 2001, 78–82). Recently, Carl Craver has presented a detailed taxonomy of levels (2007, 171). First, the levels of science include the products of scientific inquiry, such as analyses, explanatory models, and theories. Second, the level of units consists of research groups, perspectives, and programs, and so forth. The levels of nature show by virtue of what criteria two items can be said to be at differing levels; causality, size, and composition have been suggested as criteria. Thus, it has been argued that things at lower levels are smaller than things at higher levels, or that things at higher levels are more complex. Some say that things at differing levels are causally related. Craver’s levels of mechanisms are levels of composition, but the composition relation is ultimately not spatial or material; instead, the units are behaving mechanisms at higher levels and their components at lower levels. Craver argues that there is no uniquely correct answer to the placement question for levels of mechanisms (171– 72, 188–89). Craver’s idea is that neuroscientific explanations always cover multiple levels because the components of the explanandum form a hierarchy of levels. He uses spatial memory in mice and rats as an example (Craver speaks of both, without a distinction). At the highest level, we have the phenomenon of spatial memory; then comes the level of spatial map formation in the hippocampus and the temporal and frontal cortices; third is the cellular-electrophysiological level; fourth, we have the molecular mechanisms that make the chemical and electrical activities of nerve cells possible

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(Craver 2007, 163– 70). Thus, levels of mechanisms are not levels of objects (such as cell, organism, society) and do not correspond to any fixed ontological division. It also does not make sense to say that things at different levels causally interact with one another. To the extent that the levels are levels of mechanisms, “interlevel causation” would mean an interaction between the behavior of a mechanism as a whole and the parts of the mechanism (but there is no difficulty in things of one size scale interacting with things of another size scale) (190, 195). It thus is not meaningful to ask if “culture” or “society” are independent levels (see Bechtel 2008, 129–57). The question instead is whether we can describe mechanisms above the level of such things as spatial memory. According to Craver (2007, 1–9), a mechanism is “a set of entities and activities organized such that they exhibit the phenomenon to be explained.” Entities are the components of mechanisms and have properties that allow them to engage in a variety of activities that are the causal components of mechanisms (see Bechtel 2008, 14). The entities and activities of a mechanism are organized spatially, temporally, causally, or hierarchically. A mechanistic explanation thus is not only an argument or an invariance. Explanations consist of objective features of the world and of public representations such as texts describing these features (Craver 2007, 26–28, 100–01). Craver (28–49) thus rejects Hempel’s covering law model, Paul Churchland’s prototype activation model, and Kitcher’s unification model, adopting Woodward’s manipulationist account of causality. In this view, X is causally relevant with regard to Y if an “ideal intervention I on X with respect to Y is a change in the value of X that changes Y, if at all, only via the change in X” (95–96). The explanatory generalizations describing causal relevance relations are stable or invariant but not necessarily or even usually universal. This means that the relation between cause and effect holds under a range of conditions (99). Thus, culture is causally relevant with regard to religion if an ideal intervention I on culture with (respect to religion) changes culture so that a change in religion follows. Consider now Alan Garfinkel’s imaginary example of explaining increase and decrease in populations of rabbits and foxes (Garfinkel 1981, 49– 74). Let the frequency with which foxes encounter rabbits (and eat them) be the main influence on the levels of populations. Both the fox level and the rabbit level have an effect on the frequency of encounters. When there are many foxes around, this places great pressure on rabbits. Imagine now that we want to explain the death of a rabbit. We might say: The cause of the death of the rabbit was that the fox population was high. As this is an explanation of a microstate by a macrostate, it should—by a theoryreductionist’s lights—be reducible to a microexplanation: Rabbit r was eaten because he passed through the capture space of fox f. But here the explanandum is no longer “the death of the rabbit” but something like “the death of rabbit r at the hands of fox f, at place p, at time t (and so on and so forth).” But this seems to include unnecessary details, considering that the original question was “why the rabbit was eaten {rather than not eaten}.” A rabbit, for example, might want to know why rabbits get eaten, not why they get eaten by specific foxes. A microexplanation, however, says “The rabbit was eaten {by fox f at time t . . . [rather than by

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some other fox . . .] }.” But it does not follow that “If rabbit r had not been at place p, at time t (and so on and so forth), he would not have been eaten” (Garfinkel 1981, 163). The problem with microexplanations thus is that they bring a certain instability to the conditions under which they work. It can be said that microexplanations answer how-questions by providing a mechanism for the operation of macroexplanations answering why-questions. As a particular mechanism is not necessary for the effect, it is not a good explanation. As Garfinkel puts it, it is “too true to be good.” Something materially being something else does not mean that the relevant explanation could be reduced (1981, 58–59). Therefore, upperlevel explanations are often needed. Neither eliminative reductionism nor its antithesis can provide a satisfactory model for explaining religion, however. Robert McCauley’s (1986, 1996, 2007; McCauley and Bechtel 2001) explanatory pluralism and Craver’s multilevel model offer an alternative for all kinds of “fundamentalist ” views, according to which good explanations can be formulated only at the most fundamental level (Craver 2007, 9–16; see Pyysiäinen in press). A multilevel view of explanation should be combined with a contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation, because explanations are always answers to contrastive questions (Craver 2007, 202–11; Garfinkel 1981; Ylikoski 2001). This is because only some of the available information is relevant for any given explanation. Adding details to the explanation of why the rabbit got eaten, for example, does not make the explanation better or more accurate; it instead changes the explanandum. In order to be able to specify the explanandum properly, we need to contrast the question asked with something else: why did f occur instead of c? Second, it is necessary to specify a mechanism that ensures that f occurs instead of c. Consider the case of the bank robber Willie Sutton, for instance. When the prison chaplain asked him “Why do you rob banks?” he replied: “That’s where the money is!” thus making the erroneous contrast “Why do you rob banks {instead of, say, newsstands}?” The correct answer thus depends on how we conceive the question; a contrast is an economical way of fixing the causal field as it delivers us from the burden of listing all the components of the field (Garfinkel 1981, 21–22; Ylikoski 2001, 22, 27, 36, 2006). Thus, religion can be explained in terms of cognitive mechanisms when we bear in mind that these mechanisms span different levels from molecular systems to culture, in the sense of shared knowledge. Take as an example the relationship between the serotonin system in the brain and spiritual experience. Borg et al. (2003) argue that the serotonin 5–HT1A receptor density correlates with the tendency to spiritual experience. It should now be possible to describe a causal mechanism whose levels consist of the molecular level, the appropriate cellular-electrophysiological level, the cognitive aspect of the experience, and the phenomenon of spiritual experience. Moreover, as social neuroscience is also interested in the neural representation of social phenomena, it should also be possible to add a fifth level, the societal role of spiritual experience (see e.g. Bruce 2002). Spiritual experience may have causal relevance with regard to society, but society is also causally relevant with regard to spiritual experience. Whereas a scientific fundamentalist claims that good explanations of religion are possible only at some chosen level (be it culture or cognition), multilevel mechanistic explanation is based on the realization that good explanations of religion engage the levels of neurobiology, cognitive processes, and sociocultural systems. Religion is a hybrid formation and can be approached at any of these levels. Clearly, advance at any

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level can in principle also benefit scholarship at other levels by, for instance, helping formulate new research questions and testable hypotheses. There is no religion without neural activity, but neuroscientists often do not have expertise in the study of religion. Religion cannot be identified at the neural level alone, but scholars of religion do not have expertise in studying the neural processes involved. Therefore, interdisciplinary cooperation is needed, and religion should be explored from different angles, and theories developed at different ontological levels (Boyer 2005b). Individual scholars may work on specific levels; the general understanding of religion may develop simultaneously at different levels. By contrasting explanations with counterfactual scenarios, it is possible to specify the explanandum properly. In studying the serotonin system, for example, a proper contrastive research question could be, for example, “Does individual variation in serotonin 5-HT1A receptor density correlate with self-transcendence {rather than with some other personality traits}?” In Borg et al. (2003), serotonin binding potential correlated inversely with scores for self-transcendence (but no correlations were found for any of the other six “temperament” and “character inventory” dimensions). One possible interpretation of this finding is that subjects with low 5-HT1A receptor density have sparse serotoenergic innervation and thereby a weaker filtering function, allowing for increased perception and decreased inhibition. An improper research question is exemplified by such (imaginary) contrasts as “Does serotonin 5-HT1A receptor density {rather than social factors} serve as the basis for spiritual experience?” This question is based on an implicit fundamentalist assumption that there is only one proper level at which good explanations work. Insofar as “religion” is not a unitary entity with clear boundaries, it is necessary to specify mechanisms of religious behavior at differing levels. This also helps connect the study of religion with other sciences across the board—though doing so is not always easy. The human sciences have a long history in research that is centered around the scholar as an individual; this type of research is by and large characterized by Boyer’s (2003c) “relevant connections” model: 1. There is no agreed corpus of knowledge. 2. There are no manuals, or agreed techniques or methods. 3. The history of the field is crucial, in the sense of a continual reframing of past theories. 4. Books are more important than articles. 5. There is no specific developmental curve of the scholar: one may be able to produce interesting connections from the beginning. 6. There is no agreement on who is a competent performer, although there are coalitional cliques and bitter feuds. In contrast to this, studying religion at different levels of mechanisms often requires cooperation among several disciplines and scholars (see Boyer 2005b). The difficulties of doing so should challenge us to rethink the traditional division of labor between various disciplines that is supposed to reflect some kind of natural ontology. As reality does not consist of natural compartments, we should try our best to overcome the obstacles created by artificial disciplinary boundaries.

