In this chapter I will elaborate on a perspective mentioned before, that is, the cognitive factors that shaped the image of the grotesque body in early Christian discourse. A comparative approach to religions, including religious texts, their structures, and motifs, leaves scholars with the problem of explaining the similarities and differences they discover in their sources. Among the methodological viewpoints applied in earlier chapters, Jung's depth-psychological analysis especially offers an explanatory framework for comparative research, connecting the variety of religious phenomena to the internal organization and development of the human psyche. In a sense, Jung was a cognitivist before cognitive science was invented. However, his own mythological language is rather idiosyncratic and remains difficult to connect to insights about the organization of the human mind and brain that has emerged in cognitive and neuroscientific research especially in the past two decades.

An appreciation of the delicate interaction of evolutionary and cultural aspects of human cognition underlies the approach to the grotesque in this chapter. The human mind has been shaped by evolution for millions of years. The ancestors of modern humans and chimpanzees separated about a million years ago, and homo sapiens separated from other homo species about two hundred thousand years ago.