again in the same specific way. The explanation for the cultural success
of rituals is to be found in processes that are not really transparent to
practitioners, that become clearer only with the help of psychological
experiments, anthropological comparisons and evolutionary consider-
ations.
People sacrifice the goat in the way prescribed, they circulate relics
counterclockwise and make a young shaman climb a pole for the same
reasons that make a whole variety of other rituals compulsive: because
these are snares for thought that produce highly salient effects by acti-
vating special systems in the mental basement. Human minds are so
constituted, with their special inference systems for unseen danger, [263]
their weak social concepts and salient social intuitions, and their
notions of counterintuitive agents, that these very special perfor-
mances become quite natural.
WHYRITUALS?