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A.3 Religion as By-product and Sexual Selection The question remains why religious rituals often take the elaborate forms they do. One way of answering this question is the modes-of-religiosity theory, according to which there are specialized causal mechanisms that determine the development of religious traditions either toward an “imagistic” or a “doctrinal” form (Whitehouse 1995, 2000, 2002, 2004). Whitehouse calls these forms “attractor positions,” but it is not entirely clear what this is supposed to mean; as real-life religious traditions always seem to combine imagistic and doctrinal variable contents, attraction must be something very abstract (see Ketola 2007, 102–3; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004; Whitehouse and Martin 2004; Whitehouse and McCauley 2005). The attraction seems to take place on something like the level of an abstract “competence,” as distinguished from “performance” (to use Chomsky’s terminology as a loose analogy; Pyysiäinen 2006c). However, the idea of modal causality has been criticized for vagueness (Wiebe 2004) and a more reductive strategy recommended (Boyer 2005a). In the standard model of the cognitive science of religion, causal mechanisms are searched below the surface level of what is referred to as “religion” (Boyer 2001; Sperber 2006; Kirkpatrick 2006, 2008). Religion is made possible by cognitive mechanisms that are adaptations for solving problems related to survival and reproduction. Another and much less studied option is that what biologists call sexual selection may also have played a role in the evolution of the capacities and behaviors of which religion is a by-product (Dennett 2006, 87–89; Pyysiäinen 2008). I have elsewhere argued that sexual selection may have begun to operate on the individual tendency to ritualized behavior (Pyysiäinen 2008; see Dennett 2006, 87–89). I mean by ritualized behavior individual behavior that is repetitive, rigid, and noninstrumental (Boyer and Liénard 2006; Liénard and Boyer 2006). Ritual behavior, in contrast, refers to all actions that take place in the context of a collective ceremony. Boyer and Liénard (2006) argue that ritualized behavior results from a specific hazard precaution system (or several such systems) geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. Such threats create a specific adaptive problem because (1) they are quite diverse; (2) there is no straightforward feedback demonstrating that a threat has been removed, it being in the nature of such threats that they are not directly observable; (3) appropriate measures cannot be mapped one-to-one onto physically different classes of threats, since each type of threat may require very different precautions, depending on the situation. Ritualized action is then typified by stereotypy, rigidity, repetitiveness, and partition of behavior into subactions that do not seem to have any immediate instrumental goals. Such ritualization of action is found not only in cultural ceremonies but in children’s rituals and obsessive compulsive disorder as well (see also Liénard and Boyer 2006). The activation of a hazard precaution system leads to an arousal and a feeling that something must be done. Certain actions seem intuitively to be called for, although one does not have any explanation for why this is so. In the aroused state, one’s attention is focused on low-level properties of action, which thus is “parsed” in smaller units than normally. Such upper-level categories as “walking” are replaced by such lower-level categories as “walking-in-this-or-that-specific-manner.” To this is connected a “just right” syndrome: everything must be done very carefully, yet one can never be sure that a goal

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has been reached. As the relationship of the low-level actions with the more general goal of the ritual is close to a mystery, repetition of action follows. The types of actions concerned relate to a few salient themes, such as pollution and purification, danger and protection, as well as intrusion of others and the construction of an ordered environment (Boyer and Liénard 2006; Liénard and Boyer 2006). These are also the themes underlying rituals as collective ceremonies: religious and magical rituals relate to purification (e.g. baptism, libations), protection (so-called crisis rites like rainmaking), and creation of social order (rites of passages such as initiations). Inferred threats also tend to trigger the HADD and HUI/ ToM, because postulating an agent is in most cases necessary for effective precautions (see Taves 2008, 216). Thus representations of supernatural agents also get activated, and people try to please and propitiate them in attempts to do something about the inferred threat. According to Geoffrey Miller (2001a, 345), ritualization results from such sexual selection of signals and displays in which movements and structures are modified to excite optimally the perceptual systems of receivers. Such ritualization may be accompanied with hazard precaution triggered by an inferred threat to one’s fitness: not finding a mating partner means not leaving any offspring. As Westermarck (1891, 185) points out, in tribal societies, only men run the risk of being obliged to lead a single life (see Trivers 2002, 66). Courtship thus may be ritualized because of the inferred threat and then get more elaborate because of sexual selection. In sexual selection, as found among sexually reproducing organisms, the relative parental investment of the sexes in the young is the key variable: when one sex invests more time and resources in the care of the offspring, members of the other sex will compete among themselves to mate with the members of the former ( Trivers 2002, 102). In such a situation, some individual phenotypic trait may become a sign either of the good overall condition of its bearer (good genes) or of the fact that the individual is likely to be capable of and willing to invest resources in the care of the offspring. A peacock’s tail, for example, takes much energy to grow, is difficult to carry, and is an obvious handicap when trying to avoid predators. For the peahen, it thus is a reliable sign of the peacock being in good overall condition, because it can afford the tail. In some other species of birds, females prefer males who rule over a favorable territory (Dunbar 1988, 288–91; Howard 1948). Biologists now recognize such female mate sampling and choice as a fact in many species (Byers and Waits 2006; Fisher et al. 2006; Trivers 2002, 56–110; cf. Rhodes and Simmons 2007). When at some point in evolution, a given peahen had a liking for a long tail in the male, her offspring inherited both the liking (peahen) and the long tail (peacocks). The average length of the tail gradually grows in each generation, because peacocks with the longest tails have more offspring than their competitors. In each generation, it thus takes a little bit more to be above the average. Not all peacocks can grow a long tail, however, because a long tail presupposes a good overall condition, which, in turn, is determined by many different genes at different loci (see Kokko et al. 2003, 2006; Kotiaho et al. 2001; Miller 2001a,b; Tomkins et al., 2004). However, females also seem to prefer novel or rare phenotypes; when such choosiness is common, rare genotypes in one generation tend to become common in offspring generations (Kokko et al. 2007). Psychologist Geoffrey Miller provides theoretical arguments to the effect that human cultural phenomena such as music, morality, and religion also might be due to

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sexual selection (Miller 2001a,b, 2007). Haselton and Miller (2006), for example, show that in short-term mate choice, women near peak fertility (midcycle) prefer inherited creativity over wealth due to good luck. As creativity is a sign of good genes, women prefer creative males as short-term mating partners. Miller (2001a, 349–50) points out that early human hunting strategies relied on the hunters’ long-range running, high aerobic capacity, and sweating ability. The best hunters were in good overall condition with good motor control under conditions of high aerobic effort over long periods of time. From the gene’s–eye perspective, females should have preferred them as mating partners. To the extent that they would have been unable to accompany men on the hunt to see who was the fittest, they would have needed some other means of rating men. Observing ritual dancing may have been one such means. As most tribal and folk dancing includes repeated high stepping, stamping, and jumping, using the largest and most energy-consuming muscles, dancing may well have evolved as a display of the fitness needed in hunting. Ritual dancing is universal among humans and has its origins close to the time of the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa, before the spread of the human species on other continents (Kaeppler 1978; Kurath 1960; Bachner-Melman et al. 2005). The good overall condition that skillful and prolonged dancing requires is measured by the so-called fluctuating asymmetry (FA) of the body (minor deviations from perfect bilateral symmetry of the body; see Trivers 2002, 309–27).14 The validity of FA, which has been used as a measure of developmental stability and thus of good genes, is diminished by the fact that the effect tends to be smaller than errors in measurement (Rhodes and Simmons 2007). However, the study by Brown et al. (2005, not included in the metaanalysis by Rhodes and Simmons [2007]) presents evidence of strong positive association between bodily symmetry and dancing ability, especially in men. Women also rate dances by symmetrical men relatively more positively than men do. It thus might be argued that ritual behaviors serve as courtship displays that have been sexually selected (Brown et al. 2005). Rhodes and Simmons (2007, 360) observe that although there is little reason to believe that a preference for symmetric bodies is an adaptation for obtaining indirect genetic benefits from mate choice, bodily symmetry yet may convey information about possible direct benefits in the form of provided resources. A recent study of Bachner-Melman et al. (2005) suggests that two polymorphic genes seem to add to differences in aptitude, propensity, and need for creative dancing. These are the arginine vasopressin 1a (AVPR1a) gene and the SLC6A4 gene, which encodes the protein that transports serotonin. The AVPR1a gene makes a profound contribution to affiliative and social behavior, including courtship, in vertebrates in general; thus, the association between AVPR1a and dancing in humans may reflect the importance of social relations and communication in dance. The role of the SLC6A4 gene with regard to dancing may relate to sensitivity to altered states of consciousness. The protein that this gene encodes terminates the action of serotonin and recycles it; it is also a target of such psychomotor stimulants as amphetamine, for example. Serotonin receptor density, for its part, has been shown to correlate inversely with apprehension of phenomena that cannot be explained by objective demonstration (“spirituality ”) (Borg et al. 2003). The amphetamine derivative 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (known by its recreational users as “ecstasy ”) causes a marked increase in serotonin and dopamine, an effect that is enhanced by such things as loud

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music and hot, overcrowded conditions (Parrott 2004). Such conditions are typical of tribal rituals as well (see, e.g., Whitehouse 1995). Ritual dancing thus is also a favorable context for the so-called religious experiences of being in contact with supernatural agents (see Pyysiäinen 2001b, 77–139). Ritual dancing is just one example of the kind of skills underlying religion that possibly have been favored not merely by natural selection but also by sexual selection. This example also shows how difficult it is to try to explain the evolution of religion; social institutions can only evolve if certain materially realized skills and capacities first evolve, which leads directly to the standard-model idea of religion as a by-product. However, we may well also ask why many religious traditions favor institutionalized celibacy, if religion has evolved driven by sexual selection. There are several ways of trying to answer this question (see Deady et al. 2006; Qirko 2002). One option is that celibacy is an alternative strategy in conditions where it is not possible for everyone to find a partner and reproduce (see Deady et al. 2006, 394–96 for examples). Another line of reasoning is based on Trivers’s theory of parental investment as “any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving (and hence reproductive success) at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring” (2002, 67). The chances of reproductive success are the best when a parent invests all resources in one of the sons (often the oldest), because of the higher reproductive capacity among males and because dividing scarce resources among several offspring may mean that no one gets enough to survive (Boone 1986; Hartung 1976). This has led to various kinds of cultural practices meant to keep some of the youngest offspring as “helpers at the nest” who do not reproduce. There is, for example, anecdotal evidence from German folk traditions of people having “systematically kept [children] dumb and crippled” to ensure that they would stay at home (Voland 2007, 424–27). Deady et al. (2006) provide evidence from nineteenth-century Ireland, where one of the sons in each generation would inherit land that enabled him to marry; for the others, emigration or staying as a helper at home was often the only option (4.2 million people emigrated from Ireland between 1852 and 1921). At the same time, there was a sharp increase in both female and male celibacy within Irish Catholicism. Deady et al. (2006) cite Larkin’s study that shows that vocations increased from five thousand priests, monks, and nuns for a Catholic population of 5 million in 1850 to fourteen thousand clergy for a population of 3.3 million Catholics by 1900. Deady et al. identified forty-six priests born in County Limerick between 1867 and 1911 and were able to show that a significantly larger proportion of priests originated from landholding households than the county average and that the mean number of children in priests’ households of origin was significantly greater than the national average number of children per household. They conclude that the wealthier landowners were able to pursue the alternative strategy of sending a son into the priesthood, thus enhancing their family’s social status at the reproductive expense of a son who might have had difficulty finding a marriage partner. From the gene’s-eye perspective, celibacy was also an adaptive strategy for the son (or his genes) because he could increase investment in close kin, such as nieces and nephews, which provides inclusive fitness benefits for the celibate individual via improved reproductive conditions for kin (Deady et al. 2006).

