Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience

For some time interest has been growing in a dialogue between modern scientific research into human cognition and research in the humanities. This ground-breaking volume focuses this dialogue on the religious experience of men and women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Each chapter examines a particular historical problem arising from an ancient religious activity and the contributions range across a wide variety of both ancient contexts and sources, exploring and integrating literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. In order to avoid a simple polarity between physical aspects (ritual) and mental aspects (belief) of religion, the contributors draw on theories of cognition as embodied, emergent, enactive and extended, accepting the complexity, multimodality and multicausality of human life. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters open up new questions around and develop new insights into the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of ancient religions.

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol. She works on ancient Greek culture, specialising in magic and religion. She is a distinguished fellow of the Religion, Cognition and Culture section of Aarhus University, and a founder of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography. She is currently leading a project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council to develop a virtual-reality experience of consultation of the oracle of Zeus at Dodona.

Armin W. Geertz is Emeritus Professor in the History of Religions at Aarhus University. He works on the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary theory, and the psychology of religious experiences. He is co-founder/editor of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion and Advances in the Cognitive Science of Religion.

John North is Emeritus Professor of History at UCL. He has worked on the religious history of Rome and the changing character of religious life in the Roman Empire down to the rise of Christianity. He is a co-author of the two-volume history and sourcebook, Religions of Rome (Cambridge, 1998).