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British Psychological Society: Consciousness & Experiential Psychology Section 

‘Exceptional Experiences’ Conference 
8th September 2018 
 
Supernatural Habitat Nell Aubrey, UCL 
 
In the 1981 film ‘Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’, the eponymous hero 
tells the story of the disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant and the fate of the 
‘lost’ city of Tanis: 
Following the sack of Jerusalem by the Egyptians, the Ark may have been taken to 
Tannis, and hidden in a secret chamber called the Well of Souls. A year later the 
whole city ‘​was consumed by the desert, in a sandstorm that lasted a whole year; wiped 
clean by the wrath of God​’. At the dramatic denouement of the film the rediscovered 
Ark, when opened, is found to contain, not the stone tablets of the ten 
commandments, but dust. However, thunder clouds stir ominously in its depths and 
this very same dust, now eerily animated, flows out of the Ark manifesting as 
luminous spirits, followed by divine vengeance in the form of a lightning storm. 
This is the Bible according to Hollywood of course; the lost city of Tanis, 
rediscovered in the 19th century, was not destroyed by a sandstorm, and when the 
Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was destroyed in the Babylonian sacking of 
Jerusalem in 587 BC, the Ark probably went north rather than south.  
 
Despite these small factual errors, the film remains a brilliant illustration of the 
operations of divine vengeance in the Ancient Near East. The Old Testament owes a 
great deal to the religious traditions, literature and mythology of successive 
neighbouring civilizations: Hurrian, Hittite, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and 
Babylonian. Threats of the sort of desertification that befell Indiana Jones’ Tanis, 
occur with remarkable regularity throughout the biblical corpus. 
​Psalm 107 ‘He turneth Rivers into a Wilderness, a fruitful land into a salt desert’.   
Poetic these are they pale in comparison with the detailed mechanisms of 
destruction wielded by Mesopotamian Deities. ​ ​Like many ancient religious 
traditions, the Mesopotamians envisaged the soul as existing in several parts, not all 
of which were immortal. The wind-like ‘​zaqlqu​’, which in life parted from the body in 
dreams, was one of 2 aspects surviving death; becoming part of the gentle breezes 
that lift the dust from ruins, abandoned cities and temples. In this condition they 
could neither help nor harm, but once stirred into action by the Storm God Enlil they 
became the terrifying S​ edru Ezzu​: early summer storms that form a swirling wall of 
sand stretching from horizon to horizon, and can reduce mudbrick building to dust, 
root up trees and dry up everything they pass. These blast winds or furious winds of 
the Desert, are anthropomorphically personified in the persons of the U ​ tukku 
Limnuti​, the Evil Seven, that bring darkness down from ​Abuta​, the mountain of the 
Underworld. The Land of the Dead, the Underworld, or the Great Beneath, is of 
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course the barren Wilderness par excellence, which underpins the constant 
connection between ghostly and demonic powers. In the Mesopotamian texts the 
very very long dead E ​ oeinmu​ (intellect) aspect of the soul having enjoyed an afterlife 
as an ancestral spirit, takes up residence in the Great Beneath as a Demon. The 
greatest threat wielded by the Gods was their power to open the gates of the 
underworld and to release the multitude of the dead to devour the living. These 
decimations personified plagues, famines and other destructive natural phenomena 
perceived to be the Acts of a variety of angry Gods.  
 
