INTRODUCTION The American continent is very rich in psychoactive plants and fungi, and many pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures used them for magical, therapeutic and religious purposes. OBJECTIVES The archaeological, ethno-historical and ethnographic evidence of the use of hallucinogenic substances in Mesoamerica is reviewed. RESULTS Hallucinogenic cactus, plants and mushrooms were used to...

Religion and ritual have been characterized as costly ways for conditional cooperators to signal their type, and thus identify and interact with one another. But an effective signal may be prohibitively expensive: if the cost of participation is too small, freeriders may send the signal and behave selfishly later. However, if the ritual reveals only the average level of signaling in a group, fr...

Background and Objectives: The lives of all people without mental disorders are not equally healthy and fruitful, and not necessarily healthier and more fruitful than the lives of people with such disorders. Therefore, identifying psychological variables that affect well-being can play a significant role in applying these variables in practical situations. The aim of this study was to codify a ...

Evolutionary theories of religion and sacred values are essential for understanding current trends in terrorist activity. We clarify religion’s role in facilitating terror and outline recent theoretical developments that focus on four cross-culturally recurrent features of religion: communal participation in costly ritual, belief in supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, separation ...

b a ckground: the purpose of this study was to examine religious, cultural, and social beliefs of healthy women about breast cancer in rural settings in iran. m ethods: in the present study, 16 in-depth interviews with health care leaders, social and religious experts and 11 focus group discussions were conducted with 79 women in the rural areas near the capital city of tehran, iran. grounded t...

Costly rituals convey commitment to communities and advertise trustworthiness cooperativeness peers, which might explain why humans perform costly religious rituals. Here, we compare the efficacy of occasional public displays versus regular but less acts for prestige enhancement. We collected data on behaviors ranging from daily low-cost practices infrequent high-cost pilgrimages distant locati...

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, the current paper provides a...

Sociologists of the 19th and the 20th centuries were tackling the relation between science and religion. A few models of these relations were offered, by which the monopoly over the truth by any one of those is crashed. Therefore, there are a few models but each is with lots of limitations. None is sufficient to explain the relation between the science and religion, but each contributes to cert...