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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - Chanting and Dancing into Dissociation

  • from Part II - Representation
  • Edited by Esther Eidinow, University of Bristol, Armin W. Geertz, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, John North, University College London
  • Book:
    Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
    Published online:
    28 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022, pp 118-142

  • Summary

    Starting from a cognitive point of view, this paper provides an entirely new reading of the dances and chants of the Salian priests. By focusing on their dances and chants in the perspective of embodied cognition and by putting a diligent analysis of (a) the reports and (b) the prayer texts into historical comparisons with other ‘prophetic’ practices of that time, this study is able to elucidate the Salian performances as body techniques that go beyond a mere facilitation of sociality. These techniques alter the practitioners’ states of mind and thereby elicit an experience that one may call religious experience, divine experience, or ‘possession’.