Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 2...

Ethnographic, historical, archaeological and experimental work suggests the existence of two basic clusters of ritual dynamics or ‘modes of religiosity’ — a low-frequency, high-arousal cluster linked to the formation of small cohesive communities (imagistic mode) and highfrequency, low-arousal cluster associated with larger, more centralized social morphology (doctrinal mode). Currently, howeve...

Throughout most periods of ancient Near Eastem history, religious rituals frequently played an important role in the resolution of legal disputes that were brought to trial. It appears that judges would sometimes make use of them arbitrarily but often when they felt the available evidence was insufficient or at least too ambiguous to render a decisive verdict. The rituals—or cultic procedures, ...

This paper looks at healing performances as ethnographic expressions of local knowledge and culture embedded within the Malay psyche and gemeinschaft. As society develops and progresses, these healing performances are caught within conflicting trajectories which become compounded by the contestations of tradition, religious concerns, locality and modernity. As exemplifications of the Malay etho...

INTRODUCTION Is marijuana dangerous? With an estimated 150 million people worldwide smoking or eating marijuana leaves annually,1 the question is pertinent. Marijuana is perceived as an innocuous drug in many circles due to its association with cultural and religious rituals, and with the fact that unlike alcohol, cocaine, or heroin, it rarely brings individuComorbid Cannabis Misuse in Psychoti...

We develop a model of social signalling of religiosity and cooperative behaviour in religious organizations. The model embeds a ritual-based religious organization in which signalling arises through the use of costly rituals, and a discipline-based religious organization in which such signalling occurs through the monitoring of past behaviour. We use this framework to contrast -positively and n...

Background and Objectives: Mental health is one of the most important components of healthy life. Culture, particularly religious orientation, is one of the factors whose role in promoting mental health is increasingly being emphasized. The aim of this study was to investigate correlation between religious orientation and mental health among the staff of Pars Special Economic Energy Zone (PSEEZ...

The goal of this study was to assess the relationship between the Five Factor Model of personality and the belief in the paranormal. Participants (N=307) were students from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. The measures used were the IPIP version of the Five Factor Model questionnaire (Goldberg et al., 2006) along with the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (Tobacyk, 1988). The factor analysis of...

A new cognitive approach to religion is bringing fresh insights to our understanding of how religious concepts are maintained, acquired and used to motivate and direct actions. This approach suggests that seemingly extraordinary thoughts and behaviours can be supported by quite ordinary cognition and may thus be termed 'natural'. Simultaneously, this research is expanding the domain of concepts...