METHOD

&THEORY in the
STUDY OF
RELIGION

Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 19 (2007) 281-300

www.brill.nl/mtsr

Acts That Work: A Cognitive Approach

to Ritual Agency1
Jesper Srensen
Institute of Philosophy, Education and the Study of Religions,
University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark
E-mail: j.sorensen@qub.ac.uk
js@ifpr.sdu.dk

Abstract
Questions of agency are central for understanding ritual behavior in general and representations
of ritual ecacy in particular. Religious traditions often stipulate who are entitled to perform
particular rituals. Further, representations of unobservable superhuman agents are often explicitly described as the real ritual agents. Recent investigations into the processes underlying action
representations and social cognition can help explain how these representations arise. It is argued
that paying close attention to details in the cognitive processing of ordinary actions can shed
light on how ritual actions activate part of these systems while simultaneously leaving other
aspects unaccounted for. This has particular eects that make culturally transmitted representations of superhuman agents highly relevant.
Keywords
ritual, cognition, agency, action-representation, intentionality, causality, religion, magic

Introduction
Agency in religion in general and ritual action in particular is a complex problem that can be addressed at several levels of description and analysis. Believers representations of agents and agency play a pivotal role in many religious
phenomena. Who authorises religious statements as having a special status,
who is entitled to perform and to participate in specic types of ritual action,
and who controls religious institutions are among the fundamental questions
1
Working on this article has been made possible due to grant 273-05-0348 from the Danish
Research Council for the Humanities. A warm thanks to Justin Barrett and Pierre Lienard for
criticism of earlier drafts.

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007

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that must be addressed, when attempting to explain these phenomena. Further, one of the dening characteristics of religion is the persistent reference to
non-observable or absent agents believed to inuence the world. Ghosts, spirits, ancestors, and gods populate the worlds religions and religious behaviour
is often said to be motivated by a desire to interact with these agents.
The role of both human and superhuman agents and believers representations of their ability to act in the world (their agency) is thus of central importance in many scholarly accounts of religious phenomena. Few of these,
however, have addressed how people actually construct representations of
agency and what role mental constraints impose on religious thought and
behaviour. This decit can be remedied by paying close attention to recent
studies of social cognition. An agent is characterised by his or her ability to
inuence the world by means of an action. Thus, agency can be more precisely
investigated by paying close attention to how our cognitive system relates representations of actions, causal expectations to actions, and intentions of the
agent performing the action on the one hand, with that of both human and
superhuman agency on the other. As those processes are automatic and not
accessible to conscious examination, psychological investigations are of primary importance in unearthing the processes responsible for human representations of agency. This, in turn, can help us build a picture of how
representations of superhuman agency arise and why they seem to be so pervasive in cultural transmission.
Rituals are basically actions and are as such processed by approximately the
same cognitive systems as the ones elicited for processing information about
ordinary actions (cf. McCauley & Lawson 2002). However, rituals are actions
tweaked in a particular way and this tweaking has certain consequences central
for understanding the relation between ritualised behaviour and representations of superhuman agency. In short I will argue that ritual behaviour, in
itself, makes representations of superhuman agents highly relevant as these
solve two problems potentially arising in peoples comprehension of ritual performance: (1) who species the actions performed, i.e. why those actions; and
(2) how are the actions related to their purported result, i.e. why is ecacy
ascribed to the actions? In order to address these questions, I will rst build a
model of the processes involved in processing ordinary actions. Based on this,
it will be possible to show more precisely how ritual actions dier from ordinary action and how this dierence aects cognitive processing.

