Notes

Preface: Ghosts, Post-truth Despair, and Brandolini’s Law

1 The software-hardware metaphor might seem a bit passe. Indeed, studies in neuroplastic adaptability have shown the limits of this analogy: the brain changes and adapts on several different scales (e.g.

2 Family Guy, ‘Airport ’07’, Season 5, Episode 12, first aired 4 March 2007. Directed by J. Holmquist, written by T. Devanney.

3 For a cognitive and historical rebuttal of the idea that agnosticism and atheism are merely modern ideas inapplicable to ancient cultures, see Geertz and Markusson 2010; Whitmarsh 2015; and Ambasciano 2016a.

4 This is why I have sometimes resorted to an inclusive religion (s) in the course of the book.

5 One might argue that, according to Sturgeon’s Law, if ‘90 per cent of everything is crap’ anyway, then my critical point of view on the current status of the HoR is unfounded (Dennett 2013: 36-7). Ten per cent, according to such hypothetical rebuttal, is the normal, physiological percentage that keeps research going.

1. An Incoherent Contradiction

1 ‘Religious Studies’ is also used generally to group different disciplines interested in the study of religion(s) (cf. the opening epigraph).

2 Even though there is no neurophysiological distinction between non-religious and religious ways of thinking (e.g. Boyer 2001; Barrett 2004; cf. Bloch 2008), a fact that might account for a common cross-disciplinary ground, there are other significant differences between RS and CSR, as we will see in the following chapters.

3 The most remarkable among these cognitive mechanisms are teleological reasoning, over-detection of agency, mind/body dualism, tool cognition, precautionary routines, imitation, etc. See Whitehouse 2013a: 36.

4 A flourishing industry of bio-bibliographical and epistolary studies devoted to past HoR scholars is increasingly seen as a convenient retreat immunized from criticism (cf. Spineto 2010: 1302; Spineto 2013).

2. The Deep History of Comparison

1 Of course, this does not mean that everything was tolerated or tolerable. For instance, the Romans were very strict about the exclusion of what they considered ‘superstition’, that is, an incorrect way of being religious according to their own culture.

2 A most dramatic clash between these theological perspectives materialized in the harsh dispute between Ambrosius, bishop of Mediolanum (modern-day Milan, Italy), and Roman senator and prefect Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, concerning the removal of the Altar of Victory (i.e. a goddess) from the Senate. In a vibrant epistle dated from 384 ce and addressed to the emperor Valentinian II, Symmachus wrote that ‘it is reasonable to regard as identical that which all worship.

3 Although still used indiscriminately, ‘myth’ is an all-encompassing label, or a wastebasket taxon, which includes cultural representations whose origins, functions, aims and morphology can differ dramatically. Pending a reorganization of the concept,

cf. Wayland Barber and Barber 2004, and Masse et al. 2007.

4 A recent example of this Us/Them division is the rise of the so-called toxic fandoms in blockbuster films, exemplified by the Marvel Cinematic Universe vs. the D C Extended Universe feud or the backlash against the new Star Wars sequel trilogy.

5 Homo religiosus mimicks Linnean binomial nomenclature, but it is not a scientific concept. Therefore, being not regulated as such by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, the initial letter of the ‘genus’ homo should not be capitalized (except after a full stop, of course).

6 Today, thanks to interdisciplinary advances in genetics, archaeology and linguistics, there are two main hypotheses that try to pinpoint the spatio-temporal point of departure for the divergence and spread of Indo-European languages: the Anatolian hypothesis, strictly tied to the diffusion of agriculture ( ca. 9,000 years ago), and the Pontic steppe hypothesis, whose supposed vehicles of diffusion are thought to be horse-riding nomads (c a. 6,000 years ago). The first hypothesis is supported by scientific and phylogenetic analyses, the second one is the traditional one. Cf. resp., Bouckaert et al. 2012, and Pereltsvaig and Lewis 2015.

7 As recalled by Cristiano Grottanelli and Bruce Lincoln (1998: 313), ‘in contrast to Marx, who dismissed religion as false consciousness tout court, Engels perceived that within any society and any historical moment, there may be multiple competing religious attitudes and movements, which express, maintain and even (at times) exacerbate the other tensions and conflicts within that society’.

