JQ Jacobs Wrote:
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>
> Well, an expert said so and "researchers say"!

Clearly it's not a peer reviewed publication.


>
> "It is logical to think that the Nazca people's
> religious beliefs..." would be easier to accept
> without the word "religious." Does anyone else
> see an assumption in all this? Building on
> assumptions is NOT logical.



Assumption or speculation must never be the foundation for further theorizing. You'll end up like Shirley MacLean... out on a broken branch.


>
> We need a parallel term for
> "anthropomorphization," one meaning to turn
> populations into religious believers. How about
> "paganization"? (verb nov., to make pagans of).
> Maybe the term "othering" is adequate.


Bad choice. Pagan simply means "common folk". The opposite would be "elite", not "Christian", as some have deemed it.

What you're actually trying to express, I think, is the ancient's "world view", which includes their knowledge of the physical, as well as the spiritual, realms. Often these two merged into a reality that is quite alien from our own modern understanding, thanks to things like telescopes, satellites, electron microscopes and core drills.

If you read some of the heavily christianized alchemical texts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, you'll see this kind of "fusion" in the worldview of the people of that time. There is no reason to think that the Nazca did anything differently... or that we are even doing things much differently today.


>
> Why can't non-historical actors be scientists or
> free-thinkers instead of priests? Is that too
> illogical?

They mean something that is probably very different from the common meaning, so they might only serve to confuse. In most anthropological circles, one finds the term "priest" to be more shamanic than catholic.



Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.