current trends in the application of cognitive science to magic

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Current Trends in the Applicationof Cognitive Science to Magic

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

T he idea that apparently supernatural phenomena are at least as much amanifestation 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 Clas-sical antiquity, who asserted that magicians worked through a combinationof fraud, illusion, and natural processes. 1 This disparagement of magic as illu-sion was taken up by late Roman and early Medieval Christians, who used itto call into question the claims of pagan priests and popular practitioners tosupernatural power. The position informed the inuential tenth-centurycanon Episcopi , which insisted that women who thought they rode throughthe air with the goddess Diana were victims of diabolical illusions. 2 The Epis-copi s position was incorporated into subsequent ecclesiastical law codes andinterpreted broadly as holding that magic in general is illusory, an orthodoxythat dominated Church thinking until the formulation of the witch demon-ology in the late Middle Ages.

Of course, Medieval Christians believed that some supernatural effects werereal, because God was capable of contravening the laws of nature, and hecould allow lesser beings like saints and the Devil to do so as well when itsuited his purposes. Modern dogmatic skepticism, the conviction that super-natural phenomena are inherently impossible and therefore all magic must

be illusorythat, in fact, the very belief in the possibility of supernaturalphenomena is delusionaloriginated in the Renaissance in opposition to theemergence of the witch demonology and the beginnings of the trials. 3 Skep-

1. 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 Jour-

nal of Interdisciplinary HistoryXL, no. 2 (2009): 26668.


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4 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Summer 2012

tics raised questions about the ability of incorporeal spirits to cause physicaleffects and speculated about the physical processes that might instead beresponsible for them, while some physicians hypothesized that people whobelieved that they met with spirits who helped them perform dark magicwere suffering from a disease. 4 These ideas gained general currency withinthe European elite after its seventeenth-century crisis of condence in thewitchcraft demonology. 5 During the Enlightenment, earnest argumentsagainst the possibility of supernatural phenomenainitially in the presentera, and eventually at allwere complemented by ridicule of magical beliefsas irrational. In the nineteenth century, scientic controversies about the real-ity of magic increasingly gave way to social-scientic explanations of magical

beliefs. 6 The new discipline of psychology pathologized individual belief inmagic, while scholars in a variety of elds advanced competing theories toexplain magical thinkings long hold on human consciousness. The earliestexplanations focused on the evolution of human cognition as a series of stageslinked to the development of material civilization, but most came to followDurkheims dictum that social phenomena should be explained in terms of other social phenomena and not individual consciousness, and so deempha-sized psychological issues in favor of social and cultural approaches. 7

Durkheims triumph came at the expense of Le vy-Bruhl, who argued thatnatives believe in magic because they think differently from rationalmodern Westerners, if not always and inevitably then at least some of thetime and in certain circumstances. However, the leading exponents of thetwo main traditions that followed from Durkheim, the social structural-functionalist school and the symbolist/structuralist tradition, Evans-Pritchardand Levi-Strauss, both turned to the inner workings of the mind in recogni-tion of the limitations of their primary approaches. 8 Evans-Pritchard supple-

mented his focus on the relationship between social structures and magicalbeliefs with references to natives use of two modes of thinking, the mysti-cal and the empirical, while Le vi-Strauss related the systems of symbols hediscerned in cultures to unconscious structures of the human mind. Similarly,although on a much broader scale, even as semiotics gained ascendancy inanthropology as well as history during the last generation, a new interpretive

4. Matteo Duni, Skepticism, in EW , vol. 4, 104546.5. Bever, Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic, 27083; 29192.6. Bever, Magic and Religion, 695.


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5Bever Current Trends in the Application of Cognitive Science to Magic

perspective appeared, growing out of what anthropologist Bradd Shore hastermed the other great intellectual movement of the late twentieth cen-turythe revolution in cognitive science. 9 This perspective, as its origins

suggest, is rooted in the new understanding of the workings of the humanmind resulting from recent advances in cognitive psychology, computer sci-ence, philosophy, linguistics, and neuroscience.