8 It is fair to say that Durkheim's sociological take on religion has aged remarkably better than Freud's psychoanalysis (cf. resp., Whitehouse 2013b, and Bloch 2015; Paden 2016, and Cioffi 2013). And yet, Freud's ideas, falsified as a set of non-scientific and dogmatic heuristics, were soon to re-enter HoR as a re-theologized tool with Carl G. Jung's own version of psychoanalysis. Some other eclectic psychoanalytical movements value religious constructions openly (e.g. Roberto Assagioli's ‘higher unconscious' and the positive role played by ideas ‘such as the “inner Christ” in certain forms of Christian piety'); see Brooke 1991: 325.

9 However, it is important to note that Levy-Bruhl stated in a posthumous work that what he labelled as logical and prelogical mentalities do coexist in every society. See Levy-Bruhl 1949, and Smith 1993: 265-88; cf. Sorensen 2007: 25-6, 187 for a re­evaluation of Levy-Bruhl's concept of magic. Interestingly, the idea of two independent modes of thinking is still a central topic in cognitive science (e.g. Kahneman 2011).

10 However, considering James' penchant ‘to accept the genuineness of the transcendental reference in religious experience' (Sharpe 1986: 104, 108-12), his role in the development of a truly scientific study of religion remains highly debatable. See also Martin and Pyysiainen 2013: 220-1 on Luhrmann 2013.

3. The Darwinian Road Not Taken

1 This historical attention to apparently useless traits, while moving glaringly adaptive, successful traits in the background, has led palaeontologist Elliot Sober to baptize this gold standard of the new evolutionary natural history as ‘Darwin's principle’, to indicate ‘that selectively advantageous traits are “almost valueless” as evidence of common ancestry' (Sober 2008: 297).

2 On theodicy:

one word more on ‘designed laws' & ‘undesigned results’. I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent & good man stands under a tree & is killed by flash of lightning.

Letter of Darwin to Asa Gray, 3 July 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, DCP-LETT-2855

3 Frazer's evolutionism was a second-hand concept: it came through the filters provided by Tylor's and Robertson Smith's approaches (Ackerman 1975). Consequently, Frazer's cultural evolutionary model, while apparently more akin to pre-Darwinian progressionism, might be considered a parallel enterprise with regard to other, more informed, evolutionary anthropologists' frameworks (cf. Ackerman 1990: 77). Privately, as testified to in a letter of his, Frazer even seemed to have poorly understood Darwin's theory (Frazer to W J. Lewis, 28 December 1919, in Ackerman 2005b: 362).

4 A third strategy to assuage such dissonance was provided by eclectic religious and esoteric reinterpretation, and manipulation, of scientific contents (Bowler 1987: 9).

5 The well-known motto survival of the fittest was originally alien to Darwin's vocabulary: it was coined by English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) to recap the concept of natural selection (1864, 1: 444), and only later adopted by Darwin himself. It is misleading because it fails to capture the variety of mechanisms implied.

6 Mayr listed also a series of corollaries to Darwin's basic core: ‘sexual selection, pangenesis, effect of use and disuse, and character divergence' (Mayr 1991: 35).

7 Unfortunately, when Darwin published the Descent of Man in 1871, 12 years after the Origin of Species (a volume upon which he had worked for 20 years), he was old, sick and quite exhausted from all the religious discussions and personal attacks led against him. Therefore, he adopted a slightly modified version of the dominant anthropological view in vogue, that is, a ‘linear human scale' of beliefs with contemporary Europeans at the top, who had left behind ‘the remnants of former false religious beliefs'. It was a Darwinian development which the Darwin of 1859, fed up with unscientific identification of ‘high' or ‘low' forms of life, would have not accepted (Desmond and Moore 2009: 365; cf. Plotkin 2004: 64).

8 In the words of Darwin himself: ‘the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind' (Darwin 1871, 1: 105). This statement has been recently accused of fostering a fallacious understanding of animal cognition as anthropomorphically tailored (Penn 2011: 257; see also Penn, Holyoak and Povinelli 2008). However, new primatological and comparative cognitive research has vindicated Darwin's original approach; for an overview, see

de Waal 2013; Ambasciano 2016a: 167-72, passim; de Waal 2016.