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Agency in Non-Ritual Action

Rituals, in the sense investigated here, are not just actions, but social actions,
i.e. actions that are performed either with or in the presence of other people.
Rituals are not only performed but also observed, and many rituals contain an
elaborate sequencing of both positions (cf. Houseman 1993). Investigations
into cognitive systems involved in both the execution and observance of ordinary actions are therefore of primary importance if we are to build a reliable
model of the cognitive processes underlying ritual actions. Studies of how
humans understand events in the world, in general, and the behaviour of other
people in particular are by no means a new endeavour. Philosophers have
struggled with the problem for more than two millennia and psychologists for
almost two centuries. More recently, however, cognitive science has made
signicant progress in giving precise descriptions of the mental processes
involved in human representations of other peoples actions. Psychological
studies have investigated how ordinary adults and children parse actions into
chunks dened by an intentional structure (e.g., Newtson 1998; Baldwin et al.
2001). Developmental studies have unravelled how knowledge of causation
and intentionality develops (e.g., Leslie 1994, 1995; Wellman et al. 2001;
Sommerville & Woodward 2005). Psychopathologists have studied how persons suering from schizophrenia dier in their understanding of actions
(e.g., Zalla et al. 2004) and how autism aects representations of other peoples
beliefs and intentions (Baron-Cohen 1995). Computer science has attempted
to build reliable simulations of human action representations (e.g., Gobet et
al. 2001). And cognitive neuroscience has performed human-ape comparative
studies of the neural activity involved in comprehending the actions of other
beings (e.g., Gallese 2000a, 2000b, 2001). Taken together, and despite their
dierences, these studies are supplying signicant insight into the mechanisms
underly-ing human social cognition. Thus, it is now possible to construct a
model of the cognitive processes underlying representations of actions, causes,
and intentions.
The rst part of the model must specify the perceptual cues that lead to
representations of agency. Ever since Heider and Simmels (1944) seminal
studies of false ascription of agency, there have been a signicant number of
studies investigating exactly what perceptual stimuli trigger ascription of
agency. At a simple level, the movement of an object through the perceptual
eld is enough to trigger representations of agency (Mandler 1992; Leslie
1994, 1995; Spelke et al. 1995). However, in order to distinguish movement
that indicates the involvement of agency from the movement of inanimate

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objects, other cues are necessary, most notably the ability of objects to change
direction by means of an internal and renewable source of energy or force
(Leslie 1995; Gelman et al. 1995). Objects that are able to initiate movements
on their own are the prime candidates for agency as this is a necessary condition for being able to interact with the world. The ability to exert force points
to the importance of contingent response as a cue activating agency detection. Contingent response refers to the ability of agents to react to their surroundings in a non-random manner. Geometrical gures or faceless blobs are
conceived as containing agency if they adapt their behaviour to changes in an
articial environment on, for instance, a computer screen (Heider & Simmel
1944; Spelke et al. 1995; Gelman et al. 1995; Johnson et al. 2001; Blakemore
et al. 2003). Anyone slightly familiar with the world of video and computer
games will recognise the ability of contingent movement to make otherwise
non-interesting objects into exciting agents that (some) people will interact
with for hours. In a natural environment, animals (including humans) seem to
be the prototypical entities tting these features ( Johnson et al. 2001).
Perceptual cues are, however, only a basic level in representations of agency.
Humans also employ at least two hierarchically related, non-perceptual systems when ascribing agency. At a fundamental level, actions are generally
understood as goal-directed. Agents are not only reacting in a contingent way
upon stimuli from the environment. They instigate movement and react to the
environment in order to achieve specic types of goals (e.g., moving to a
specic position, avoiding collision, following another agent etc.). This teleological structure of actions entails that perceptible movements are chunked
together to form fundamental action gestalts dened by a proximate goal or
proximate intention (Searle 1983). Recent studies in primate cognition have
exposed mirror-neurons that are activated both when the animal performs an
action, such as grasping, and when it observes another animal performing the
same action (Gallese 2000a, 2000b, 2001). Neuroscientic investigations indicate that humans have a similar mirror-system that is activated when performing or observing certain types of simple actions (Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004).
Developmental studies show that representations of simple action gestalts arise
earlier than more complex action representations and that they are intimately
related to representations relating motor action and causal expectations in a
teleological schema (Csibra et al. 2003; Sommerville & Woodward 2005).
Lesion studies further indicate that patient with specic types of frontal lope
damage experience huge problems when asked to parse larger series of behaviour into complex action representations while this does not impede the ability
to chunk ne-grained motions into simple action gestalts (Zalla et al. 2003).

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The chunking of perceptual information into basic action gestalt, such as

