The issue of religious experience has long puzzled scholars of religion. Those who have addressed this issue at all largely reflect the Protestant-tinged conclusions of William James (1902). If identifying symptoms of religious experience among modern adherents has proven problematic, how much more so is this the case for ancient religions? When such symptoms for ancient religions have been addressed by scholars at all, they are inferred from the ancient texts that supposedly allude to them. However, much evidence for ancient religions is not textual but material, and for the cults of the Roman Mithras, the evidence is overwhelmingly so. New methodologies from the neurocognitive sciences, complementary to traditional archaeological and historiographical methods, might offer an approach to symptoms of religious experience from material culture by identifying experience with attention-focusing modulations of historically assessable measures of quotidian sentience. The techniques for effecting such modulations are often preserved in the material evidence and allow for a tractable history of their neurocognitive technologies. Two techniques for provoking experience among the cults of the Roman Mithras are identified from the archaeological evidence: communal meals and rites of initiation. These practices took place in the architectural structure of the mithraeum itself in the presence of Mithraic imagery, including the ubiquitous tauroctony, the cult image of Mithras slaying a bull. From these material remains of the Mithraic cults technologies of experience might be identified and the nature of the evoked experience itself inferred.

Tantalizing similarities between Euripides’ Bacchae and the historical ritual of the oreibasia— – a mountainside dance performed for Dionysus – have fascinated and polarized scholars for over a century. The wild women of myth are depicted as ecstatic devotees of the Dionysian cult, or as raging, murderous avatars of the god’s vengeance. But in the tightly regulated civic cult, ritual practitioners were respectable women who honoured Dionysus by imitating his mythological entourage.<break/>The question of whether ritual participants could have experienced ecstasy and epiphanic visions has stimulated a long-running debate encompassing hysteria, belief, and the interplay between cult and myth. Lacking first-hand accounts, historians have struggled with reconciling the ecstatic ‘madwomen’ of myth with the prestige of the civic cult performance, but the apparent gap between ritual performers and mythical exemplars may not be so wide. Inspired by Jan Bremmer’s 1984 paper on the physiological effects of the oreibasia, I revisit the ancient evidence with a cognitive interpretative framework, looking at ritual experience in the embodied mind. Incorporating theories of agency detection and predictive processing, I explore how an interdisciplinary approach can integrate artistic and historical narratives, and better understand the lived experience and religious identity of historical maenads.

The chapter opens by making the case for a capacious understanding of the psychology of the religious imagination. Psychological capacities and propensities, it is suggested, are enabling as much as they are constraining, and religious actors creatively employ these capacities and propensities as much as they are unknowingly subject to them. The particular phenomenon for which this notion of the religious imagination is then explored in the bulk of the chapter is the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy; the relevant imaginative capacity is the human propensity for make-believe. The chapter argues that both externally, as a form of make-believe, and internally through details of the dialogue between god and characters, deus ex machina scenes pull systematically in two directions: the religious experience they enable is one in which there is room simultaneously for both belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, commitment and distance. A subsidiary strand of the argument aims to contribute to current debates about the notion of ‘belief’ in scholarship on Greek religion. The chapter emphasizes that ‘belief’ is usefully understood as sometimes including an attitudinal dimension. This attitudinal dimension comes to the fore in the deus scenes.

The present contribution offers a neurosociological and socio-cognitive re-analysis of the two festivities dedicated to the ancient Roman goddess known as Bona Dea, both managed and attended by women only. Additionally, the main variants of Bona Dea’s mythography are assessed as a violent reminder of gendered behavioural norms and as a coercive mate-guarding strategy supported by religious storytelling. The two festivities are assessed as different expressions of class stratification and socio-political negotiation within the Roman agnatic patriarchy. The patrician December festival is identified as a special agent ritual with distinctly imagistic features. The poorly known May celebration is tentatively reconstructed as a predominantly doctrinal, non-patrician special patient ritual, mainly attended by freedwomen, and led by a priestess known as the damiatrix. The supposedly orgiastic Greek roots of the cult are questioned on linguistic, historiographical, and archaeological grounds. The conclusions highlight the need to establish a cross-disciplinary cognitive historiography of sex and gender in antiquity to overcome the limitations behind the study of ancient women’s religious experiences.

In this chapter I argue that we should take seriously the numerous vivid images of material begetting in Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius because they provide him with a more experientially based, and so intuitive, way to conceive of the hard-to-grasp idea that the first and second Person of the Trinity were both distinct entities and also unified in essence or nature. However, I shall also argue that Gregory was at the same time continuously correcting problems that an intuitive model of begetting might bring to the divine by returning to more theologically correct, reflective ways of conceiving of the divine. I shall argue that via this oscillation between intuitive ways of thinking about the divine and reflective and theological ways of thinking about it, which Ilkka Pyysiӓinen has argued is normal for theological discourse, Gregory was able to present the Trinity as what Dan Sperber has defined as a ‘relevant mystery’.

This chapter examines the ways that Greek gods were perceived as anthropomorphic, positing why and how these perceptions may have developed in relation to specific cultural forms, such as narrative. By drawing on the theory of situated conceptualization, within the framework of grounded cognition (as developed by Lawrence Barsalou), it aims to explore how the mind, body, and physical and social environments were inextricably linked in shaping god concepts in ancient Greek culture. Examining both narrative as a cultural form, and narratives that described or alluded to other cultural forms, including ritual activities, it investigates how descriptions of smell and smelling could evoke, and in turn shape, experience of a divine presence for their audience. Such an approach, it argues, allows for cultural, group, and individual variation within the constraints of shared cultural forms, illuminating how ancient Greek conceptions of the gods became embedded, while at the same time allowing for the variety of a polytheistic culture, and, in addition, the personal response of individuals. As such, it contributes to discussions of belief in ancient Greek cultures by offering some suggestions for the ways in which concepts of the divine may have been formed, shared, personalized, embodied, and embedded within, across, and between communities.

