Kind Goddessess: an Evolutionary Perspective on Personal Prayer as a Medium through which Representational Features Resembling the Primary Caregiver Are Spread
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Pantheon: Religionistický časopis |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Philosophy and religion |
| Keywords | Neo-Paganism; Goddess; Personal Prayer; Cognitive Science of Religion; Cultural Selection; Audience Design; Czech Neo-Pagans |
| Description | This article deals with the popularity of female deities among Neo-Pagans. it is argued that the current opinion on this issue is insufficient to explain certain prevalent aspects of female deities widely shared among Neo-Pagans, therefore an additional insight from cognitive science is adopted. It is suggested that the fitness optimal mental representation of maternally loving woman can significantly bias the mental representation of the Goddess or goddesses being female, due to the essentiality of the representation of maternally loving woman in cultural selection. Additionally, it is also suggested that an improvised personal prayer or ritual is the environment that closely resembles attachment to a primary caregiver, therefore the convenient environment in which "kind" female deities are especially preferred. In the end, the results from the case study, testing the hypotheses concerning the preferred deities in personal contact among Czech Neo-Pagans are provided to illustrate the main argument. |
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