The term revolution tends to be overused by historians, but in the caseof the cognitive revolution it seems thoroughly warranted. The reason isthat since the Enlightenment, educated opinion has accepted Lockes under-standing of the newborn human mind as a blank slate, a big, empty storagespace attached to a general purpose information processor, ready to be lled

up with whatever set of understandings, attitudes, and beliefs its environmentputs into it. 10 Naturally, it was understood that basic metabolic functions likecausing the lungs to breath and keeping the heart beating, along with basicperceptual and cognitive capacities like the ability to taste and the capacity tomake associations, are hard-wired in, and Freudian psychology suggestedthat some of the inchoate urges that constitute the Id manifest instinctivedrives. However, Freud put more emphasis on common infantile experi-ences, 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 itwas programmed to after birth, from understanding basic physical causalitythrough belief, or disbelief, in God. 11

The cognitive revolution has changed all this. In outline, it started withNoam Chomskys observation that the ability to learn language appears tobe hard-wired into the human brain. 12 As various lines of research haveconrmed that we do indeed come equipped not only with a specializedcapacity to learn a language, but with a specic portion of our brain dedicatedto mastering and retaining one, other cognitive scientists broadened the ideathat our minds consist in part of hard-wired specialized subsystems. In The Modularity of Mind (1983) Jerry Fodor extended the concept to geneticallyspecied 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.


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color, and other visual stimuli, justifying these by pointing to the adaptiveadvantage of being born with automatically developing and functioningsystems involving perception and response to danger. 13 While in Fodors

model mental modules are peripheral to the cognitive system, subordinatedto non-modular, higher-level processes, capable of counteracting the moreirrational inferences delivered by input systems, Dan Sperber has advocateda much broader modular theory, postulating that the mind is made up of many domain-specic, innately specied, hardwired, autonomous mod-ules that are associated with xed neural architecture. 14 Other cognitivescientists place less emphasis on modularity, but there is broad agreement thatthe mind possesses genetically specied . . . intuitive ontological principals

that predispose us to understand different ontological domains in our envi-ronment in specic ways. 15 We appear to have, for example, an innate phys-ics, innate biology, and innate psychology, or put another way, sets of at leastpartially prewired modules or cognitive systems that equip us to understandthe fundamentals of the physical, biological, and social environments intowhich we will be born. 16 We dont have to reinvent the wheel every genera-tion, although there is enough exibility that the wheel we develop can adaptto the condition of the roads and the kind of loads it will carry; our cogni-tive modules or intuitive ontological principals give us a head start onthe learning process that Enlightenment tradition has assumed started eachgeneration from scratch. Over the past generation, advances in cognitive the-ory have gone hand in hand with advances in neurology and have beensupported by neuroimaging studies that show with increasing sophisticationthe brain centers, and systems of brain centers, that mediate our perceptions,memories, thoughts, and feelings. 17 At the same time, evolutionary psycholo-gists 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 hisown, 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 Sciences21(1998); Pinker, How the Mind Works, 31633.

17. For example, Patrick McNamara, Religion and the Frontal Lobes, in Reli- gion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience , ed. Jensine


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theories explaining in terms of natural selection the reasons that specic cog-nitive capabilities became hard-wired into our brains. 18

Historians of magic have paid relatively little attention to this fundamentalchange in our understanding of how the mind works. Starting from thetraditional rationalist and romantic views of magic as a manifestationof primitive thought, misunderstood popular practices, and/or individualpathology, they moved through social-scientic invocations of psychoana-lytic concepts like projection and sublimation to explain how socialtensions were redirected into witchcraft accusations to the postmodern posi-tion that all historically signicant human mental activity can be treated asa form of language, a disembodied system of signs structured by narrative

conventions that effectively constitutes the mind.19

The few historical studiesof magic that have taken cognitive factors into account have been relativelyisolated and ad hoc. 20 Anthropologists have paid more heed to the cognitiverevolution, as the quote from Shore indicates and we shall see below, butthe most signicant recent cognitive work relating to magic has been doneby scholars of religion. To some extent this has been an incidental by-productof their broader investigations into religious phenomena, since magic andreligion 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 trendin the eld. It is rooted in Sperbers relevance theory of communicationand epidemiological model of cultural transmission. 21 What the latter doesis 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 (Gordons-ville, Va.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4; Veikko Anttonen, Indentifying the Genera-tive 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 ModernEurope: 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 EarlyModern Culture , ed. Stuart Clark (Houndsmill, UK: Macmillan, 2001), 8, 10.

20. For example, Owen Davies, The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, andWitchcraft Accusations, Folklore 114 (August 2003): 182203.

21. Ilkka Pyysia inen, Introduction: Religion, Cognition, and Culture, in Reli-


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former, asserting that it is not merely blind cultural selection that makessome ideas and behaviors more successful than others; some ideas and behav-iors are easier to spread to begin with, because they t the human mind.