grasping, walking and touching, organised by a teleological schema, is thus
necessary but not sucient when attempting to explain the cognitive mechanisms underlying representations of agency. Even though the recognition of
proximate intention gives some structure to the ow of information coming
from the behaviour of fellow humans, the structure is very poor and insucient
to allow the perceiver to navigate in social interaction. The crucial further step
is the ability to connect action gestalts into longer strings of intentional actions
controlled by an agent with specic beliefs and desiresan ultimate goal or
intention (Searle 1983). This ability has been named theory of mind (Gopnik
& Wellman 1994; Baron-Cohen 1995; Carruthers & Smith 1996; Frith &
Frith 1999). Accordingly, the tendency to understand another agents actions
as determined by a specic set of beliefs and desires are relatively independent
of the ability to understand an action as teleological. Thus, I can understand
an act of walking as goal-directed (X wants to cross the street) without being
able to represent the ultimate intention specifying the act (X wants to go to the
baker across the street in order to buy a cake). Representing an ultimate goal,
however, enriches my understanding of the actions performed and allows me
to have certain expectations about the likely actions of a person. Around age
four, children know that other agents access to information about the world
is limited, so they ascribe certain cognitive attitudes, e.g., beliefs, to agents and
such cognitive attitudes are represented as informing an agents goal-directed
behaviour (Wellman et al. 2001; Perner & Ruman 2005). Further, people
suering from autism seem to lack the ability to form representations of other
peoples mental states and therefore their ultimate intentions of performing
specic actions (Baron-Cohen 1995). The ability to relate the simple actiongestalt produced by perceptual cues and teleological ascription to the cognitive
attitudes of a perceived agent thus facilitates the emergence of more complex
representations of intention and, in turn, the ability to envisage the future
behaviour of other people.
The two systems involved in ascribing goals and intentions to perceived
actions will, all things being equal, work in unison in ordinary perception and
representation of action. Still, the distinction between the two underlying cognitive systems is crucial. It enables us to distinguish representations of proximate intention or teleology of an action (e.g., performing an action with the
arm in order to put bread into the mouth), from representations of more complex or ultimate intentions (eating in order to satisfy hunger). Humans spontaneously move from perception of proximate intentions to ascription of
ultimate intention. The perception of goal-directed actions, in which an

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agent performs a series of concerted bodily actions in order to move bread

from the plate into the mouth is, automatically, followed by an ascription of
an ultimate intention of eating in order to satisfy hunger. Further, the two
systems are hierarchically related and have dierent sources. Whereas proximate intentions are constructed automatically based on perceptual features
and cognitive simulation, knowledge of ultimate intentions has neither uniform origin nor applicability. Some actions, like eating, are universal human
phenomena and as such are cross-culturally recognised. Others, such as moving the queen in the game of chess, involve knowledge of rules of the game
delineating possible actions based on cultural convention, and this might lead
to complex knowledge of chess that enables the recognition of a move as the
reection of another players ultimate intentions. In addition, there is no absolute limit to ascription of ultimate intentions. The player could purposefully be
losing a game of chess in order to obtain other goals. An important consequence of this distinction is that agents can use an action dened by its proximate intention (e.g., moving an object) as an instrument in attaining very
dierent ultimate intentions. This points to the nal characteristic of ordinary
actions: proximate and ultimate intentions are directly and hierarchically
related. Ultimate intentions over-determine proximate intentions (I move the
Queen in order to . . .), and proximate intentions specify the actions necessary
for anything to happen (I move the Queen in order to . . .). As we shall see
below, this is not the case in ritual actions.
The human cognitive system used in understanding action and agency can
thus be summarised as reacting to perceptible features such as movement and
contingency, as simulating proximate intentions and agency in perceived
actions, and as ascribing ultimate intentions to agents based on represented
cognitive attitudes such as beliefs and desires. This action representation is
modelled in gure 1.

Traces in the Sand

Before discussing how particular features of ritual actions tweak the cognitive
systems processing perceived actions, I will shortly address the human proclivity to understand events as caused by the actions of non-observable agents.
Representation of actions need not be forward directed, i.e. as predicting the
relation between perceived actions, their agent and a predictable result. The
system is exible and the entire causal scenario can unfold based on the perception of the consequences of an action. This is found in a simple form in the

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Ultimate intention

Action sequence

a1

a2

a3

a4

a5

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Figure 1: This schema models an ordinary action-sequence: An ultimate

