1This co-edited volume explores ways in which cognitive studies can help to understand ancient religious experience. The papers are the result of several consecutive meetings of the Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience (CAARE) network. This project brought together cognitive scientists of religion with specialists of various ancient cultures. The aim of these meetings was twofold: to better understand individual ancient religious experiences, as well as to experiment with and advance methods for studying them in this interdisciplinary way.

3The first part of the book, on “Ritual”, consists of two chapters. Hugh Bowden (Chapter 1), using Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson’s Ritual Form Hypothesis, sets out to explain why sacrifice may have appealed to worshippers over many centuries. He argues that burning portions for the gods was the single most crucial ritual in the sacrificial process and may have accounted for the emotive power of sacrifice, due to the strong emotional effects that the smells of burning may have had on participants. This is an interesting argument (even though it could arguably have been made without referring to McCauley and Lawson’s work). Nevertheless, minimizing the role of killing the animal and eating it (which Bowden argues were not religious rituals in the perception of worshippers, p. 31, 34) strikes me as problematic. Another suggestion that may require further explanation is the intriguing idea that we should see sacrifice (taken as one experience again) as a “special agent” as opposed to a “special patient” ritual—that is to say a ritual in which the god is considered to be acting rather than a recipient of human action, p. 39). In what way is the god acting in sacrifice? — Yulia Ustinova (Chapter 2) analyses the cognitive processes involved in the experience of a suppliant at the sanctuary of Trophonius at Lebadeia in Boeotia. Ustinova uses evidence from anthropology, neurophysiology, the cognitive science of religion and other fields to comment on several aspects of suppliant’s experience, who would have descended into an artificial, subterranean cave for a face-to-face encounter with the god to obtain prophetic visions. Various of the observations Ustinova makes in the course of her analysis are clearly illuminating (such as her analysis of cognitive effects of the high investments that participants made, which would have primed them to have a more valuable experience; and the importance of cognitive depletion in the possibility for religious authorities to shape the suppliant’s memory after the katabasis). What, to me at least, is missing somewhat is a deeper analysis on individual points.

4In Part 2, “Representation”, Esther Eidinow (Chapter 3) studies ways in which (anthropomorphic) concepts of Greek gods are formed in the mind. In particular, the chapter is about narrative and narrated rituals (in archaic and early classical Greek literature) with descriptions of smelling a god, and of gods smelling. Eidinow explores how these stories would have informed worshippers’ conceptions of the divine, by applying the theory of situated conceptualization. Eidinow explains how a smell, both the experience and the description of it, may activate an entire (anthropomorphic) god concept, and argues that smell may be a particularly powerful modality to achieve this effect. The question is then how such descriptions “could evoke, and in turn shape, experiences of a divine presence for their audience” (p. 70). Eidinow explores a series of literary examples through this lens, and shows how various examples draw attention to perceived differences between humans and gods, and boundaries between the two. The A. is surely persuasive when she claims that that her topic may inform us about aspects of “belief ” in the ancient Greek gods. This is one of the most interesting chapters in the book. — In Chapter 4, Felix Budelmann studies the deus ex machina of Attic tragedy, in comparison to non-dramatic ritual practices of enacting divinities. The chapter sets out to explain how we are to understand the kind of belief (or disbelief) involved in these cases. Budelmann uses theoretical insights from the study of pretend-play in developmental psychology, the study of narrative fiction, as well as anthropology, to show that spectators of these staged epiphanies would have engaged in a self-conscious make-believe. He convincingly argues that full awareness of the pretense involved in these divine impersonations can go hand in hand with high emotional involvement or commitment, and an experience of divine presence. — In Chapter 5, Maik Patzelt focuses on the song of the Salian priesthood—the carmen Saliare—to get to grips with the religious experience of those involved in this ritual practice, by identifying the cognitive effects that the “leaping, outrageously capering” (p. 129) dance patterns and chanting elicited, and the embodied cognitive aspects of these effects.

5In Part 3, “Gender”, Vivienne McGlashan (Chapter 6) asks whether ritual practitioners of Maenadic rituals were actually “madwomen” in some way, in dialogue with scholars who noted a discrepancy between what we know about civic cult (a regulated cult of the polis, featuring respectable women) and myth (featuring violent, hallucinating madwomen in a state of delirium). Using the theory of predictive processing, McGlashan’s argument that ritual practitioners of maenadic rituals accessed an interpretative schema of the “ideal” maenadic experience that was fed into by artistic, literary, ritual, and historical information, and that this model explains how the two sources of information (myth and ritual) related to one another, is illuminating. The argument in the second half of the paper, an exploration of cognitive processes that may have helped maenads to experience an epiphany of Dionysus, is also interesting. McGlashan argues that sensory confusion (the ritual takes place in the darkness, frantic dancing confuses the senses) causes top-down input to govern the experience, which is how worshippers may have felt that the god was with them, since that is what they expected to happen. This is all well taken. What is missing, to me at least, is some more discussion of how epiphany involves an altered mind-state (as suggested on p. 160). — In Chapter 7, Leonardo Ambasciano focuses on the Cults of Bona Dea. He uses neurosociological and socio-cognitive approaches to human rituals (the Ritual Form hypothesis and Modes of religiosity, also used in Chapter 1) to better understand how Bona Dea cults were organized. Ambisciano is well read in the relevant literature; this is very much an interdisciplinary article. It is also a very demanding article to come to terms with, certainly for classicists, because of the pervasive use of jargon and the frequency of theoretical concepts.

6In Part 4, “Materiality”, Michael Scott (Chapter 8) focuses on walls and other boundaries of temenē and of temples, in particular, those of the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, in order to understand what effects these boundaries may have had on the ritual experience. This is a promising topic: a study of the cognitive processes at work, and of the religious experience involved in entering a temenos, would certainly be very helpful. There is still much to be understood about what happened in the mind of an Ancient Greek person when he or she crossed a visible (or invisible) boundary and entered into “sacred space”. Scott’s analysis of the experience at this particular sanctuary contains various good observations, but the sheer amount of theoretical approaches used, with the consequence that none of them are pursued with the depth that one might perhaps wish for, detracts from the clarity of the individual arguments and makes some of them confusing. — Luther Martin (Chapter 9) studies material evidence from the cult of the Roman god Mithras for evidence of neurocognitive processes, taking religious experience itself as “material, that is as neurophysiological”(p. 220). Martin argues, for example, that sharing meals and drinking wine (that this happened in the cult is clear from archaeological remains of dining couches and iconography showing communal meals) leads to the release of oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. While this is no doubt true, these observations are of such a general nature that it is not easy to know what historians of religions should do with them. In the second part, Martin discusses images of a tauroctony which were at the same time visual representations of Mithras slaying a bull to sacrifice it, and a star-map. This would, Martin argues, have caused cognitive dissonance, and stress and anxiety; as well as pleasure, when the double nature of the scene was fully appreciated. This is a fascinating topic, and a searching analysis of the precise cognitive effects of viewing such an ambiguous image would be welcome, but again, the observations remain at a rather general level.