Recent work on the evolution of religion has approached religions as adaptive complexes
of traits consisting of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioural and developmental
features that are organized into a self-regulating feedback system. Religious…
The last Talmudic demon? The role of ritual in cultural transmission | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Login to your account Email Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in New User Institutional Login Change Password Old Password New Password Too Short Weak Medium Strong Very Strong Too Long Your password must have 8 characters or more and contain 3 of the following: a lower case character, an upper case character, a special character or a digit Too Short Congrats! Your password has been changed Create a new account Email Returning user Can't sign in? Forgot your password? Enter your email address below and we will send you the reset instructions Email Cancel If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to reset your password. Close Request Username Can't sign in? Forgot your username? 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The role of ritual in cultural transmissionPhil. Trans. R. Soc. B3752019042520190425http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0425SectionAbstract1. Introduction2. Religious systems3. Content, context and integration: alternative theories about cultural transmission4. Babylonian demons55. Ruach ra'ah6. ConclusionData accessibilityCompeting interestsFundingAcknowledgementsFootnotesEndnotesYou have accessResearch articlesThe last Talmudic demon? The role of ritual in cultural transmission Richard Sosis Richard Sosis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6838-881X Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Richard Sosis Richard Sosis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6838-881X Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:29 June 2020https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0425Abstract Recent work on the evolution of religion has approached religions as adaptive complexes of traits consisting of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioural and developmental features that are organized into a self-regulating feedback system. Religious systems, it has been argued, derive from ancestral ritual systems and continue to be fuelled by ritual performances. One key prediction that emerges from this systemic approach is that the success of religious beliefs will be related to how well they are connected to rituals and integrated with other elements of the religious system. Here, I examine this prediction by exploring the rich world of Jewish demonology. As a case study, I briefly survey the historical trajectory of demonic beliefs across Jewish communities and focus on one demon, a ruach ra'ah, that has survived the vicissitudes of Jewish history and maintained its relevance in contemporary Jewish communities. I argue that it has done so because of its linkage with a morning handwashing ritual and its effective integration into the core elements of Jewish religious systems. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours’. 1. Introduction During years of conducting ethnographic fieldwork among observant Jews in Israel (e.g. [1,2]), demons were not regularly discussed. However, there was one particular demon, a ruach ra'ah, that was mentioned occasionally in conversation. It is only recently that I recognized that this fact was curious. A plethora of demons once inhabited Jewish religious imaginations [3,4]; how did this demon survive while others did not? Before exploring this question, two matters require attention. First, I must explain why the near-complete disappearance of demonic beliefs among observant Jews presents a significant puzzle. After all, secular theorists (e.g. [5]) could reasonably point to the Enlightenment and the spread of scientific and secularist worldviews to dismiss this query as easily resolved. While secularism may explain the weakening of many religious beliefs, in this case, such a position would be misguided. As I describe below, the Babylonian Talmud contains extensive discussions about demons, including their activities and the threats they pose to humans. If the Babylonian Talmud were simply a book of history, the disappearance of demons would hardly be noteworthy; the puzzle, however, is that the Babylonian Talmud has been the focus of ritualized study for nearly a thousand years [6]. One of the first things that an observant Jew recites upon waking is that the study of holy scriptures is one of four precepts for which there are no prescribed limits. Within contemporary observant Jewish communities, especially those characterized as Ultra-Orthodox,1 most men spend hours every day in diligent religious study, and the Babylonian Talmud is the focal text of engagement. In other words, Talmudic demons have not been forgotten; rather, they have been denuded of their power. How a ruach ra'ah survived provides a constructive historical case study for both the role of ritual in the cultural transmission of religious ideas and the merits of a systemic approach to religion. Second, I need to justify the importance of such a parochial inquiry about forgotten or flourishing ancient demons. As will be clear below, the questions I raise about Talmudic demons are able to shed light on broader research questions concerning the evolution of religion, cultural transmission and the role of ritual2 in creating and sustaining social worlds. Furthermore, these questions about Talmudic demons offer an opportunity to evaluate competing evolutionary hypotheses on the transmission of cultural concepts. While cognitive scientists of religion have focused on how successful religious ideas exhibit particular forms that are memorable [10], cultural evolutionists have emphasized the importance of local socioecology in explaining the transmission of particular beliefs [11]. Below I will describe a third approach, in many ways complementary to cultural evolutionary theory [12], which suggests that the success of religious traits, such as beliefs, values, meanings and practices, will be related to how well they are integrated into the religious system. Religious commitments, such as beliefs in demons, cannot be understood in isolation; they are only one element within a complex system [13]. Their emergence and maintenance are the product of cultivation and the interaction of multiple elements within the religious system in which they are embedded. Thus, interrogating the questions raised above will allow us to evaluate these alternative perspectives, advancing our understanding of how religions change and adapt, and the role of ritual in these processes. 