Current Trends in the Application of Cognitive Science to Magic

E D WA R D B E V E R SUNY College at Old Westbury

The idea that apparently supernatural phenomena are at least as much a manifestation of the workings of the human mind as of effects that actually occur in the physical world goes back as far as skeptical philosophers of Classical antiquity, who asserted that magicians worked through a combination of fraud, illusion, and natural processes.1 This disparagement of magic as illusion was taken up by late Roman and early Medieval Christians, who used it to call into question the claims of pagan priests and popular practitioners to supernatural power. The position informed the inuential tenth-century canon Episcopi, which insisted that women who thought they rode through the air with the goddess Diana were victims of diabolical illusions.2 The Episcopis position was incorporated into subsequent ecclesiastical law codes and interpreted broadly as holding that magic in general is illusory, an orthodoxy that dominated Church thinking until the formulation of the witch demonology in the late Middle Ages. Of course, Medieval Christians believed that some supernatural effects were real, because God was capable of contravening the laws of nature, and he could allow lesser beings like saints and the Devil to do so as well when it suited his purposes. Modern dogmatic skepticism, the conviction that supernatural phenomena are inherently impossible and therefore all magic must be illusorythat, in fact, the very belief in the possibility of supernatural phenomena is delusionaloriginated in the Renaissance in opposition to the emergence of the witch demonology and the beginnings of the trials.3 Skep1. Edward Bever, Magic and Religion, in The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition (hereafter EW), vol. 3, ed. Richard Golden (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2006), 693. 2. Edward Peters, Canon Episcopi, in EW, vol. 1, 16566. 3. Edward Bever, Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History XL, no. 2 (2009): 26668.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Summer 2012) Copyright 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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tics raised questions about the ability of incorporeal spirits to cause physical effects and speculated about the physical processes that might instead be responsible for them, while some physicians hypothesized that people who believed that they met with spirits who helped them perform dark magic were suffering from a disease.4 These ideas gained general currency within the European elite after its seventeenth-century crisis of condence in the witchcraft demonology.5 During the Enlightenment, earnest arguments against the possibility of supernatural phenomenainitially in the present era, and eventually at allwere complemented by ridicule of magical beliefs as irrational. In the nineteenth century, scientic controversies about the reality of magic increasingly gave way to social-scientic explanations of magical beliefs.6 The new discipline of psychology pathologized individual belief in magic, while scholars in a variety of elds advanced competing theories to explain magical thinkings long hold on human consciousness. The earliest explanations focused on the evolution of human cognition as a series of stages linked to the development of material civilization, but most came to follow Durkheims dictum that social phenomena should be explained in terms of other social phenomena and not individual consciousness, and so deemphasized psychological issues in favor of social and cultural approaches.7 Durkheims triumph came at the expense of Le vy-Bruhl, who argued that natives believe in magic because they think differently from rational modern Westerners, if not always and inevitably then at least some of the time and in certain circumstances. However, the leading exponents of the two main traditions that followed from Durkheim, the social structuralfunctionalist school and the symbolist/structuralist tradition, Evans-Pritchard and Le vi-Strauss, both turned to the inner workings of the mind in recognition of the limitations of their primary approaches.8 Evans-Pritchard supplemented his focus on the relationship between social structures and magical beliefs with references to natives use of two modes of thinking, the mystical and the empirical, while Le vi-Strauss related the systems of symbols he discerned in cultures to unconscious structures of the human mind. Similarly, although on a much broader scale, even as semiotics gained ascendancy in anthropology as well as history during the last generation, a new interpretive

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Matteo Duni, Skepticism, in EW, vol. 4, 104546. Bever, Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic, 27083; 29192. Bever, Magic and Religion, 695. Ibid., 696. Ibid., 69697.

