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The cult of Cybele and Attis was an ancient cult disseminated throughout the entire Roman Empire. Among the rites held by its followers, there were the so-called Day of Blood (dies sanguinis) which, according to the Calendar (or Chronography) of Philocalus (354 CE), was celebrated on 24 March. On this day the worshipers and priests (galli) of Cybele/Attis flagellated themselves until they bled profusely, and with their blood they sprinkled Cybele’s effigy as well as the altars of the temple, while the initiates castrated themselves and offered their testes to the goddess as a real-life imitation of what happened mythologically to the goddess’ consort Attis. The present contribution offers a preliminary systemization of this glaringly maladaptive and quite puzzling belief-behaviour complex in the anthropological and neurocognitive frame of the so-called extreme rituals, highlighting the specific in-group benefit reaped by worshipers and initiates (e.g., community cohesion through costly signalling and credibilityenhancing displays).

Special Issue Introduction

Robert McCauley and Ernest Thomas Lawson, Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion

James Cresswell, Culture and the Cognitive Science of Religion

Religion and imagination both deal with what is beyond theempirical here and now. In this article, I will argue that imaginationas a capacity is highly important for the development, maintenance,and evolution of religion and the variety of componentsthat together make a religion: (Religious) belief, religious cognitionbroadly, religious events such as miracles, religious agentssuch as deities, religious rituals and experiences, religious textsand narratives, and finally religious art and creativity. I will arguethat the cognitive science of imagination can crucially shed lighton various aspects of religion that previously may have seemedunrelated, and that in fact, perceiving, remembering, and imaginingmay not be as distinct processes from each other as wemight have thought, and indicate what consequences these suggestionsmay have for beliefs as we understand them.

Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe, eds, Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-Five Years (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), xi + 260 pp. $102.60 (hbk). ISBN: 978-1-35003-246- 0; $39.95 (pbk). ISBN: 978-1-35010-592-8; $102.60 (PDF eBook). ISBN: 978-1-35003-247-7.

This article treats the roughly half dozen instances of shadows in the Christian New Testament using evolutionary-cognitive approaches and understandings. This literary-historical data set generally conforms to predictions from cognitive science in two ways. First, shadows stimulate cognitive interest due to their evolutionary ties to predation and humans as both prey species and hunter. Second, shadows fortify the status of supernatural agents due to shadows’ uncertain and shifting boundaries, which lend themselves to agency attribution. Additional discussion theorizes shadows as a type of object particularly related to religious beliefs, due to shadows’ particular set of characteristics that differ from standard folk ontologies. This unique typology is shared with certain other objects likewise possessing outsize presence in religious history such as clouds, flame, and smoke.

In the book Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind, McCauley and Graham present a novel contribution to the Cognitive Science of Religion. The authors propose a naturalistic, pluralistic, and interdisciplinary approach to analyze the continuities between normal cognition, religious cognition, and abnormal cognition. McCauley and Graham use the idea of maturationally natural systems to understand different religious “abnormal” experiences: hearing voices from God or other spiritual beings, mood disorders caused by a failure in petitionary prayer, religious scrupulosity and its resemblance with Obsessive-Compulsive symptoms, and the “mindblind atheism” of Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Despite some minor weaknesses, e.g., an excessive use of maturationally natural systems to explain religious phenomena, the book is an important contribution to the Cognitive Science of Religion.

In this commentary of McCauley and Graham’s book on mental abnormalities and religions, we identify a number of challenges, and present possible extensions of their proposed research. Specifically, we argue that no specialized religious cognition should be assumed, and instead suggest that the cases of mental abnormalities discussed in the book specify particular instances of religious content, and that other disorders may show a more causal relationship to religiosity. We argue that the discussed religious content may be best explained in the context of cultural frameworks and their contribution to experiencing the world through priors and predictive processing. Moreover, cognition required to understand and engage with religion, but not special to it, might crucially involve our capacity for imagination, supported by memory. Disorders in imagination are therefore expected to show likewise dysfunctions in religious phenomena.