9 The striking analogy behind the mechanisms of development and differentiation through time in both philology and natural sciences caught also the attention of evolutionary biologists. As early as 1854, Thomas H. Huxley, having recalled the common ancestry of ‘unus, uno, un, one, ein’, and‘Hemp, Hennep, Hanf, and Cannabis, Canapa and Chanvre’, wrote that ‘Philology demonstrates that the words are the same by a reference to the independently ascertained laws of change and substitution for the letters of corresponding words, in the Indo-Germanic tongues: by showing in fact, that though these words are not the same, yet they are modifications by known developmental laws of the same root' (Huxley 1854: 283).

10 Max Muller's anti-evolutionary criticism was just one voice in a field dominated by human exceptionalism; cf. Ambasciano 2016a: 167-72.

11 On Frazer's criticism of Max Muller's divinely inspired ‘natural' reason, see his letter to Henry Jackson, 22 August 1888, in Ackerman 2005b: 47.

12 As Darwin wrote in 1837 in one of his notebooks, ‘the tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead, so that passages cannot be seen' (Barrett et al. 1987: 177; cf. Eldredge 2005).

4. Goodbye Science

1 However, mana implies the positive outcome of a certain action. Commenting on Ann Taves' Marettian definition of mana as something which is ‘ beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature' (Taves 2013: 145), Luther H. Martin has recently remarked on an important aspect concerning spiritual and ethnocentric distortions:

during my travels, however, I once asked the chief of a traditional Melanesian village how he would define m ana. He thought for a moment and then answered: ‘If a fisherman goes out to fish and he wants to catch a big fish and he does - that's mana.' A good day, perhaps, but hardly a feat ‘ beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature'. In other words, do we (modern Western scholars) really understand what people in other times and places consider to be ‘nonordinary’, or do such inferences reflect our cultural biases? It might be noted that Marett's description of mana was based upon an Anglican missionary's account of Melanesians (Taves 2013: 145, citing Marett 1914b: 104) and, although I am not a trained ethnologist, it is at least questionable whether this missionary's anecdotal report is of more scientific significance than my own.

Martin 2015: 126

See also Sharpe 1986: 69-71.

2 Although the double surname has stuck in the disciplinary historiography, the surname was Smith, Robertson being the maiden name of his mother (Turner 2014: 448: note 13).

3 ‘Natural Philosophy' had been defined as follows by physicist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson; 1824-1907) and Tait himself:

the term Natural Philosophy was used by Newton, and is still used in British Universities, to denote the investigation of laws in the material world, and the deduction of results not directly observed. Observation, classification, and description of phenomena necessarily precede Natural Philosophy in every department of natural science. The earlier stage is, in some branches, commonly called Natural History.

Tait and Thomson 1912 [1879]: v

4 One of Smith's colleagues in the Physical Laboratory was future Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), who took pleasure in debating amicably with Smith and future oceanographer John Murray (1841-1914) ‘on the age of the earth and the foundations of Christianity' - this when not ‘plaguing Robertson Smith with irrelevant metaphysical questions' (resp., Knott 1911: 72; Booth 2010).

5 As to how could Frazer the atheist be such a close and intimate friend of Free Church minister Smith, it should be remarked that the two never discussed personal religious beliefs. Frazer wrote in a letter to John F. White, dated 15 December 1897, what follows: ‘I confess I never understood his [i.e. Smith's] inmost views on religion. On this subject he maintained a certain reserve which neither I nor (so far as I know) any of his intimates cared to break through. I never even approached, far less discussed, the subject with him' (Ackerman 2005b: 109). On his part, Smith was ‘reluctant to disclose, let alone discuss his religious convictions' (Maier 2009: 227).

6 It is interesting to note that Darwin knew the works of Smith, as evident by a citation included in the posthumous second edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1890). In that passage, Darwin was exploring the ethnographic data pertaining to the universal emotion of shame accompanied by a more or less visible blushing of the face. The philological authority of Smith is summoned to correct a passage of the first edition with regard to the apparent absence of blushing as inferred from a passage in the Bible (i.e. Jeremiah 6:15): ‘according to Professor Robertson Smith, these words do not imply blushing. It seems possible that pallor is meant. There is, however, a word [haphar] occurring in Psalm xxxiv. 5, which probably means to blush' (1890: 335 n. 11). Archival research might provide more information about direct or indirect epistolary contacts or links between Darwin and Smith (cf. the letter sent from J. V Carus to Darwin, 24 October 1872, Darwin Correspondence Project, DCP-LETT-8574, where the above issue had been mentioned with an explicit reference to Smith's predecessor at the Cambridge chair of Arabic, i.e. William Wright).

