Soul Flights

Narratives of soul flights are common in ancient Mediterranean literature, sharing many similarities such as the movement of the soul along a vertical path that is associated with life and death. But they also display significant differences such as peculiar accounts of cosmic realms, idiosyncratic...

Description complète

Enregistré dans:  
Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: DeConick, April D. (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
Vérifier la disponibilité: HBZ Gateway
Journals Online & Print:
En cours de chargement...
Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Publié: Brill 2017
Dans: Aries
Année: 2017, Volume: 17, Numéro: 1, Pages: 81-118
Sujets / Chaînes de mots-clés standardisés:B Antiquité / Histoire / Littérature / Voyage de l’âme / Études transculturelles / Science cognitive
RelBib Classification:AA Sciences des religions
AE Psychologie de la religion
AZ Nouveau mouvement religieux
TB Antiquité
Sujets non-standardisés:B spatial orientations sensory motor schemas intuitive cognition dualism reflective cognition ratchet effect soul spirit gnostic ascent descent
Accès en ligne: Volltext (Verlag)
Description
Résumé:Narratives of soul flights are common in ancient Mediterranean literature, sharing many similarities such as the movement of the soul along a vertical path that is associated with life and death. But they also display significant differences such as peculiar accounts of cosmic realms, idiosyncratic reasons for soul flights, and wild diversity of associated rituals. Historical critical studies of soul flights have been unable to address successfully this problem of comparison, which remains unable to explain structures that are engineered consistently in cultural productions. Cognitive explanations are more helpful in this regard. Yet current cognitive explanations struggle to account for the differences. How can both the similarities and the differences be accounted for within the same parameters of the operations of human cognition? This paper presents a model called cognitive ratcheting to address this problem. It is a theoretical formulation of the natural mental process through which concepts take shape and are innovated when they are mentally mapped onto spatial orientations, then ratcheted up with intuitive cognition, and finally elaborated into many cultural variations by reflective thought. This process acknowledges that, at the same time a concept is diversified through reflective elaboration and ratcheted up within different cultural contexts, it retains deep structures, especially with regard to spatial orientations, intuitive processes, and reflective recursion.
ISSN:1570-0593
Contient:In: Aries
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15700593-01701004