In much of the theological discourse concerning human evolution, the emergence of the human “soul” is commonly treated as off limits from any naturalistic analysis, lest one reduce human uniqueness or the immortality of the soul. This article offers a naturalistic approach to the “soul's” emergence in conversation with Catholic theological commitments, using René Girard's mimetic theory. I argue that locating “religion”—defined as the taboos, culture, and rituals that contained early human violence—as prior to cognition and language better orients our conceptions of what we mean by the human soul and how we evolved into our current form.