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perspective appeared, growing out of what anthropologist Bradd Shore has termed the other great intellectual movement of the late twentieth centurythe revolution in cognitive science.9 This perspective, as its origins suggest, is rooted in the new understanding of the workings of the human mind resulting from recent advances in cognitive psychology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and neuroscience. The term revolution tends to be overused by historians, but in the case of the cognitive revolution it seems thoroughly warranted. The reason is that since the Enlightenment, educated opinion has accepted Lockes understanding of the newborn human mind as a blank slate, a big, empty storage space attached to a general purpose information processor, ready to be lled up with whatever set of understandings, attitudes, and beliefs its environment puts into it.10 Naturally, it was understood that basic metabolic functions like causing the lungs to breath and keeping the heart beating, along with basic perceptual and cognitive capacities like the ability to taste and the capacity to make associations, are hard-wired in, and Freudian psychology suggested that some of the inchoate urges that constitute the Id manifest instinctive drives. However, Freud put more emphasis on common infantile experiences, and the general consensus, what the evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides have labeled the Standard Social-Scientic Model (or SSSM), assumed the mind could do and contain pretty much whatever it was programmed to after birth, from understanding basic physical causality through belief, or disbelief, in God.11 The cognitive revolution has changed all this. In outline, it started with Noam Chomskys observation that the ability to learn language appears to be hard-wired into the human brain.12 As various lines of research have conrmed that we do indeed come equipped not only with a specialized capacity to learn a language, but with a specic portion of our brain dedicated to mastering and retaining one, other cognitive scientists broadened the idea that our minds consist in part of hard-wired specialized subsystems. In The Modularity of Mind (1983) Jerry Fodor extended the concept to genetically specied perceptual . . . systems . . . for analysis of spatial relations, shape,
9. Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11. 10. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 4445. 11. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer, http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html. 12. Whitehouse, Introduction, in The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology vs. Ethnography, ed. Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001), 67.

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color, and other visual stimuli, justifying these by pointing to the adaptive advantage of being born with automatically developing and functioning systems involving perception and response to danger.13 While in Fodors model mental modules are peripheral to the cognitive system, subordinated to non-modular, higher-level processes, capable of counteracting the more irrational inferences delivered by input systems, Dan Sperber has advocated a much broader modular theory, postulating that the mind is made up of many domain-specic, innately specied, hardwired, autonomous modules that are associated with xed neural architecture.14 Other cognitive scientists place less emphasis on modularity, but there is broad agreement that the mind possesses genetically specied . . . intuitive ontological principals that predispose us to understand different ontological domains in our environment in specic ways.15 We appear to have, for example, an innate physics, innate biology, and innate psychology, or put another way, sets of at least partially prewired modules or cognitive systems that equip us to understand the fundamentals of the physical, biological, and social environments into which we will be born.16 We dont have to reinvent the wheel every generation, although there is enough exibility that the wheel we develop can adapt to the condition of the roads and the kind of loads it will carry; our cognitive modules or intuitive ontological principals give us a head start on the learning process that Enlightenment tradition has assumed started each generation from scratch. Over the past generation, advances in cognitive theory have gone hand in hand with advances in neurology and have been supported by neuroimaging studies that show with increasing sophistication the brain centers, and systems of brain centers, that mediate our perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings.17 At the same time, evolutionary psychologists have developed increasingly sophisticated, although still controversial,
13. Whitehouse, Introduction, 78. 14. Dan Sperber, Mental Modularity and Cultural Diversity, in The Debated Mind, 2627 (note that Sperber is actually quoting Fodor, 36 and 98, to set up his own, much broader employment of the concepts). 15. Whitehouse, Introduction, 9. 16. Pascal Boyer, Cultural Inheritance/Cultural Predispositions in The Debated Mind, 6162. See also Scott Atran, Folkbiology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998); Pinker, How the Mind Works, 31633. 17. For example, Patrick McNamara, Religion and the Frontal Lobes, in Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience, ed. Jensine Andresen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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theories explaining in terms of natural selection the reasons that specic cognitive capabilities became hard-wired into our brains.18 Historians of magic have paid relatively little attention to this fundamental change in our understanding of how the mind works. Starting from the traditional rationalist and romantic views of magic as a manifestation of primitive thought, misunderstood popular practices, and/or individual pathology, they moved through social-scientic invocations of psychoanalytic concepts like projection and sublimation to explain how social tensions were redirected into witchcraft accusations to the postmodern position that all historically signicant human mental activity can be treated as a form of language, a disembodied system of signs structured by narrative conventions that effectively constitutes the mind.19 The few historical studies of magic that have taken cognitive factors into account have been relatively isolated and ad hoc.20 Anthropologists have paid more heed to the cognitive revolution, as the quote from Shore indicates and we shall see below, but the most signicant recent cognitive work relating to magic has been done by scholars of religion. To some extent this has been an incidental by-product of their broader investigations into religious phenomena, since magic and religion overlap so much, but to some degree they have focused on magic specically. While there are several signicant interpretive approaches to the cognitive study of religion, one has emerged in the past ten years as the dominant trend in the eld. It is rooted in Sperbers relevance theory of communication and epidemiological model of cultural transmission.21 What the latter does is explain the differential spread of concepts and beliefs in terms of the
18. Whitehouse, Introduction, 56; Kelley Bulkeley, Introduction, in Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-Mind Science (Gordonsville, Va.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4; Veikko Anttonen, Indentifying the Generative Mechanisms of Religion, in Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, eds. Ilkka Pyysiainen and Veikko Anttonen (London: Continuum, 2002), 2226. 19. Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life (Baskingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xixxx; on the current privileging of language and narrative, see Stuart Clark, Introduction, in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology, and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, ed. Stuart Clark (Houndsmill, UK: Macmillan, 2001), 8, 10. 20. For example, Owen Davies, The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations, Folklore 114 (August 2003): 182203. 21. Ilkka Pyysia inen, Introduction: Religion, Cognition, and Culture, in Religion 38 (2008): 1023.

