[PDF] Cognitive Approaches To Ancient Religious Experience eBook

Author : Esther Eidinow
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 20,39 MB
Release : 2022-08-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1316515338

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Explores the religious rituals and beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, using modern research into human cognition to better understand the experiences of men and women. Integrates literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. Accessible to those without prior knowledge either of cognitive theory or of the ancient world.

Author : Blanka Misic
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 32,52 MB
Release : 2024-01-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1009355554

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How do the senses shape the way we perceive, understand, and remember ritual experiences? This book applies cognitive and sensory approaches to Roman rituals, reconnecting readers with religious experiences as members of an embodied audience. These approaches allow us to move beyond the literate elites to examine broader audiences of diverse individuals, who experienced rituals as participants and/or performers. Case studies of ritual experiences from a variety of places, spaces, and contexts across the Roman world, including polytheistic and Christian rituals, state rituals, private rituals, performances, and processions, demonstrate the dynamic and broad-scale application that cognitive approaches offer for ancient religion, paving the way for future interdisciplinary engagement. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Author : Istvan Czachesz
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 36,2 MB
Release : 2014-10-14
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1317544404

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The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts? "Mind, Morality and Magic" draws on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind - including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship - such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics - as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.

Author : Istvan Czachesz
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 19,37 MB
Release : 2014-10-14
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1317544412

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The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts? "Mind, Morality and Magic" draws on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind - including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship - such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics - as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.

Author : Olympia Panagiotidou
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 13,58 MB
Release : 2017-11-02
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 1472567404

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The Roman Mithras Cult: A Cognitive Approach is the first full cognitive history of an ancient religion. In this groundbreaking book on one of the most intriguing and mysterious ancient religions, Roger Beck and Olympia Panagiotidou show how cognitive historiography can supplement our historical knowledge and deepen our understanding of past cultural phenomenon. The cult of the sun god Mithras, which spread widely across the Greco-Roman world at the same time as other 'mystery cults' and Christianity, offered to its devotees certain images and assumptions about reality. Initiation into the mysteries of Mithras and participation in the life of the cult significantly affected and transformed the ways in which the initiated perceived themselves, the world, and their position within it. The cult's major ideas were conveyed mainly through its major symbolic complexes. The ancient written testimonies and other records are not adequate to establish a definitive reconstruction of Mithraic theologies and the meaning of its complex symbolic structures. Filling this gap, The Roman Mithras Cult: A Cognitive Approach identifies the cognitive and psychological processes which took place in the minds and bodies of the Mithraists during their initiation and participation in the mysteries, enabling the perception, apprehension, and integration of the essential images and assumptions of the cult in its worldview system.

Author : Ann Taves
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 43,23 MB
Release : 2009-09-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1400830974

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How the sciences of the mind can advance the study of religion The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims experience as a central concept while bridging the divide between religious studies and the sciences. Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across times and cultures? Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious.

Author : Jensine Andresen
Publisher : Imprint Academic
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 13,50 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Consciousness
ISBN : 9780907845133

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This book throws down a challenge to religious studies, offering a multidisciplinary approach - including developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy of mind, and anthropology.

Author : Efrosyni Boutsikas
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 36,88 MB
Release : 2020-10-29
Category : History
ISBN : 110848817X

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Reconstructs ancient rituals in their day/night/season combining them with relevant mythology and astronomical observations to understand the ritual's cosmological links.

Author : Brett E. Maiden
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 15,55 MB
Release : 2020-10-08
Category : Bibles
ISBN : 1108487785

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Recent tools and findings from the cognitive sciences illuminate religious thought and behaviour in ancient Israel and the Bible. Primarily intended for scholars of the Bible and religion, it is also relevant to cognitive scientists, researchers, and graduate students interested in the intersection of cognition and culture.

Author : Ilkka Pyysiäinen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 31,24 MB
Release : 2021-10-11
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9004496211

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Recent findings in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology provide important insights to the processes which make religious beliefs and behaviors such efficient attractors in and across various cultural settings. The specific salience of religious ideas is based on the fact that they are 'counter-intuitive': they contradict our intuitive expectations of how entities normally behave. Counter-intuitive ideas are only produced by a mind capable of crossing the boundaries that separate such ontological domains as persons, living things, and solid objects. The evolution of such a mind has only taken place in the human species. How certain kinds of counter-intuitive ideas are selected for a religious use is discussed from varying angles. Cognitive considerations are thus related to the traditions of comparative religion. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.