Book contents
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Ancient Religion and Cognition
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Funder Acknowledgement
- Introduction
- Part I Ritual
- Part II Representation
- Part III Gender
- Part IV Materiality
- Chapter 8 Walls and the Ancient Greek Ritual Experience
- Chapter 9 Identifying Symptoms of Religious Experience from Ancient Material Culture
- Part V Texts
- Index
- References
Chapter 9 - Identifying Symptoms of Religious Experience from Ancient Material Culture
The Example of Cults of the Roman Mithras
from Part IV - Materiality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2022
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Ancient Religion and Cognition
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Funder Acknowledgement
- Introduction
- Part I Ritual
- Part II Representation
- Part III Gender
- Part IV Materiality
- Chapter 8 Walls and the Ancient Greek Ritual Experience
- Chapter 9 Identifying Symptoms of Religious Experience from Ancient Material Culture
- Part V Texts
- Index
- References
Summary
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.
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- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience , pp. 218 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022