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There must, of course, also be some proximate, psychological explanations for why individuals are willing to and capable of acting against their biological nature. Among the factors contributing to individuals’ learning to identify with religious or other orders rather than their kin are close association among group members that resembles family ties; false phenotypic matches such as uniforms, emblems, hairstyles, speech patterns, and so forth; metaphoric kin terminology; recruitment of members at puberty; and separation from biological kin (Qirko 2002, 2004a; see also MacIntyre 2004).15 Not only is it possible to use these methods to recruit individuals to celibate orders; such methods may also partly underlie the recruitment of modern suicide terrorists (Qirko 2004b; cf. Atran 2004; see Bushman et al. 2007). Sexual selection thus may well have played a role in the evolution of the capacities underlying “religion” as their by-product. The following are among the things that may speak for sexual selection of “religious” beliefs and practices: “religion” becomes important in puberty (rites of initiation); it is male-dominated (women mostly are “audience”); it is costly in terms of time and resources (the handicap principle); it is species-specific, like all sexually selected traits; there are heritable differences in “religious” attitudes and behavior (see Koenig and Bouchard 2006); and “religion” has a multimodular basis in mind. Although this is so far only a speculative hypothesis, it is testable in principle. It is possible to explore whether men display their “religiosity” as part of courtship, whether they also try to downplay the “religiosity” of their sexual competitors, whether females really prefer “religious” males, and whether females at peak fertility prefer “religious” indications of good genes over wealth (Miller 2007).


Notes

chapter 1 1. I use the term “represention” in a very general sense to refer to mental concepts, beliefs, and images as well as to such public representations as pictures, maps, texts, and so forth (see Sperber 1996; see also Perner 1993); not in the technical, cognitivist sense of mental units on which the mind performs syntactical operations (see Fodor 1975, 2000a; Paivio 1986, 16 –33). 2. Stahl (1831–33, vol. 1) believed that living matter differed from nonliving matter in that it contained a soul (anima sensitiva). Together with Johann Becher, he also introduced the “phlogiston theory ” of combustion: combustion occurred when the combustible “phlogiston” (Gr. flogistos, “fiery ”) was released from the burning substance. 3. Here Tylor ’s argument goes wrong: spirit beliefs do not arise from the perception of dead bodies; instead, dead bodies are experienced as an uncanny mystery because we have spirit beliefs. 4. Baker ’s book inspired the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski (2003, 135– 36) to describe how Sir Samuel tried to explain the doctrine of the resurrection of the body to Kommoro, the chieftain of the Latukas, using the simile of a plant growing from a seed that itself decays. Kommoro’s attitude turned out to be so naturalistic that Sir Samuel finally had to admit in despair that “in this wild naked savage there was not even a superstition upon which to found a religious feeling.” 5. Commenting on Edward Westermarck’s (1891) evolutionary theorizing about marriage, Durkheim remarks: “D’abord, faire reposer la sociologie sur le darwinisme, c’est asseoir la science sur une hypothèse; ce qui est contraire à toute bonne méthode” (1975, 73). Westermarck (1897) replied that rejecting evolutionary theory all too easily led to accepting divine creation as a fact (see Korthof 2004; Lagerborg 1951, 180 –89; Roos 2006).

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Durkheim (1884, lecture 20) also accused Spencer of circular reasoning in deriving the Kantian categories from experience. Categories cannot be derived from experience because they are the necessary preconditions of all experience. Lukes (1977, 447), however, observes that same circularity is involved in Durkheim’s way of deriving categories from social experience (see Bergesen 2004; Gans 2000; Pyysiäinen 2005d; Schmaus 2003). 6. In the words of R. R. Marett, written before the publication of Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires, “the sociological school of Durkheim, on the other hand, combines a genuine psychological interest with the gratuitous postulate of determinism, a position which leads them, in their quest for objectivity, to abstract away, and hence in effect to ignore and undervalue, that free moment in human history of which individuality is the expression” (1914, 122). On Malinowski’s individualism and Durkheim, see Stocking (1995, 249–50). See also Mort (2006). 7. The “theory theory” of mentalizing contrasts with the so-called simulation theory, holding that one understands other minds by running simulations of them in one’s own mind; it may, however, be that people use both, depending on the task in question. I shall not take any definite stand here, as this is not immediately relevant for my concerns. 8. It can also be argued that HADD does not function in exactly the same way in all individuals, being more hyperactive in some than in some others, because of heritable differences in its levels of activation (Saler and Ziegler 2006; see Happé et al. 1998; German and Hehman 2006). 9. Wimmer and Perner (1983; Perner 1995, 251) think that younger children cannot understand that although the chocolate is in container B, Maxi has the erroneous belief about the chocolate bar being in container A. The two tend to merge because three–year-olds cannot understand that a belief can also misrepresent reality. Jerry Fodor (1992), however, argues that even the younger children understand the nature of belief; they only make the crucial mistake because they have a rule of thumb saying that agents always act in a way that helps satisfy the need in question. This heuristic then overrides their understanding of belief and leads them to say that Maxi will look where the chocolate bar actually is. 10. The extension of term “Morning Star ” is the planet Venus, whereas its intension is something like “the last star visible before sunrise.” The extension of “Evening Star ” is also the planet Venus, because it is the first star to appear at sunset (Venus is close to Earth but also closer to the Sun than the Earth is). 11. For Bering, second-order ToM refers to the structure “A thinks that B thinks that C thinks that x.” There are two ToM relations involved (A > B, B > C). This might also be considered third-order intentionality because there are three intentional relations involved (A > B, B > C, C > x) 12. “I know ” here represents zero–order intentionality (unless it metarepresented as “I think I know ”). 13. Hauser et al. (2002) have presented the somewhat controversial thesis that language in the narrow sense only includes the principle of recursion—that is, the capacity to generate a limitless range of meaningful expressions from a finite set of elements—and that this is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language (Fitch and Hauser 2004; see also Fitch et al. 2005). Whether or not this is


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a correct view of the evolution of human language, it remains true that recursion is absent from the communication systems of other animals ( but may be found in, for example, their visual systems; Jackendoff and Pinker 2005). 14. I have elsewhere called this “derived naturalness,” as distinguished from “intrinsic naturalness” (Pyysiäinen 2003c). 15. Boyer 1994a,b, 1996a,b,c, 2000a,b,c, 2001, 2003b; Boyer and Ramble 2001; Boyer and Walker 2000; Boyer et al. 2000; Pyysiäinen 2001b, 2002b; Pyysiäinen, Lindeman, and Honkela 2003. The idea has been adopted and codeveloped by Scott Atran (2002a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004; Norenzayan and Atran 2004) and Justin L. Barrett (2004b) (see Franks 2003). 16. Robert N. McCauley has suggested “modestly counterintuitive” as a substitution for “minimally counterintuitive” (see Slone 2005, 201 n. 1). I use “modestly and “massively ” as mutually exclusive alternatives, with “massively ” meaning more than one violation. 17. Seminar, Center for Anthropology and Mind, Oxford University, May 21, 2007 (see Boyer 2007). 18. It has been argued that in counterfactual thinking one tends to focus on ways to prevent bad or uncommon outcomes, which may then affect one’s causality judgments by changing one’s beliefs about the relative probability of various alternatives (Spellman and Mandel 1999). 19. William Hamilton pointed out in 1964 that if natural selection really followed the classical mathematical models of natural selection, “species would not show any behavior more positively social than the coming together of the sexes and parental care” (Hamilton 1964, 1). Before Hamilton’s idea of “inclusive fitness,” there were no models of the evolution of traits that were disadvantageous to the individuals possessing them. In 1971, Robert Trivers developed the idea of inclusive fitness further with his model of the evolution of “reciprocal altruism,” showing how selection can operate against cheaters ( Trivers 2002, 1–55). 20. Atran 2000; Buller 2005a, 171–81, 2005b; Buller et al. 2005; Fodor 2000b; Sperber and Girotto 2002; Sperber et al. 1995; Sterelny 2003, 102, 190 –91; cf. Bucciarelli and Johnson-Laird 2005; Cosmides and Tooby 2005; Fiddick et al. 2000. 21. “Weak reciprocity ” refers to kin selection, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, and costly signaling; “strong reciprocity” refers to prosocial behavior and punishing for antisocial behavior at a cost to oneself in situations where it is unlikely that one will meet the other ever again (see Burnham and Johnson 2005, 114). 22. In 1961, Ernst Mayr distinguished between “ultimate” and “proximate” causes. Roughly, proximate causes are physiological and developmental processes in an individual organism (“decoding the genetic program”); ultimate causes operate at the level of statistical attributes of populations. Mayr considered both to be causal explanations—but the matter is very complex. Ultimate explanations may be better understood as statistical explanations (Ariew 2003). 23. One can, for example, memorize the order of the planets around the Sun using the sentence “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto). 24. Lawson and McCauley may have put the cart before the horse: certain ritual occasions are not unique because of superhuman agents; it may instead be that

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supernatural agents are summoned because things such as being born and dying only happen once for everybody (Boyer 2001, 260 – 61; Pyysiäinen 2001b, 93). 25. Kimmo Ketola (2007, 103, 112) argues that ritual systems may be unbalanced in McCauley and Lawson’s (2002) sense of the term—that is, they may lack specialagent rituals yet be balanced in the sense of involving high-sensory pageantry (or the other way around; see also Uro 2007). 26. The movement in question is a typical Papua New Guinean cargo cult in which the believers expect to receive the white man’s wealth (“cargo”).

chapter 2 1. It may also take place in artificial intelligent systems, but these are made by humans and thus not products of biological evolution. If machines (some day) can derive mental contents just as humans do, we will still have to ask whether mind is inside the machine or its software or is in the environment. 2. I cannot, nor do I need to, go into the philosophical details of the debate here (see Hurley 2008b). 3. Cf. Kroeber 1948, 8: “the reason our Louisiana Negro of a few pages back sings the blues, goes to a Baptist church, and cultivates corn is that these things are parts of American culture.” Maybe, but why do these things belong to American culture? 4. Here, Δ means that we are only talking about approximately 2 (2 plus or minus something). 5. Tiele first distinguished between “nature” and “ethical” religions; “universalistic religious communities” was a subcategory within “ethical” religions, along with “national nomistic religious communities” (such as primitive Buddhism and Confucianism). “Nature religions” included many subcategories (see Masuzawa 2005, 110).

chapter 3 1. Also in Haitian Voodoo, for example, a distinction is made between the physical body, its animating principle, and agency or awareness (ti-bon anj). The sorcerer ( boko) can steal a person’s agency either immediately after physical death or through sorcery that leaves the victim apparently dead; the boko then keeps the agentive principle in a fastened bottle where it exists as the “zombie astral” and gives the boko a control over the zombified body (Littlewood and Douyon 1997; see Bronkhorst 2001, 402–8). 2. The German word for “folk ” is in the plural. 3. In 1900, Paasonen had spent three months among the Cheremiss (the Maris) in Ufa, Russia, and studied the Mari language and religion. This resulted in a short publication that focuses on the description of the Mari priesthood, gods, and so-called great offering festival ( küsö ), with no mention of soul beliefs (Paasonen 1901). 4. The Uralic languages consist of Samoyed languages and Finno-Ugric languages such as Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. Proto-Finno-Ugric is believed to have been spoken about five to six thousand years ago. 5. The Finnish word hahmo refers to outward form or appearance. It is a variant of haamu, “ghost.” By the hahmo-soul Karjalainen (1918, 22–23) meant the ensemble of a human being ’s spiritual abilities or even conscious awareness.


