Human cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive—the '4E approach'—meaning thinking is shaped by bodily actions, cultural contexts, and interactions with others. This perspective offers new insights for studying religious rituals, which involve a dynamic network of bodies and minds across time and space. Humans are biocultural creatures, and a systematic, scientific study of brain, body, and behavior in rituals is needed. The chapter reviews available evidence and theories developed to understand how bodily actions, thinking, and cultural embeddedness interact in religious contexts.
Ritual conveys information that remains effective even when not consciously perceived, and its effects often exceed explicit doctrine. Among these effects are changes in consciousness characterized as religious ecstasy, involving heightened and synchronized emotions, unusual speech, dissociative states, and claims of divine contact. Literary evidence from early Christian communities, from Corinth in the 50s to the Montanist movement at the end of the second century, preserves many instances of such ecstatic practice. The chapter examines the evolutionary basis of ritual and ecstasy, surveys examples within early Christian rituals, and suggests why ecstatic experience may have been valued by this movement.