2. Religious systems Over the past decade and a half, I have proposed with my colleagues Candace Alcorta, Benjamin Purzycki, John Shaver, Jordan Kiper and Connor Wood (see [14] for review and references) that religion may best be understood as an adaptive complex of traits incorporating cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioural and developmental elements. We have argued that these traits derive from pre-human ritual systems and were selected for in early hominin populations because they contributed to the ability of individuals to overcome ever-present ecological challenges of resource acquisition and production. By fostering cooperation and extending the communication and coordination of social relations across time and space, these traits served to maximize the potential resource base for early human populations. The religious system, we have suggested, is a complex adaptation that serves to support extensive human cooperation and coordination, and social life as we know it. Here, I draw on this construction of religion to address the questions raised above. Before turning to these historical considerations, however, I offer a brief sketch of religions as adaptive systems. Further details about the structure, operation, complexity and adaptability of religious systems can be found in Sosis [14,15] and references therein. The systemic approach posits that religious systems typically maintain eight core elements: authority, meaning, moral obligation, myth, ritual, sacred, supernatural agents, and taboo. Each of these elements is most usefully conceived of as a unique category that may have an independent phylogenetic history, but within religious systems they are inherently interconnected to the other elements within the system. These elements are likely universal across religious systems, but they are not core elements because of their universality; there are other universal features of religions that are not core elements (e.g. the creation of alternative worlds, symbolization, etc.). Rather, these features are core elements and universal because they each appear to play a distinct and integrative role within religious systems. Other features of religion are common, such as music, spirit possession, afterlife beliefs, prophecy, superstition and pilgrimage, but they are not essential to the working of the religious system; they are better understood as secondary forms of one of the fundamental components identified above. The core structure of religious systems consists of interactions between these eight core elements. While all elements may not interact with each other directly, they do all interact with and through ritual, which lies at the centre of religious systems. Recent efforts have modelled how these core elements interact [16], but our understanding of these interrelationships remains limited. Religious systems are born from a group of socially engaged individuals. Like all communities, religious groups are influenced by external factors including the social, political, economic, ecological and socio-religious environment in which the group is situated. Notably, however, religious groups are not simply influenced by their external conditions, they actively shape them [17,18]. These external factors, as well as the internal social dynamics of the group, motivate human action in the form of ritual behaviour. Like all systems, religious systems require energy and information to function. Ritual performance introduces social information about the state of performers [9], as well as energy in the form of calories, into the religious system. All systems transform energy and information [19]; likewise, the religious system transforms the energy and information of human ritual behaviours into human cooperative and coordinated behaviours. Once energy and information enter the religious system through ritual behaviours, the elements that constitute the system interact with ritual behaviour in feedback loops. For example, ritual behaviours become associated with supernatural agents, such as demons. Supernatural agents can take on various roles in ritual performance, such as the recipient of aromas or the object of petitionary prayers. But whether supernatural agents are seen as receivers, creators, enforcers or targets of a ritual performance, once such agents become linked to a ritual, desires to please or thwart the agents can proximally motivate the ritual performance. Indeed, the human action that emerges from the social group, which provides the seeds of the system, will be transformed into what we recognize as religious ritual once it interacts and incorporates the elements of the religious system. While religious systems generate diverse social norms through ritual, the norms that sustain religious systems involve community-level cooperation and coordination, which is ultimately the energetic output of these systems. It is worth bearing in mind that religious systems are a stunningly convoluted way to produce such behavioural responses. Other social organisms have devised ways of achieving collective goals that are less complicated and mysterious. Selection, however, operates on available traits and the religious system was built on the existing cognitive and behavioural foundation. Also, human language has necessitated complex solutions for sustaining cooperation and coordination. As Rappaport [9] observes, the symbolic nature of language means there is always the possibility of deceit and lying since the relationships between signs and their significata are arbitrary. Thus, ultimately, actions (i.e. rituals) speak louder than words [20]. Ritual performance, within religious systems, can be understood as a barometer for the health of the community. Rituals that are well integrated with the core elements of the system are more likely to be performed, supporting the religious system with the necessary energy and information it needs to be sustained. However, when rituals are not well integrated, there is little proximate motivation for performance, which will drive the system towards either extinction or religious revitalization. Obviously, most religious systems spend much of their existence fluctuating between periods of success, stasis, failure and revitalization. But ultimately, religious systems either die or transform beyond the recognition of the old system. 