In other words, beliefs and behaviors are informed and constrained by thenatural and cross-culturally recurrent operation of implicit cognitive sys-tems. 22 Those that mesh most easily with them will spread most widely andbe 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 fortuneand punish bad behavior with misfortune, the epidemiological explanationgoes as follows. It starts with the concept of maturationally natural cognitive

systems, by which it means cognitive systems that arise through the ordi-nary functioning of human biological endowment in ordinary human envi-ronments, like learning to speak your native language, and understandingbasic physical processes. 23 These maturationally natural cognitive systems giverise to nonreective beliefs like the appropriateness of the rules of grammar and the necessity of physical contact to transfer movement. More pertinentto god beliefs, they also give rise to our (Hyperactive) Agency DetectionDevice (or HADD), our Theory of Mind (ToM), and an intuitive sense of morality. We share with other animals a nonreective Agency DetectionDevice, which is the ability to understand that when an event happens in theenvironment, it may be because a deliberative agent intended for it to hap-pen. 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, becausegame theory predicts that in a world full of predators and competitors itssafer to mistakenly assume that something random is purposeful than viceversa. 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, andthereby anticipate and even manipulate their behavior. Together, HADD andToM give us a propensity to attribute agency to both intentional and randomevents and processes, and once having inferred agency, to attempt to discernthe intent behind the presumed act. Our maturationally natural, intuitivesense of morality (ISOM), for which a body of evidence has accumulatedover the past few decades, provides one rich source of possible intent. 24

22. Justin Barrett and Jonathan Lanman, The Science of Religious Beliefs inReligion 38 (2008): 109.


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together. 27 For example, he explains the Trobriand Islanders ritual to exor-cize garden blight through a spell that calls on it to paddle away in a canoe asthe 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 cre-ates a blended space where elements from the profane and the sacred domains(which themselves are based on common cognitive primitives) mix: breadand wine are profane instantiations of containers containing the essence of bread and wine; Christs body and blood are sacred instantiations of contain-ers containing the essence of Christ; the Eucharist creates a blended space inwhich bread and wine are understood to no longer contain their ownessences 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 howpeople generate, spread, and maintain so many beliefs that seem impossibleor nonsensical to us. This constitutes a major contribution to the sociologyof magic. However, because he does this in a way that quite deliberatelyinvolves cognitive mechanisms that are not fundamentally different fromordinary 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 theoryof belief in magic. In other words, Srensen explains how people can thinkthat magic works, and thus why they engage in the rituals those beliefsengender, but does not really explain how they come to experience magic:why they see visions, what is going on when they converse with spirits, andhow come they sometimes seem to be able to foretell the future or actuallycure the sick.

A recent analysis of spirit possession from the cognitive epidemiologicalperspective, Emma Cohens The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Posses-sion, suggests that this limitation is inherent in the approach. The rst step inCohens analysis is to dene spirits as a concept so that she can then deploythe whole arsenal of HADD, ToM, MCI, and so on to explain the spread andretention of possession beliefs. 30 What is missed is not only an appreciation of the astounding subjective experience of possession, but also a real under-

27. Ibid., 6061, 75.28. Ibid., 12527.29. Ibid., 8384, 98100.30. Emma Cohen, The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-


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standing of how that subjective experience comes about. Concepts aboutspirits may inform the perceived characteristics and behaviors of spirits, butthey cannot explain the experience of encountering or being taken over by

one. To explain this, we need to understand how dramatically nonordinaryforms of perception and cognition come about.

Another prominent cognitive theory of religion, Harvey Whitehousestheory of two modes of religiosity, the imagistic and the doctrinal, wouldseem 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 thepropagation and retention of belief systems in populations than the experi-ence of spiritual or magical encounters by individuals. The focus of his con-

cern about the two modes is their ability to spread the faiththe doctrinalthrough frequent repetition of low-arousal stimuli like linguistic formulas;the imagistic through occasional inducement of intense, and intensely memo-rable, sensory and emotional experiencesand the way that the power of the latter gives rise to popular practices at odds with the former. Whitehousedoes consider the especially rich patterns of analogical thinking that aretriggered by intense ritual experiences, but his emphasis is on the trade-off between their memorability and emotional resonance, which contributes totheir social power, and the difculty of generalizing and communicatingthem, which inhibits it. 32