intention determines a possible action sequence that in turn specify the
causal and temporal relation between a number of individual actions each
specied by their own proximate intention.
ability to infer the activity of agents from perceptible features, such as the
scent of a predator or traces in the sand. The ability to infer the activity of an
agent is more developed when it comes to human agents, where perceptions of
design, i.e. the deliberate spatial or functional relation between observable elements, is sucient to trigger representations of agency. Psychological research
has for a long time recognised what has more recently been dubbed promiscuous teleology, i.e. the tendency in humans to ascribe agency to natural and
physical events and to explain natural objects as somehow made by an agent
for a specic purpose (Kelemen 2004). Pre-school children prefer explanations
arguing that rocks are pointy in order to avoid having elephants sitting on
them to more naturalistic explanations of erosion by rain and wind (Kelemen
1999). Thus, the human cognitive system is not only able to ascribe agency to
actions observed, but is also able to infer the actions of an absent agent based
on observations of states in the world (e.g., the bread on the plate is no longer
there). This tendency is especially strong in childrenan observation that led
Piaget to argue that children are natural animists (Piaget 1992). Recent developmental research, however, indicates that this feature remains a default strategy also evoked by adults when lacking adequate information (Kelemen 2004).
This line of research is further backed by other studies pointing to the human
proclivity to ascribe agency to all sorts of events and states (Guthrie 1996;
Boyer 2001; Atran 2002). The branch scratching the window and the uncanny

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sound in the dark house are by default interpreted as the result of (often harmful) agents, and are only subsequently reclassied as natural events either by
means of physical investigation or by a conscious symbolic eort. Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie (1996, 2002) has argued that the proclivity to see agents
behind natural events and design behind natural objects can explain the origin
of religious representations. Religion would be a by-product of an evolved
ability to scan an ambiguous perceptual environment for agents. This makes
good evolutionary sense, since false positives are relatively cheap (seeing a
stone as a bear) in contrast to a false negative. Not perceiving a potentially
dangerous agent (seeing a bear as a stone) is most likely to be fatal. Because of
a selective pressure humans are oversensitive to cues of potential agents in the
environment (Barrett 2000). Ancestors, spirits and gods become relevant concepts as they explain events (why did this happen) and objects (why are they
designed this way) that human cognition has a proclivity to process as resulting from the activity intentional agents. Therefore, the popularity of culturally
transmitted concepts of religious agents might be conceived as the result of
human tendency to infer the actions of intentional agent from scarce an
ambivalent perceptual cues. As we shall see, something similar takes place
when perceiving the performance of ritual actions.

Agency in Ritual Actions

Classical anthropological theories have addressed the roles of agency in ritual
action from dierent angles. Traditionally, it has been argued that the performance of ritual action is motivated by beliefs in specic superhuman agents.
Ritual actions are accordingly special because of the special character of the
beliefs involved. Further, gods, spirits and ancestors are understood as fullling
specic ritual roles because of the beliefs entertained. In its purest form this
intellectualist approach sees ritual as a method of interacting with the world
based on awed explanatory theories of the world (e.g., Horton 1970). More
symbolically inclined anthropologists have argued that this rational motivation is only a (minor) part of the story and that the real function of a ritual,
and therefore its raison dtre, must be found elsewhere, whether in social cohesion (e.g., Durkheim 1965), Freudian repression (e.g., Roheim 1962) or as the
expression of basic social values (e.g., Beattie 1964).
None of these approaches, however, have adequately addressed why representations of superhuman agents such as gods, spirits and ancestors, are so
closely related to the performance of ritual actions. The relation between

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alleged religious beliefs and the presence of such special agents in rituals are
merely stated rather than explained. Further, few of these studies have paid
any close attention to how peculiar features of ritual actions aect representations of agency (or the opposite). When we turn our attention to representations of agency, ritual actions initially seem to be rather normal. We nd
actions performed by an agent and sometimes involving dierent types of
patients, instruments and objects. A Christian priest baptizes a child, a Jain
sacrices rice to the image of a Jina (Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994), or an
Ndembu priest heals a childless couple (Turner 1969). All are actions or,
rather, series of actions that can be analysed as observable agents performing
specic actions with proximate and purported ultimate intentions on patients,
possibly employing dierent types of instruments. In short, ritual actions
exploit cognitive systems that are used to process ordinary types of actions
(Lawson & McCauley 1990; McCauley & Lawson 2002). Further, ritual
agents generally seem to be special by having privileged positions that enable
them to perform specic ritual actions. Religious guilds usually impose a
strong monopoly on ritual services (Boyer 2001), and even if this is not the
case, individuals performing rituals often need to be initiated into a religious
group, or at least perform certain actions in order to evoke the right conditions
for performing the ritual. However, not all rituals are performed by agents
with special qualities, and the ecacy of the ritual action can be ensured by
other means, e.g., by the correct pronunciation of a spell, or by possessing the
correct ritual object. This is particularly pronounced in the co-called magical
practices, where agents perform ritual actions in order to achieve some specic
goal. So, even though ritual agents are often endowed with special qualities
and there seems to be a spontaneous tendency to ascribe ritual agents with
such qualities, rituals can attain their ecacy through other means than a
special agent. A theory of ritual agency must address how dierent ritual elements can become represented as wielders of the agency supplying the force
necessary for a ritual to have any ecacy.
An obvious solution to this problem lies in the fact that many rituals contain more or less direct reference to non-observable superhuman agents. The
structural presence of gods, spirits, ancestors, and holy gures is exactly the
dening characteristic of magical and religious rituals. Such agents are often
referred to as really performing the actions, the logical agent merely working
on their behalf. However, superhuman agents are by no means always directly
evoked, and they can be related to the ritual both directly as either agents or
patients, or indirectly as lending credence to the ecacy of specic practices or
objects. In some cases gods and spirits themselves act through intermediaries

