the transcendental stance (especially second order intentionality associated with
autoscopic phenomena) may be familiar features of shamanic ritual; are before, and
above all, basic features of the human social mind and of the complex ways this mind
engages and interacts with the material world. In other words, I may suggest, critically
rephrasing the title of a recent article on the topic by M. Rossano (2007), that if there was
a single special element in the process of human becoming then it has to be ‘mediation’
rather than ‘meditation’, it was because of mediation that humans came to meditate after
all. Having clarified that let me now return to answer the question we posed at the
beginning of this paper and which motivates the hypothesis advance here: Why does
religious thinking need material culture?
Obviously, no single answer can do justice to the complex affective and
multifaceted operations that define the phenomenology of the sacred engagement in its
many cross cultural and historical manifestations - a simple look o the variety of ritual
and religious experiences described by the papers of this volume would suffice to
confirm that. However, if we approach the above question from the specific view point
that concerns the possible cognitive origin of early religious intelligence, a possible
answer may start to be sketched - or so I claim in this paper. To focus the possible
parameters of our discussion I will take issue with a recent argument by Steven Mithen
(1998) and use the famous 30,000-year-old Hohenstein-Stadel lionman statuette from
Germany (Marshack 1990; Mithen 1996) as a concrete example of such an early (Upper
Palaeolithic) ‘sacred engagement’. The question to ask is what can this specimen of
therianthropic art tell us about early religious intelligence and its relationship with
material culture? Why ‘turning something that is eternal and supernatural into something
that is transient and material’ (Mithen 1998a, 100) like this small (28 cm) ivory figurine?
The answer that Mithen proposes to this question can be summarised as follows:
First, following his well-known ‘cognitive fluidity hypothesis’ (1996) he suggests that the
emergence of religious ideas ‘is most likely no more than an epi-phenomenal
consequence’ (Mithen 1998a, 101) of this cognitive transition. Then he proposes that the
critical feature and common characteristic of these ideas is that they contradict our
intuitive understanding of the world. Drawing primarily on the work of Pascal Boyer
(1993; 1996) he argues that the cognitive function of those violations to our intuitive
understanding of the world is to make them attention-grabbing and thus enhance their
cultural saliency and significance. This process according to Mithen is not itself sufficient
to secure their cultural transmission because while religious ideas ‘need to violate some
aspects of our intuitive knowledge of the world to have salience, they also need to
conform to some aspects of this to have survival value’ (1998a, 102). This becomes
possible by projecting onto them features that conform to our intuitive understanding of
the world, and this is the reason behind the human-like, anthropomorphic or animistic
elements that often characterize supernatural creatures. It is through such projections that
religious ideas are ‘anchored in the human mind’ and it is only those ideas that most
easily find such an ‘anchor’ that are likely to survive (1998a, 102).
Up to this point all the processes described above are ‘mental’ or ‘internal’, that is,
firmly situated within the boundaries of skin and skull. Religious concepts and ideas
emerge inside the mind and are subsequently anchored through various internal ‘intuitive
strategies’ in order to gain survival value. Let me call that ‘first order anchoring
argument’; evidently in itself it does not answer our initial question about the