ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an understanding of the nature of human supernatural relations in an analysis of the biogenetic origins of ritual behaviour. Human’s supernatural behaviours involve innate psychosocial processes and cognitive structures. These structures involve exaptations of the functions of primates’ ritualised displays that were used to expand mechanisms for social communication and coordination. The communicative and integrative displays among primates, particularly the ritualised behaviours for group unification among great apes, provide a framework for understanding the origins of supernatural behaviour in activities that enhanced social integration. The concept of costly displays provides a framework for identifying the forces that led to the shamanic expansion out of the hominid ritual capacity, using drumming, singing and dancing to expand the social integration function provided by mimesis. Shamanism emerged in this expansion of the mimetic capacity and its associated suite of expressive capacities that extended the social coordination functions of displays. Shamanic rituals expanded as adaptations involving enhanced capacities for ritual bonding of communities and the associated placebo healing responses.