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(e.g., baptizing) or are acted upon by humans (e.g., sacrice). In other cases
the superhuman agents have instituted ritual actions or objects thereby ensuring their ecacy. In Bringing Ritual to Mind, McCauley and Lawson treat
these aspects of religious rituals in depth (McCauley & Lawson 2002; see also
Lawson & McCauley 1990). McCauley and Lawson argue that a theory of
ritual form can explain why rituals are represented as ecacious actions. Further, by focussing on the structural role of superhuman agents, a formal analysis can elicit which rituals are considered to be central in a given religious
tradition, and whether any given ritual is repeatable or non-repeatable (among
other explanatory facts). In short, the more immediately gods or spirits are
represented to act in the ritual, the more important and central the ritual will
be for the participant (the Principle of Superhuman Immediacy). Further,
whereas ritual acts performed with superhuman agents as patients (e.g.,
sacrice) can be frequently repeated in order to renew the eect, rituals having
these gods or spirits as more or less direct agents (e.g., baptizing) are, in principle, non-repeatable (the Principle of Superhuman Agency). Thus, cultural
rituals can be divided into non-repeatable, odd-numbered rituals in which
superhuman agency is directly related to the agent slot in the ritual (e.g., a
consecrated priest baptizing), and repeatable, even-numbered rituals in which
a superhuman agency is directly related to the patient or instrument slot in the
ritual (e.g., sanctied bread in Holy Communion).
According to McCauley and Lawson, participants intuitions about ritual
performance are informed by knowledge about how superhuman agents are
related to a particular ritual. This entails tacit representations of how previously performed rituals enable particular ritual elements to function as agents
in a ritual (the priest can baptize because he is ritually initiated; the bread is
active because it is consecrated by an initiated priest). The ecacy and wellformed-ness of every ritual is thus judged by its relation to a vast network of
embedded rituals that must be taken into account in order to give a full structural description of any given ritual (McCauley & Lawson 2002: 19). It is an
empirical question, however, whether it is plausible that participants have
access to vast implicit networks of structurally embedded rituals when judging
the performance of a single ritual. Here I want to address another but related
matter. McCauley and Lawson argues that religious rituals are dened by the
role of Culturally Postulated Superhuman agents (e.g., gods) and as such, this
is the most important aspect distinguishing them from ordinary actions.
McCauley and Lawson therefore assert that . . . participants presume that
CPS-agents act denitively in ritual, because they are already inclined to credit
them the power to direct matters in life generally (McCauley & Lawson

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2002: 22, original emphasis). Thus, beliefs in acting gods, spirits and ancestors
are prior to their participation in ritual actions, whether as agents or patients.
I claim that it might very well be the other way around: That ritual actions
are the primary context of acting superhuman agents and that this subsequently
leads to representations of gods acting in life generally (Srensen 2007). This
can be expressed in the hypothesis that in religious traditions involving gods,
spirits, and/or ancestors but having no rituals in which these are really believed
to act, people will be very unlikely to ascribe real world events to the intervention of such agents. Contrary, in religious traditions involving both beliefs and
strong convictions that gods, spirits or ancestors act in rituals, people will be
much more susceptible to interpreting real world events as caused by such
agents. Ritual actions entailing representations of the involvement of superhuman agents facilitates more general beliefs.
This hypothesis is backed by psychological experiments where children
(age 3-5) are told a story about a magical object capable of changing anything
it touches into what it was two years before. This narrative has no eect in the
judgement of the children about the possibility of such an objects real existence, which is atly denied. In contrast, an action sequence seemingly changing an old postal stamp into a new one does not make the children doubt the
credibility of the action (they do not suspect cheating) but rather makes them
believe that such magical objects are real and in fact has been responsible for
the observed transformation (Subbotsky 1994). Thus, actions prevail where
concepts fail to substantiate beliefs in superhuman agency. Now, it might reasonably be argued that, in contrast to the psychological experiment, most ritual actions contain no direct perceptible evidence of the workings of a
superhuman agent. Even though many rituals claim to eect direct, if nonperceptible changes, we therefore need to direct our attention to the distinguishing features of ritual actions in order to understand how they can more
or less automatically produce representations of active superhuman agents.
The rst important feature concerns representations of intentionality in
ritual actions. In The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994), Humphrey and Laidlaw claim that we nd consistent displacement of intentional meaning
(1994: 260) in ritualized actions. Rituals are characterised as actions that must
be performed in the correct manner, no matter their instrumental eect or the
often diverse intentions participants can entertain as their personal reason
for performing a particular ritual. The identity of particular ritual actions
does not depend on participants intentions but, rather, on the adherence to
the stipulated actions dening a particular ritual sequence. The intentions of
ritual participants are thus directed to performing the whole ritual sequence.