Another cognitive theory that more directly addresses the problem of mag-ical thinking and experience is Le vy-Bruhls concept of participation,which was adopted by Stanley Tambiah in connection with his emphasis onthe performative dimension of magico-religious ritual. 33 His elaboration of the idea that participation involves a different, holistic, and associative formof knowledge than the analytical, causally oriented rationality of everydaythought has been picked up and developed in turn by two recent scholars of

magic, the anthropologist Susan Greenwood and the developmental psychol-ogist Eugene Subbotsky. 34

Subbotsky has been conducting a long series of experiments over the pastthirty years that demonstrate that magical beliefs are a ubiquitous feature of

31. Pyysiainen, Introduction, 102103; Barrett and Lanman, The Science of Religious Beliefs, 119.

32. Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiousity: A Cognitive Theory of ReligiousTransmission(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;


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human cognition. They are manifested not only by children and uneducatednon-Western adults, but also by grown up modern Westerners, who exhibitsuperstitious reactions and engage in ritualistic behaviors if the stakes are high

and/or the costs of appearing credulous are low, even as they explicitly denytheir validity. 35 The explanation, Subbotsky asserts, is that the mind is natu-rally divided into two domains, ordinary reality and magical reality, whichexist in a symbiotic relationship. 36 Participation is the tendency to mergeentities that from a rational point of view should be treated as separate basedon holistic thinking in which the essences of physically or logically sepa-rate entities are shared or blended. It is the mechanism, in Subbotskysreckoning, by which we apprehend magical reality.

Subbotskys denition of participation points back to the mainstream cog-nitive tradition, for it is really not that different from Srensons concept of a blended conceptual space mixing elements from the sacred and profanedomains. However, his insistence that the existence of the magical cognitivedomain reects the existence of a magical dimension of human reality con-trasts strongly with the mainstream traditions assumption that the ontologicalcategories and categorizations accepted by modern Western adults are bothvalid and intuitive, and the task of cognitive theory is therefore to explainhow children and other primitive peoples come to adopt invalid, counterin-tuitive ideas about how the world works. 37 Subbotsky argues to the contrarythat 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 tosuppress it. 38

In contrast to Subbotskys employment of the concept of participation toexplain the results of his etic investigations of magical beliefs, Greenwooddiscusses it in connection to her emic investigations of magic as practice and

experience. She agrees with him that participation involves a mode of cogni-tion that is a ubiquitous feature of human mental life, that it connects inimportant ways to human reality, and that it is the key to understandingmagic, 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 Interpreta-tion of Religion, ed. Nancy Frankenberry (Port Chester, N.Y.: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002), esp. 133, 139, 146.


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Subbotsky, like the dominant cognitive tradition, treats magical beliefs asconscious or unconscious conceptsthoughts, ideas, or beliefs about howthe world worksGreenwood focuses on mystical mentality or magical

consciousness, an associative experience resulting from a form of mentalprocessing in which bodily boundaries and distinct notions of self are tem-porarily abandoned and imaginal experience comes to the fore. 40 Speak-ing from her own experiences as a participant-observer in magical practices,as well as from informants reports and published accounts, Greenwoodasserts that it is this shift in consciousness or change in awareness thatconstitutes participation and yields the perception of connections betweenthings, situations, and feeling that distinguishes magical understanding and

shapes its practices.41

Greenwoods discussion provides important insights into the experiencesassociated with magical thinking, but it is ultimately descriptive rather thanexplanatory. This is actually true of the concept of participation itself: it pro-vides a handy label for the bundle of mental processes magical thinkinginvolves, but it doesnt really explain how they work. Indeed, Greenwoodexplicitly asserts that the emotional and imaginative experiences associatedwith magic cannot be understood purely by studying them by conven-tional scientic methods of analysis since these are bound within rationalis-tic discourses that either reduce the experience of magic to external termsor obliterate its essence. 42 She draws on Gregory Batesons concept of abduction, which centers on the recognition of patterns and their embodi-ment in metaphor, in an attempt to outline a system of knowledge separatefrom but equal to science, but in the end this seems to lead back to the sameplace, another descriptive cul-de-sac that essentially repackages the cognitiveattributes of magical thinking under a new label. 43

Fortunately, there is another, more straightforward approach to the experi-ence of magicencounters with supernatural agents, journeys to magicalrealms, and employment of magical powersthat does help explain it, whichis to go beyond cognitive theory to cognitive neuroscience. This approachstarted with the basic neurological work of Ernst Gellhorn, who rst pro-posed the concept of tuning the nervous system, altering the balancebetween the ergotropic, or arousal, and the trophotropic, or relaxation, sys-

