Cognitive Science in pursuit of ancient religious experience: A joint seminar

This seminar will be held in person and online via Zoom. Advance booking is essential for online attendance and strongly encouraged for in-person attandance.

Recent advances in Cognitive Science, and especially the Cognitive Science of Religion have been manifold and wide-ranging. (Barrett 2004; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007; Barrett 2011; Schjødt and Geertz 2017; Barrett 2022) At the same time the revival of comparative anthropology (Luhrmann 2023) has resulted in new models for understanding religion and particularly religious experience. (Taves 2009; Taves and Asprem 2016 ; Luhrmann 2020; Luhrmann et al. 2021; Xygalatas 2022). These developments have already had an influence on the writing of ancient history, (Eidinow, Geertz, and North 2022) and the process continues. We propose a joint seminar, offering two contrasting approaches to the use of such insights into religion in classical Athens: Ben Cassell investigates the lived experience of kanephoroi at the Panathenaea; David Wilson analyses the role of choral dance in generating religious experience of different kinds at the City Dionysia.

Ben Cassell: Balancing for Athena: embodied morality, cognitive depletion, and the kinaesthetic experience of the kanephoroi

Scholarship has emphasized the religious duties assigned to kanephoroi during the Panathenaic processions, and paid attention to the social identities of the performers, their families, and indeed Athens as a democratic whole. (Shear 2021). This paper seeks to consider how haptic, kinaesthetic, and cognitive conditions framed this ritual act, and impacted the identities of its performing korai. Issues regarding weight, temperature, and, most vitally, physical balance, will be examined in relation to the adoption of embodied moralities and how they influenced the cognition of the performing korai, drawing on theories relating to embodied cognition in ritual practice (Klocová and Geertz 2018) particularly the intersection between doctrinal teaching and bodily experience as a mode of cultural transmission. Deploying findings relating to cognition resource depletion in ritual performance allows a better understanding of how the physiological/cognitive impact of ascending to the Akropolis affected the memory, interpretations, and group bonding among performers (Schjødt 2018; Schjødt and Jensen 2018) The paper examines depictions of the kanephoroi, and the female ideal they represent, to establish the cultural and bodily expectations which framed the experience of the procession for the kanephoroi.

Ben Cassell is a PhD candidate with the Department of Classics King’s College London. His research is focused on the role of cognition in Athenian ritual practice, as a mechanism by which collective memory was generated. Ben has authored several papers Ancient Greek ritual experience, with his latest being focused on the ephebic oath and the Spartan Hyacinthia. He is currently a guest editor on two special vols. for the Journal of Cognitive Historiography and is the recipient of this year’s G. Grote Prize in Ancient History.

David Wilson: Making Gods Real through Choral Dance

This paper investigates how contrasting choral dance elements in Euripides’ Cyclops and Alcestis contributed to a sense of divine presence at the Dionysia. Gods are ‘supernatural’, inherently invisible and untouchable in normal circumstances, but worshippers need ‘to shift from knowing in the abstract that the invisible other is real to feeling that gods and spirits are present in the moment...’ (Luhrmann 2020; Luhrmann et al. 2021) Ancient Greece was no exception. Whatever the ontological status of a god, or the philosophical niceties regarding ideas about belief, or the complexities of a god’s relationships with the material world or with images, to be ‘effective’ in the world of the worshipper, a god had to be made ‘real’. There were many ways to achieve this, ranging from prayer and sacrifice as part of making a relationship with the deity, to larger ritual activities like choral dancing or processions and indeed impersonation. 

This paper will compare two very different plays, each of which constituted the final play in a tetralogy at the Dionysia. Close concentration on the metres involved in the choruses can offer a sense of the emotional, psychological and indeed physiological tone and temperature the productions – and their didaskalos Euripides - were aiming for. This will be combined with evidence from the ceramic record and modern research into neurology, including brain/body interconnections, to suggest how through choral dance Euripides made gods, and particularly Dionysos, ‘real’ to fifth-century Athenians and their guests. 

David Wilson is a PhD candidate at King’s College London having retired from a career in television, during which he made a number of archaeological and historical films including Delphi: Bellybutton of the Ancient World, Guilty Pleasures: Luxury in Ancient Greece, and Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth (all BBC4). His most recent film projects (2021-3) have been about archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.