Approaching religious or mystical experience in association with mental or brain disorder has been a widespread practice in psychology and neuropsychology, but not so much in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). By their recent book, McCauley and Graham balance the disproportion within CSR. In the commentary, I address McCauley and Graham’s solutions to fundamental problems typical for the psychiatric approach to a religious experience. This approach understands religious experience as a mental or a brain disorder, diagnoses the disorder based on insufficient data in historical cases, and neglects cultural and historical aspects of religious experience and mental disorders. McCauley and Graham handle the diagnosis problem by focusing on the particular aspect of the religious experience (e.g., “hearing voices”) and analyzing its pathological and non-pathological aspects, instead of simply assuming disorder. In regards to the neglect of historical and cultural aspects of religious experience and mental illness, McCauley and Graham stress the importance of the cultural domestication of unusual aspects of religious experience. In dealing with the psychiatric approach problems, McCauley and Graham introduce a new complementary and complex theoretical model for embracing mental abnormalities into the framework of CSR.

How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, by Tanya Luhrmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. xv + 235 pp., $29.95 (cloth), ISBN: 9780691164465.

Commentators’ concerns occasion clarifications of positions in Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind. Philosophical naturalism holds that philosophers needlessly handicap their projects if they ignore the sciences. Ecumenical Naturalism maintains that similar forms of cognition and experience associated with religiosity and mental disorders may submit to similar scientific explanations. The by-product theory, which looks to the operations of maturationally natural cognitive capacities to explain religious representations’ forms, offers explanatory leverage with regard to some mental disorders. The fact that examples are mostly American, Christian, and Western need not preclude the accounts’ broader applicability. Explanatory pluralism endorses many explanatory approaches. The aim is only to show how much cognitive considerations can do, not to suggest that they provide comprehensive theories of anything. Other telling proposals will enhance understanding of these matters. The operations of maturationally natural dispositions, regardless of how they are cued, contribute to what humans take to be meaningful.

Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind seeks to bring the theories and discoveries of the Cognitive Science of Religion to broader discussions of mental health. In doing so, the authors introduce auditory verbal hallucinations as one example of a supposed continuity between religious experiences and mental disorder. Based on up-to-date research into the phenomenological overlap between the voice-hearing experiences of those with and without a mental health diagnosis and those who report hearing spiritually significant voices, this essay elucidates the complexity of presupposing such continuities. We critique the notion that the cognitive mechanisms implicated in religiosity are inadvertent “by-products” of the mind’s operations and propose, rather, that they are the inevitable outcomes of human meaning-making.

Reliance on convenience samples for psychological experiments has led to the oversampling of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations (Henrich et al. 2010a). Our analysis of academic articles from six leading psychology journals revealed a significantly lower but still very high percentage of studies from European and English-speaking nations (92%), compared to a decade ago (95%), largely due to more studies from Asia (6%). Further analysis of four cognitive science of religion (CSR) journals showed how a more representative field is possible (67% from the Western and Other region), with proportionately more studies in Latin America (4%) and Africa (7%) than psychology (

Are there any methodological issues unique to the psychology of religion? The claim has been made that the psychology of religion was decisively hampered by its inability to conduct true experiments. Looking at the past half-century, it is shown that there are no limits on experimentation in the field, and that both interesting theories and original experiments have been mainstreaming it within psychology. The rise of CSR has been a major stimulus, together with other fruitful approaches. Challenging CSR notions can only lead to more progress. The need for treating both biological and historical generalizations with caution may force psychologists to focus on cross-cultural experimentation, which promises significant insights.

Adopting newly proposed “open science” reforms to improve transparency and increase rigor is hard and can make us, as researchers, feel vulnerable. Nonetheless, these reforms are vital to improving the overall quality and confidence of our collective research. We have, through our own experiences, found that preregistration and detailed analysis plans can help to identify, and potentially avoid, errors. Prepublication has similarly helped us to collaborate and receive feedback on manuscripts, particularly during prolonged periods of peer-review. The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) field is constituted by a diversity of scholars and disciplines, and thus faces somewhat unique challenges in its efforts to establish common practices, standards, and research terminology. In this paper we offer an introduction to the open science reforms of preregistration and prepublication specifically orientated towards the CSR field. We discuss common concerns around these practices, highlighting areas of misunderstanding while conceding and discussing genuine limitations. We conclude with voluntary, low-investment recommendations for best-practices with regards to preregistration and preprints for the field of the Cognitive Science of Religion.