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6. In the German text, Harva says the Turkic peoples call the spirit Odem (Old Tataric and Yakut tyn, Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk amin, ämin). In the original Finnish text of the book (1933), the Finnish word henki is given as a translation. Henki derives from hengittää (to breathe) and refers to life and being alive. Losing one’s henki is the same as dying; dead bodies do not breathe. 7. In many cultures, souls are postulated on everything that is considered to be somehow a living being (Severi 1993; Snellgrove 1987, 20 –22). 8. Vainaja (pl. vainajat) comes from the Gothic vainags (“poor creature”; Finnish raukka; cf. German wenig, “little”). Raukka may, in turn, derive from old Scandinavian draugr, “deceased, ghost ” (Krohn 1915, 42). 9. The German translation Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker was published in 1938. Here I refer to its reprint. 10. Ein wirklicher Begriff von der Seele existiert nicht bei den Primitiven, auch nicht auf viel höherer Stufe der Kultur. Was existiert, ist ein Bündel von Assoziationen, die an einem gegebenen Punkt ansetzen und dadurch bestimmt werden, obgleich sie lose und schillernd sind. 11. The expression Suomen suku (“The Finnic family ”) had also been used by Julius Krohn (1894). In the German translation of Harva’s book, the “Altaic family ” is replaced by the expression Altaischen Völker (Altaic peoples). 12. R. R. Marett (1936, 101), for example, argued that “it would not do to class the Pope or the archbishop of Canterbury among the animists.” This would be like calling some leading Darwinist an ape. 13. The types and motives of Finnish narratives expressing folk beliefs are listed in Jauhiainen (1999), which is an enlarged version of Simonsuuri (1961); see Thompson 1955–58, II: 404–81). 14. In some cultures, we find what are called “double funerals”: first the corpse is buried; later, when no flesh is left on the bones, they are exhumed and reburied. The deceased becomes an ancestor only when the body is finally, properly dead (see Boyer 2001, 208–9). 15. Tuoni originally meant a dead body but later came to mean death as an abstraction. 16. But such peoples as for example the Veddas of Sri Lanka, living in a warm climate, also formerly used to simply leave their dead behind, just putting some leaves and branches over the corpse (Seligman and Seligman 1911, 122). 17. Haltia is from Gothic haldan and German hüten, “to beware, tend, herd, watch” (Haavio 1942, 12). 18. Tonttu can also refer to an evil being such as a giant (Haavio 1942, 115–23). 19. The word “shaman” derives from the Evenki ( Tungus) word šaman/xaman (“agitated, excited, raised”), which probably comes from Proto-Tungusic (< IndoEuropean root ša-, “to know ”); it was introduced to the West by eighteenth-century German writers (Hultkrantz 1973, 26; Pentikäinen 1998a, 41; Ripinsky-Naxon 1993, 69; Znamenski 2007, viii, 3–4). 20. It has been argued that shamanism belongs to the oldest cultural institutions of humankind and that it began in northern Eurasia some forty thousand years ago and spread into the Americas through migration; it is also found in Australia and Oceania (Siikala 1994, 38–39; Tedlock 2005, 14–15; see Znamenski 2007, 63– 71).

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Some European scholars tend to regard Arctic or Siberian shamanism as the prototypical manifestation of the Paleolithic religion of the early hunter-gatherers (Harva 1993; Hultkrantz 1973, 28; Lewis 1975, 43; Pentikäinen 1998b, 60; Siikala 1978, 14–15, 29, 1985; cf. Sjöblom 2002, 140 –47; Znamenski 2007). 21. The Seligmans adopted the term “shaman(ism)” from Yule and Burnell (1968), who defined it as a set of superstitions concerning exorcism, “devil-dancing,” and mischievous spirits (Seligman and Seligman 1911, 16 n. 2; see Znamenski 2007, 8–9). 22. There are numerous entoptic forms, but certain types are particularly recurrent. These are (Lewis-Williams and Dawson 1988, 203) a basic grid and its development in a lattice and expanding hexagonal pattern; sets of parallel lines; dots and short flecks; zigzag lines crossing the field of vision; nested catenary curves; filigrees or thin meandering lines. 23. The actually observed order ’s Spearman rank-order correlation with this list was.93, which is significant ( p < .01), although the small number of categories involved requires that we treat this with some caution. 24. Magic toad is motive B177.1 in Thompson (1955–58, 1:390). 25. Shirokogoroff (1999, 274), for example, describes shamanism as “a special system of animism.” 26. Siikala (1985) also points out that the Siberian and Central Asian shaman can retain a contact with the audience during the séance, when appropriate. 27. Linguistically trained, Shirokogoroff studied the Tungus (Evenki) and later settled himself in the Chinese port city of Kharbin. His magnum opus brings together his earlier observations in southern Siberia and comparative materials on the Manchu culture of northern China (Znamenski 2007, 110). He is largely responsible for the erroneous view that the word “shaman” derives from the Sanskrit śramana (wandering mendicant or ascetic) (Shirokogoroff 1999, 270 – 71; see Znamenski 2007, 15–17, 110). 28. This book is commonly attributed to Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, but it seems to be written by Kramer alone (Maxwell-Stuart 2007, 23–31). 29. The Spanish Inquisition achieved independence from Rome in the latter half of fifteenth century. It fought especially against converted Moslems and Jews (conversos) whose sincerity was constantly under suspicion. However, the Spanish Inquisition seems not to have been as cruel as its profane counterparts (Edwards 2003). 30. There exists a wide literature on witches and witchcraft that I will not try to review here (see Briggs 2002, 325–27; Ogden 2002; Russell 1992, 296 –301; Sørensen 2007; Thompson 1955–58, 3:285–310). 31. Institoris also tells about a witch who always used to lie down in the name of all the devils; “then a kind of light blue vapour would come out of her mouth,” which helped her to “see with absolute clarity every single thing which was being done there” (2007, 138–39). Although it is not directly said, the idea seems to be that the evil spirits somehow existed in the vapor. 32. Martin Luther, for example, says: “If we believe that Satan is the prince of this world, ever ensnaring and fighting against the kingdom of Christ with all his powers; and that he does not let go his captives without being forced by the Divine Power of the Spirit; it is manifest, that there can be no such thing as—“Free-will! (nullum esse


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posse liberium arbitrium)” (De servo arbitrio, p. 786, lines 7–10, English translation by Henry Cole, sec. 167). 33. While I was writing this, the Oxford Mail (July 14, 2007, 3) featured a story about a woman whose newborn baby was given a wrong identity tag in the hospital. When the mother said she could recognize her real baby, the tag was simply changed. “She could’ve been bringing up a child that wasn’t biologically hers,” the chairman of the Association of for Improvements in Maternity Services commented in horror. Such errors may have been far less likely in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness where our remote ancestors lived, however. 34. Expelling demons from individuals was also known in the Graeco-Roman world but may have been imported from Jewish culture (Ogden 2002, 166 – 67). See also Lang (1898, 139–58). 35. The behavior of the possessed man seems to resemble the ritualized behavior of those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder: it is mandatory, repeated, and rigid. What we do not know in this particular case is whether this behavior brought temporary relief from anxiety and by the same token also served to strengthen the disorder (Boyer and Liénard 2006). It is, however, at least a good guess that in cases like this, compulsive blasphemy serves as a reminder of sacred values and thus actually prevents one from rejecting the Christian religion (and thus the solidary group). A psychoanalyst would probably take the opposite stand and claim that this behavior testifies to unconscious hate felt toward (one’s father ’s) religion; this may be more difficult to combine with a biologically plausible view of human nature. 36. Belém is separated by thousands of miles from the more cosmopolitan and intellectually and economically prosperous conurbations of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to the south; it is also both geographically and culturally very remote from the African heart of Brazil, Bahia. Although the related Candombé cult was legalized decades ago, participation in the spirit possession cult in Belém is only possible in terreiros (cult houses) and private rooms around the city’s margins. Most of these places are almost hidden in the poorest districts of the city, and those not involved in the cult tended to say that the beliefs and practices of these people were either reflective of their social and economic deprivation or outright dangerous and evil (Cohen 2007, 16 –17, 22–28). 37. In the religion of the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin in Africa, Orìshas were ancestral spirits or divinities under the high God Olorun or Olódùmarè (see Idowu 1962, 32–37, 70 – 75; Mort 2006, 35 n. 27, 117–18; cf. the speculations in Lucas 1948, 33–48, 51–115). See Cohen (2007, 107–14). 38. Pai is from Pai-de-santo, “father of saint/orixá,” or leader of the community, the name of one of Cohen’s informants. 39. Spirits said to have lived as human beings but who have passed through ‘‘the portal’’ into the dwelling place of the spirits, the encantaria, without undergoing physical death (Cohen 2007, 209).

chapter 4 1. The Tylor Library at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University houses a copy of The Making of Religion that Lang sent to Tylor. Lang