3. Content, context and integration: alternative theories about cultural transmission As mentioned above, here I consider three distinct theories about the survival of a surprisingly enduring and potent demon, a ruach ra'ah, which I describe in more detail below. Minimally counterintuitive (MCI) theory, from the cognitive science of religion, posits that agents such as ruach ra'ah have survived across generations because they are MCI, thus endowing them with a memorability advantage. That is, successful religious concepts elicit a fundamental ontological category but violate an expectation of that category, enhancing the likelihood that the concept will be remembered [10]. Ruach ra'ah, for example, likely elicit the ‘person’ mental category,3 but their invisibility violates expectations about the physical nature of humans. Such MCI violations have been shown to increase memorability over intuitive concepts (e.g. [22]; but see [23]). Cultural evolutionists, however, argue that counterintuitiveness cannot fully explain the cultural success of religious ideas because humans encounter many counterintuitive religious ideas yet they maintain beliefs in a very limited set of those ideas, specifically the ones that are adhered to in their own religious communities. This issue has been dubbed ‘The Zeus Problem’ in recognition that Western school children can learn about Zeus, a MCI religious concept par excellence, yet none of these children becomes committed to Zeus or believes that he is real [11]. Rather, cultural evolutionists emphasize the importance of context, that is, the social environment, in explaining the transmission of particular religious beliefs. Accordingly, cultural evolutionists contend that agents, such as ruach ra'ah, have survived because of conformist learning biases [24] in which individuals generally learn to believe what others in their community believe. Alternatively, a systemic approach suggests that religious concepts that are transmitted across generations are those that are best integrated into the religious system. Specifically, religious beliefs that are interconnected to other elements within the religious system, especially ritual, are more likely to endure than religious beliefs that are not connected, or lose their connection, with other elements within the religious system. The systemic approach thus predicts that belief in a supernatural agent, such as a ruach ra'ah, has survived because of its connections to the other core elements—myth, ritual, taboo, moral obligation, sanctity and authority—of the religious systems in which it is embedded. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. All three factors—content, context and integration—undoubtedly play a role in understanding why some religious concepts are more successful than others. However, cultural evolution and cognitive science accounts typically study religious beliefs in isolation [25], without reference to the religious system in which the examined beliefs exist. The systemic approach is built on such reductionist studies but demands a holism that unifies this research, and thus can easily incorporate the insights of cultural evolution and cognitive science into its framework. Indeed, the systemic model engages all four levels (function, phylogeny, ontogeny, and mechanistic causation) of Tinbergen's analysis [26], although the focus here is on phylogeny, that is, understanding the historical trajectory of Jewish beliefs in demons.4 In other words, it is the most comprehensive of the three approaches and offers a promising model for advancing our understanding of the evolution and transmission of religious concepts. 4. Babylonian demons5 In modern Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) is the central text of Jewish ritual study, even superseding the Torah in hours of commitment, if not sanctity and authority. Its breadth, covering the gamut of human activities, and length, consisting of over 2700 double-sided folios in 63 volumes, are massive, and its meandrous arguments, use of multiple archaic languages, lack of punctuation, and inclusion of the opinions of more than a 1000 rabbis, often in disagreement, yield a text that demands a lifetime of study to master. The Babylonian Talmud was redacted around 500 AD, but it was preceded by the Jerusalem Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi) by about 200 years, which receives much less attention in modern Judaism. These two talmuds developed from different academies and local traditions in Babylon and Palestine, respectively. For our purposes, what is interesting is the almost complete absence of demons in the Jerusalem Talmud and extensive reference to demons in the Babylonian Talmud. The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud acknowledge this disparity and the difference even resulted in divergent Biblical translations in these respective academies (Gittin 68a).6 The Babylonian Talmud (Berachot 6a) maintains that humans are constantly surrounded by demons: Abba Binyamin says: If the eye were permitted to see them, no creature could endure the demons. Abaye says: They are more numerous than we are and they surround us like the ridge around a ditch. Rav Huna says: Everyone among us has a thousand on his left and ten thousand on his right. The Babylonian Talmud refers to dozens of demons by name, including numerous stories about the king and queen of the demons, Ashmodia and Argat bat Machalat, respectively. Some demons are benevolent, but others are harmful, and the Talmud offers various defences, includ… truncated (33,013 more characters in archive)