Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas

300 Pages·2009·0.87 MB·English

by  Ilkka Pyysiainen

Supernatural Agents
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Supernatural
Agents
Why We Believe in Souls, Gods,
and Buddhas
ilkka yysiäinen
P
1
2009
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pyysiäinen, Ilkka.
Supernatural agents: why we believe in souls, gods, and buddhas
/ Ilkka Pyysiäinen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-538002-6
1. Psychology, Religious. 2. Cognitive science. 3. Soul.
4. Buddhas. 5. Gods. I. Title.
BL53.P99 2009
202'.1—dc22 2008039709
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Acknowledgments
I had been working with the idea of this book for a couple of years
when Harvey Whitehouse kindly invited me to work as a visiting
researcher at the newly founded Center for Anthropology and Mind
at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford
University. I am very grateful for this unique opportunity. It was at
Oxford, in the summer of 2007, that the ideas of this book fi nally
began to take shape and different pieces of the puzzle started gradu-
ally to fi nd their place. I am also hugely indebted to Justin Barrett,
Emma Cohen, Jon Lanman, and Harvey Whitehouse, as well as
Pascal Boyer, for help and advice during that summer. The seminars,
lectures, and informal discussions we had have been an important
source of inspiration.
I also want to thank all others who have in many ways helped
and inspired this project. This book would never have been written
had I not met in March 1995 with Tom Lawson, whose support,
advice, and friendship is much appreciated. Bob McCauley helped
me and my family move to Oxford. Thanks also to Barbara de Bruine
for kind help in many practical matters, as well as to the staff of the
Tylor Library.
Over the years, I have had numerous enjoyable discussions with
István Czachesz, Nicholas Gibson, Jeppe Jensen, Pierre Liénard,
Luther Martin, Joel Mort, Tom Ryba, Benson Saler, Jesper Sørensen,
and Don Wiebe; I am grateful to them for help, advice, and friend-
ship. This work was begun during my term as an Academy Research
Fellow ( project 1111683) at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
Studies. I am grateful both to the Academy of Finland that has
vi acknowledgments
funded my work and to the Collegium that has provided me with a fi rst-class
academic environment for many years. Its past and present directors, Raimo
Väyrynen and Juha Sihvola, have supported my work with keen and much-
appreciated interest. I also thank the fellows of the Collegium and my colleagues
at its administration: Minna Franck, Hanna Pellinen, Marjut Salokannel, Taina
Seiro, Iiris Sinervuo, Maria Soukkio, Tuomas Tammilehto, and Aarno Villa.
Thanks also to my fi rst teacher of comparative religion, Juha Pentikäinen,
who showed me the importance of not forgetting one’s own cultural heritage,
in my case the long traditions of Finnish scholarship on folk beliefs. I began
the study of religion together with Veikko Anttonen, now the godfather of my
daughter Milja. I would not be what I am without his help, support, and always
perceptive criticism of my most ambitious speculations. For many years I have
also had the pleasure of working closely with Kimmo Ketola and Tom Sjöblom
in Helsinki. I could never have done it all alone.
I have learned a lot from the members of the governing board of the Mind
Forum, a two-year series of multidisciplinary workshops on the study of mind
at Helsinki—Riitta Hari, Johannes Lehtonen, Kirsti Lonka, Anssi Peräkylä,
Stephan Salenius, Mikko Sams, and Petri Ylikoski—as well as all the partici-
pants in our seminars, too numerous to be listed here. Last but by no means
least, I thank my students and Ph.D. students who have at times worked very
hard in advancing the cognitive science of religion in Finland: Elisa Järnefelt,
Kaisa Maria Kouri, Jani Närhi, Outi Pohjanheimo, Mia Rikala, Aku Visala, espe-
cially, and many others. Thanks also to such important fellow scholars as Scott
Atran, Tamás Bíró, Joseph Bulbulia, Armin Geertz, Harry Halén, Sara Heinä-
maa, Timo Honkela, Markus Jokela, Jutta Jokiranta, Kai Kaila, Klaus Karttunen,
Simo Knuuttila, Hanna Kokko, Teija Kujala, Arto Laitinen, Jason Lavery, Mar-
jaana Lindeman, Dan Lloyd, Petri Luomanen, Brian Malley, Juri Mykkänen,
Matti Myllykoski, Markku Niemivirta, Asko Parpola, Anna Rotkirch, J. P. Roos,
Heikki Räisänen, Pertti Saariluoma, Risto Saarinen, Mikko Salmela, Stephen
Sanderson, Matti Sintonen, Jason Slone, Todd Tremlin, Reijo Työrinoja, Risto
Uro, and Ted Vial. The kind of interdisciplinary work that underlies this book
would not have been possible without many good contacts across disciplinary
boundaries. Finally, I am grateful to Cynthia Read and Oxford University Press
for accepting my book for publication. It has been a pleasure to work with
Meechal Hoffman, Martha Ramsey, and Mariana Templin. The two anonymous
reviewers made some good suggestions for improvements.
I am also happy that my family had the wonderful opportunity to enjoy a
summer at Oxford with me while I was fi nishing this book. Thanks for being
there, Sari, Miihkali, and Milja!
Preface
A book needs a good title. To the extent that Supernatural Agents
fulfi lls this purpose, it yet is nothing more than just a title. “Super-
natural” is here not a technical, explanatory concept and does not