7 The unprecedented attention towards social aspects made James Turner claim that Smith is ‘the founder of the comparative study of religion' (Turner 2014: 294; see also Warburg 1989 and Segal's insistence on Smith's ‘revolutionary' role in Segal 2002b: ix-xi, xiv).

8 For the early influence of Tylor's works on Tiele, see Platvoet 1998a: 143 n. 41.

9 As recapped by Arie L. Molendijk (2004: 333-5), these laws described the universal and panhuman progressive development of religion: (1) ‘law of the unity of the human mind', according to which cultural evolution precedes (and accompanies) religious development; (2) ‘law of balance' between authority and freedom, by which, through stable socio-political conditions, religious advancement is achieved. Three corollaries completed Tiele's scheme (i.e. ‘law of reformation'; ‘law of [Tylorian] survival'; ‘law of advancement by reaction'). In any case, it is fair to add that Tiele's general scheme and laws changed through the years; please refer to Molendijk 2004 and Molendijk 2005 for further information on the topic.

10 Later on, his disciplinary proposal would become further subdivided into a nomothetic history of religion (singular) and a descriptive history of religions (plural; relabelled as ‘hierography'; cf. Tiele 1877: 1-2; see also Wiebe 1999: 35-6).

11 Tiele wrote the entry ‘Religions' for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which, according to Tiele's plan to conflate ‘natural' and ‘revealed' religions, the concept ‘world religions' was criticized (Tiele 1886; the aforementioned letter is archived in the Tiele Collection of the Leiden University Library, BPL 2710. See Molendijk 2016: 174 for further critical and biographical references; cf. also Molendijk 2004: 340). However, by 1893, Smith acknowledged that Tiele's conception had become more favourable to belief than to ritual: ‘for my own part I am inclined to think that you give too great prominence to gods, while you on the other hand will think that I give too much prominence to institutions’ (Smith's own emphasis; Smith to Tiele, 23 October, BPL 2710; from Molendijk 2005: 125 n. 7).

12 On Chantepie's fervent anti-Darwinism, see Platvoet 1998a: 124.

13 Also, as Eric Sharpe acutely noted, an ‘objective eidetic vision is quite literally a contradiction in terms' (Sharpe 1986: 224).

14 Interestingly, some prima facie epistemologically sound understanding of ‘phenomenology' within an empirical framework is also well attested (Tuckett 2016a: 78).

15 Wagner's law stated that geographical isolation of a group made up by a limited number of individuals was necessary to prevent inbreeding with the ancestral community and trigger the evolution of a new species. Wagner failed to conceive of this process as complementary to selection (in fact, he highlighted it as exclusive), and his thesis has since been revised and expanded to include genetic mechanisms within populational thinking (i.e. founder effect and genetic drift). On the discussions between Wagner and Darwin about the role of isolation in evolution, see Mayr 1982: 562-6, Bowler 1992: 32, and Milner 2009: 433.

16 As Woodruff Smith has observed, ‘today, we might say that Ratzel was looking for central statistical tendencies in sets of phenomena, but he did not see it that way. He had some notion that ethnological “truth” depended on the perspective of the observer, but he did not develop the idea' (Smith 1991: 145).

17 Ratzel was not interested in human creativity, and his model scarcely accounted for innovation per se. According to him, ‘humans are naturally uncreative. They have an inherent tendency toward inertia, from which they must be forced in order for any significant change to occur' (Smith 1991: 144).

18 See also Andriolo 1979: 137 and 143 n. 11 for Schmidt's use of Geist as another impersonal, creative force as historical agent.

19 A term coined by philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) and adopted by Max Müller to indicate those polytheistic religious systems in which many deities are subordinated to a main divinity (see Yusa 2005).

20 Anyway, Lang did not discard socio-cultural progressive evolutionism; see Wheeler­Barclay 2010: 131. Tylor replied by pointing out that distortions and misinterpretations were the results of missionary zeal and local proselytism (cf. Smith 1982: 67-8).