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attached a note on inside the front cover: “Dear Tylor, Never mind writing about the Tome to me, I fancy the second part, where we drop bogles & Co, will have the better chance of interesting you. The ideas, right or wrong, occurred to me in a crowd, I had not expressed them. I hope my remarks on you are not offensive! I did not ‘go for to do it ’. I am very truly, A Lang.” 2. Lang ’s view was later given a monumental vindication in Father Wilhelm Schmidt ’s Ursprung der Gottesidee, arguing for a primal monotheism. However, historian of religions Raffaele Pettazzoni (1956, 2–5) argues that Schmidt ’s examples were neither about monotheism, nor about primitives. In Pettazzoni’s opinion, monotheism presupposes polytheism because monotheism means the denial of all other but one God. It is not developed from polytheism; it instead is its rejection. The Supreme Being of savage peoples “is but an approximation to the ideal of monotheism.” Pettazzoni himself examined omniscience as an attribute of god “independently of all prejudged monotheistic influence”; by omniscience he meant such knowing that comes from visually seeing everything. This was a special characteristic of sky-gods and astral gods. 3. In Gray et al.’s (2007) study of modern Western conceptions of agents and minds, the subjects attributed to God maximal agency but only very little felt experience. 4. A corporation sole is a legal entity consisting of a single incorporated office, occupied by a single person. The corporation sole was invented as a means of keeping the property of the Church from being treated as the estate of the vicar. The property thus was titled to the office of the corporation sole, not the individual person. 5. The English “God” derives from the Indo-European *ghu-, “to call, invoke.” 6. Underlying the Pentateuch (“Books of Moses”) are three different sources scholars have named as “Elohist,” “Yahwist,” and the “Priestly (writer).” 7. elōhîm is in the plural (eloah in the singular) but it is used with singular verbs and adjectives. 8. The Phoenicians had developed a phonetic alphabet in the eleventh century BCE. The Phoenician–Old Hebrew script derives from it. By the third century, a script derived from the Aramaic script (known from the ninth century) and called “the Jewish script ” had replaced it (Cross 1961; Würthwein 1987, 3–11). Writing became the main mode of storing prophecy in Elijah, Elisha, and their disciples, although oral and written traditions coexisted during the eighth and sixth centuries BCE (Smith 2002, 191). 9. According to Wyatt (2005, 171), “all religious thought which operates in a dimension other than the purely conceptual (as in modern systematic theology) is intrinsically mythological.” Myth is a “mind-set ” (176). This actually equals saying that mythological thought is dominated by intuitions, as distinct from cognitively more costly processes and concepts. 10. Compare Mark 1:10: “immediately, coming up from the water, He saw the heavens parting and the Spirit ( pneuma) descending upon Him like a dove.” Matthew 3:16: “When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God ( pneuma tou Theou) descending like a dove and alighting upon Him.” In John (14:16), Jesus says to his disciples that he prays his Father to send a “helper,” the “Spirit of truth” ( pneuma tēs alētheias) to abide with them forever.


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11. Demiourgos, from the Greek demos (“folk”) and ergon (“work”). 12. Anselm’s ontological proof (Proslogion c. 2) runs as follows: the fool thinks that God is ( by definition) a being such that no greater being can be conceived but also holds that God does not exist. This, however, involves a contradiction. The fool believes himself to be thinking of the greatest possible being, and yet a great being that exists is greater than the one the fool is thinking of (which does not have the property of existence). Thus, denying that the greatest possible being exists, involves a contradiction; it is therefore necessary (to think) that God exists (see Kenny 2007, 290 –95). It has, however, also been argued that Anselm did not mean this as a rational proof at all; it is instead a theological argument showing that the non-believer (the “fool” [insipiens]) cannot understand the existence of God (Barth 1958; also Tillich 1967, 1:205– 6). 13. A similar debate on the ontology of God’s attributes had been going on in the Islamic word. The Mu’tazilites of the 9th and 11th centuries, wishing to deny all anthropomorphism in God, argued that the attributes of God were actually identical with God, not separate beings in him. The Arabic word for “attribute,” sifah, is translated as attributio in the Latin translation of the Hebrew translation of the Guide of the Perplexed (Doctor/Dux perplexorum) by Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) (Kenny 2007, 50 –53; Wolfson 1959, 1961, 49–52). This work influenced theologians such as Aquinas, Albert the Great (1206 –80), and Duns Scotus (c. 1266 –1308). When William Ockham (Quodlibet 3 q. 2, Ockham 1991, p. 176) relates how “the ancient Saints did not use the word ‘attributes,’ but instead used the name ‘names’ (nominatio),” this may testify to the fact that attributio really had been adopted from Maimonides’ translation as a substitute for nominatio ( Wolfson 1959; 1961, 49–52). 14. “Primum efficiens est intelligens et volens” ( Tractatus de primo principio 4.4, Duns Scotus 1941, 71). Tractatus de primo principio is based on Ordinatio 1.2 and develops the philosophical doctrine of God in an axiomatic way; Duns Scotus 1994, 8; Knuuttila 1981, 218). 15. “One kind of contingency and possibility is that the will is successively related to opposite objects, and this possibility and contingency result from its mutability. And according to this possibility a distinction is made regarding possible propositions which are composed of contrary and opposite terms, such as Something white can be black. And according to the divided sense the proposition is true, as far as the terms are understood to have a possibility at different times, such as Something white can be black at b. Hence the possibility results from succession” (Lect. 1.39.48). Lect. 1.39.47: “Non enim est libertas in volontate nostra ut simul velit opposite obiecta” (“There is no such freedom that we could will and simultaneously will opposite things”). Lect. 1.39.50: “et ideo voluntas volens a in hoc instanti et pro hoc instanti potest nolle a in eodem et pro eodem” (“and so the will, willing a at this moment and for this moment, can not-will a at and for the same moment ”). 16. The following presentation is based largely on Mann (2003); Mann’s exposition draws mainly from Scotus’s Ordinatio version of his Commentary on the sentences of Peter Lombard of c. 1300 –1304. This work is his two-stage revision of his lectures given as a bachelor at Oxford ( Williams 2003, 9). Cf. Cross (2005, esp. 91–117). 17. Institoris put it thus in the Malleus: “The more useful a question is for preaching, the more difficult it is to make sense of it ” (Institoris 2007, 94).

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18. “In theologia, verum est, verbum esse carnem factum, in philosophia simpliciter impossibile et absurdum” (Luther 1932, Vol. 39, part 2, ch.3, 2nd thesis). 19. Nietzsche seems to have been the first philosopher in the modern West to proclaim the death of God: “After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. . . . When will all these shadows of God cease to obscure us? When shall we have nature entirely undeified? When shall we be permitted to naturalize ourselves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?” (Nietzsche 1974, 3:108–9). 20. The English translation “Holy Spirit ” became common in the twentieth century, replacing the older “Holy Ghost,” which is still used in some contexts. Originally, the English word “ghost ” had the same meaning as “spirit ” and “soul. The Holy Spirit was originally said to proceed (Gr. ekporeúetai) from the Father; in 447, the phrase “and the son” ( filioque) was added, which created a controversy between the Eastern and Western churches. 21. The Confessio Augustana is the primary confession of faith of the Lutheran Church. It was written in both German and Latin and presented by German rulers and free-cities at the Diet of Augsburg on June 25, 1530. The text of the original editio princeps was edited by Philipp Melanchton (see Maurer 1986). 22. Paul Johannes Tillich was born in Starzeddel in Brandenburg, Germany, in 1886. His father was a Lutheran minister, and Paul struggled hard to gain intellectual independence in relation to his father ’s more conservative views. He developed his theology, partly at least, in contrast to the views of Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten, and the neoorthodox theology that was in vogue in Marburg where Tillich taught in 1925– 25. He was fired in 1933 because of his opposition to the Nazis; Reinhold Niebuhr then invited him to teach at Union Theological Seminary, and in 1940 Tillich became a U.S. citizen (Hopper 1968, 15–28; Wilson 2007, 221–22). 23. It appears that Systematic Theology (1951– 63) does not represent a turning point in Tillich’s thinking. He began to work on it in Marburg in 1925 and gradually elaborated his main ideas, which already existed when he moved to Marburg in 1924 (Hopper 1968, 16 –17, 66 – 67). “The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation” ( Tillich 1948, 57). 24. Tillich (1912, 38–39), for example, quotes Schelling ’s words: “( T)he final ground of all reality is a Something (ein Etwas) that can only be thought about through itself, that is, through its being (Sein), a Something that can be thought about only insofar as it is, briefly, a Something by which the principles of being and thinking coincide.” 25. Also Heidegger suggests in passing that God’s Being cannot be of the same kind as that of his creatures (Heidegger 1987, 74, 126). 26. This is in accordance with Genesis 1:1–2, which translates as “In the beginning, (when) God created the heavens and earth, the world was formless and empty.” God did not necessarily create the heavens and earth out of nothing; creation instead


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means that he gave form and content to the heavens and earth that already were in existence. 27. Philosopher S. Albert Kivinen has actually developed a proof of the existence of God based on mereology. He first divides all beings into those that are from something else (ab alio) and entities in themselves (Ens a se). Now, the mereological sum of all ab alio entities either is an Ens a se or derives from something that is not ab alio (i.e. an Ens a se). In both cases, there is one entity that is an Ens a se, that is, a God-like absolute (see Kivinen 1998). 28. A typescript of the data (in Finnish) is available from the author. 29. The Finnish pronoun hän ( he, she) is neutral in terms of sex. 30. Sielun silmin ( by the eyes of the soul) is a common saying in Finnish and does not necessarily have any deep metaphysical implications. It is just a way of saying that one can imagine something, without being able to perceive in a physical sense. 31. The Finnish word kaikkivaltias (the one who is omnipotent) refers to one who has all (kaikki ) the power (valta); it is a very common epithet of God both in theological and everyday language. 32. The reply item “theological concepts and definitions” appears 83 times in the data (Heiskanen 2005, 27, 29). 33. “Maailman katsomuksesta on päästävä irti että voisi nähdä maailman.”

chapter 5 1. See Bareau 1953, 1962, 1963, 1970 – 71, 1974a,b, 1979, 1980, 1991; Foucher 1949; Pye 1979; Pyysiäinen 1987, 1993; Thomas 1975; Williams 2006, 30 –34. The Sanskrit and Pali word buddha is a past participle of the verbal root budh-, “to wake up.” The Buddha thus is “the awakened one.” The name Siddhārtha appears in such late works as the Nidānakathā and Lalitavistara but is never mentioned in older texts ( Thomas 1975, 43–44; Williams 2006, 21). 2. Later, Bronkhorst (1998) argues that as the sutras do not pretend to inform us about the beliefs and practices of early Buddhists but only those of the Buddha, it is for the most part safe to take them as testimonies about the beliefs of the Buddha but not necessarily of early Buddhism (also Bareau 1974a, 280). For me, an even safer conclusion is that the sutras tell us about what the early Buddhists regarded as the beliefs of the Buddha. 3. Bechert 1982, 34–36, 1986, 19–24, 50 –51, 1988, 24–26; Eggermont 1965– 79, 2:41–44, 4:77–120, 5:69– 70, 8:55–57. See Parpola 2002a, 363– 64. 4. In the words of the famous ending of the Heart Sutra (Prajnāpāramitāhrdayāsūtra): “Om, gate, gate, pāragate, pārasamgate” (“Gone, gone, verily gone, verily and truly gone”). 5. My interpretation is inspired by the Finnish expression edesmennyt (“one who has gone ahead [of us]”), which is commonly used of dead persons, much like the English expression “late.” The idea is of course that the deceased is gone and that others will follow in due course. 6. There are serious problems with this view. First, Griffiths does not present valid criticism of reductionism; second, his own view is not as antireductionist as he thinks. As John Keenan (1996, 496) argues, studying doctrines in a context is not the

