A History of Niue

<p>"In the beginning, this island now called Niue was nothing but coral rock (he punga)... There came a god, an aitu, from the south, a god sailed to and fro on the face of the waters. He looked down here and saw far below on the ocean the white punga rock. He let down his hook and hauled the punga up to the surface, and lo! there stood and island!" - John Lupo. The genesis of Niue remains conjectural. The Polynesian calls in a supernatural agency, an aitu from the south, to explain the emergence of the multiplication of corals and algae from the waters of the mid-Pacific to form an island two-hundred feet high, but the story of the god and his line and hook is a local adaptation of a very ancient and widespread fable, as are in varying degrees other Polynesian versions of the birth of the island, Cook advanced two further possibilities in 1777 when he speculated: "Has this Island been raised by an earthquake? Or has the sea receded from it?"</p>

A History of Niue

<p>"In the beginning, this island now called Niue was nothing but coral rock (he punga)... There came a god, an aitu, from the south, a god sailed to and fro on the face of the waters. He looked down here and saw far below on the ocean the white punga rock. He let down his hook and hauled the punga up to the surface, and lo! there stood and island!" - John Lupo. The genesis of Niue remains conjectural. The Polynesian calls in a supernatural agency, an aitu from the south, to explain the emergence of the multiplication of corals and algae from the waters of the mid-Pacific to form an island two-hundred feet high, but the story of the god and his line and hook is a local adaptation of a very ancient and widespread fable, as are in varying degrees other Polynesian versions of the birth of the island, Cook advanced two further possibilities in 1777 when he speculated: "Has this Island been raised by an earthquake? Or has the sea receded from it?"</p>

Materiality, Oral Incantations and Supernatural Agency in Ancient Healing Magic

In the Ancient World illness was thought to be the effect not of accidental or natural causes, but rather the result of a negative agency, an external attack on the victim’s body. This paper focuses on the diverse strategies used in healing magic attested in the material and textual records from the ancient Near East to Late Antiquity, with special attention paid to how the cultural status of objects and substances was changed through ritual, a process that, along with the invocations of demons and gods, allowed objects to acquire agency to counterattack the harm inflicted on the victim’s body.

Epidemics and Religion: From Angry Gods and Offended Ancestors to Hungry Ghosts and Hostile Demons

Throughout history, religious beliefs have been a primary way of understanding the experience of epidemic disease. This article offers a pan-historical and cross-cultural analysis of such interactions. The first section examines common structures and assumptions of religious explanatory models. These are characteristically two-fold, nominating both supernatural causal agents and particular human actions that have set these forces in motion. A society’s identification of the behaviors that would prompt the infliction of mass suffering and death upon an entire people reveals a great deal about the values and world view of that culture. Most revolve around definitions of the sacred, which could be polluted, profaned or neglected by deliberate or inadvertent actions, and acceptable standards of moral behavior. Defensive strategies vary according to the nature of the supernatural agency held responsible, from one or more angry gods to offended ancestors, hungry ghosts or hostile demons. The final section investigates the extent to which religion may be helpful or harmful in shaping responses to epidemics, including the present global pandemic of Covid-19.

The Sense of Supernatural Agency

The sense of supernatural agency constitutes a defining characteristic of the religious sphere of life. But what accounts for the continued cross-cultural recurrence of this psychological phenomenon over the course of human history? This paper reviews evidence indicating that the source of panhuman or universal cognitive patterns of thought and behaviour such as this lies in the common characteristics of the evolved human mind. Further, that the sense of the supernatural is constituted by a unique combination of commonly recurring cognitive processes that together give rise to a panhuman conviction in the reality of supernatural agencies able and (when minded) willing to assist each individual in situations deemed beyond the capacities of that individual. These cognitive processes are driven most acutely by existential anxiety in response to extrinsic physical, economic and social pressures indicating that religiosity is best understood as a social-psychological phenomenon.

Religion, Cognition, and the Myth of Conscious Will

Characteristic of the recent cognitive approach to religion (CSR) is the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality. This thesis readily lends itself to the critical understanding of religious belief as “our intuitive psychology run amok.” This effective restriction of the scientific critique of agent causality to notions of supernatural agency appears arbitrary, however, in light of evidence from cognitive and social psychology that our sense of human agency, including our own, is interpretive in nature. In this paper I argue that a cognitive approach to religion that extends the critique of agent causality to the folk psychological experience of conscious will is able to shed light on several characteristically religious phenomena, such as spirit possession, ritual action, and spontaneous action in Zen Buddhism.

Hermeneutical Constraints

The topic of this chapter is a body of work from various branches of the cognitive sciences suggesting that the tendency to distinguish qualitatively between bodies and minds—between physical objects subject to mechanical causality and agents capable of free will, planning, and intentionality—is a human cognitive universal. It develops reliably and early in human beings, a genetic inheritance shaped by the powerful adaptive pressures of social living. In addition, there is good evidence that this distinction between objects and agents reliability kicks off mind-body dualism, afterlife and soul beliefs, a perception of “meaning” in the world, and concepts of supernatural agency that share broad features across cultures and throughout history. These universals create suspicion of any claim that the early Chinese were strong mind-body holists. Relevant cognitive universals include Theory of Mind, concepts of psychological interiority, and basic supernatural, afterlife and soul beliefs.

How Did Spinoza Declare War on Theology and Theologians?

Israel argues that Spinoza’s biblical criticism revolutionized the discipline by combining a historical-critical approach with a philosophical demonstration. It eradicated supernatural agency and miracles from the historical process. Spinoza’s new hermeneutics scrupulously distinguished authorial intention from truth of fact. Taken together with his philosophical naturalism, this challenged the essential reconcilability of reason and faith, of science and religion, which was to become the groundwork of the edifice of the Enlightenment erected by Locke, Newton, Leibniz, and Wolff. Thus Spinozism undermined the claim that theology, science, and philosophy form a single harmonious whole. Standard accounts of the Enlightenment and early modern history fail to grasp the full scope of Spinoza’s critique of religion. Ironically, Spinozism became the intellectual origin of a revolutionary consciousness that threatened the political and religious state of affairs because it was publicized and reinforced by apologetic eighteenth-century observers, who excoriated Spinoza’s legacy.