21 Schmidt, in turn, was ready to acknowledge the similarities between his method and Pettazzoni's - at least before 1922. In 1913, for instance, Schmidt praised the ‘exemplary improvement with regards to the previous evolutionary theories' in Pettazzoni's monograph on ‘primitive' religion in Sardinia (Schmidt 1913: 575; from Gandini 1996: 116).

22 Pettazzoni, who recognized the ‘practical-political value' of the ethnological component of the new HoR to instruct colonial administrators, took part in colonial policy, organizing and proposing the topic (i.e. colonial Africa) of the 8th Convegno Volta (4-11 October 1938), where Schmidt, as delegate for the Vatican, vehemently advocated a Kulturkreislehre justification for imperial control in Oriental Africa (see resp., Gandini 2003: 195-202 and Conte 1988: 126-7; cf. Spottel 1998, Ciurtin 2008: 338-9 and Stausberg 2008: 388-92).

23 Croce's ongoing opposition to Pettazzoni's appointment might also be understood as a way to get back at Gentile's institutional support of the HoR (Gandini 1999b: 118). However, Gentile also established compulsory Catholic education, which ran counter to Pettazzoni's expectation.

24 A few years earlier, Pettazzoni also depicted Aristotle as the founding father of the science of religion, the ‘Master' precursor of the union of historicism and phenomenology as well as the designer of a ‘“history” of theology, conceived as an exposition of theological and theogonic systems of various peoples' (Pettazzoni 1954b).

5. Eliadology

1 Pettazzoni's criticism of Eliade might be compared to Croce's refusal to acknowledge the academic status of the HoR, seen as a sort of ‘bibliographical collecting'; cf. Spineto 2006: 110; for HoR's ‘parallelomania', see L. H. Martin 2014: 95.

2 Apparently, de Martino was to acknowledge the pitfalls of such endeavour after an unsuccessful field trip in the early 1960s; cf. Angelini 2012.

3 For the political viewpoints held by these thinkers, see Ambasciano 2014. More generally, the biological and evolutionary Romanian panorama of the period was mainly influenced by German and French anti-Darwinist approaches (Tatole 2008). Germany and France were also the main sources of inspiration as far as literature and culture were concerned, and this is also reflected in Eliade's own education and intellectual formation (Werblowsky 2006: 300; Turcanu 2007).

4 Eliade began writing about the paranormal in 1925, promoting its allegedly positive role in questioning and extending scientific knowledge (Eliade 1996: 243-54).

5 During his Romanian years, influenced by Nae lonescu, Eliade wrote political articles characterized by an abundance of religious keywords as if they were spiritual sermons, in which he supported a raucous elitism; an antidemocratic pledge ‘to redeem the [Romanian] race'; the exaltation of dictatorship; the unconditioned submission to the political leader; the glorification of the fundamentalist and xenophobic Orthodox legionarism as a superior political option with regards to Nazism, fascism and communism; the celebration of local folklore and peasant traditions (reputed to be extremely ancient and thus particularly prestigious); the fanciful claim for a Romanian Orthodox and fundamentalist revolution which would have ultimately conquered Europe; a sense of revanche born of the narrow-minded provincialism which he nourished; and the usual attacks against the bourgeoisie and most of Western science and democracy (reputed fifth columns of the Western powers which had weakened the Romanian population), as well as anti-Semitism, bulgarophoby, and magiarophoby (references and comments in Ambasciano 2014: 277-80).

6 Eliade's signed document dating from his detention has been recently rediscovered and published (Handoca 2008: 382-3). In that document, Eliade renounced the political activity tied to the extremist Legiune. However, he publicly denied having signed such a document in his published memoirs, for the very act of signing would have confirmed his political activity (see bibliographical discussion in Ambasciano 2014: 356 n. 614).

7 As a result of his participation in foreign propaganda, among other activities, in 1942 Eliade devoted a celebratory pamphlet to the dictatorship of Portuguese statesman Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970). The following year, Eliade rewrote the history of Romania reimagining ancient, pre-Roman Dacia as the ‘California of its times', whose Shangri-La opulence attracted many foreign invaders, and depicted early modern Romanian states as the last European defence against the Ottomans. Thus, Eliade's reconstruction drew an explicit parallel with the Eastern Front during the war, with Romania as the last dam against Communist Russia (works collected in Eliade 2007; for a historiographical rebuttal, see Alexandrescu 2006, and Ambasciano 2014: 199-203, 398-401, 410-11).