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former, asserting that it is not merely blind cultural selection that makes some ideas and behaviors more successful than others; some ideas and behaviors are easier to spread to begin with, because they t the human mind. In other words, beliefs and behaviors are informed and constrained by the natural and cross-culturally recurrent operation of implicit cognitive systems.22 Those that mesh most easily with them will spread most widely and be retained most rmly. Applied specically to religious belief, and in particular to belief in gods, or supernatural beings who reward morally good behavior with good fortune and punish bad behavior with misfortune, the epidemiological explanation goes as follows. It starts with the concept of maturationally natural cognitive systems, by which it means cognitive systems that arise through the ordinary functioning of human biological endowment in ordinary human environments, like learning to speak your native language, and understanding basic physical processes.23 These maturationally natural cognitive systems give rise to nonreective beliefs like the appropriateness of the rules of grammar and the necessity of physical contact to transfer movement. More pertinent to god beliefs, they also give rise to our (Hyperactive) Agency Detection Device (or HADD), our Theory of Mind (ToM), and an intuitive sense of morality. We share with other animals a nonreective Agency Detection Device, which is the ability to understand that when an event happens in the environment, it may be because a deliberative agent intended for it to happen. It is labeled hyperactive in this context because it is designed to err on the side of caution, the assumption that intent is behind an event, because game theory predicts that in a world full of predators and competitors its safer to mistakenly assume that something random is purposeful than vice versa. Our Theory of Mind, which we presumably share only with other higher mammals, endows us with the ability to simulate complex thought processes of agents we detect, both other animals and other people, and thereby anticipate and even manipulate their behavior. Together, HADD and ToM give us a propensity to attribute agency to both intentional and random events and processes, and once having inferred agency, to attempt to discern the intent behind the presumed act. Our maturationally natural, intuitive sense of morality (ISOM), for which a body of evidence has accumulated over the past few decades, provides one rich source of possible intent.24
22. Justin Barrett and Jonathan Lanman, The Science of Religious Beliefs in Religion 38 (2008): 109. 23. Ibid., 113, ff. 24. Ibid., 116.

