ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the cognitive mechanisms which lead to syncretism as an inherent part of human religious behavior. Syncretism is the term which is generally given to religious mixing. The chapter attempts to account for the human cognitive apparatus which makes religious change, including syncretism, a normal human development. At the highest level of observable abstraction in human behavior, the religious knowledge contains three cognitive entities: Symbols; Categories into which those symbols are arranged and Organizational rules which relate the categories of symbols. Healing seems to be a central province of so many indigenous religious specialists in Southern and West Africa that in Africa healing must be seen as an integral part of the definition of religion itself. Historically, except for Buddhism, all the sources of Chinese religion are all indigenous. Until 1911, the chief religious specialist was the emperor, and even now the symbol of China itself remains the most numinous of all the religious ideas in Chinese religion.