The equation of natural phenomena with powerful supernatural forces is a universal 
feature across religious traditions, expressed through the ecological experiences of 
each culture. Furthermore, physical landscapes provide a fundamental background 
to the explanatory landscape of experiences and how they are interpreted and 
integrated with natural and unnatural phenomena into cultural traditions and belief 
systems. Supernatural powers are frequently localized within a particular arena in 
which they reside and rule, both in terms of actual geographical place, and by type. 
Wilderness has its own mythology: Mountains, hills, woods, forests, rivers and 
springs all feature as sites of special supernatural interest, as do wastelands whether 
scrub, steppe, marsh, swamp or desolate ruins. Wilderness is of course, very much a 
constructed concept: its common denominator being a place where humans aren’t, 
and for moderns it is far more valued than it was in ancient or medieval times, due to 
its relative scarcity. After nearly 2 millennia of preaching against the ‘superstitions’ 
of well dressing, seasonal bonfires and sacred trees the decline of pagan nature 
spirits in western Europe probably owes a good deal more to concrete than 
Christianization. 
The term Wilderness comes from the Old English for a place of Wild Deer or game, 
this in turn is derived from the proto-Germanic ​wildia "​ in the natural state, 
uncultivated, untamed, undomesticated, uncontrolled”. In the term ​bewilder​, the 
archaic w​ ild​ means "lead astray, lure into the wilds. The Latin ‘​desertum​’: ‘a thing 
abandoned’, underlies the later romance ​desert​: uncultivated, waste, barren and 
unproductive. The Wilderness is where the wild things are, quite literally, be they 
Deer, the Big Bad Wolf, or Scary monsters; and by implication a place where humans 
should not be. The other-than-human nature of the wilderness is the essence of its 
wildness. The creepy stillness of the graveyard lies over derelict houses, and the ruins 
of cities where people once were before being laid waste by war, flood, drought, 
volcanic eruption, earthquake or phantasmal sandstorms.   
 
Whilst Wilderness is not confined to the Desert, it is an accident of source survival 
that the ancient Near East provides the longest documented period of religious, 
medical, magical and even legal traditions that deal with the manifestation of the 
supernatural. A great deal of the source survival is due to the excellent preservative 
conditions of dry sand, just as much as the source content is due to the looming and 
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threatening presence of the desert. Of course once upon a time everything was 
wilderness, long term settled human habitations such as Jericho are a feature of the 
last ten thousand years or so. Jericho probably originated as a stopping place for 
pastoralists and hunter gatherers, a place for meetings and burials, well in advance 
of any permanent settlement. To the earliest sedentary humans the ‘otherness’ of 
non-settled areas developed over millennia as a manifestation of all that was outside 
the fragile human structures of civilization; kinship, law and religion. The otherness 
of outside increased in tandem with the scale of urbanization. In the ​Marriage of 
Murtu t​ he cosmopolitan Mesopotamians describe the nomadic Amorites as less than 
noble savages: 
“Lo, their hands are destructive, (their) features are (those) [of monkeys]...A tent-dweller, 
[buffeted] by wind and rain, [who offers no] prayer... He eats uncooked meat, / In his lifetime 
has no house. / When he dies, he will not be buried.” 
Sedentary life, protection from the elements, cooked food, religious rites and, finally, 
proper burial are the fundamental signs of a fully human, civilized life.   
 
The Order that underlies Civilization is in no way a natural state, it had to be carved 
out, either from the natural environment, or in mythological terms, from primordial 
chaos. Many creation myths involve a cosmic struggle between the personified forces 
of order and chaos in which successive generations of Gods subjugate their 
primaeval predecessors; Giants such as Ymir or the Greek Titans, Sea Creatures 
such as Leviathan, Tiamat and Behemoth, and a multitude of other Chaos ‘monsters’. 
The defeated parties are imprisoned, often under mountains, or otherwise 
subjugated and the resulting order is created, shared in and maintained by the 
Victors. The Pantheons of the Ancient Near East operate at a cosmic level wielding 
the awesome uncontrollable forces of nature, whilst simultaneously occupying 
metropolitan civilizations that essentially mirrored human societies: complete with 
conspicuous consumption and a civil service. The existence of an ‘inside’ means the 
existence of an outside: exceptions to the established power structures, human or 
divine, some of whom menaced the wilderness beyond the city walls. ‘Otherness’, if 
not outright enmity, is the special preserve of the ‘in-between’ beings, that occupy 
the conceptual space between humans and Gods. Their social and geographical 
alienation is often represented in their anomalous physical forms such as immutable 
shapeshifting, or hybridity, inherently un-natural and monstrous. But more 
importantly each ‘animal’ aspect of a Hybrid symbolizes its inherent force, and 
similarly many gods take on theriomorphic forms. Protective, Apotropaic entities 
such as the l​ amassu ​and ​sˇe ̄du figures that stand on either side of entryways to 
palaces and temples are depicted as often winged, colossal human-headed bulls or 
lions, are the ideal supernatural bouncers, potent enough to protect against any 
manner of intruder. T ​ utu ​of Egypt, depicted with his underlings, the Evil 7, has the 
body of a striding, winged lion, the head of a human, with the heads of hawks and 
crocodiles projecting from the body, and the tail of a serpent. His northern 
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counterpart ​Pazuzu​ (one of the few Mesopotamians to make it to Hollywood), has a 