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When an event or process benets us, its because were being rewarded for having done something commendable; when one harms us, its because we did something wrong, especially something for which we have not already been punished. While HADD, ToM, and ISOM explain why people might imagine that invisible agents are manipulating events for or against them depending on their moral worth, they dont account for why people accept that such invisible agents exist, or why they are able to affect natural processes to bestow rewards or inict misfortunes. Why dont people, in other words, consider but then reject the results of their hyperactive agency detector, cutting off the process before it gets to ToM or ISOM? The answer involves one key element in the epidemiological process, and one that puts the magic back in magico-religious: what cognitive scientists of religion call Minimially Counterintuitive Ideas (or MCI), which violate a small number of the expectations, inferences, and beliefs generated by maturationally natural cognitive systems (such as those dealing with physical objects, artifacts, living kinds, and persons).25 The idea that a tree might have beliefs and desires, for instance, involves a transfer of an intuitive inference from one ontological domain (intuitive psychology) to another domain (living kinds) with which it is not normally associated. Similarly, a stone statue that weeps tears of blood likewise involves the transfer of an inference pertaining to biological systems and applies it to an artifact. Domain violations such as these have been shown to make concepts more memorable, especially if connected to moral judgments, so MCI facilitates the propagation and retention of religious beliefs while validating the supernatural agency and causation needed to make the inferences of HADD and ToM plausible. This idea of domain violation lies at the heart of the most direct application of this overall approach to magic, Jesper Srensons A Cognitive Theory of Magic.26 While Srenson emphasizes that magic is a complex phenomenon, his central argument is that magical beliefs manifest a particular form of conceptualization that results from the combination at higher levels of mental processing elements belonging to different basic cognitive domains. More specically, he posits a generic space containing cognitive primitives like agent, object, and force, two input spaces containing specic instantiations of these primitives in two different conceptual domains, and a blended space where elements from the two input spaces are brought
25. Ibid., 115. 26. Jesper Srenson, A Cognitive Theory of Magic (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleeld, 2007), 7677.

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together.27 For example, he explains the Trobriand Islanders ritual to exorcize garden blight through a spell that calls on it to paddle away in a canoe as the mixing of elements from the seafaring domain and the garden domain in a blended ritual space.28 More generally, he portrays magic as ritual that creates a blended space where elements from the profane and the sacred domains (which themselves are based on common cognitive primitives) mix: bread and wine are profane instantiations of containers containing the essence of bread and wine; Christs body and blood are sacred instantiations of containers containing the essence of Christ; the Eucharist creates a blended space in which bread and wine are understood to no longer contain their own essences and instead contain the essence of Christ.29 By linking magical beliefs to current cognitive theory, Srensens book, like the works that it builds on, creates an intriguing explanation of how people generate, spread, and maintain so many beliefs that seem impossible or nonsensical to us. This constitutes a major contribution to the sociology of magic. However, because he does this in a way that quite deliberately involves cognitive mechanisms that are not fundamentally different from ordinary cognition, but instead are just a particular set of instantiations of itor more precisely, a peculiar set of misapplications of itthe result is not really a full cognitive theory of magic, but rather more of a cognitive theory of belief in magic. In other words, Srensen explains how people can think that magic works, and thus why they engage in the rituals those beliefs engender, but does not really explain how they come to experience magic: why they see visions, what is going on when they converse with spirits, and how come they sometimes seem to be able to foretell the future or actually cure the sick. A recent analysis of spirit possession from the cognitive epidemiological perspective, Emma Cohens The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession, suggests that this limitation is inherent in the approach. The rst step in Cohens analysis is to dene spirits as a concept so that she can then deploy the whole arsenal of HADD, ToM, MCI, and so on to explain the spread and retention of possession beliefs.30 What is missed is not only an appreciation of the astounding subjective experience of possession, but also a real under27. Ibid., 6061, 75. 28. Ibid., 12527. 29. Ibid., 8384, 98100. 30. Emma Cohen, The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an AfroBrazilain Religious Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. chaps. 6 and 7.