8 For Lecomte du Nouy, see Ricketts 2000a: 304 (Eliade's note dated 30 January 1948). Eliade and de Chardin met on 23 January 1950 (Eliade 1990a: 102; further personal and philosophical reflections in Eliade 1989a: 99, 170-1, 190, 261). On de Chardin's pseudoscientific and spiritual renovation for modern man, cf. Eliade 1967d; on de Chardin's pseudoscientific eschatology (as well as for Eliade's idea that science and technology show an archetypical religious structure), cf. Eliade 1985.

9 The Dechardinian reflections that underpin these positions are available in Eliade 1989b: 186 (20 January 1975).

10 Eliade revised the English translations of some among his most famous works (e.g. Eliade 1958a and 1958b; Eliade 1961) to expunge the references to the recurrent ‘apish imitation' by the unconscious (‘imitation simiesque de l'incosciente') with regard to a transcendent reality. This change was occasioned by a letter sent on 19 January 1955 by Carl G. Jung, in which the psychoanalyst scolded Eliade and noted the psychological inconsistency of such interpretation. Jung's letter is in Adler and Jaffe 1976: 220-1; Eliade's two replies are dated 22 January 1955 (from which the aforementioned citation comes), and 11 February 1955 (in which Eliade promises to modify the forthcoming English translation of Yoga: Immortality and Freedom), resp. from Handoca 2004b: 84-7, and 89-91.

11 More precisely, according to Natale Spineto, there are three instances of the Eliadean archetypes: (1) archetype as an expression of a metaphysical, Platonic ‘archaic ontology'; (2) archetype as an existential intuition about the location of (the male members of the taxon) H. sapiens in the cosmos (for Eliadean patriarchal sexism, cf. Kinsley 2002); (3) archetype as a morphological, quintessential structure of religious phenomena tout court (Spineto 2006: 179-201).

12 In this case, the exploitation of the historicist mantra of ‘myth as true story' is evident: the primacy of the attention-grabbing, hagiographic historical document is assumed as truthful because it is reported by second-hand witnesses. On such gullibility, see Hume 2008b: 79-96, and Law 2018.

13 On Eliade's contact with Racovita, see Oisteanu 2010: 335.

14 E.g. one might cite the Native Australians' technological mastery and regular control of ‘fire-stick farming' as a ‘resource management strategy', which was culturally astonishing and evolutionarily unprecedented (Bliege Bird et al. 2008). Indeed, this innovation (coupled with other hunting techniques) might have even been too successful, contributing to drastic ecological changes as well as to the anthropogenic extinction of the local megafauna (Martin and Klein 1989; Flannery 2002; Tuniz, Gillespie and Jones 2009). However, such hypothesis remains contentious, for the cause-effect relationship is still debated (e.g. fire-stick farming might have been implemented after the extinction of the local megafauna).

15 Even though the ethnographic analogy between modern-day peoples and reconstructed past human populations can found some epistemic justifications (e.g. Currie 2016), the fact still remains that we ignore the actual cultural and social environments of the different species of the genus Homo as well as their intra-specific and diachronic variability. All we have is reconstructions, which might be epistemically warranted until new palaeoanthropological information is discovered - i.e. they are provisional. Even in the most charitable reading of the case-by-case viability of the ethnographic analogy, one cannot escape the possibility that in-group cultural variation might have been high since the very beginning (cf. Foley and Mirazon Lahr 2012). Expanding on this issue, Peter J. Richerson has commented that

whatever Homo erectus was doing (likely rather different things at different times and places) it was not what the San or Shoshoni were doing, perhaps not even close. [...] Some ancient Homo might have ‘experimented' with forms of social organization that are quite deviant from a straight-line extrapolation from chimps to ethnographic [hunter-gatherers]. Who can say? There is no harm in telling stories about what might have been going on in the Pleistocene. The danger comes if you believe them and try to build a scientific argument on such a foundation of quicksand.

Richerson 2014, reproduced with permission; cf. Richerson and Boyd 2013: 293, 295; Ambasciano 2016a: 187-8.

For a recent scientific enquiry about early human religiosity, see Geertz 2013. Elsewhere in Eliade's academic production, Racovita's living fossils are strategically invoked with regard to the historical existence and resistance of yoga (Eliade 2009: 361).

