The issue of religious experience has long puzzled scholars of religion. Those who have addressed this issue at all largely reflect the Protestant-tinged conclusions of William James (1902). If identifying symptoms of religious experience among modern adherents has proven problematic, how much more so is this the case for ancient religions? When such symptoms for ancient religions have been addressed by scholars at all, they are inferred from the ancient texts that supposedly allude to them. However, much evidence for ancient religions is not textual but material, and for the cults of the Roman Mithras, the evidence is overwhelmingly so. New methodologies from the neurocognitive sciences, complementary to traditional archaeological and historiographical methods, might offer an approach to symptoms of religious experience from material culture by identifying experience with attention-focusing modulations of historically assessable measures of quotidian sentience. The techniques for effecting such modulations are often preserved in the material evidence and allow for a tractable history of their neurocognitive technologies. Two techniques for provoking experience among the cults of the Roman Mithras are identified from the archaeological evidence: communal meals and rites of initiation. These practices took place in the architectural structure of the mithraeum itself in the presence of Mithraic imagery, including the ubiquitous tauroctony, the cult image of Mithras slaying a bull. From these material remains of the Mithraic cults technologies of experience might be identified and the nature of the evoked experience itself inferred.

Before beginning a review of the cultural context for adolescent development, I will touch on “middle childhood” a newly emerging field of study that examines the period between childhood and adolescence. Physiological changes associated with the period between ages seven and twelve include the full maturation of the brain and the onset of adrenarche (increase in the adrenal production of the neurosteroid DHEAS) and a modest increase in growth referred to as the “mid-growth spurt” (Campbell 2011). The complementary cultural components of middle childhood will also be reviewed.

Adolescence is associated with more dramatic physiological change, notably puberty and a rapid growth spurt (Bogin 1994). First menses is often treated as an important milestone, sometimes triggering an elaborate series of rites to mark the change in a young woman’s status. Other physiological markers may be treated as culturally salient. “’Youth’ on Vanatinai begins at about age fourteen, or when the signs of puberty … are visible to onlookers.