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standing of how that subjective experience comes about. Concepts about spirits may inform the perceived characteristics and behaviors of spirits, but they cannot explain the experience of encountering or being taken over by one. To explain this, we need to understand how dramatically nonordinary forms of perception and cognition come about. Another prominent cognitive theory of religion, Harvey Whitehouses theory of two modes of religiosity, the imagistic and the doctrinal, would seem to focus more directly on this aspect of magico-religious phenomena.31 However, like its dominant rival, it is more concerned with the issue of the propagation and retention of belief systems in populations than the experience of spiritual or magical encounters by individuals. The focus of his concern about the two modes is their ability to spread the faiththe doctrinal through frequent repetition of low-arousal stimuli like linguistic formulas; the imagistic through occasional inducement of intense, and intensely memorable, sensory and emotional experiencesand the way that the power of the latter gives rise to popular practices at odds with the former. Whitehouse does consider the especially rich patterns of analogical thinking that are triggered by intense ritual experiences, but his emphasis is on the trade-off between their memorability and emotional resonance, which contributes to their social power, and the difculty of generalizing and communicating them, which inhibits it.32 Another cognitive theory that more directly addresses the problem of magical thinking and experience is Le vy-Bruhls concept of participation, which was adopted by Stanley Tambiah in connection with his emphasis on the performative dimension of magico-religious ritual.33 His elaboration of the idea that participation involves a different, holistic, and associative form of knowledge than the analytical, causally oriented rationality of everyday thought has been picked up and developed in turn by two recent scholars of magic, the anthropologist Susan Greenwood and the developmental psychologist Eugene Subbotsky.34 Subbotsky has been conducting a long series of experiments over the past thirty years that demonstrate that magical beliefs are a ubiquitous feature of
31. Pyysia inen, Introduction, 102103; Barrett and Lanman, The Science of Religious Beliefs, 119. 32. Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiousity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2004), 9. 33. Srenson, A Cognitive Theory of Magic, 2122. 34. Susan Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2009),11; Eugene Subbotsky, Magic and the Mind: Mechanisms, Functions, and Development of Magical Thinking and Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 98.

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human cognition. They are manifested not only by children and uneducated non-Western adults, but also by grown up modern Westerners, who exhibit superstitious reactions and engage in ritualistic behaviors if the stakes are high and/or the costs of appearing credulous are low, even as they explicitly deny their validity.35 The explanation, Subbotsky asserts, is that the mind is naturally divided into two domains, ordinary reality and magical reality, which exist in a symbiotic relationship.36 Participation is the tendency to merge entities that from a rational point of view should be treated as separate based on holistic thinking in which the essences of physically or logically separate entities are shared or blended. It is the mechanism, in Subbotskys reckoning, by which we apprehend magical reality. Subbotskys denition of participation points back to the mainstream cognitive tradition, for it is really not that different from Srensons concept of a blended conceptual space mixing elements from the sacred and profane domains. However, his insistence that the existence of the magical cognitive domain reects the existence of a magical dimension of human reality contrasts strongly with the mainstream traditions assumption that the ontological categories and categorizations accepted by modern Western adults are both valid and intuitive, and the task of cognitive theory is therefore to explain how children and other primitive peoples come to adopt invalid, counterintuitive ideas about how the world works.37 Subbotsky argues to the contrary that both the ubiquity and the utility of magical thinking indicate that it is just as intuitive and valid, in its domain, as mundane processing, and indeed, what really needs explaining is why modern Western adults work so hard to suppress it.38 In contrast to Subbotskys employment of the concept of participation to explain the results of his etic investigations of magical beliefs, Greenwood discusses it in connection to her emic investigations of magic as practice and experience. She agrees with him that participation involves a mode of cognition that is a ubiquitous feature of human mental life, that it connects in important ways to human reality, and that it is the key to understanding magic, but her discussion leads in a rather different direction.39 Whereas
35. Subbotsky, Magic and the Mind, 166. 36. Ibid., 13435, 144, 98100. 37. For a critique of the notion that magico-religious beliefs are counter-intuitive, see Maurice Bloch, Are Religious Beliefs Counter-Intuitive? in Radical Interpretation of Religion, ed. Nancy Frankenberry (Port Chester, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 133, 139, 146. 38. Subbotsky, Magic and the Mind, 11531. 39. Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic, 45, 26.

