ABSTRACT
From the past two hundred years of scholarly endeavour in the study of religion, we have all become acquainted with a profusion of innovative hypotheses concerning the origin and essence of religion. In the course of theoretical, methodological, even political, progress, most of these ideas were dismissed as unwarranted – historically, psychologically, ethically, gender-wise and so forth. However, academic turns and tides unfortunately often assume the rhetorical form of what could be called “wet auto-da-fés” (i.e. throwing a lot of babies out with the bathwater). Although I take cognitive studies to belong to one of the most promising approaches in the academic study of religion today, I am also a staunch believer that it is usually worthwhile to re-read and recycle its precursors. To be sure, not just for the sake of erudite namedropping, genealogical awe, or an Olympic vista of alterations and continuities, but for the sake of genuine re-exploration. As Victor Turner put it:
It is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his ashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. ey even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. e intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive. (Turner 1974: 23)
us, the following tentative ideas on the interrelations of religion, origins, evolution, cognition and play are beholden – at least indirectly – to the early theories of the playwright, poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759-
1805; Schiller [1795] 1981), the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903; Spencer 1873), and some lesser known neo-Darwinian philosophers and psychologists like Karl Groos (1861-1946; Groos 1898) and Granvill Stanley Hall (1844-1924), as well as the physical “educator” Luther Gulick (18651918; Gulick 1898). Furthermore, an early cognitive pioneer, namely Jean Piaget (1896-1980; Piaget & Inhelder 1971), proved not only absolutely indispensable but also a felicitous match to the most contemporary of my inspirational sources, the cognitive linguist George Lako and philosopher Mark Johnson. Lako and Johnson’s theories regarding basic image schemas imprinted in the mind through embodied action seems to support Piaget’s initial conclusions on a phenomenon he designated as object permanence (explanation follows).