canine-like face with bulging eyes, a scaly winged body, the talons of a bird and a 
snake-headed penis. Both ​Tutu ​and P ​ azuzu​ are ​Master Demon​s, whose evil powers are 
directed towards keeping other lessers evils in line. Both are specifically invoked 
against the unregenerate demon L ​ amasˇtu​, the daughter of the Son God ​Anu​, she 
channels primordial chaos and acts malevolently on her own whims, not at the 
instigation of a more powerful Deity. ​Lamasˇtu​ has seven names and is described in 
incantations as ‘seven witches’, specifically targets unborn and newborn children, 
new and expectant mothers, and also brings nightmares, diseases and sucks men’s 
blood.  
The exact nature of ‘ unattached’ entities, shifts between cultures, but the 
undomesticated destructive forces such as L ​ amasˇtu​ form a persistent seam of 
hardcore malevolence. Against a background of ambiguous or ambivalent spiritual 
beings, whose goodwill is engaged through the offering of cult and a complex 
exchange economy of rituals, offerings and propitiation, these irredeemable 
reprobates, are very much the Terminators of the cosmic sphere. No cult is offered 
to them, as they cannot be propitiated or enter into reciprocal relationships: they are 
outside the sphere of kin group, patronage and community, both human and 
superhuman. These beings are the ones whose notice is simply best avoided, as they 
are responsible for and personified as a host of diseases and other misfortunes.   
 
But before looking at the supernatural populations of the Wilderness in more detail, 
I would like to consider their evolutionary background. Modern research on 
Monsterology postulates that horror stories act to propel us backwards in time ‘into 
virtual universes that brim with lurking dangers and aggressive predators’. 
Dangerous Beasts have to share headspace with a multitude of imaginative 
constructs, but it makes sense that our imagined monsters began as real ones. 
Human experiences over millennia created ecologically augmented monsters, 
different shapeshifters occupy different cultural habitats; w ​ ere-Leopards​ in Africa, 
were-Tigers​ in India and w
​ ere-Crocodiles​ in Indonesia, and in general the 
anthropological data points to the embellishments of local predators rather than the 
imaginative evolution of entirely new sorts of monsters (Asma p. 126, Rose, 2000, pp. 
389–390, Clasen) 
 