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Subbotsky, like the dominant cognitive tradition, treats magical beliefs as conscious or unconscious conceptsthoughts, ideas, or beliefs about how the world worksGreenwood focuses on mystical mentality or magical consciousness, an associative experience resulting from a form of mental processing in which bodily boundaries and distinct notions of self are temporarily abandoned and imaginal experience comes to the fore.40 Speaking from her own experiences as a participant-observer in magical practices, as well as from informants reports and published accounts, Greenwood asserts that it is this shift in consciousness or change in awareness that constitutes participation and yields the perception of connections between things, situations, and feeling that distinguishes magical understanding and shapes its practices.41 Greenwoods discussion provides important insights into the experiences associated with magical thinking, but it is ultimately descriptive rather than explanatory. This is actually true of the concept of participation itself: it provides a handy label for the bundle of mental processes magical thinking involves, but it doesnt really explain how they work. Indeed, Greenwood explicitly asserts that the emotional and imaginative experiences associated with magic cannot be understood purely by studying them by conventional scientic methods of analysis since these are bound within rationalistic discourses that either reduce the experience of magic to external terms or obliterate its essence.42 She draws on Gregory Batesons concept of abduction, which centers on the recognition of patterns and their embodiment in metaphor, in an attempt to outline a system of knowledge separate from but equal to science, but in the end this seems to lead back to the same place, another descriptive cul-de-sac that essentially repackages the cognitive attributes of magical thinking under a new label.43 Fortunately, there is another, more straightforward approach to the experience of magicencounters with supernatural agents, journeys to magical realms, and employment of magical powersthat does help explain it, which is to go beyond cognitive theory to cognitive neuroscience. This approach started with the basic neurological work of Ernst Gellhorn, who rst proposed the concept of tuning the nervous system, altering the balance between the ergotropic, or arousal, and the trophotropic, or relaxation, sys40. Ibid., 29, 4, 67. 41. Ibid., 11, 29, 67, 31. 42. Ibid., 79. 43. Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic, Kindle Edition position 33533365, 34553502.

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tems to produce qualitatively different psychological experiences and cognitive capabilities.44 The approach really got under way, though, when Eugene dAquili and Charles Laughlin, the founders of an interdisciplinary approach to culture integrating anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience called biogenetic structuralism, got anthropologist Barbara Lex to apply Gellhorns ideas to the problem of ritual trance.45 Lex discussed how either intense overstimulation drives the ergotropic system or profound understimulation drives the trophotropic system into a state of overload, leading to the activation of the complementary system while the overloaded one is still engaged. The result is a hybrid physiological state and state of consciousness characterized by some features of sleeping and some features of waking.46 These include shifts in the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain, resulting in the strong intrusion of internally generated, dreamlike imagery on consciousness; the synchronization of the different levels of the brain and the frontal lobes leading to the integration of information from the lower levels of the brain, including nonverbal emotional and behavioral information, into the processing capacity of the frontal cortex; this in turn yields intuitive insight, understanding . . . and personal integration and deactivation of the orientation association area of the brain to create a disembodied sensation that can be manifested as an out-of-body experience, the intrusion of some external presence into the body, or a feeling of oceanic oneness with the universe. It also produces the synthesis of beta-endorphin and a consequent sense of wellbeing; accelerated heart rate and reduced blood pressure in an unusual combination known otherwise only from life-threatening situations . . . when a person is close to death from an infectious disease or bleeding (which may be why ritual practices are often thought to involve contact with the dead or journeys to the land of the dead); and nally, radically heightened bioelectric activity associated with learning and the generation of new insights and heightened creativity. DAquili and Laughlin focused more on the implications of Lexs work for community-enhancing religious rituals than for individual consciousness, but the anthropologist Michael Winkelman has made it the central focus of his
44. Charles Laughlin, Day Eight: A Review of Past Material, Plus Ergotropic Trophotropic Tuning, http://www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/tuttune.htm. 45. Barbara Lex, The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance, in The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structuralist Analysis, eds. Eugen dAquili and Charles Laughlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 46. Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 202204; note that this discussion amalgamates Lexs original contribution with later work by other researchers.