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same as negating their doctrinal meanings. As I argue in the appendix, antireductionist arguments in the study of religion are themselves arguments for a specific type of reduction. Keenan similarly points out that Griffiths’s method “is itself a reductive procedure that denudes texts and leaves them supine, ready to submit to the analytical procedures to be performed upon them” (1996, 496 –97). Because doctrines are conditioned by language and culture from the start, a completely ahistorical study of doctrine does not focus only on the doctrines’ own self-understanding; it is instead an attempt at understanding the doctrines in question in the context of the modern author ’s own views (Griffiths actually starts from Kant ’s idea of “maximal greatness”; cf. 501– 02). 7. Note that “Hinayana” ( hīnayāna) began as a pejorative term first used by Mahayanists. It is, however, very difficult to try to avoid using it. 8. The expression cakravartin rāja (Pali cakkavatti rāja) appears for the first time in the Maitrīupanisad and then in the Arthaśāstra; the most detailed description of a cakravartin rāja is in the Buddhist Cakkavattisīhanādasutta, which presents the “wheelturning king ” as an ideal ruler (Dīghanikāya 3.58– 79; see Drekmeier 1962, 203; Gonda 1966, 123). 9. The word deva is derived from *deiwos (< *dei-), “shining,” “sky ”; in various phases of the development of Indian traditions, it refers to various deities. An Īśvara is a creator-god in the four monotheistic systems, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśesika, and Vedānta. 10. These are the states of infinity of space (ākāsānañcāyatana), of infinity of cognition (viññānancāyatana), of nothingness (ākiñcaññāyatana), of neither mental representations nor no mental representations (nevasaññānāsaññāyatana), and of the cessation of mental representations and feeling (saññāvedayitanirodha or nirodhasamāpatti ) (Samyuttanikāya 4.217; see Abhidharmakośa 5:143, 207–9; Bronkhorst 1993b; Schmithausen 1981, 249). 11. The four āsavas are sense-desires, desire for continued existence, ignorance, and ( later) “views.” Sometimes also ignorance is added. The āsavas are mentioned in the Tipitaka in stereotypical descriptions of how someone achieved nirvāna by liberating himself or herself from the āsavas, as in the case of the Buddha’s first five converts, who attained nirvāna by merely listening to the Buddha’s teaching (Vinayapitaka 1.10 – 20). No further explanation of the nature of this liberation is provided; in later Buddhism the āsavas no longer play a central role (Johansson 1985, 177; Keown 2004, 22). 12. For example, the Buddhist scholar Asanga Tilakaratne argues that nirvāna is no thing and cannot be experienced. “What takes place is an inner transformation and acquisition of new knowledge. . . . Accordingly, nirvana may more accurately be described as the quality of the life led by the emancipated person” (1993, 69). 13. Literally, the word dharma means “bearer ” or “supporter ” and, from the Rgveda onward, also “law ” or “eternal order” (Mayrhofer 1963, 2:95; see Carter 1978, 112) and in Buddhism specifically the law revealed by the Buddha. In Buddhism, these two meanings are related because the “bearers” or “elements of reality ” are regarded as conditioned by the law (von Glasenapp 1938, 385). 14. On the supranormal (abhūtam) see Rhys Davids and Stede 1972, 60; cf. Bareau 1951, 18, 21 n. 25. 15. The fact that at the moment of birth one has no memories of past lives is often explained by saying that the suffering of the baby at birth ( janmaduhkha) destroys memories of previous lives (see Hara 1980; cf. Goldman 1985).


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16. “L’ātman n’existe pas” (Abhidharmakośa 2:56). “Il n’y a pas de délivrance en dehors de ( bouddhisme), car les autres doctrines sont corrompues par une fausse conception du ‘moi ’ ” (5:230). “Parce qu’aucune preuve n’établit l’existence d’un moi indépendant des éléments” (5:231). “En ce qui concerne un moi indépendant des éléments, ni évidence, ni induction.—Nous savons donc qu’un moi réel n’existe pas” (5:232). 17. Bronkhorst (2007) argues that Buddhism first flourished in “Greater Magadha,” the area east of the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamunā, from Śrāvastī in the northwest to Rājagrha in the southeast. The culture of Greater Magadha was distinct from Vedic culture until the time of Patañjali (c. 150 BCE) and beyond. The most important feature of this culture was a belief in rebirth and karmic retribution that antedated Buddhism and Jainism. 18. For example, Prebish and Keown argue that the idea of nirvāna would be unintelligible without the idea of transmigration, thus identifying nirvāna with liberation from reincarnation. They also think that the Buddha’s enlightenment was a visionary experience “in the mythic mode of the earliest Vedic tradition” (2006, 5). 19. Robert Goldman (1985, 418–19) points out that the majority of people in India have not been interested in how the karmic mechanism actually works and have simply left it for metaphysicians and theologians to sort out the details. The Buddha, for example, is believed to have said that the mechanism of karma was inconceivable to anyone except himself (see Prebish and Keown 2006, 21). 20. La Vallée Poussin says the following is a common but mistaken explanation: “Sakyamuni teaches annihilation at death, and denies rebirth or transmigration; but he believes that, owing to the strength of actions, a new being is created who is to inherit the actions of the dead man and to enjoy their fruit. A man dies and is dead for ever, but his goodness or wickedness persists and causes another man to be born” (1917, 34–35). 21. La Vallée Poussin argued in his Hibbert Lectures of 1916: “The belief in reincarnations was a purely savage surmise, liable to be organized into what is called totemism, an unprogressive and absurd paganism, and no more: to be sure of it, we have only to open the books of Tylor or Durkheim. Brahmans and Buddhists borrowed this belief, which was altogether new to the Aryan tradition; but they found no difficulty in adapting it either to the dogma of the reward of good and evil deeds, or to a monism as rigid as that of the Eleatic school” (1917, 18). 22. In Jainism, for example, karma was understood as a kind of substance or subtle matter, “like dust which sticks to the soul ( jīva)” (Bronkhorst 2000, 119). 23. Bronkhorst (2000, 17) actually says that Vaiśesika denies intrinsic goaldirectedness. 24. The formula goes as follows: because of ignorance (avijjā), mental formations (sankhārā), because of mental formations, consciousness (viññāna), because of consciousness, psychophysicality (nāmarūpa), because of psych-physicality, six spheres of sense (salāyatana), because of six spheres of sense, contact ( phassa), because of contact, feeling (vedanā), because of feeling, thirst (tanhā), because of thirst, grasping (upādāna), because of grasping, becoming ( bhava), because of becoming, birth ( jāti), because of birth, aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, suffering, grief, and depression (Vinayapitaka 1.1).

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25. Jurewicz’s interpretation is inspired by Gombrich’s (1992) view of the Buddhist cosmogonical myth as a satire targeted at Brahmanical beliefs. The myth is found in the Aggaññasuttanta (Dīghanikāya 3.84–97); Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:285–301; and Mūlasarvāstivādin vinaya 1884, 1–13; see Drekmeier 1962, 136 –37; Gonda 1966, 48, 129–31. 26. This one-page treatise is preserved both in Sanskrit and as a Tibetan translation. Theodor Stcherbatsky (Fjodor Ščerbatskoj) published both, together with a Russian translation, in 1904. For an English translation see Nāgārjuna (1969). 27. In the commentarial literature, dhammabhūta is interpreted as “one who has become dhamma, one who has dhamma as his nature” (Carter 1978, 93). 28. This text was found by George Coedès in a Theravada anthology in Pali called the Suttajātakanidānānisansa, copies of which are located in Bangkok and Phnom Penh (Dhammakāyassa Atthavannanā 1956; Reynolds 1977, 384–85). 29. But cf. the Pañcavimsatisāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra: “His contemplation of the Buddha-body as it really is, is the contemplation of the Dharma-body as it really is” (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 176). 30. E.g. the Astadasasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra (Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1984, 484): “Those who honour this perfection of wisdom, they thereby worship Me, as well as the Buddhas and Lords of the past, future and present ” (in a Gilgit manuscript; 484). See also Ratnagotravibhāga (1966, 207 and n. 63). 31. Cf. Mahāyānasamgraha 10.28.7: “Il pénètre tout le monde par l’éclat de sa loi (dharmaprabhā), comme le soleil.” 32. The marks are also paralleled by the thirty-two impure parts of the human body that are used as objects of meditation (see Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom 1972, 95–100; Strong 2004, 17). 33. The Buddhist tradition knows ten (in the Pali nikāyas and in the Chinese Madhyamāgama) or fourteen (in e.g. the Abhidharmakośa, most Chinese āgamas, and Nāgārjuna’s Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra) questions never answered by the Buddha (see Collins 1982, 131–2): Are the world and the self eternal? / Are they not eternal? / Are they both eternal and not eternal? / Are they neither eternal nor not eternal? / Do the world and the self have an end? / Do they not have an end? / Do they both have and have not an end? / Do they neither have nor not have an end? / Does a Tathāgata exist after death? / Does he not exist after death? / Does he both exist and not exist after death? / Does he neither exist nor not exist after death? / Is the soul ( jīva) the same as the body (śarīra)? / Is the soul different from the body? (Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra 1944–49, 1:155). 34. Sūkaramaddava is probably the name of a local dish that was made of sūkara (“boar, pig ”) and was maddava (“soft ”) (von Hinüber 2000). The cause of the Buddha’s death was probably mesenteric infarction caused by an occlusion of an opening of the superior mesenteric artery (Mettanando Bhikkhu 2000). When the Buddha first got seriously ill, his favorite disciple, Ānanda, wished that he would say something to the sangha before he died. The Buddha replied that he had taught everything explicitly and held no secrets; an old and sickly man did not want to be the leader of the sangha. Later, however, he said that he could stay in the world for an aeon if he wanted to. But poor Ānanda was so led astray by the Evil One (Māra) that he did not understand that he should ask the Buddha to stay in the world. When Ānanda later asked twice the


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Buddha to stay in the world, the Buddha twice turned him down, saying that on previous occasions he would have agreed on a third request, had Ānanda been wise enough to ask (Dīghanikāya 2.99–118). 35. “Avyāvatā tumhe Ānanda hotha Tathāgatassa sarīrapujāya.” T. W. Rhys Davids mistakenly assumes vyāvata to mean “hindered” and translates: “Hinder not yourselves, Ānanda, by honoring the remains of the Tathāgata” (see Rhys Davids and Stede 1972, 654). A correct translation is “Ānanda, you should not worry about the funeral of the Tathāgata.” Dillon (2000, 536) translates: “Do not worry yourselves about the funeral arrangements, Ananda.” Here sarīrapujāya (“body-worship”) most likely refers to a funeral, but it could also mean relic worship (Strong 2004, 99). 36. Birth without the intercourse of the parents is also implied in Majjhimanikāya 3.120 –21 and Dīghanikāya 2.13. 37. Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:113: “ ‘Now, at this moment, is it time for me to depart hence. For men are sunk in gross darkness, are blinded, and of dimmed vision. Attaining me, they will be delivered.’ ” Mahāvastu 1949–52, 1:114–115: “ ‘Bodhisattvas are not born of the intercourse of a father and a mother, but by their own merit independently of parents.’ ” Mahāvastu 1:134: “Although the Sugata’s corporeal existence is not due to the sexual union of parents, yet the Buddhas can point to their fathers and mothers. This is mere conformity with the world.”

