Much of modern academia and science ignores the societal nuances
of supernatural experience. However, there are cross-cultural features that
make numinous experience universal. It goes without saying that if these events
were culturally specific and developed solely within each separate culture,
then each account would be wholly unique. But we find shared features and
universal similarities. This stems from the experiential nature of the supernatural
experience. Social accounts across cultures are based upon the dialogue that is
created when perceiving the experience.
Cross-cultural dissemination also occurs through a process anthropologists
call peer polity interaction. Traditionally, PPI refers to exchanges of social
behavior and material goods that are appropriated (for lack of a better term)
as separate polities interact with one another. They both symbolically and
literally begin to take on attributes of one another. This happens in ritual as
well. Both material artifacts and symbolic artifacts share characteristics
through an intermingling of separate cultures and their gods. We see this in the uncanny resemblance between
ancient mystery religions in the Greco-Roman world. In both ritual and in
ritual paraphernalia, there are clear features of peer polity interaction at
work. It’s left to us to examine how and to what extent PPI affects the
legitimacy and dissemination of supernatural folk belief in the modern world.
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