40. Ibid., 29, 4, 67.41. Ibid., 11, 29, 67, 31.42. Ibid., 79.


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tems to produce qualitatively different psychological experiences and cogni-tive capabilities. 44 The approach really got under way, though, when EugenedAquili and Charles Laughlin, the founders of an interdisciplinary approach

to culture integrating anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience calledbiogenetic structuralism, got anthropologist Barbara Lex to apply Gell-horns ideas to the problem of ritual trance. 45 Lex discussed how either intenseoverstimulation drives the ergotropic system or profound understimulationdrives the trophotropic system into a state of overload, leading to the activa-tion of the complementary system while the overloaded one is still engaged.The result is a hybrid physiological state and state of consciousness character-ized by some features of sleeping and some features of waking. 46 These

include shifts in the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain, resulting in thestrong intrusion of internally generated, dreamlike imagery on consciousness;the synchronization of the different levels of the brain and the frontal lobesleading to the integration of information from the lower levels of the brain,including nonverbal emotional and behavioral information, into the proc-essing capacity of the frontal cortex; this in turn yields intuitive insight,understanding . . . and personal integration and deactivation of the orienta-tion association area of the brain to create a disembodied sensation that canbe manifested as an out-of-body experience, the intrusion of some externalpresence into the body, or a feeling of oceanic oneness with the universe. Italso produces the synthesis of beta-endorphin and a consequent sense of well-being; accelerated heart rate and reduced blood pressure in an unusual com-bination known otherwise only from life-threatening situations . . . when aperson is close to death from an infectious disease or bleeding (which maybe why ritual practices are often thought to involve contact with the dead or journeys to the land of the dead); and nally, radically heightened bioelectricactivity 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, butthe 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


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work on shamanism. 47 Winkelman relates it to both the magical experiencesof 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 seemto facilitate divination by integrating information from the lower levels of the brain including nonverbal emotional and behavioral information intothe processing capacity of the frontal cortex, yielding intuitive insightand understanding. 48 Winkelman argues that shamanic trance can promotehealing both indirectly and directly. It can promote healing indirectly by

facilitating the shamans own trance-based healing activities, like narrating aight to the spirit world to rescue the sick persons soul, which, along withsleight-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 theplacebo effect. 49 Tuning can have a direct effect if the shaman induces atrance in the patient, which can trigger endorphin release as well, resolveintrapsychic tensions responsible for psychophysical ailments, facilitate hyp-notic and auto-hypnotic susceptibility to positive suggestions, and end in atrophotropic-dominated state with the restorative systems tuned up and thestress-related ones, which inhibit recuperation, tuned down.

While Winkelman concentrates on the effects of full-blown shamanictrance in his work, the present authors recent historical study of magic, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe , extends theidea of tuning the nervous system to include subtler changes in conscious-ness induced by what it calls ne-tuning the nervous system via moresubdued ritual activities. 50 To give one example, it discusses how a womansincantation of a spell so that no forest ranger could see or catch her when

she snuck into restricted forestland could have actually helped her remainundetected. 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 Con-sciousness and Healing (Westport, Conn., and London: Bergin and Garvey, 2000).

48. Michael Winkelman and Philip Peek, Introduction: Divination and HealingProcesses, in Divination and Healing , eds. Michael Winkelman and Philip Peek (Tus-con: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 11.

49. Winkelman, Shamanism, 199200; 19395.50. Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic , 211.


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for any threatening ranger to become bent . . . lame . . . [or] blind, todisappear or to be led away by the Devil, its potential for keeping thewoman from being detected would have hinged on its direct effects on her

and only indirectly inuenced him. 52 In mottled light and tangled under-growth, stillness is often the best camouage, which is why small animalsfreeze when they become aware of a predator nearby; even if they are in itseld of vision they may still escape notice, while ight virtually guaranteespursuit. 53 For a poacher trying to avoid forest rangers, the greatest danger wasoveractivity, and an incantation could help avoid this in several ways. First of all, incanting a spell, whether beforehand or quietly at the time, would reas-sure 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 torun; intensifying self-condence is one way that magic can actuallyinuence reality. 54 Second, reminding herself of or reciting the spell wouldgive her something to do with her mind instead of anxiously miscalculatingher chances of escape; distraction is another important component of magic.Finally, if incanted quietly or silently while hiding, the cadence of the wordswould have produced a physiologically calming effect, for oral recitationimposes control over breathing, and experimental studies have demonstratedthat even purely mental activities can produce states of greater relaxation. 55