Starting from a cognitive point of view, this paper provides an entirely new reading of the dances and chants of the Salian priests. By focusing on their dances and chants in the perspective of embodied cognition and by putting a diligent analysis of (a) the reports and (b) the prayer texts into historical comparisons with other ‘prophetic’ practices of that time, this study is able to elucidate the Salian performances as body techniques that go beyond a mere facilitation of sociality. These techniques alter the practitioners’ states of mind and thereby elicit an experience that one may call religious experience, divine experience, or ‘possession’.

We are fortunate to have detailed descriptions of both the ritual and the suppliant’s experience at the sanctuary of Trophonius in Lebadeia that provide an opportunity for a case study juxtaposing ancient evidence with the results of modern research in cognitive science. The paper explores changes in the suppliant’s body and mind, experienced during his stay in Trophonius’ sanctuary.<break/>The main rite was a descent into the artificial subterranean cave of Trophonius, who was believed to appear to the suppliants in person. In the subterranean chamber the inquirer experienced alteration of consciousness, induced by sensory deprivation and comprising vortex and out-of-body experiences as well as hallucinations and the sensation of unmediated communication with supernatural beings. The core experience was preceded by a series of preliminary rites, each of them involving a different cognitive and/or physiological mechanism.<break/>The ritual of descent to Trophonius combined characteristics of a mystery rite, such as secrecy, brush with death, utter distress, obliteration of memory, and personality change, and an oracular consultation, which was based on interpretation of hidden knowledge revealed in the sacred grotto.

In the chapter, I explore what may be gained by reading textual instantiations of feelings in light of current knowledge of their underlying emotional counterparts. The overall idea is to bridge the gap between ‘biology’ and ‘culture’ to examine how knowledge about basic biology may contribute to deepen the textual understanding. I seek to illustrate the theoretical discussion by providing a biological emotional reading of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians chapter 6. I analyze Paul’s emphasis on baptism as moral cleansing in light of recent research in moral psychology and evolutionary biology on the Lady Macbeth complex. The argument is that there is an intrinsic relationship between the use of water and cognitive notions of cleanness, purity, dirt, moral filth, and impurity. These insights may be used to cast further light on Paul’s argument, thus illustrating the overall point that historians of religion, ancient historians, and classicists will benefit considerably by including knowledge from life sciences in the historical analyses.

This chapter considers whether scholars should be seeking ‘meaning’ when considering animal sacrifice. Ritual activity that can be described as ‘normative Greek sacrifice’ is carried out in different circumstances with very different aims, for example to propitiate and honour a god or goddess, as part of the preparation of a meal, as a process to enable divination, or as a responsibility handed on by tradition. The various ritual actions that make up ‘normative Greek sacrifice’ – including burning incense, killing the animal, examining the entrails, eating the meat, and singing hymns and offering prayers – can be carried out outside the context of animal sacrifice. I make use of theories of ritualization to argue that ‘normative Greek sacrifice’ should be seen as a collection of actions to which those who take part in it bring their own intentions and therefore provide their own meanings. I then examine the sensory impact of these actions to show that they would have been emotionally satisfying in their own right. Finally I consider cognitive theories that might explain why ‘normative Greek sacrifice’ might have been transmitted in the form it was, and suggest directions for future research to provide answers to this question.

This volume arises from a project that brought together cognitive scientists of religion (CSR) in face-to-face contact with historians and other scholars in the humanities concerned with the religious history of antiquity in a series of meetings and conferences: some held in the UK, some in Denmark. The objective was to provide up-to-date historical data for cognitive scientists to analyze, up-to-date theories about cognition for historians to exploit, and an opportunity for both groups to discuss the contributions they could offer one another, through bringing the two disciplines (traditionally quite separate) together. This volume seeks to extend this project through a collection of essays mostly by those scholars. Each chapter reports on a problem of understanding that arises from some ancient religious activity and seeks to bring together the different insights of the two disciplines.

This chapter reviews the evidence from the Greek world for tribute and taxation. It begins with some comparative considerations about tributary regimes and the impact of Achaemenid imperialism on the fiscal development of the Greek city-states, including the Delian League and the Hellenistic kingdoms. The transition from tribute to taxation is cast as a significant indicator of state formation. A fundamental theme in ancient Greek taxation is the relationship between coercion and consent, especially how political institutions facilitate the sharing of communal burdens by the rich. Extraordinary levies on property and persons were a common feature of city-states, which Macedon and the Hellenistic kingdoms also adopted. Finally, the chapter treats indirect taxes, which are thought to provide a much larger and more regular portion of state revenue in the Greek world.

The conquest of Egypt and Asia, leading to new urban and fiscal infrastructures and new forms and levels of elite consumption, increased the scale of trade and exchange in the Hellenistic economy. Complex institutional changes that were spurred by both fiscal-military demand and local responses to this demand changed agrarian and commercial patterns, with likely positive effects on local markets. This chapter argues that the Hellenistic period was one of moderate economic growth both in the Greek poleis of the Aegean and in the core regions of Hellenistic Asia and Egypt. The greater presence of Roman traders in the Hellenistic East from the second century onwards is also likely to have had positive effects on market exchange and monetary circulation. Yet there is reason to assume that in the final decades of the Hellenistic period, all Hellenistic regions to some extent, but particularly the Aegean and Asia Minor, suffered from the destructive forces of the Roman military presence and subsequent tributary exploitation. Only after the Roman civil wars came to an end and fiscal practices were better regulated did the economies of the East begin to recover and to expand along the pathways that had developed in the Hellenistic period.