‘If we assume that the human race[s] originated in Asia, and other sciences like physical anthropology and prehistory confirm this assumption, then they must have migrated from here to all the other parts of the earth' (Schmidt 1926: n.p.; from Brandewie 1983: 145-6).

Moreover, many recent discoveries have ascertained that Neandertals were capable of cognitive abilities on a par with those exhibited by H. sapiens, such as the elaboration of new lithic techniques (Riel-Salvatore 2010), the exploitation of avian plumage for ornamental or symbolic use (Peresani et al. 2011), the use of ochre for hygienic and/or symbolic purposes during burials (Roebroeks et al. 2012), the ability to process and cook plant-based food (thus debunking the die-hard myth of Neandertals as meat­eater brutes; Hardy et al. 2012), and the creation of cave art (Hoffmann et al.2018). The list is growing, with new evidence disconfirming the old ‘brutal' paradigm added on a regular basis (e.g. the alleged Neandertal inability to produce proper speech; Krause et al. 2007; see also Ambasciano 2014: 126-7).

A general discussion of the ideological tenets behind Eliade's perspective is provided in Ambasciano 2014.

Lessa also remarked how Eliade's ‘literary efforts' might mislead ‘hasty and undiscriminating' readers. Those were the same criticisms Haydon levelled against Schmidt; see Chapter 4, §Schmidts legacy.

This section has been elaborated upon thanks to the invaluable help of (in alphabetical order) Roberto Alciati, Sergio Botta, Francesco Cassata, Enrico Manera and Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli.

Because of space limitation, I am obviously unable to expand on the history of shamanism. For a detailed account of previous, and much debated, historical accounts, I refer to DuBois (2009) and Ambasciano (2014).

As it happened, Eliade did with ancient Thracian and Romanian folkloric rituals the same thing Ohlmarks did for the seidr, differentiating them from shamanic practices, often on equally shaky grounds; see Ambasciano 2014: 342-6.

The same remarks previously reported in n. 12 apply here.

On the Eliadean scala religionum made up of different, more or less pristine and prestigious ‘shamanisms', see Ambasciano 2014: 53, 61-2, 223 (e.g. the allegedly more primitive and ‘Neandertal' Australian medicine men were never identified as ‘shamans'; cf. Znamenski 2007, Znamenski 2009).

6. The Demolition of the Status Quo

Eliade's tortuous response, dated 3 July 1972 (available in Handoca 2004a: 122-40), baffled Scholem, who asked in vain for more clarifications in another letter, dated 28 March 1973 (in Handoca 2006: 318-19).

However, Eliade had already been proposed, and his nomination discarded, as early as 1957 by Ernesto Koliqi (1903-1975), Professor of Albanian literature at the University of Rome (Nomination Database, Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014).

3 For instance, in the aftermath of World War 11, Eliade became involved with Romanian expats' journals culturally tied to the previous national regime (Berger 1994: 64-5). In 1952, Eliade signed an article for the journal Destin, entitled Catastrofa

mesianism. Note pentru o Teologie a Istoriei (‘Catastrophe and Messianism: Notes for a Theology of History'), in which, adopting an anti-historical two-fold fallacy (i.e. assuming the literal reality of sacred texts and judging history teleologically on the basis of such beliefs), he justified the ancient tragedies suffered by the Jews because those events were reputed teleologically necessary to lead their elite towards a purer form of monotheism and, later on, to finally give rise to Christianity - thus reiterating Nae lonescu's theological anti-Semitism (Eliade 1992b; see Ambasciano 2014: 296-9).

4 To avoid further complications, and for the sake of brevity, I cannot discuss here whether or not shamanism is an adequate tool to analyse Japanese religion.

5 ‘Power' in classical HoR was understood along the emic reading exemplified by Otto's systematization. Eliade, building on van der Leeuw's meta-theological ‘manifestation of power' in religion(s) (Tuckett 2016b: 27-31), wrote about the ‘kratophany- hierophany dialectic', that is, the potentially dangerous and profane manifestation of sacred power correctly developed by homo religiosus into a symbol which, by its integration in a religious system, extends this sacred, powerful manifestation in time (Eliade 1958a: 20; cf. Spineto 2006: 208).