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According to Humphrey and Laidlaw the very ontology of rituals is based on

the stipulation of the right sequential performance, or as philosopher John
Searle would have phrased it, in their constitutive rules (Searle 1969).
A basic problem with this approach is that it only covers stipulated ritual
actions (liturgical rituals) and not what Humphrey and Laidlaw call performative rituals (Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 12-18). The problem can be
solved if not only actions, but also agents and objects can be ritualized and
thereby facilitate representations of magical agency in the ritual action. In
such cases, it is the special quality of the object or agent that ensures the establishment of a connection between action and result, and the actions surrounding such ritualised objects or agents are non-intentional (and not unintentional)
due to their relation to these ritualized elements. The strange behaviour of a
shaman is not interpreted by participants as actions with ultimate intentions,
but rather as an index of the underlying special quality of the agent and his or
her ability to produce the desired end. Further, such cases usually also contain
some of the qualities that distinguish rituals from other types of actions, such
as condensation, redundancy and iteration, strange prosody, grammar and
vocabulary, or unusual communicative behaviour (Srensen 2005a). Thus,
rituals are not only actions in which superhuman agents are active, but are
actions distinguished from ordinary actions by the ritualization of one or several elements, whether agents, action sequences, or objects.
Therefore, we can rene the description by relating the ndings of Humphrey and Laidlaw to the dening characteristics of ordinary human action
representations discussed above. First, at a basic level, the perceptual features of
actions performed by participants will immediately entail the recognition of
these as agents, no matter their role in the larger action sequence. Individuals
are moving inside the perceptual eld; they are reacting to each other in a contingent manner; and they are manipulating objects and instruments. The activation of the cognitive systems dealing with such teleological actions will lead
to representations of proximate intentions: e.g., an agent hands out bread to
participants and participants open their mouths in order to receive the bread in
Communion. As such, rituals will be regarded as ordinary actions involving
agents, actions, patients and objects. However, in ritual actions, representations
of ultimate intentions, ordinarily related to the action sequence perceived, are
disconnected from the automatically produced representations of proximate
connections. The amount of bread received during Communion, the special
quality of the bread, the fact that the bread is being fed to you even as an adult
etc. immediately disconnects all ordinary representations of ultimate intentions
(e.g., eating in order to satisfy hunger). The very format of the ritual underscores

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Ultimate intention

Ritual action sequence

a1

a2

a3

a4

a5

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Proximate
intention

Figure 2: This schema models a ritual action representation: The performance of a specic ritual action sequence is determined by an ultimate
intention. This, however, does not specify the actions performed or the
causal relation between them. Instead the sub-actions are frozen into a
stipulated series of proximate intentions, whose performance only signals
that the ritual action sequence has been performed.
the fact that this is not to be understood as an ordinary act of eating. As such it
facilitates interpretations of the agency responsible for this connection and the
necessary force used to obtain the desired result. The transformation of representations between intention, action and causality is modelled in gure 2.
The disconnection of proximate and ultimate intention has a curious result,
namely that rituals attain an event-like character. In contrast to action, events
are changes in the world that are not specied by the ultimate intention of an
agent. At the same time, however, the actions performed will necessarily produce representations of proximate intentions related to the specic actions
performed, and as such are represented as actions involving agents, action,
patients and objects. So, what are we to make of the fact that rituals are both
like events and like actions? The solution to this problem lies in the human
proclivity to ascribe ultimate intentions to actions whenever presented with
proximate intentions. As participants in ritual actions cannot use their own
ultimate intentions to explain the proximate intentions found in the actions
performed, agents able to connect these two aspects of the actions must be
found elsewhere. Superhuman agents are highly relevant in this respect as their
projection into the ritual representation explain whose ultimate intentions
specify the actions performed. Humans have a proclivity to infer the activity