Spells like this can thus be thought of as a form of psycholinguistic pro-gramming that entrain cognitive and emotional neural networks in waysthat can provoke profound physiological changes. 56 Of course, the womanwould not have objectively become impossible to detect and a forester wasunlikely to have been suddenly aficted by the maladies she invoked, butthe objective reality and specic impact were not what mattered; what wasimportant was that the person involved was not noticed at a particular timeby 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: Sev-

ire, 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 Conscious-

ness, 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 ItsReported Effects on Consciousness, ibid., 509510; and Akira Kasamatsu andTomio Hirai, An Electroencephalographic Study on the Zen Meditation (Zazen),


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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 magiccan 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 theexample here, while the effects of the spell on the person who recited it werein some ways dependent on belief (the intellectual and emotional reassuranceit gave), they were in other ways independent of it (the physiologically calm-ing effects of oral or mental recitation and the predisposition of predators toattend more to perceptions of movement than stillness). Furthermore, thislast point highlights the fact that in this case the beliefs of the target wereentirely irrelevant. By controlling her own thoughts and behaviors, the early

modern poacher could affect the patrolling rangers perceptions not justregardless of his belief in the power of the spell, but indeed in the necessaryabsence of his awareness that it was being cast at all.

The Realities classies the less profound yet potent alterations of conscious-ness induced by ne-tuning the nervous system as shamanistic to dis-tinguish them from the dramatic trance states produced by full-blownshamanic tuning. It further denes shamanism as the manipulation of the mind in the practitioner and others via tuning or ne-tuning thenervous system to produce alterations of consciousness that give access toknowledge and manifest powers that are not accessible in normal wakingconsciousness. The justication for this denition of shamanism is that whilethe term is derived from the activities of certain magical practitioners in cer-tain central Asian societies, and is commonly used to label healers in tribalsocieties who enter an ecstatic trance as part of their practice, shamanism doesnot exist as a cohesive set of beliefs and practices characteristic of any particu-lar culture. 57 Whether it is restricted to the spiritual practices of Siberianhealers, as some anthropologists advocate; used to describe any alterations of

consciousness that yield inspired insights that are conveyed to others, as it issometimes popularly employed; or given any of several possible intermediatemeaningspractices that induce the experience of a journey to the spiritworld, or practices that induce contact with spirits whether or not an imagi-nal journey is involvedit is an articial construct created by Western intel-lectuals, an etic category rather than an emic one. Furthermore, except whenrestricted to the narrowest denition, it is not an ordinary cultural traditiondependent on ongoing continuity of beliefs manifested through a set of cus-

toms.58

Instead, it is an amorphous phenomenon that has been discovered


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and developed by disparate and unconnected cultures around the world atdifferent times. It is, in Winkelmans words, a range of cultural adaptationsto the biological potentials of altered states of consciousness . . . and certain

ecological conditions and social demands. 59Dening shamanism in cognitive rather than the anthropological terms

focuses our attention on the commonalities linking the wide variety of wayshuman beings deliberately manipulate their nervous systems to alter their consciousness to access normally unconscious knowledge and skills, whiledistinguishing shamanistic from shamanic practices gives us a vocabulary thatacknowledges the different degrees and impacts of such manipulations. Addi-tionally, using the term in this way highlights the connection, also noted by

Greenwood, between the psychological process of altering consciousness andthe 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 signicantimplications for our understanding of magic. First of all, the cognitiveapproach developed by scholars of religion sheds new light on the propaga-tion and retention of magical beliefs as well as religious ones, relating themto the innate structures and ordinary processes of the mind. Second, Le vy-Bruhls concept of participation has been adopted by a developmental psy-chological as well as an experiential anthropological investigator of magicbecause it seems to encapsulate the cognitive processing that distinguishesmagical from mundane thinking that their very different investigative projectshave revealed. Finally, the neurocognitive approach not only offers insightinto the physiological causes of the cognitive effects associated with participa-tion, but also indicates how practitioners can exert real power over them-selves and others. The rst of these recent applications of cognitive scienceto 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 understandmagic it is not enough to explain what seems invalid and counterintuitive tous. Instead, they suggest a new, realist approach that focuses on the waysin which magical beliefs and practices reference and inuence reality. Theythereby promise to yield important new insights into magics long and reso-lute hold on the human psyche that traditional scholarly interpretations, withtheir preconceptions about the invalidity of magical beliefs, can never pro-vide.

59. Michael Winkelman, Altered States of Consciousness, in Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook of Method and Theory, ed. Stephen. Glazier (Westport, Conn.:


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