Of course ‘During the formation of the human brain the fear of being grabbed by 
sharp claws, dragged into a dark hole and eaten alive, was not an abstraction’ 
(Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters). ​ Hominids and proto-hominids faced an 
impressive range of threats from Predators ​ Far from being a mighty hunter tempted 
down from the trees by bloodlust, early man lived in a world teeming with multiple 
gigantic versions of modern day carnivores now extinct. O ​ f the 15 identified species 
of mega carnivore mammals including lions, sabre-toothed tigers, and bears, only 6 
of the smaller species remain. Not only were their extinct cousins between three and 
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four times the size and weight of their modern counterparts, but the size of the 
megaherbivores they predated strongly suggests they hunted in prides, clans and 
packs. S ​ ize and Predation of course go hand in hand; ​memorialized in impressive 
imprints in human consciousness; from the Kraken and King Kong , to Godzilla, 
Jaws and even Nessie, mythologies, folklore and popular culture all resound with the 
motifs of of Big as Bad. ​Th​e ​universal characteristics of mythical monsters include 
their great size and or strength, claws, fangs or some other means of facilitating 
predation, and a taste for human flesh and blood (in Saler & Ziegler 220). P ​ redatory 
agents were permanent features of the environment for most of the 55 million years 
of our evolution from early mammals. Apart from the mega carnivores, hominids 
evolved being predated by wolves, leopards, hyenas and big cats of all kinds, snakes, 
bears, crocodiles, komodo dragons, sharks and other primates. The archaeological 
record is littered by skulls of hominids with puncture marks that match perfectly the 
teeth of large feline predators, reptiles and raptors (Hart & Sussman, 2008)​. T ​ hreats 
from animals are not limited to predation of course, stings and bites can cause 
infection even if not poisonous, potentially fatal injuries can occur through goring, 
tampling or crushing. The ill advised proximity to any number of large herbivores is 
attested by the massive fatalities from Elephant stampedes on both sides of the 
Second Punic War, but possibly most beautifully illustrated by a gold Scythian belt 
buckle depicting a man being bitten by a grumpy camel. 
 
The human brain is “pre-wired to learn fears that were of relevance in the Stone 
Age” (194). Ridley), with a startle response of an evolutionary depth of 5 million 
generations of primates increasingly aware of themselves as prey. In cases of 
uncertainty, perception is biased in favour of sensing agency, either seen or unseen. 
Therefore, “the fail-safe mechanism for most species would be to interact with an 
unknown object as though it were animate, and probably predaceous.” (Ristau, 1989, 
139). This regularly result in false alarms, but this is far less costly than becoming a 
meal, even at the price of thinking you are having a heart attack. This Hypervigilant 
detection of agency combines with other cognitive norms, Animism, (the detection 
of life in inanimate forms), and Anthropomorphism, (our predilection to project 
human notions of mind onto non-human animals or objects). Evolutionary 
psychologists and Cognitive Scientists have discussed the origins of religion within 
the framework of these three core cognitive stratagems. Detecting supernatural 
agents in our environment, rather than predators, seems like a big leap, and 
arguments continue as to how this gap is bridged.  
 
I don’t have an answer, but I am fascinated by some of the possibilities suggested by 
the complex behaviour that has been observed in male chimpanzees. In response to 
perceived threats, such as thunder and lightning, chimps swagger and charge about 
hooting and aggressively shaking and throwing branches and other objects in the 
direction of the offending weather. Thunderstorms trigger the same reaction as 
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does a predator or a rival, or certain other natural phenomena : fire, rivers and 
waterfalls. These threatening displays have been described as ‘directed toward these 
inanimate targets as though they were alive’, and all of the above are characterized 
by one or more of the features of living things; motion, unpredictability, heat, noise 
and growth.  
 
Waterfalls, thunderstorms, rivers and fire, which so impress wild chimpanzees, are 
also amongst the earliest and most widely recorded examples of animistic worship. 
This is not to suggest that Chimps have found religion, even in the form of the 
mighty Thor; threatening an intimidating and emotionally salient natural 
phenomenon with a branch is not the same as imbuing it with ‘a local habitation and 
a name’. This behaviour in non-humans has been described as ‘Reflexive Animism’: 
a strategy by which inanimate objects and extreme sensory stimuli showing even 
minimal ‘proof of life’ are imbued with agency, and presumably with appetites and 
teeth to match. Animals in the wild not infrequently behave as though in the 
presence of an unseen predator. In the detection of agency invisible and intangible 
agents can be tracked via signs of their presence, a skill vital in stalking and hunting. 
Whilst T​ hunder and Lightning are neither wholly visible or tangible, they alter 
atmospheric pressure and make a lot of noise, throw branches and sometimes whole 
trees around, and generally make their presence felt in a threatening manner. 
Imbuing a Storm with Agency similarly imbues it with intent, hence Wild 
Chimpanzees threaten Thunderstorms with the same performance they would put on 
for a rival Chimp, or predators. Making a lot of noise and throwing things about is a 
communicative strategy, widespread amongst testosterone fuelled males of various 
species, and presumably the Chimp hopes that the threat communicated will be 
understood. Inasmuch as a Chimp interprets the behavioural cues of a 
Thunderstorm by the framework of his own behavioural repertoire, this​ strongly 
suggests that non-human primates extend agency beyond its biological limits, just as 
humans do. The shift between the two, ​the attribution or rather ‘misattribution’ of 
mental rather than solely biological agency to natural phenomena, forms part of a 
conceptual bridge in understanding how humans understand and relate to their 
natural and supernatural environment. 
 
