Abstract This chapter considers a cross-historical selection of cases from the ritual magical traditions and discusses explanations of how such practices may produce subjectively convincing experiences of otherworldly beings on the one hand, and methodological questions of how we might best study them on the other. The chapter argues that our best model is found in the framework of predictive...
Magic and fortune-telling have been standard elements in stereotypes about Europe’s Romani minorities since the fifteenth century. These stereotypes produced two mutually contradictory images of the Roma: That they possess real occult powers, and that they are frauds. Both images were perpetuated by nineteenth-century ‘gypsylorist’ scholarship, which construed ‘the gypsies’ as Europe’s internal...
We argue that event is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists, and cognitive psychologists can use to build a consilient research platform for the study of experiences that people deem religious. Grounding the study of experience in event cognition allows us to reframe several classic problems in the study of “religious experience”: (1) the function of culture-specific knowledge in...