6 At the same time, Eliade discarded the Schmidtian, theological-value judgement of a generalized ‘decadence of the shaman' (Eliade 1964: 125 n. 36, 258; however, this survival does not indicate ‘any priority of women in the earliest shamanism'; Eliade 1964: 258).

7 Lincoln was considered by Eliade himself to be his most brilliant student (Doniger 1991: xi). Lincoln shares this record with Culianu who, by the way, was not a direct student of Eliade. Eliade wrote in his journal on 1 August 1984 that ‘my admiration for Ioan [P. Culianu] is sincere and without limits' (Eliade 2004: 482).

8 Culianu's admiration for Derrida (2005a: 165-7) might explain his later attention to reality as a linguistic game.

7. The Cognitive (R)evolution: The End?

1 In the wake of the success of the Brexit referendum and the Trump presidential campaign, various mass media, political movements, and social organizations all across Europe have resorted to the same strategy in order to foster what Oxford Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl has called ‘a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment' to gain public visibility and reclaim social and political power, which will undoubtedly affect the future of the HoR (Flood 2016).

2 Cf. the following statement in Sagan 1996a: 28: ‘science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.'

3 In the 1960s, Donald T Campbell (1916-1996), a social psychologist, resorted to Baldwin's ideas to devise what is perhaps the catchiest Darwinian formula to describe cultural selection in the arts as a combination of ‘blind variation and selective retention', or BVSR (Campbell 1960; Plotkin 2004: 87). In the long run, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson told historian Daniel Lord Smail, ‘even intentions become a form of blind variation when they interact with other intentions and produce unforeseen consequences' (Smail 2008: 91).

4 Frazer contributed with an analysis of ancient Greek anthropogony: in a volume dedicated to the honour of one who has done more than any other in modern times to shape the ideas of mankind as to their origin it may not be out of place to recall this crude Greek notion of the creation of the human race, and to compare or contrast it with other rudimentary speculations of primitive peoples on the same subject, if only for the sake of marking the interval which divides the childhood from the maturity of science.

Frazer 1909: 153

5 ‘The child helps us understand our own primitive selfs' (Harrison 1909: 508).

6 It was also one of the most prone to ideological misappropriation. In 1869, German naturalist Gustav Jäger (1832-1917) published Die Darwinsche Theorie und ihre Stellung zu Moral und Religion (‘The Darwinian Theory and its Relation to Morals and Religion'). In this work, aimed at reconciling Christianity with an aggressive form of Darwinian evolutionism, Jäger wrote that religion boosts social cohesion in view of out-group hostility and wrote that ‘religion is a weapon in the struggle of survival'. However, Jäger's militant viewpoint led him to devise a Christianized Darwinism which justified an aggressive Christian imperialism (Jäger 1869: 114-15, 119; from Achtner 2009: 266). No wonder, thus, that Darwin, who read in part the volume in that same year, ignored Jäger's forays and merely cited an ornithological note about pheasants' plumage and sexual selection from Jäger's work in his Descent of Man (Darwin to Gustav Jäger, 9 September 1869, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. DCP-LETT-6885).

7 The list, which focuses on consilient approaches in the study of culture and cognition, is illustrative and omits many potential additions, such as US anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell's (1892-1974) take on human culture in a phylogenetic perspective (see Saler 2009: 82-91). A more famous case is perhaps provided by American sociologist Robert N. Bellah (1927-2014). In 1964, Bellah published an article entitled ‘Religious Evolution’, in which he posited a cultural evolutionary development of social organization through different stages (Bellah 1964), starting a project which will be eventually completed only in the 2010s (Bellah 2011). Bellah, however, was only tangentially concerned with cognition and his reconstruction hinged on obsolete concepts (Ambasciano 2016a: 181-5; see also Boy and Torpey 2013; cf. Turchin 2015 for an updated take on Bellah's theory).

8 Even if religious beliefs and behaviours did not evolve for any particularly adaptive purpose - i.e. they can be a by-product of other cognitive abilities evolved to deal with other purposes (see Ambasciano 2016a: 177 n. 24) - they might have been co-opted and exploited socially and politically, thus re-entering into an evolutionary feedback loop (see Pievani, Girotto and Vallortigara 2014).

9 In 1990, Culianu's interest led him to establish Incognita: International Journal for Cognitive Studies in the Humanities, an interdisciplinary academic journal published by Brill, and discontinued after his death.