chapter 6 1. Ted Peters (2002, xiv) says theology is in the position of risking falsification by science and that “in a sense,” science is also in the position of risking falsification by theology. The latter claim is absurd, because falsification is not fatal to science; it is an essential part of scientific practice (Popper 1963). This is not so with theology. 2. “En dehors de l’individu humain et du monde physique, il doit donc y avoir quelque autre réalité par rapport à laquelle cette espèce de delire qu’est bien, en un sense, toute religion, prend unde signification et une valeur objective” (Durkheim 1925, 124). Joseph Swain (Durkheim 1965, 107) translates: “Aside from the human individual and the physical world, there should be some other reality, in relation to which this variety of delirium which all religion is in a sense, has a significance and an objective value.” The French word délire has much wider and more general connotations than the English “delirium”; it can refer to any state of mind that departs from reason and/or reality, whereas the English “delirium” usually refers only to the special kind of mental disturbance or confusion due to fever or drink. “Delusion” and “illusion” thus are among possible translations (Lutzky 1997; Pickering 1997, 1998, 1999; see Pyysiäinen 2005d).

appendix 1. Among other alternatives is also dynamical systems theory (DST), which emphasizes feedback control systems, and the embedded/embodied (E/E) view of cognition, or embodied dynamicism ( Thompson 2007). Different views, however, take different kinds of things to be paradigmatic of human cognition: when cognitivist take reasoning, playing chess, and processing language as paradigm cases, the E/E and

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DST camps regard sensorimotor tasks as central (Grush 2002, 282–84). Keeping in mind the dual nature of cognition, there seems to be room for both views. For example Barsalou’s (1999) idea of cognition as simulating perceptual processes offline, as it were, is useful in many contexts, although it might be argued that the symbols that are grounded in perceptual experience need not “spend eternity underground” (Gabora 1999). In that case, a computational model seems to be necessary for explaining how the symbols work (Dennett and Viger 1999). 2. The symbol processor of the B–system may have evolved from the connectionist A–system and be situated on top of it (Smolensky 1988); the two systems may work in unison (Sun 2002; Sun et al. 2005); or they may be instances of a higher-order system (see Holyoak and Spellman 1993; Kokinov 1997). 3. E.g., Carruthers 2004; Cosmides and Tooby 1994, 2002; Pinker 1998, 2002, 2005a,b; Samuels 2000; Sperber 1994; Tooby and Cosmides 1995; Tooby et al. 2005. Geary (2005; Geary and Huffman 2002) has developed a mediating position he calls “soft modularity.” 4. E.g., Buller 2005a,b; Edelman 1992; Fodor 2005; Gould 1997; Gould and Lewontin 1984; Gould and Vrba 1982; Griffiths 2002; Laland and Brown 2003, 153– 96; Lickliter and Honeycutt 2003a,b; Kitcher 1990; Panksepp 2007; Panksepp and Panksepp 2000; Sterelny 2003; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999, 328–32; Woodward and Cowie 2004. Responses to Buller ’s criticism: Cosmides et al. 2005; Fiddick et al. 2005; cf. Buller et al. 2005. 5. The evolutionary psychologists’ ideas of humans’ cognitive modules having emerged in the Pleistocene and of present-day hunter-gatherers as essentially similar to their remote ancestors is strikingly similar to Tylor ’s idea of survivals. The Tylorian idea of the evolution of religious beliefs is here replaced by attempts to trace the evolution of cognitive mechanisms that make religious belief possible (see Boyer 2001, 32–33). 6. Sperber here prefers the interpretation of many innate modules being learning modules that generate further modules (Sperber 2005, 59). 7. Buller, however, seems to draw rather extreme conclusions from the experimental work that has revealed the plasticity of the cortex; plasticity clearly has its limits (Sereno 2005; Smirnakis et al. 2005). 8. Carruthers (2006, 7) defines encapsulation to mean that a processing system’s internal operations cannot draw on any information held outside that system (in addition to its input). Domain specificity means that a system only receives inputs of a particular kind. 9. Churchland (1995, 200–02) makes this point but also unduly conflates Jackson’s argument with Thomas Nagel’s (1974) similar argument on “what is it like to be a bat.” 10. This, of course, is why this program has had a continuing appeal to some scholars of religion, even though no successful applications exist (Gilhus 1994; Jensen 2003; cf. Ryba 1991). 11. Jean-Paul Sartre (1978) criticized Husserl for making the apparently independent intentional objects actually dependent on a “transcendental ego” (see Husserl 1950b, 137–38). Sartre (1978, 1943) argued that the ego was in the world, that is, in the cognized objects, and that consciousness, in not having any intrinsic existence, thus was “unhappy consciousness.”


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12. Some have also seen obvious overlap in the projects of phenomenology and cognitive science (see Gallagher 1997; Varela 1996); Dreyfus (1982b, 3–11) argues that in its first stage, Husserl’s theory of intentionality corresponded “exactly ” to Fodor ’s representational ToM, while in its second stage it also shows resemblances to Fodor ’s idea of computation on mental representations. Cognitive science focuses on the structures and processes that make up a mind, by and large irrespective of verbal language, much as Husserl focuses on the “noematic ” components of perception (McIntyre and Smith 1982). However, this view has also been contested on the basis that Husserl does not have the kind of representationalist theory of mind Dreyfus attributes to him and that Huserl’s project also includes the notion of a precognitive and non-objectdirected “operative intentionality ” ( Thompson 2007). 13. In Nagel’s classical model of theory reduction, reduction means deriving a reduced theory’s laws from the laws of a reducing theory with the help of some bridge principles. The idea is not one of elimination of an upper-level theory but of its deduction from a lower-level theory of which it is a special case. Reduction is a kind of explanation of another explanation or a theory. However, as the reducing theory also corrects the reduced theory, the laws of the latter cannot deductively follow from the first. Thus, it has been argued that, for example, neuroscientific theories instead eliminate and displace folk psychology (Churchland 1998; Churchland 1989). This is a case of historical theory succession rather than of reduction (Craver 2007, 3 n. 2; McCauley 2007). 14. Directional asymmetry arises when one side of a trait is systematically larger than the other side; antisymmetry occurs when an organism develops asymmetrically, the side with larger traits being determined randomly by environmental factors; FA is caused by developmental instability, small random perturbations in cell division arising from the stochasticity of development (Rhodes and Simmons 2007). 15. Qirko (2004a, 699) regards “kin-cue manipulation” as “complementary ” to explanations based on inclusive fitness theory. However, the two clearly operate on different levels: the ultimate and the proximate.


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Index

Aarne, Antti, 61 Adams, Fred, 44–45 adaptations, 21, 31–32, 34 adaptationism, 31 by-products of, 31, 186–87 agency, 5, 8 – 9, 12–16, 18, 21, 23, 36, 41, 53, 57, 66–67, 88, 93– 94, 97– 98, 109, 134, 136 Buddhist, 138 –39, 143, 150, 157–59, 163, 165–66, 170 – 71, 173– 74 detection of, 13, 176, 190 disembodied, 16, 23, 58, 29 –30, 67, 73, 83, 96, 108, 155, 158, 174, 180 full-access, 31–32, 38, 182 Aizawa, Ken, 44–45 altered states of consciousness, 77– 78, 81, 138, 149 altruism, 22, 31–34, 36, 106, 213 n. 19 reciprocal, 36, 88 Amitābha, 169 – 70 animacy, 12–14, 21–25, 29, 41, 63, 66–68, 94, 101, 104, 106, 108, 112, 129, 165–66, 170, 173, 179 detection of, 176 animism, 9 –10, 63, 65–66 Anselm of Canterbury, 109, 111, 128 anthropomorphism, 101–2

Anttonen, Veikko, 61–62, 66 Aquinas, Thomas, 108 –12, 115, 127 Arbman, Ernst, 63, 174 arhat, 146–47, 168 Aristotle, 57–58, 63, 89, 102, 109, 110 –113, 117–118, 178 āsava, 145–46, 222 n. 11 ātman, 150 –51, 154–55, 158, 181 anātman, 151, 158, 181, 223 n. 16 Atran, Scott, 26–28 Augsburg Confession, 125 automatic processes, 4, 6– 7, 13, 16–17, 20, 32, 34, 164. See also controlled processes Barrett, Justin L., 4–5, 12–13, 26, 30, 47–48, 95 Bastian, Adolf, 49, 57, 59, 61 being-itself ( Tillich), 126–30, 132–33, 185 Bengel, Johan, 120 Bering, Jesse, 16, 19, 47, 72 Beyer, Stephan, 138 bhavacakra, 144 Bloom, Paul, 15–16, 66–67, 174 Bodies of the Buddha (trikāya), 159 –64 Boyd, Robert, 36