Here, we present two case studies which combine ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative methods to describe religious behaviour in two ecologically valid settings. Case Study 1 describes the use of mixed methods to explore whether different types of supernatural agents are associated with different categories of moral transgression in Burma, a syncretic and multi-religious environment which naturally lends itself to this question. In this case study, ethnography plays a key role in designing appropriate questionnaire measures, generating hypotheses, and interpreting the behaviour of experimental participants. Case Study 2 describes the use of mixed methods to investigate the interrelationships between religious scandals and the emergence of ex-Catholicism in Ireland, a country noted for its recent and rapid secularization. Here, ethnography plays a key role in elucidating the limitations of early experimental designs and generating further hypotheses, while surveying in turn addresses issues of representativeness in the fieldwork. Together, these case studies serve to illustrate a number of advantages and challenges that come with adopting a mixed methods approach. We close by outlining four reasons for mixing qualitative and quantitative methods when studying religious cognition in the field, using the case studies above as examples. These are: 1) methodological triangulation, 2) assessment of instruments and procedures, 3) qualitative/quantitative iteration, and 4) capturing the current context in scenarios where existing ethnographic research is sparse or deficient.

Cross-cultural beliefs about gods’ concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such appeals to gods’ concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically and the evolution of religious systems more generally. Here, we review case studies to this effect, and introduce the “god-problem problem”: to the extent that gods are concerned with local socioecological problems, which criteria does a problem need to satisfy in order to become an object of supernatural attention? We offer some preliminary solutions to this puzzle, which leads to a related, but often-overlooked, question: granted that features of religions may culturally evolve to adaptively fit to and resolve aspects of the local socioecological environment, what are the psychological processes through which this adaptation could occur? We wager that in order to answer the question satisfactorily, contemporary evolutionary approaches need to work together. Psychologically, the socioecological environment provides the initial impetus for a belief or practice by increasing the cognitive salience of a corresponding local problem and its costs. This increased receptivity makes such ideas and corollary behaviors easier to learn and transmit along the routes posited by dual-inheritance theorists. Behaviors feed back to beliefs and can offset the costs of social life in a variety of ways. As such, examining how cognition, social learning, behavior, and ecological pressures inform each other is especially crucial for understanding the persistence, diffusion, and evolution of religious ideas and practices.

This article utilizes a cognitive science of religion framework in approaching the cultural phenomena of relics from the prophet Muhammad in Islamic tradition. The basic arguments are that a contagion aspiration system that underlies the phenomenon of relics in general could hypothetically be construed as an evolutionary exaptation of a contagion avoidance system within a framework of social learning, and that the specific phenomenon of relics can be seen as a by-product of this exaptation. This explanatory model is used to make sense of two specific complexes of beliefs and practices: (1) the notion that physical contact with prophetic relics results in transfer substance, baraka, with this-worldly beneficial effect, and (2) the fact that prophetic relics throughout history has been used by political and religious dignitaries as a means to boost social prestige and authority.

Martin, Luther H. and Donald Wiebe (eds) 2017. Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-five Years. xi + 260 pp. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN: 978-1 350-03246-0 £85.00 (hbk); 978-13501-0592-8 £28.99 (pbk); 978-13500-3247-7 £31.30 (e book).

Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and Experimental Philosophy, edited by Helen De Cruz and Ryan Nichols, Bloomsbury, 2016. Advances in Experimental Philosophy series. 221pp. $42.95 USD ISBN: 978-1-47422- 382-9

Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, edited by Armin W. Geertz, Routledge, 2014. 429 pp. Hb., $161.62 USD ISBN: 978-1-84465-701-8

The present contribution, concerning the ancient Roman cult of Bona Dea, explores the interplay between intuitive healing beliefs, morality, disgust, and coercive control of sexual behaviours. In order to preliminarily investigate cultural variations concerning sex and gender issues in past societies (a somewhat neglected topic in current cognitive studies), this article engages the socio-sexual organization of Roman culture which underpinned the cult devotion, explaining the evolutionary rationale of the underlying mythography as a mate-guarding strategy and the cult itself as a relief valve and a temporary compensation for subordinate women. The essential components of the cult (i.e., wine and snakes) are further analysed via evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion. The final paragraph tackles the problematic scholarly reconstruction of the cult's promise of an afterlife for its worshippers, arguing that a phylogenetic analysis of Graeco-Roman mythographies might help contextualizing this issue.

