umes of mythology, fantastic tales, anecdotes, cartoons, religious writ-
ings and science fiction, you will get an extraordinary variety of differ-
entconcepts,but you will also find that the number of templatesis very
limited and in fact contained in the short list given above.
Indexing supernatural themes in this way has all the attractions of
butterfly-collecting. We now know where to put various familiar themes
and characters in our systematic catalogue of templates, from listening
trees to bleeding statues and from the Holy Virgin to Big Brother.
There is no reason to stop there. We could go through compilations
such as Bullfinch's Mythology or various folktale indices and check that
most concepts actually correspond to one of these templates. However, [79]
we have much better things to do. For one thing, we should explain why
these combinations of concepts seem so good to human minds that the
supernatural imagination seems condemned to rehash these Variations
on a Theme. Second, we should try and figure out why someof these
combinations are much more frequent than others. Third, we should
explain why some supernatural concepts are taken very seriously indeed,
as representing real beings and objects with consequences in people's
lives. Explaining all of this is probably more rewarding and certainly
more urgent than classifying mythological themes.
Our first task was to show that very diverse concepts from different
places correspond to a few templates. Now we must explain whythis is
the case. To achieve this, we do what could be called "experimental
theology." In controlled experiments, we create new concepts, and we
see whether concepts that correspond to these templates are really
better recalled or better transmitted than other concepts.
Psychologist Justin Barrett and I have been involved in running
such experiments for some time now. Our reasoning was that the pre-
sent explanation of supernatural concepts, on the basis of what we
know from anthropology, also implied precise psychological predic-
tions. Cultural concepts are selected concepts. They are the ones that
survive cycles of acquisition and communication in roughly similar
forms. Now one simple condition of such relative preservation is that
concepts are recalled.So Barrett and I designed fairly coherent stories
in which we inserted various new violations of ontological expecta-
tions as well as episodes that were compatible with ontological expec-
tations. The difference in recall between the two kinds of information
would give us an idea of the advantage of violations in individual
memory. Naturally, we only used stories and concepts that were new
to our subjects. If I told you a story about a character with seven-
WHATSUPERNATURALCONCEPTSARELIKE