neurological foundation. This will enable us to overcome the problem of the folk-
psychological status of these notions, and thus, to reveal some possible links and
connections of interest at the intersection between cognition and material culture. But
first two important clarifications are in order:
a) The first point pertains to the issue of ritual. The absence of ritual from the above
triadic nexus of religious intelligence can raise a number of questions: Is not ritual a
constitutive part of our basic religious intelligence? Is not ritual the principal means for
the enactment and re-enactment of religious thinking through embodied action and
mediated performances? Since I shall not be dealing with the issue of ritual in this paper
it is necessary to summarize my position on this crucial issue. My claim, very briefly is,
that although ritual is undoubtedly a constitutive element of religious behaviour it does
not constitute a principal causal factor in the emergence of religious intelligence. More
specifically, although ritual behaviour temporally precedes the origin of religious
thinking, it should not be understood as the cause of it. Ritual may well be the
performative, individual or collective, mnemonic device par excellence, but there is
nothing inherently religious about it. Outside the nexus of religious intelligence ritual is
simply a manifestation of the social character of the human mind. More simply, human
religious intelligence did not emerge because of ritual, although it did made use of ritual
(symbolism was another domain that religious thinking did capitalize) in order to solve
the problem of its cultural transmission.
b) The second point concerns the cognitive and neurological processes that, as I will
discuss below, can be associated with the identified anthropological phenomena that
constitute the hypothesized nexus of human religious sense. It is important to clarify at
the outset that the proposed associations do not mean to imply anything more than a mere
correlation between processes manifest at radically different time scales and levels of
experience. Thus, these processes should be perceived as the continuous and interactive
aspects of an unfolding extended and distributed cognitive system. The (neuro-)
archaeological perspective adopted in this paper is firmly grounded and emanates from
the general theoretical framework of the Material Engagement approach (Malafouris
2004). Consequently, I have no intention of reducing the complicated, mediated and
variable aspects of religious intelligence to the neuronal level. I simply believe that a
naturalized account of religious thinking needs to start from some concrete and well
identified elements of ‘religious thought’ and building upon that to explore the
complicated and irreducible phenomenology of religious experience. The cognitive
science of religious behaviour offers such a starting point.
Animism as Theory of Mind (ToM)
I start with animism, and I suggest, following Guthrie (1993), that far from a strange,
primitive, or irrational way of engaging and making sense of the world, animism, from an
evolutionary perspective should be understood as an intelligent perceptual strategy.
Animism is universal because seeing as a form of active visual exploration and
interpretation constantly embodies the element of choice and thus a gamble (cf. also
Johnson 2003; Scholl and Tremoulet 2000). From such an angle, animism as a perceptual