McCauley, Robert N. and Thomas E. Lawson. 2017. Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion: A Head Start. London: Bloomsbury. xii + 179 pp. ISBN: 978-1-3500-3031-2 £85.00 (hbk); 978-1-3501-0586-7 £28.99 (pbk); 978-1-3500-3032-9 £31.30 (ebook).

The consensus in philosophical and scientific circles is that physicalism is the most warranted position to adopt. With respect to the academic study of religion, physicalism underwrites two complementary approaches, one widely recognized and the other underappreciated in the field at large. While the cognitive science of religion (CSR) enjoys widespread recognition, the ethology of religion does not. This paper employs ethology to explain two submissive behaviours ritual practitioners often perform, that is, ocular aversion and rump presentation. Significantly, the means of submission reflect the practitioner’s perceptions of the intimidating agents’, e.g., deities’, organ of intimidation. As it is in the animal kingdom, so too in the religious imagination, dominant others, especially males, will use their eyes or their phalluses to intimidate.

Cognitive by-product theorists suggest that the ability to accept religious and supernatural belief is a by-product of humans’ evolved propensity to over-attribute agency to non-human entities such as animals and objects. It is argued that this phenomenon facilitates and underpins belief in gods and supernatural beings. With this in mind, how then is non belief and atheism explained? The present study aimed to explore atheism from the perspective of by-product theory, examining differences in Anthropomorphizing (attributing human qualities to non human entities) in a population of atheists compared to a sample from a general population. One hundred and twenty-three participants recruited from a general population for a study on beliefs and thirty-six participants were recruited via an atheist organization completed the study. Results showed lower use of non-animal agency anthropomorphic concepts was linked to lower religiosity, and that the atheist recruited participants showed the least endorsement of anthropomorphic concepts than the general population sample. The implications of this finding are discussed with respect to the nature of atheism and the role of de-anthropomorphizing in the adoption of an atheist belief position.

Luther H. Martin, Deep History, Secular Theory: Historical and Scientific Studies of Religion (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 364 pp. ISBN 978-1-61451- 619-4. €99.95 /US$140.00 hbk.

Jeppe Sinding Jensen, What is Religion? (Durham: Acumen, 2014), xi + 186 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84465-759-9. $19.95 pbk.

Robert N. McCauley with E. Thomas Lawson, Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion: A Head Start (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 184 pp. £85.00 (hbk). ISBN: 978-1-35003-031- 2. £28.99 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-35010-586-7. £91.80 (ePUB/kindle) ISBN: 978-1-35003-033-6. £91.80 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-35003-032-9.

This article brings philosophy into dialogue with cognitive science of religion (CSR). After a brief overview of CSR and theories of meaning, we explore the philosophical semantic constraints of CSR. We focus on how the beliefs and behaviours of religious adherents, as conceived by CSR, can be meaningful in ways that illuminate the scholar’s understanding of religious phenomena. We argue that CSR is committed to an externalist and holistic semantics. This highlights a potentially problematic tension between the beliefs of religious people and the explanations proposed by CSR. We end by suggesting that this tension could be resolved if CSR were to give more attention to external factors (e.g., biological, cultural, environmental etc.).

When dealing with the “origins” of all things religious the major risk to avoid is the naïve building of a just-so storytelling similar to the dismantled passe-partout once labelled homo religiosus (Smith 1982). Historically, religious studies and classical anthropology have been most vulnerable to a twofold fallacy, i.e. the narrative form of explanation and the (originally theological) ambition to know the ultimate point of departure of things, as if it were the epicentre of absolute (transcendent) meaning (Stoczkowski 2002). Even after Darwin’s watershed work, these two themes have thriven. Do cognitive scholars successfully escape these old traps today and make treasure of Darwin’s lesson when treating the “origins” of culture and religion? The aim of this paper is to critically review the cover and contents of a new book devoted to the Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture (Geertz 2013), in order to briefly assess the question at stake.

Dimitris Xygalatas and William W. McCorkle Jr. (eds.), Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2013; republished in 2014 by Routledge, London and New York), 268pp. ISBN 978-1-84465-742-1