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work on shamanism.47 Winkelman relates it to both the magical experiences of shamans, like soul ight and spirit encounters, and their magical powers, in particular divination and healing. The physiological roots of the former are obvious from the list of effects tuning has on the nervous system dreamlike imagery, feelings of disembodiment, and so onbut the roots of the latter require more elaboration. Tuning the nervous system would seem to facilitate divination by integrating information from the lower levels of the brain including nonverbal emotional and behavioral information into the processing capacity of the frontal cortex, yielding intuitive insight and understanding. 48 Winkelman argues that shamanic trance can promote healing both indirectly and directly. It can promote healing indirectly by facilitating the shamans own trance-based healing activities, like narrating a ight to the spirit world to rescue the sick persons soul, which, along with sleight-of-hand and other tricks, can trigger endorphin release in the patient, relieving pain and creating a sense of well-being, as well as mobilizing the placebo effect.49 Tuning can have a direct effect if the shaman induces a trance in the patient, which can trigger endorphin release as well, resolve intrapsychic tensions responsible for psychophysical ailments, facilitate hypnotic and auto-hypnotic susceptibility to positive suggestions, and end in a trophotropic-dominated state with the restorative systems tuned up and the stress-related ones, which inhibit recuperation, tuned down. While Winkelman concentrates on the effects of full-blown shamanic trance in his work, the present authors recent historical study of magic, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, extends the idea of tuning the nervous system to include subtler changes in consciousness induced by what it calls ne-tuning the nervous system via more subdued ritual activities.50 To give one example, it discusses how a womans incantation of a spell so that no forest ranger could see or catch her when she snuck into restricted forestland could have actually helped her remain undetected.51 While the spell was formally a transitive one, with words calling
47. Charles Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene dAquili, Introduction, The Spectrum of Ritual, 2935; Michael Winkelman, Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing (Westport, Conn., and London: Bergin and Garvey, 2000). 48. Michael Winkelman and Philip Peek, Introduction: Divination and Healing Processes, in Divination and Healing, eds. Michael Winkelman and Philip Peek (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 11. 49. Winkelman, Shamanism, 199200; 19395. 50. Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 211. 51. Ibid., 16263, 173. Wu rttemberg Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (WHS), Archive A209 (Oberrat: Kriminalakten), le 767, Initial Report.

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for any threatening ranger to become bent . . . lame . . . [or] blind, to disappear or to be led away by the Devil, its potential for keeping the woman from being detected would have hinged on its direct effects on her and only indirectly inuenced him.52 In mottled light and tangled undergrowth, stillness is often the best camouage, which is why small animals freeze when they become aware of a predator nearby; even if they are in its eld of vision they may still escape notice, while ight virtually guarantees pursuit.53 For a poacher trying to avoid forest rangers, the greatest danger was overactivity, and an incantation could help avoid this in several ways. First of all, incanting a spell, whether beforehand or quietly at the time, would reassure her both intellectually and emotionally that she would not be caught, so if a ranger was nearby there would be no apparent need and less impulse to run; intensifying self-condence is one way that magic can actually inuence reality.54 Second, reminding herself of or reciting the spell would give her something to do with her mind instead of anxiously miscalculating her chances of escape; distraction is another important component of magic. Finally, if incanted quietly or silently while hiding, the cadence of the words would have produced a physiologically calming effect, for oral recitation imposes control over breathing, and experimental studies have demonstrated that even purely mental activities can produce states of greater relaxation.55 Spells like this can thus be thought of as a form of psycholinguistic programming that entrain cognitive and emotional neural networks in ways that can provoke profound physiological changes.56 Of course, the woman would not have objectively become impossible to detect and a forester was unlikely to have been suddenly aficted by the maladies she invoked, but the objective reality and specic impact were not what mattered; what was important was that the person involved was not noticed at a particular time by a particular person. The effective agent was the woman channeling the
52. WHS, A209, 767, document 3. 53. Joost A. M. Meerloo, Intuition and the Evil Eye (Wassenaar, Netherlands: Sevire, 1971), 15. 54. Ivor Lissner, Man, God, and Magic, trans. Maxwell Brownjohn (New York: Putnam, 1961), 245. 55. Charles Tart, The Psychophysiology of Some Altered States of Consciousness, in Altered States of Consciousness, ed. Charles Tart (New York: Wiley, 1969), 485; Joe Kamiya, Operant Control of the EEG Alpha Rhythm and Some of Its Reported Effects on Consciousness, ibid., 509510; and Akira Kasamatsu and Tomio Hirai, An Electroencephalographic Study on the Zen Meditation (Zazen), ibid., 500501. 56. Winkelman, Shamanism, 72, 146.

