{"title":"“Hands of gods” at Work","authors":"Yulia Ustinova","doi":"10.1558/jch.23723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.23723","url":null,"abstract":"In ancient Greece, some basic Hippocratic practices were almost indistinguishable from magic healing, and above all, catharsis was essentially a magic action. The use of cleansing, usually by hellebore, in the treatment of various ailments, is a shining example of the vitality of the magic worldview, which did not turn into an insignificant modest detail, but was a major method in Hippocratic therapy. The main principle behind purification can be described as the feeling that misfortune, including disease, is filth contained within the body, and therefore can and has to be removed. The efficacy of catharsis was based on its cognitive impact, and this impact was enhanced by additional magic rites. Therefore, healing based on purification produced better results when administered in a cultic context, by a traditional healer or exorcist, than in a medical context, by a professional physician. Thus, the hostility of physicians towards sorcerers and other traditional healers receives an additional explanation.","PeriodicalId":499803,"journal":{"name":"Journal of cognitive historiography","volume":"143 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140483653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Magic and Cognition","authors":"Esther Eidinow, Irene Salvo","doi":"10.1558/jch.27099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.27099","url":null,"abstract":"A short introduction to the special issue.","PeriodicalId":499803,"journal":{"name":"Journal of cognitive historiography","volume":"92 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140481695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fearing the Gods?","authors":"Celia Sánchez Natalías","doi":"10.1558/jch.24365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.24365","url":null,"abstract":"After some introductory remarks on current approaches to curse tablets, this article focuses on the defixiones from Britannia, analyzing the idiosyncratic features of this corpus to demonstrate how the island’s inhabitants adopted and then adapted this magico-religious technology. In particular, it examines a group of curses in which the name of the practitioner is clearly stated. This specific piece of information has been understood by previous scholarship as a reflection of the fearlessness that these practitioners (who were supposedly asking for something fair) felt towards the gods. Nevertheless, this article interprets the use of names as a reflection of the perception that these practitioners had of the god’s omniscience. Additionally, this research also takes into account the context where these artefacts were deposited and the array of rituals that took place in those spaces. Tellingly, most of the curse tablets from Britannia with this feature (i.e. the name of the practitioner) come from sanctuaries and shrines, a context that could have promoted different ways for practitioners to conceive of the cursing ritual and the types of relationship that it created between the author of the curse and the invoked deity.","PeriodicalId":499803,"journal":{"name":"Journal of cognitive historiography","volume":"68 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140483556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embodied Theories of Knowledge and the Evil Eye in the Roman World","authors":"Antón Alvar Nuño","doi":"10.1558/jch.23601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.23601","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims at enriching current interpretations of the Evil Eye in the Roman world by applying embodied theories of knowledge to the social environments that triggered this belief. In general terms, religious belief is grounded on representational processes of the body and of its surrounding environment; these, together, organize specific mental reference-systems. In other words, actual experience is encoded in a mental frame that may later be used to make plausible explanations of a given situation. The psychosomatic feeling of envy (the Evil Eye was often conceptualized as an emotion) that the individual experienced at a given situation was processed into a complex socio-cultural reasoning that included 1) the identification and description of the pain suffered by the envious person (including the idea that the whole colour of their skin became bluish – livor); 2) the monitoring of one’s own moral conduct in the situation that triggered the feeling of envy; 3) the association of envy with a whole system of beliefs of mystical harm that could affect others; and 4) the possibility of restraining it. This experience fed the variety of cognitive strategies that individuals then elaborated in order to externalize their responsibility towards random misfortune.","PeriodicalId":499803,"journal":{"name":"Journal of cognitive historiography","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135365427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Causal Opacity or Causal Translucence?","authors":"Jennifer Larson","doi":"10.1558/jch.23722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.23722","url":null,"abstract":"According to longstanding interpretations in the social and cognitive sciences, rituals are said to be characterized by arbitrary action and the lack of a causal connection between action and desired outcome. The observer who assigns a physical-causal connection has taken the instrumental stance, while one who accepts a group convention is said to take the ritual stance. I argue that in religious rituals at least, including those with magical elements, the gap is bridged and causal intuitions are present, if limited. For example, we rely on a mental heuristic called Representativeness in order to make many causal judgments, and Representativeness tells us that effects usually resemble their causes. This heuristic, studied by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, corresponds to J. G. Frazer’s so-called “Law of Similarity” in magic. Representativeness and other forms of magical thinking appear to yield weaker causal inferences than our intuitions about physical processes or the agency of other people. Accordingly, religious rituals are often employed in situations where a goal cannot be achieved in more obvious ways, but some lesser intuition of causal efficacy can still be generated. Illustrative examples are drawn from ancient Greek rituals of offering, oath-taking, and purification.","PeriodicalId":499803,"journal":{"name":"Journal of cognitive historiography","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135823659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Flipping the Political Scale","authors":"Janne Holmén","doi":"10.1558/jch.22942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.22942","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates spatial representations of the political system in Swedish civics textbooks, 1900–2020. It challenges common assumptions about the spatiality of politics, such as the analogy between parties representing the upper classes and the right. Instead, the investigation reveals a complicated history, which includes a sudden shift in polarity of the political spectrum in the 1980s. Then, the political right finally moved to the spatial right in diagrams of the political system, after having been placed to the left for most of the 20th century. The article also discusses how diagrammatic representations of the party system changed in the 2010s, as democracy was perceived to be under threat and new dimensions emerged in politics. These puzzling empirical findings are analyzed with the help of theories on spatial and diagrammatic cognition, such as primary metaphors and spatial agency bias.","PeriodicalId":499803,"journal":{"name":"Journal of cognitive historiography","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135823656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jennifer Larson, Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter Francois, Daniel Hoyer, Peter Turchin
{"title":"Moralizing Supernatural Punishment and Reward","authors":"Jennifer Larson, Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter Francois, Daniel Hoyer, Peter Turchin","doi":"10.1558/jch.25994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.25994","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we respond to three critiques of our 2019 article ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.’ We clarify that our research does not, as our critics suppose, support the claim that moralizing gods played a decisive role in the development of complex societies. Indeed our goal was to test this claim and we found it wanting. Our methods ‘reduce’ neither religion or social complexity in the ways claimed, while our tentative conclusions about the relationship between frequent, routinized ritual and social cohesion are supported by much research beyond the paper under discussion. In the Roman Empire, many forms of collective ritual contributed to the propagation of Romanitas. We have never claimed that this depended on absolute uniformity of belief. Other misconceptions about our supposedly ‘inattentive’ qualitative analysis result from misreadings of information in our open-access database, which functions as an evolving set of information relevant to specific research questions rather than a general encyclopedia. Despite these disagreements, we continue to maintain that neither qualitative historical methods nor quantitative analytic approaches alone can produce satisfying answers to causal questions about world history. The best approach, we argue, is to integrate the insights from humanities with ‘Big Data’ analyses from social science, and we welcome continued engagement and collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries.","PeriodicalId":499803,"journal":{"name":"Journal of cognitive historiography","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135823657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}