successful people who are not, in one way or another, suspected to
have committed such witchcraft murders in order to steal the others'
goods or talents.
The representation of the evuractivates some intuitive biological
expectations and violates others. It conforms to expectations in the
sense that we routinely produce assumptions about hidden internal
features of animal species. Tigers are aggressive but chickens are not;
tigresses give birth to live offspring but hens lay eggs. This is not
because of where they live or what they eat. We intuitively expect that
such salient differences in observable behavior are caused by internal
differences in the ways animals are built. On the other hand, we do [67]
not expect such fundamental internal differences between members of
the same species. All tigers and all chickens are supposed to have the
same organs (with the exception of sexual organs). This is where the
evurconcept is counterintuitive: in assuming that the list of internal
organs is different in somepeople.
That species-membership is essential and permanent (once an
aardvark, always an aardvark) is an intuitive expectation. So it is none
too surprising that metamorphoses should be common supernatural
devices. People turn into animals, animals into mountains or rocks,
etc. Now such concepts again illustrate how supernatural imagination
is more structured than we would usually assume. First, note that the
transformation is generally not complete. That is, the prince who
"turned into a toad" has not literally become a toad; if he had, the
story would stop there. This new toad would carry on doing whatever
toads do, which is fine but of no great narrative interest. What holds
the reader's or listener's attention in such stories is that we now have a
human mind, indeed the prince's own mind, trapped in a toad's body,
which is a very different matter.
Second, the choice of species or kind of object is itself constrained
by intuitive ontology. Psychologists Frank Keil and Michael Kelly went
through a mass of mythological and folkloric material to tabulate what
was turned into what, and how often. The results show that most
accounts of mythical metamorphoses occur between close ontological
categories. Persons are turned into animals more often than into
plants, and into mammals and birds rather than insects and bacteria;
animals are turned into other animals or plants more often than into
inert natural objects. Both persons and animals are seldom turned into
artifacts. Now what does it mean to say that two ontological categories
are "close"? Simply that they have lots of inferences in common. Turn-
WHATSUPERNATURALCONCEPTSARELIKE