Panagiotidou (2015a;2015b), in her study of the Asclepius cult, has shown how cognitive approaches to ancient evidence provide to the historians the opportunity to release themselves from their own common sense understanding of the world in order to deeper understand the processes of appropriation and internalization of seemingly paradoxical or even inconceivable religious ideas by people of the past. In particular, the healing inscriptions found at the asclepieia record narratives of treatments which historians have characterized as miraculous, extraordinary or even inconceivable. Such stories would have violated intuitive expectations shared by Asclepius’ supplicants mostly as they violate our modern common sense perception of the world