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of non-observable or absent agents in understanding real-world events and

objects. This tendency is even stronger in the relation to performance of ritual
actions as these are obviously actions. Further, they make possible the stabilising of which agents are evoked due to the repeated performance of the same
ritual in the same social context.
There is an additional aspect of ritual action that makes the evocation of
superhuman agency highly relevant. Rituals are not only distinct from ordinary actions because of the transformation of the link between proximate and
ultimate intentions. The causal link between action and purported result is
also radically altered. Even if some rituals seem to be almost totally devoid of
representations of any immediate result (e.g., the Jain puja described by Humphrey and Laidlaw), many rituals are much more intimately connected to representations of an eect of the actions, and in the domain of magical rituals
this instrumentality seems to be a dening characteristic. Still, even if ritual
actions are represented as having a particular eect, this representation does
not arise in a manner similar to causal expectations guiding non-ritual actions.
The causal unfolding of ordinary actions is guided by a signicant number of
intuitive expectations. If I throw a ball towards you, you can attempt to catch
the ball by processing its likely trajectory, youll expect it to fall down eventually, but you will not expect it to alter its direction by its own will. By contrast,
there are no intuitive expectations linking the action of making a babys head
wet and being baptized, casting spells over an axe used to cut down the bush
and getting an abundant harvest (Malinowski 1935), or burying magical medicine in the ground and getting revenge over a thief (Evans-Pritchard 1937).
This lack of causal transparency, however, does not entail that the fundamental
characteristic of ritual action is its meaninglessness (as proposed by Staal
1979). A meaningful relation can be established by means of two hermeneutical strategiesone based on available perceptual clues, another based on symbolic interpretations.
Since an obvious causal outcome of the action performed is lacking, the
participants can direct their attention to directly perceptible cues. The rst
hermeneutical strategy is thus characterised by the cognitive processes underlying so-called magical actions, namely perceived relations of contagion and
similarity (originally proposed by Frazer 1975). These impose severe formal
constraints on the actions performed: the water must touch the childs head,
the spell must be uttered in the vicinity of the axes, and the magical medicine
must be directed towards its goal. These perceptual features produce representations of what ethologist Hans Kummer describes as weak causal connections relating actions and possible result (Kummer 1995).

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295

Ritual actions are seldom performed in a contextual or semantic void.

Besides the weak causal connections, a second hermeneutic strategy is available
to ritual participants: they can relate ritual actions to more or less established
symbolic interpretations that connect actions to pre-specied conditions and
to pre-specied results. Instead of focusing on perceptual features of the actions
performed, participants can interpret the eect of actions by means of habitual
and conventional symbolic relations. These are to a large extent underdetermined by the actions performed, even though the actions do place certain
constraints on meaningful symbolic interpretations. Thus, the act of touching
a childs head with water is exactly an act of baptizing by means of the symbolic interpretation chosen to relate the actions performed to mythical narratives of Christ being baptized, to notions of essential change made through
contact with sanctied water etc. All such interpretations are only loosely constrained by the basic schematic properties involved in the actions and, because
of this under-determination, rituals are readily connected to larger conceptual
and institutional networks, and thus to both myth and dogma.
The two cognitive systems involved in representations of actions might help
us explain why interpretations of ritual action apparently cluster around these
two attractors. The perceptual interpretation is based on associative relations
between elements in the perceived action and a locally dened pragmatic purpose. Instead of attempting to integrate the whole ritual sequence into an
encompassing intentional structure, the simple action gestalts found the ritual
sequence can each be related directly to a specic goal. Thus, ingesting
sanctied bread will transfer sacred essence by means of contact, but the same
bread can be used in other action gestalts such as preventing theft by burying
it under the doorstep (Thomas 1991). In short, magical interpretations of
ritual actions entail that perceived schematic properties of individual action
gestalts are directly related to locally dened pragmatic purposes. This leads to
the formation of a context-near goal structure where the only thing that constrains the linking of a ritual act to a specic pragmatic purpose is its inherent
schematic structure. By contrast, the symbolic interpretation is based more or
less solely on a top-down structure in which the purported meaning of the
ritual can be constructed relatively independent of the actions taking place.
Understanding baptism as a symbolic entrance to a new fellowship does not
entail any great focus on the actions performedthese need only have a
marked temporal structure dividing before and after. The focus on the
meaning of a ritual leads to the formation of a context-distant intentional
structure in which the performance of ritual actions is related to symbolic
interpretations instead of local pragmatic situations. All instances of correctly