282

index

Boyer, Pascal, 23–24, 26–29, 48, 71, 80, 130, 175, 177, 182, 186 brāhmana, 154 Brahmanism, 157 Bronkhorst, Johannes, 139, 146, 154–56, 177, 223 n. 17 buddhahood, 141, 143, 144–50, 170 properties of, 148 –49 Buddha images, 164–66 burials, 69 – 72 cakravartin rāja, 142–43, 222 n. 8 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi, 65 Chalmers, David, 44 changelings, 89 cheater detection, 34–36, 190, 192– 93 Church, 84, 87–88, 120 –21, 123, 135, 163, 179 Catholic, 83, 108, 119 –20, 123–25 as mystical body of Christ, 97, 105–6 Lutheran, 125, 133 visible and invisible, 106 Clark, Andy, 44 cognitive architecture, 3–5, 49, 78, 80, 193– 95 cognitive constraints, 3, 15–16, 58, 73– 74, 78 –80, 117, 174– 77, 185 cognitive cost, 4–5, 7–8, 13, 48, 93, 96–98, 123, 126, 132, 163, 165–66, 178–79 cognitive selection, 15, 19, 34 Cohen, Emma, 90 – 92 collective consciousness, 12, 37, 42, 49, 177 controlled processes, 6, 13, 93. See also automatic processes cooperation, 22, 30 –31, 33, 35–36, 38 –39, 75, 84, 88, 106, 120 corpus (Christi) mysticum, 105–106 Cosmides, Leda, 34–35 costly signaling, 33, 36, 87–88, 106 counterfactuals, 19, 28 –29, 112 counterintuitiveness, 22–30, 39 –40, 66–67, 79 –80, 100, 108, 114, 118, 149, 153, 167, 173– 74, 187. See also intuitions creation ex nihilo (de nihilo), 127 Creeds (Christian), 123–24

cultural selection, 4, 47–48 culture, 3– 7, 9, 11, 22, 37, 45–49, 62, 64, 67–68, 72, 96, 182–83 Czaplicka, Antoinette, 76, 81 Darwin, Charles, 11, 46, 211 n. 5 Dawkins, Richard, 132, 185–86 death, 9, 24, 26, 58 –60, 68 – 73, 81, 96, 125–26, 133, 174, 179 –80 of the Buddha, 139, 167–68 in Buddhism and Hinduism, 144–46, 150, 152–55, 166–67, 170, 181 of God, 132, 185 demiurge, 109 Dennett, Dan, 19, 32, 39, 44, 176 devas (‘gods ’), 143, 176 Dharma, 159 –62 dharmas, 149 –50 dual-process theories, 5–6, 189 – 92 duhkha, 145, 151, 157, 181 Dunbar, Robin, 21, 35 Duns Scotus, Johannes, 109, 111–15, 117–18, 178 Durkheim, Émile, 8 – 9, 11, 12, 36–37, 39, 42, 81, 88, 177, 182, 185–86 El, 99 –103, 113, 136, 185 Eliade, Mircea, 60, 76 emic and etic concepts, 12, 62, 64, 82, 197–201 enlightenment (bodhi), 138, 140–41, 143–45, 147, 169 – 70 entoptic phenomena, 78 epidemiology of representations, 3, 12, 26–28, 43, 47–49, 80, 182 Epstein, Seymour, 7 everyday thinking, 7 evolutionary theory, 22. See also adaptations and agency, 175 and cooperation, 38 –39, 75 Durkheim on, 11 misunderstood 10 –11, 95– 96, 98 and “population” thinking, 46 and religion, 31 exaptation, 31

index false belief task, 14–15 Finno-Ugric peoples, 57, 59 –61, 64, 174 free will, 16–17, 32, 85, 87, 108, 112–14, 154, 156, 178, 181 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 116 genres, genre analysis, 64, 74 ghosts, 29, 73, 96, 104, 126, 144, 173– 75 Gombrich, Richard, 164–65, 224 n. 25 Gonce, Lauren, 27 Gould, Stephen J., 31 Griffiths, Paul J., 141, 148 –49 Grimm, Jakob, 64 ground of being ( Tillich), 4, 126–28, 147 group entitavity, 37 Haavio, Martti, 73– 74, 76 HADD, 13, 67, 182–83 Harva [Holmberg], Uno, 60 – 70, 73 hazard precaution (theory), 48, 205–209 Heidegger, Martin, 116, 126–27 heresy, 5, 83, 85, 179 Hintikka, Jaakko, 18, 50, 109, 111 Hitchens, Christopher, 132 Holcot, Robert, 116–17, 119, 178 holy spirit, 102– 7 homo sapiens, 65, 67–68 Honko, Lauri, 22, 64, 75 HTR, 13, 18, 21–23, 30 –31, 75, 136, 182–83 HUI, 13–14, 18, 21–23, 29 –31, 67, 75, 82, 105, 129, 136, 182–83 Hultkrantz, Åke, 63, 73, 77, 174– 75 Hus, Jan, 118 intelligence, 7 intentionality, 13, 16, 21–22, 30 –31, 34, 36, 67, 108, 111, 114 as intensionality, 18 –19 intrinsic and derived, 43–44 orders (degrees) of, 6, 19, 26, 38, 106, 136, 176, 182 intuitions, 5, 12, 16–17, 18, 21–24, 26–30, 34, 37, 43, 47–48, 106 about afterlife, 71– 73 Buddhist, 150, 158, 165, 172– 74, 179 – 80, 182

283

intuitive system, 6–8 Judeo-Christian, 87, 98, 102, 109, 117, 121, 126, 132, and soul concepts, 57, 63, 67–69, 82, 89 intuitive ontology, 23–24, 58, 174, 187 Īśvara (‘Lord’), 156, 158, 176, 181, 222 n. 9 Jains (‘Jainas ’), 50, 148, 154–55 Jātaka, 147, 152, 164 joint attention, 13, 15, 20 Jurewicz, Joanna, 157 Kalevala, 76 Karjalainen, K. F., 59 –62 karma, 146, 150, 152–58, 164, 171, 180 –81 Kelemen, Deborah, 179 Kenny, Anthony, 116, 118 King ’s Two Bodies (Kantorowicz), 97– 98, 163, 176 kinship, 31, 36, 88 Knuuttila, Simo, 109, 112 Krohn, Julius, 61 Krohn, Kaarle, 61–62, 64, 66, 69 Lang, Andrew, 96 language of thought, 7, 116 Lawson, E. Thomas, 39 –40 Lewis, Ioan, 75 Lewontin, Richard, 31 Liénard, Pierre, 48 literacy, 37, 48 –49, 70, 100 –1 Lovejoy, Arthur, 49 –50, 102, 109 Luther, Martin, 117, 119 –21, 125, 171 McCauley, Robert N., 39 –40 Madhyamaka, 158 Mahāvastu, 168 –69 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 64, 76 Malleus maleficarum, 83– 90 Māra (‘Evil One’), 143, 177, 224 n. 34 Marett, R. R., 63, 65–67, 76, 93, 151 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 51 Maxwell-Stuart, P. G., 83–84 meditation, 138, 143–46, 167, 170 – 71 memetics, 50

284

index

mentality, 12–13, 15–16, 21–25, 29 –30, 37, 41, 63, 66–68, 80, 86–87, 92, 94, 173– 74, 176, 179 in Buddhism, 166–67, 170, 172 in Christian theology, 101, 103, 106–108, 111–112, 114, 124, 129 mentalizing (mind reading, theory of mind), 13–15, 17–20, 22, 28, 67, 165, 176– 77 metamorphoses, 78 –80 metarepresentation, 15, 19 –20, 117, 136, 147 mirror neuron system, 17–18 modal theory ( logic), 108 – 9, 112–13, 178 modularity, 14–15, 28, 34–35, 192– 97 methodological, 23 morality, 31–32, 36, 42, 96, 155, 177, 181 moralistic punishment, 32, 36, 88 Moses Maimonides, 114 mystical experience, 126, 130, 138 Nāgārjuna, 158 natural selection, 11, 21, 31, 36, 186 Nielsen, Torsten, 17 Nilsson, Martin, 62 nirvāna, 142, 144–50, 153, 159, 164, 167, 170 – 71 nominalism, 109, 111–12, 118 –19, 127, 178 numinosity, 30, 96, 128 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 165 Ockham, William, 40, 112, 114, 116–119, 178 Old Testament, 99 –105 olonism (a disease), 81 omniscience, 24–25, 95– 96, 111–12, 130, 132, 134–35 of Buddha, 149, 160, 177, 183 Paasonen, Heikki, 59 –60, 62, 68 Paulson, Ivar, 63 Pentikäinen, Juha, 77 Philo of Alexandria, 105, 107 placeless souls, 69 Plato, 5, 57–58, 104–5, 107– 9, 126 possession, 30, 75– 77, 80, 85, 90 – 93, 102, 104, 175, 180

Prajnāpāramitā, 161–63 pratītyasamutpāda, 156–58, 181 Principle of plenitude, 109, 111 Prisoner ’s Dilemma, 32–34 Przyluski, Jean, 169 Radin, Paul, 76 Rahula, Walpola, 147, 153–54, 156 Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 17 Ratzel, Friedrich, 49 –50 rebirth (reincarnation), 72, 143, 146–47, 150, 152–55, 158 –59, 164, 171, 180 –81 recursion, 15, 19 –20, 26, 31, 177, 179, 182, 212 n. 13 relics, 143, 165–68, 170, 182 Richerson, Peter, 36 ritual, 11, 37, 40, 78, 80, 82, 88, 100, 104, 138, 205–209 of initiation, 39 of passage, 3 8 –39 rule-based systems, 7 samnyāsa, 154 samsāra, 147–50, 153, 166–67, 170 – 71 Śankara, 156 scaffolding (of mind), 6, 49, 132 Searle, John, 43 selection. See cognitive selection, cultural selection, natural selection Sharf, Robert, 138 Shirokogoroff, Sergei, 76, 81 Siikala, Anna-Leena, 70 “skill in means ” (upāyakauśalya), 161 Smith, Mark, 99 social cognition/intelligence, 18 –19, 30 –31, 34, 38, 81 spandrel, 31, 187 Spencer, Herbert, 11, 66, 68 –69 Sperber, Dan, 3–4, 20, 31, 87, 117, 136, 147, 178 śramana, 154–55, 216, n. 27 Stone, Valerie, 15, 19 strategic information/decisions, 32, 34, 38, 81, 132, 177, 182 Strauss, David Friedrich, 102, 121

index “subtle ” bodies, 16, 67, 87, 166, 175 survivals, 10 –11, 226 n. 5

Veddas (of Sri Lanka), 77 Voodoo, 176, 214 n. 1

Tathāgata, 140 Tathāgatagarbha, 148, 170 teleo-functional reasoning, 21 “promiscuous,” 42, 108, 136, 158, 179, 181–82 temporality, 22–24, 26 theological correctness, 5, 8, 48, 52, 95, 119, 135, 179 Tiele, Cornelis, 51 Tilakaratne, Asanga, 157, 222 n. 12 Tillich, Paul, 125–133, 147, 185 Tomasello, Michael, 19 Trinity, 115–16, 123–24, 130 Tylor, E. B., 8 –12, 36, 42, 57–60, 62–63, 66, 95– 96, 174– 75, 177

Ward, Tom, 78 Wason selection task, 34–35 Wegner, Daniel, 17, 93 Weller, Friedrich, 140 Whitehouse, Harvey, 40, 48 Wisdom, John, 122 Wolfson, Harry, 107 Wolpert, Lewis, 21 Wood, Thomas, 158 World Values Survey, 133 Wundt, Wilhelm, 57–60, 62–63, 174 Wyatt, Nick, 100, 102 Wyclif, John, 118

uncompounded (asamskrta), 149 –50 Upal, Afzal, 27 Upanisads, 154

Yahweh, 99 –103, 105, 117, 136, 185 yaksas (‘evil spirits ’), 143–44 Yogācāra (Vijñānavāda), 156–58, 181 Zen Buddhism, 138, 171

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