All societies developed beliefs about the supernatural. What is the supernatural? Traditionally, this has meant anything that seems unnatural. It has meant anything that possibly involved gods or other spiritual beings. Many people in the past, for example, thought that magnets were supernatural. (How does a magnet work? Do you see a 'force'?) People in historical cultures saw many things as being supernatural, things like earthquakes, the causes of storms, or the movement of stars in the night sky. Some aspects of human behavior were also seen as coming from the gods, as in the case of illness for example. In short, people tended to associate the many things that they did not understand with the supernatural. This is a very reasonable, and human, thing to do without access to modern technology and science. (Modern science, after all, is itself a very recent historical development.)
Beliefs about the supernatural formed the basis for many other ideas that related human beings to the natural world and to each other in societies. Ideas that attempted to describe the structure of the universe, for example, are called cosmological ideas. These not only presented a scientific explanation of the universe, but they also described the place of humanity within the large scheme of things. It is true that in the modern world "cosmology" is a separate science unto itself, but historically this has covered scientific and moral concerns. Cosmology was an attempt to find order in the universe and to begin to assert control over these unseen forces of nature, such as the weather. They were also beliefs that affected the social and political structures of societies. Cosmological beliefs can be viewed as a kind of spiritual technology that helped humans control their world. One way to control the future was to predict what was going to happen.
A distinct class of people developed who could "correctly" forecast future events. Weather foecasting was of particular interest to agrarian societies. To predict the future augurs, shamans, astrologers and priests tapped into their cultural cosmology and produced answers to topical (and sometimes mundane) questions. They could achieve their results becasue they possessed a fundamental understanding of the interaction of humanity and the cosmos.
In a broader sense, cosmological ideas control how you look at the universe and your place in it. In fact, it has been argued that cosmological ideas about the universe are at the root of all human action. Do you think your cosmological ideas shape your actions? This week, you will see how different societies responded to supernatural problems with cosmological ideas.
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2. Interpretation of Images.
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