Although in the modern western world one has to go out of one’s way to be eaten by 
a predator, to the extent that the term is now associated with sexual criminality, 
rather than carnivores. Apart from Large Carnivores and Snakes, which Indiana 
Jones famously hated, the list of human ‘primal’ fears is short and universal: Spiders, 
Strangers, Solitude, Darkness, Heights, Deep water, Thunderstorms, Confined 
spaces, Scrutiny and Blood. All of the above are associated with the substantial 
dangers presented by predation, pain, conflict and high risk environments. Darkness 
and Deep Water also cover the more abstract fear of uncertainty, which merely exists 
as the portal through which all other possible terrors may emerge, and upon which 
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the imposition of form and substance is laid, accurate or not. These same fears are 
still prevalent amongst human city dwellers, and the entirely common sense 
responses towards seen and​ ​unseen dangers still escalate in the dark or at night; in 
an unfamiliar environment; when startled; or in the face of solitude, illness, or the 
prospect of death. Wilderness environments even today are populated by most of our 
greatest terrors. And in the wilderness one must factor in the additional possibilities 
for misadventure in terms of exposure, disorientation, thirst, hunger, lack of sleep, 
temperature extremes, and loss of one’s wits from any one of the above... and those 
are just the dangers from the mundane, visible world. The absence of safety (in the 
form of protection from dangerous predators, or access to food, water, shelter, 
medical care or human company) seems to have been reflected in the gathering mass 
of unknown but dangerous ‘others’ in the lonely places of the ancient world, 
themselves echoes of the wilderness as the locale of the dangerous and unknown.  
 
Being outsiders and therefore exiles from the ordered natural or supernatural 
structures of the world also accounts for the stateless, lawless and all together 
aberrant nature of the Wild and its inhabitants. The Wandering spirits of the dead 
and wandering demons, are considered two of the most dangerous entities in the 
Ancient Near East, and are frequently the subject of protective magical spells. The 
spirits of the dead most often wander because their bodies have been left unburied or 
the appropriate rites and sacrifices have been neglected, the revenge for such 
dereliction was believed to be both indiscriminate and deadly. Surviving execration 
dolls, figurines symbolising pursuing demons, are often depicted with their limbs 
bound, or twisted, and the head and neck forced backwards, specifically to cripple 
them and prevent them pursuing their prey. Similarly drawings of bound demons, 
and long, legalistic incantations inscribed onto curse bowls, employ sympathetic 
magic to symbolically trap the demon in the object. The ritual aspect of such spells is 
fortified by burning or burial of the object in a suitably ‘’dangerous’ location, a tomb, 
in the steppe, the desert, or ruins or a crossroads, in order to contain them, in 
perpetuity. Most of the execration objects discovered have been excavated from old 
cemeteries. 
 
Examples of Assyrian Hand of A ghost cures. 
 
If a ghost seizes on a man and he is hot (and) cold (alternately), his terror approaching so 
that) he (can)not rest by day or by night, his voice uttering in [sl]eep (?) like the sound of the 
wind : it is the hand of a ​hostile ghost of the ruins which has seized on him​. 
 
