ABSTRACT
This chapter employees "syncretism" as a description of ongoing religious histories of Michael Pye. The issue suggested by cognitive science is not a contrast between assumptions about cultures as historically constructed systems and about cultures as artificial constructs, but that the systemic scaffolding of complex cultural constructions like syncretisms seems to be erected upon the constraints of cognition itself. Clifford Geertz writes that culture is "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" itself an understanding influence by Weber's historicism. "Syncretism" begins to describe religious disorder, and also begins to employ by Biblical theologians to characterize Greco-Roman paganism in contrast to the normative and exclusivist claims of Christian origins; and, subsequently, by Protestant theologians to characterize the historical corruptions they attributed to Roman Catholicism.