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performed rituals are thus understood as instances of the same symbolic procedure that has either generalizable and rather abstract results (the performance of ritual X leads to salvation) or cease to be ascribed any ecacy what
so ever.
In both of these cases, however, ascription of agency plays a key role in
representing rituals as actions with ecacy. In case of magical interpretations, agency is relegated to individual ritual elements that are really doing
the work and that are represented as indispensable if the ritual is to have any
ecacy (no transfer of sacred essence or protection against theft without
sanctied bread). Thus, ritual actions understood as instrumental for specic
pragmatic endeavours will automatically generate representations of magical agency responsible for the eect. These might be more or less strongly
identied with cultural representation of superhuman agents but the spread
of magical objects and instruments, without such connections (e.g., magical
medicine among the Azande, Evans-Pritchard 1937), indicates that this is a
secondary process. Symbolic interpretations that downplay both perceptible
elements and local pragmatic context makes representations of superhuman
agents even more relevant as they can guarantee that otherwise opaque
actions are actually connected to their purported results. Superhuman agents
thus not only solve the problem of relating proximate and ultimate intentions in ritual actionsspecifying why particular actions are performed. The
performance of ritual actions also makes their evocation highly relevant as
they eectively construct a causal link between the actions and their purported eect.
It is important to emphasise that the two hermeneutic strategies do not
characterise specic religious traditions or even particular rituals. They are
strategies that can be employed by ritual participants/observers to extract a
purpose or meaning of ritual actions. The dierence between the two strategies, however, has potentially important ramications for understanding the
development of religious institutions. Representatives of religious institutions
are generally sceptical or at least ambivalent towards magical interpretations as
it is dicult to control locally entrenched interpretations and these might
eventually produce competing symbolic interpretations. A method to control
this is to enforce strict symbolic and context-distant interpretations of the
ritual performed. The problem for religious institutions is that this is not only
unlikely to be met with great success, as individuals spontaneously invest context-near magical ecacy to ritual elements. Rituals specied by symbolic
interpretations alone also tend to become irrelevant to participants due to a

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lack of connection to locally dened, pragmatic concerns (see Boyer 2001 and
Srensen 2005b, 2007). This, in turn, might prompt movements of ritual
revitalisation or a search for sources of context-near ritual ecacy outside the
religious monopoly.

Conclusion
Attempting to explain the role of agency in human ritual actions makes it
necessary to pay close attention to the cognitive systems responsible for
understanding ordinary actions. Based on convergent evidence I claim that
two, hierarchically related, systems can be discerned when constructing an
operational model of human action representation. One chunks perceptual
motions into simple action gestalts dened by a teleological structure or
proximate intention. The second system unites dierent action gestalts into
a sequence dened by an ultimate intention. Together the two systems create
an action representation system in which actions with proximate intentions
are instrumental to ultimate intentions. Ritual actions dier from this model
of ordinary actions on two accounts. First, by means of ritualizing specic
elements, proximate intentions related to specic actions inside a ritual are
disconnected from ultimate intentions that might be entertained by participants. Even if participants do entertain ultimate intentions when performing the ritual, these cannot motivate the particular actions performed.
Second, ritual actions are causally disconnected from their purported result.
Strong causal relations based on intuitive expectations are replaced either by
weak, perceptually motivated relations or by more or less culturally approved
symbolic interpretations. Together, these two aspects of ritual actions make
the evocation of superhuman agency highly relevant: (a) by relating the
proximate and ultimate intentions of ritual actions (specifying why those
actions are performed); and (b) by guaranteeing the relation between the
actions performed and their purported result (specifying why the actions
work). Thus, theories that argue that beliefs in superhuman agents motivate
the performance of religious rituals might be on the wrong track. An alternative explanation focuses on the role of ritualized behaviour in producing
cues that makes the evocation of existing culturally transmitted superhuman
agents highly relevant or, alternatively, lead to the production of new superhuman agents.

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