A ghost which pursues has ​seized on him in the desert 
 
Brigand-demon of the highway and c​ rossroad, 
 
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An evil wind hath blown upon me, and a ​ghost of the roads pursueth me​. So am I 
perturbed, distressed, and troubled 
 
Lurker Demons:​ Another group of Egyptian demons, ​werets ​ (great ones) did not 
wander about like (literally) lost souls, but their malevolent influence was restricted 
to specific topographical features in which they lurked looking for victims.  
 
The evil god is an evil u.-demon, a ​demon of the steppe, demon of the mountain, demons 
of the sea, or demon of the tomb 
 
The harmful udug [daimon] is present in the​ steppe,​ the ala [daimon] ​envelops (​ its victim) in 
the​ steppe.   
  
“If when he comes up from the water, his body is paralyzed and he (feels like he) is spinning 
and falls down, he was struck by the ​‘lurker’ of the river.​..” 
 
Demons have a special association with ​Mountains, Storms and the Blast-Winds 
described earlier 
 
“the murderous storm-demon is an unleashed lurker demon”  
 
‘They are billowing clouds which causes gloom in Heaven, 
they are the blast of the rising winds which cause darkness on a bright day’  
 
As already mentioned, the deification of Storms is prevalent throughout ancient and 
modern religion: weather Gods proliferate across Ancient Near Eastern iconography, 
Greek Myths, Mesoamerican rituals and even Hollywood franchises. Mountains are 
frequently personified as Storm Gods, their power manifesting as Thunder and 
Lightning, Avalanches, and storms of all kinds. Most of the Great Gods of the 
Ancient Near East: E ​ l, Dagon, Belial, YHWH ​and​ Tessub​ are associated with 
mountains, and storms, and depicted either in symbol or text, wielding lightning 
bolts. The importance of seasonal climate to an area where agriculture first 
developed is pretty much obvious, but Mountains hold an ambiguous role across 
myth, depending on how fertile or arid the landscape they occupy. A great deal of 
time and effort was spent carting building supplies up mountains, from 
Mesopotamia to Mexico. Gilgamesh’s friend the wild man Enkidu, the first in a 
tradition of hairy w​ odwose​, who I always think of as being like Captain Cave-Man, 
was living happily off the land before Gilgamesh made him get a hair cut, and cut 
down a holy mountain cedar forest to build a temple. In Mexico the Mountain is a 
beneficent God or ​Apu​, entreated to care for the camelid herds, but like the other 
in-between places, they are infested with ungovernable evil spirits. Some of these 
also occupy the ancient mayan stone tombs, and even today are considered the 
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source of a ghostly infection, almost exactly the same as the Hand of a Ghost, 
described above. 
 
In the arid heights of the Judean wastes hundreds of small pillars and altars have 
been found along the herding routes of nomadic pastoralists, often connected to 
tumuli tombs. This may point to an early but extremely persistent tradition of 
ancestor and tribal cult, ironically our best textual evidence for these are the multiple 
injunctions against them in the chronologically later books of the Old Testament. A 
plethora of small cult sites based around Terebinth ‘holy trees’, masseboth, stone 
pillars, and altars on ‘high places’ are described being destroyed; desecrated with 
human bones, their idols burnt and smashed to dust, which is then dumped in the 
Kidron graveyard outside the new cult centre of Jerusalem. That so many survive is 
a testament to the enduring depth of these personal and tribal forms of managing the 
supernatural landscape in the face of the pressures of centralization or eradication. 
Even once demonized, Mesoamerican tombs, like the Irish sidhe mounds, are aspects 
of belief tied into landscape by anciently deep roots, and not easily torn up by 
conversion or reform of religion. 
 
