A Paucity of Diversity in Supernatural Beings

In principle, there should be no limit to the diversity of supernatural beings that humans can imagine. However, as the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has argued, only a limited repertoire of such beings is exploited in human religions. Its members—ghosts, gods, ancestor spirits, dragons, and so on—have in common two features:

1. They each violate some major intuitive expectations about living beings: the expectation of mortality, of belonging to one and only one species, of being limited in one’s access to information, and so on.

2. They satisfy all other intuitive expectations and are therefore, in spite of their supernaturalness, rather predictable.

Why should this be so? Because being “minimally counterintuitive” (Boyer’s phrase) makes for “relevant mysteries” (my phrase) and is a cultural attractor. Imaginary beings that are either less or more counterintuitive than that are forgotten or are transformed in the direction of this attractor.

John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter (2012-02-14)

• culture
• religion
• supernatural