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activities of her own nervous system in order to inuence her own behavior and thereby affect the perceptions of others. It is a commonplace that magic can have real effects on a person who believes in it, but it is less widely appreciated that it can have effects on people regardless of their beliefs. In the example here, while the effects of the spell on the person who recited it were in some ways dependent on belief (the intellectual and emotional reassurance it gave), they were in other ways independent of it (the physiologically calming effects of oral or mental recitation and the predisposition of predators to attend more to perceptions of movement than stillness). Furthermore, this last point highlights the fact that in this case the beliefs of the target were entirely irrelevant. By controlling her own thoughts and behaviors, the early modern poacher could affect the patrolling rangers perceptions not just regardless of his belief in the power of the spell, but indeed in the necessary absence of his awareness that it was being cast at all. The Realities classies the less profound yet potent alterations of consciousness induced by ne-tuning the nervous system as shamanistic to distinguish them from the dramatic trance states produced by full-blown shamanic tuning. It further denes shamanism as the manipulation of the mind in the practitioner and others via tuning or ne-tuning the nervous system to produce alterations of consciousness that give access to knowledge and manifest powers that are not accessible in normal waking consciousness. The justication for this denition of shamanism is that while the term is derived from the activities of certain magical practitioners in certain central Asian societies, and is commonly used to label healers in tribal societies who enter an ecstatic trance as part of their practice, shamanism does not exist as a cohesive set of beliefs and practices characteristic of any particular culture.57 Whether it is restricted to the spiritual practices of Siberian healers, as some anthropologists advocate; used to describe any alterations of consciousness that yield inspired insights that are conveyed to others, as it is sometimes popularly employed; or given any of several possible intermediate meaningspractices that induce the experience of a journey to the spirit world, or practices that induce contact with spirits whether or not an imaginal journey is involvedit is an articial construct created by Western intellectuals, an etic category rather than an emic one. Furthermore, except when restricted to the narrowest denition, it is not an ordinary cultural tradition dependent on ongoing continuity of beliefs manifested through a set of customs.58 Instead, it is an amorphous phenomenon that has been discovered
57. Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 435. 58. Ibid., 194, 436.

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and developed by disparate and unconnected cultures around the world at different times. It is, in Winkelmans words, a range of cultural adaptations to the biological potentials of altered states of consciousness . . . and certain ecological conditions and social demands.59 Dening shamanism in cognitive rather than the anthropological terms focuses our attention on the commonalities linking the wide variety of ways human beings deliberately manipulate their nervous systems to alter their consciousness to access normally unconscious knowledge and skills, while distinguishing shamanistic from shamanic practices gives us a vocabulary that acknowledges the different degrees and impacts of such manipulations. Additionally, using the term in this way highlights the connection, also noted by Greenwood, between the psychological process of altering consciousness and the cultural practices of magic, while relating both to the neurophysiology of tuning and ne-tuning the nervous system.60 In conclusion, it seems clear that the cognitive revolution has signicant implications for our understanding of magic. First of all, the cognitive approach developed by scholars of religion sheds new light on the propagation and retention of magical beliefs as well as religious ones, relating them to the innate structures and ordinary processes of the mind. Second, Le vyBruhls concept of participation has been adopted by a developmental psychological as well as an experiential anthropological investigator of magic because it seems to encapsulate the cognitive processing that distinguishes magical from mundane thinking that their very different investigative projects have revealed. Finally, the neurocognitive approach not only offers insight into the physiological causes of the cognitive effects associated with participation, but also indicates how practitioners can exert real power over themselves and others. The rst of these recent applications of cognitive science to magic thus illuminates a major issue in the sociology and history of magic as well as religion, while the latter two remind us that in trying to understand magic it is not enough to explain what seems invalid and counterintuitive to us. Instead, they suggest a new, realist approach that focuses on the ways in which magical beliefs and practices reference and inuence reality. They thereby promise to yield important new insights into magics long and resolute hold on the human psyche that traditional scholarly interpretations, with their preconceptions about the invalidity of magical beliefs, can never provide.
59. Michael Winkelman, Altered States of Consciousness, in Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook of Method and Theory, ed. Stephen. Glazier (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997), 403. 60. Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic, 31.

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