The less manageable aspects of the mountain landscape are frequently represented 
not just by demons but by Giants, ogres and trolls: often taking the form of a 
humanoid-mountain hybrid, typified by enormous size, a craggy appearance and 
cannibalism. This form of sub-human hybridity, possibly best typified by 
Polyphemus the Cyclopes in the Odyssey, is another depiction of barbarism: outside 
the human and the domestic in everything from dress to table manners. Trolls and 
Frost Giants feature heavily in Scandinavian myth and folklore, the outlaw ​Grettir 
kills Giants and Zombies and wrestles and seduces trolls in his 21 stint in the wilds. 
The poster boy for the archetypal ‘other’, the half-​jotun​ (frost giant) ​Loki​ has three 
monstrous children with the Troll-woman ​Angroburdr​, an indiscretion which creates 
a form of mischief ‘squared’, and shifts the fate of the A ​ esir​ inexorably towards a 
volcanic apocalypse. Once ​Loki​ wrests free of his confinement in the geysirs of the 
‘kettlewood’, where he has been chained up causing the odd earthquake, he joins 
with ​Fenrir​ (the wolf), ​Jorgmungandr​ (the sea-monster) and all H ​ el​ breaks loose, quite 
literally. Which goes to show, You can take the monster out of chaos, but you 
cannot take the chaos out of the monster.   
 
Ragnarok is an apocalypse of ice and fire, very much what I’m hoping for from the 
final season of Game of Thrones, and like so much of myth and folklore is inexorably 
tied to Natural phenomena and the physical Landscape. The defeat of the 
gigantomachy by Zeus and his Olympian brethren is mapped upon the landscape of 
the Mediterranean, at the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 Philostratus records that at 
the time people thought the Giants were rising to revolt. The battleground was 
thought to be located in the volcanic Phlegrean fields, on the NW curve of the Bay of 
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Naples, where the geographer Strabo (5th AD) describes the Wounds of 
thunderbolted giants, pouring out in streams of fire and water. At Leuca near 
Tarentum, the sulphurous water springs were considered to be contaminated with 
the i​ chor​ of the Giants blood. The volcanic landscape made sense in terms of the 
Wars of the Gods, especially in view of the enormous bones they found. At Leuca, the 
‘Cave of the Giants’ contained sulphurous springs and gigantic fossils, and all over 
the ancient mediterranean the fossilized bones of giraffes, rhinos mastodons, and 
hippo’s were interpreted as the bones of giants from numerous mythical wars with 
various Gods.  
 
Individual experiences of the exceptional, the spooky, demonic and divine inform 
and are informed by the traditions they inherit in their expectations and 
explanations. This also informs those universal perceptual errors that regularly affect 
us, Pareidolia, the propensity to see faces in random images and patterns e​ xplains 
how human forms and features​ are seen in natural phenomena as divergent as the 
Old Man of Hoy and the Horsehead Nebula to clouds, trees, rocks and even toast. 
The Roman poet Claudian described the forests near the summit of Etna as full of 
Giants, vanquished by the thunderbolts of Zeus; their ‘faces, fixed in the trees, still 
threaten cruelly’. Psychoneurological research has demonstrated that humans are 
biased in favour of detecting human-like features, even a​ minimal arrangement of 
punctuation marks in the appropriate formation is instantly recognisable as an 
expressive face, as demonstrated by the recent rise of emoticons. The same applies 
to interpretations of noises; P ​ areidolia also occurs in the auditory capacity; hearing 
intelligible words in random sounds, white noise, wind, wolf howls and birdsong, is 
far from uncommon and is notably reported in cases of sensory deprivation. Both of 
these cognitive illusions are a form of Apophenia​, ​an​ ​excess​ ​of​ ​perceptual​ ​or 
heuristic​ s​ ensitivity​ ​leading​ ​to​ t​ he​ ​discernment​ ​of​ ​ meaningful patterns where none 
exist. The evolutionary and physical landscape are a fundamental background to the 
explanatory landscape of experiences and how they are interpreted. Apart from 
taking comfort in the knowledge that we are not alone as a species when it comes to 
making a fool of ourselves, those who are afraid of thunder and lightning are in good 
company. In one of the earliest historical examples of Animism, Herodotus records 
several groups of menacing Scythian warriors who habitually shot threatening 
arrows at their Sky-Gods during thunderstorms.