necessarily identify any clearly demarcated phenomenon. I only use
it as catchy term to refer to the representations of nonhuman agents
described and analyzed in this book. These include ghosts and spirits
in Finno-Ugric and western European traditions, God within the
Christian traditions, and buddhas and bodhisattvas in the Buddhist
traditions. My aim is to show that the mental representation of God
and of buddhas are made possible by the same mental mechanisms
that are used in representing ourselves and our fellow human beings
as embodied agents (“souls”). God, buddhas, and human beings are
agents in the sense of animated organisms that have a mentality or
mind. Agency thus consists of the two properties of animacy ( liveli-
ness, self-propelledness) and mentality (beliefs and desires). Mentality
is subjectively experienced as an “I” or a “self” that inhabits the body;
usually we do not think of ourselves as simply identical with the
material body.
I draw from the cognitive science of religion, trying to show how
humans are able to represent agency in all its varieties and to draw
agentive inferences that feel natural and compelling, irrespective
of whether the agent in question can be directly perceived or not.
The cognitive science of religion emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in
religious studies and in anthropology and psychology of religion. It
has by and large focused on producing empirically testable hypoth-
eses about religious phenomena (Lawson and McCauley 1990; Boyer
viii preface
1994b, 2001, 2003a; Barrett 2000, 2004a; Pyysiäinen 2001b; Pyysiäinen and
Anttonen 2002; Whitehouse 2004; Tremlin 2006; Paiva 2007; Barrett 2007).
Not every scholar involved in this project is a natural scientist, and not every proj-
ect directly aims at empirical testing of theories, however (e.g., Martin 2004a,
2005; Pyysiäinen 2004d; Cohen 2007; Vial 2004; Sørensen 2007). It is equally
important to try to apply the fi ndings of cognitive science in attempts at under-
standing and explaining religion as it is found in archaeological and historical
records and documents, doctrinal treatises, archival sources, and ethnographic
reports (e.g., Mithen 1998, 2004; Pearson 2002; Luomanen et al. 2007a). This
book is an example of this kind of approach to religious materials.
The fi rst part of the book consists of an outline of the cognitive structures
that make it possible to mentally represent agents and agency; some method-
ological remarks; and important conceptual clarifi cations. In the second part,
I describe and analyze various kinds of conceptions of souls and spirits in folk
traditions, representations of the Christian God in their varieties, and repre-
sentations of supernatural agents in Buddhism. I try to show that conceptions
of souls and supernatural agents are cognitively natural and that even the most
abstract theological conceptualizations are elaborations of folk-psychological
notions. Analysis develops bottom-up, in the sense that I proceed from spirit
beliefs toward more abstract ideas about gods, buddhas, and bodhisattvas.
I am well aware that I am comparing traditions many scholars regard as
incommensurate: ancient Finno-Ugric conceptions of soul and Scholastic the-
ology, everyday Christian beliefs about God and Buddhist doctrine, and so forth.
The received view in anthropology has long been that beliefs and practices
receive their meaning in a cultural context and that cultural systems cannot be
understood from outside (e.g., Geertz 1973, 1993; cf. Boyer 1994b; D’Andrade
2000). The task of the anthropologist is to “read” particular cultures like texts
and to interpret them.
My own, essentially comparative project is based on the realization that
there are crossculturally recurrent patterns and that cultures do not have any
clear boundaries or an essence. As all comparison is always made from some
point of view and all similarities and dissimilarities are relative to that point of
view, there are many ways of comparing religious beliefs and practices (Boyer
1994b; Lawson 1996). As Tom Lawson (1996) points out, the problem of com-
parative religion has been precisely the lack of an independent measuring
stick that would make comparison possible; here I suggest that a comparative
exploration of religious traditions is possible by linking religious concepts and
ideas to the human cognitive architecture that channels the cultural spread of
ideas and beliefs. This is not to deny cultural or any other differences. To quote
the Oxford anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett, “the special function of the
comparative method is to testify to a unity in difference, as in this case consti-
tuted by the human mind . . . amid an endless diversity of outer circumstance”
(Marett 1920, 81). Analyzing crossculturally recurrent patterns is not to deny
preface ix
differences in semantic contents but only to recognize important continuities
and invariances. It is mostly these continuities that I explore in the pages to
follow.
This book is intended for various kinds of audiences, and there are thus
various ways of reading it. An easy way to grasp the basic ideas will be to read
the summaries at the end of each chapter, and then to read the general conclu-
sion; the main text provides detailed justifi cations for the claims made, based
on extensive source materials.