Ritual In Greek Religion

In particular, she explores seemingly irrational concepts and beliefs found in ancient myths and narratives, which formed the ‘explicit theology’ of Greek religion, taking into account theories about ‘counter-intuitive agents’ appearing in most religions (e.g. Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Pyysiäinen 2003; Barrett 2004) (Chapter 1). As she notes, theories about symbols suggested by modern anthropologists (e.g. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz) and largely used by classicists, mainly focus on the functionality of symbolism in cultural contexts and avoid explaining why and how seemingly irrational religious statements are widely accepted by their adherents. At this point, she suggests that the theory of the symbolic thought articulated by Dan Sperber (1996) opens up new possibilities for scholars to proceed beneath the surface and to get insights into the underlying cognitive mechanisms that generate symbolic thinking as ‘a by-product of our ability to think reflectively’ (Larson 2016, …show more content…
Using the theory of the two modes of cognition, she traces the origins of myths in reflective cognition, while she considers rituals to arise from intuitive inferences and beliefs about the gods and human relationships with them. Therefore, her approach provides some new insights into the fusion between ancient Greek myths and rituals suggesting that rituals may have incorporated some reflective beliefs arising from wider conceptual framework of myths and narratives, but they were not restrained and did not strictly reenacted specific mythological episodes and narratives (Chapter