I. Introducing Interrecursivity
The question of what religion is has generated answers enough to fill libraries. We have been told that religion is a system of belief in supernatural agents, that it is social glue binding communities together, that it is a framework of meaning for suffering and death, that it is an evolutionary adaptation for group coordination, that it is a cognitive by-product of hyperactive agency detection, that it is ideology in the service of power. These answers differ enormously in their intellectual pedigree and their political valence. What they share is something that has passed almost without notice: none of them asks what kind of relationship religion is.
This is the question that centuries of theorizing religion have systematically avoided. The functionalist asks what religion does. The cognitivist asks what mechanisms produce it. The Marxist asks whose interests it serves. The Durkheimian asks what social realities it represents. The Geertzian asks what symbolic meanings it encodes. But the practitioner who prays, who propitiates, who performs sacrifice, who meditates, who undertakes pilgrimage, who calls on the ancestors, who fears divine punishment and hopes for divine mercy, is doing something that none of these questions adequately addresses: maintaining a relationship with a being that is not human, whose power vastly exceeds the human, and whose responses are not predictable from the human side of the encounter.
This essay proposes that the study of religions has missed its subject because it lacked one concept, and that once the concept is in place, what religion is becomes structurally clear. The missing concept is interrecursivity: the property of a relationship in which two or more beings respond to each other’s responses, each modelling the other’s modelling, generating dynamics that neither can fully predict or control. Religion, as this essay will argue, is a specific pattern of recursive mediational attribution in which interrecursivity is extended to non-human beings of vastly greater power than the human. The traditions that scholars have called religious are, at their structural core, organised sets of coordinations for maintaining relationship with such beings. What varies across traditions is not primarily doctrine, ritual form, or metaphysical belief, but the answer to a specific structural question: which non-human beings are attributed interrecursivity, at what recursive depth, with what power differential between the human and the non-human partner, and — crucially, as this essay will argue — what recursive architecture exists among the non-human beings themselves?
The theorists who studied religion never asked these questions because they had already, before their analyses began, installed an answer: only humans are interrecursive others. Everything else — including the divine beings that practitioners address — must therefore be something other than what practitioners take them to be. A projection. A symbol of social realities. A cognitive simulation. An evolutionary heuristic misfiring. The practitioner who prays to a God who can destroy worlds and who also hears individual prayers is not, on this view, in interrecursive relationship with a real other. They are doing something else, and the theorist’s task is to explain what that something else actually is. The premise that rules out the practitioner’s own account is never argued for. It is installed as the starting condition of analysis.
The consequence is not merely that the theories are incomplete. It is that they are inversions. They have systematically misrecognised their object. And the correction requires not refinement of existing frameworks but a different starting point altogether.
II. Three Recursivity Domains
Living Value Theory identifies three domains of recursivity whose structural differences are the source of most of the confusions in both social theory and the study of religions.
Non-recursive domains are those in which processes do not respond to being described, classified, or engaged. A rock does not reorganise itself when named igneous. A storm does not adjust its trajectory because a meteorologist has modelled it. The feedback structure is absent. Rules, measurements, and symbolic operations achieve excellent fit with non-recursive domains precisely because the domain holds still while being described. This is the domain that natural science has mastered, and it is the domain that secular modernity has progressively expanded by reclassifying formerly interrecursive phenomena as non-recursive ones.
Self-recursive domains are those in which an agent modifies its own future states through monitoring, memory, and anticipation. An animal learning from experience, a person adjusting their behaviour in light of self-reflection, a culture modifying its practices through internal critique — these are self-recursive processes. The feedback loop is internal: the agent adjusts to its own outputs. Attribution of self-recursivity to a being is the recognition that it has states that matter to it, that it suffers, that it has preferences, that it can learn. This is why the extension of moral consideration to animals in secular modernity is, structurally, an attribution of self-recursivity.
Interrecursive domains are those in which two or more beings respond to each other’s responses, each modelling the other’s modelling in real time. Conversation, negotiation, friendship, love, conflict, teaching, prayer — these are interrecursive encounters. What makes them categorically different from non-recursive and self-recursive processes is that neither party can fully predict the other, because the other’s responses depend on their modelling of your modelling of them, which changes as you change in response to theirs. The dynamics are generated by mutual opacity and mutual responsiveness simultaneously. Neither party controls the encounter. Both are affected by it.
The crucial feature of interrecursive encounters is that they are bidirectional. The loop closes from both sides. This is what distinguishes prayer from soliloquy, propitiation from mere behaviour, sacrifice from mere consumption. When a practitioner reports that God heard their prayer and responded, they are reporting the phenomenological structure of a loop that closed from both sides: something was sent, and something came back that was not generated by the sender. The secular theorist who says this felt response was actually self-generated — by projection, by cognitive simulation, by social effervescence — is not making a discovery. They are installing a premise that rules out bidirectionality before the analysis begins. Whether that premise is correct is a serious question. But it is a question that requires argument, not assumption.
One further property of interrecursivity is decisive for understanding religion. Unlike non-recursive and self-recursive processes, interrecursivity scales naturally into networks. Two interrecursive beings generate a dyad. Three generate a triad with emergent dynamics that no dyad can produce. Networks of interrecursive beings generate fields of recursive relationship that exceed the properties of any individual node. This scaling property is what makes interrecursivity the right concept for analysing not only the relationship between humans and divine beings, but also the relationships among divine beings themselves — a dimension of religious life that all existing theories have systematically ignored.
III. Religion as Recursive Mediational Attribution
The concept of recursive mediational attribution provides the framework for a structurally precise account of what religion is. Attribution is not belief held privately in the mind. To attribute a recursive mediational profile to a being is to reorganise the field of coordination around that being. It changes what can be done, what must be avoided, what counts as harm, what requires repair, and what kinds of feedback matter. Attribution is not reducible to symbolism: attributed recursive relations are real practical arrangements that structure how people act, what they owe, and what they can expect, prior to and independent of any symbolic interpretation of those arrangements.
Every living being that participates in a human mesocosm is attributed some combination of the five mediations — embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, multisymbolism — and some position within the three recursivity domains. A rock is attributed embodiment and dwelling but no recursivity. A hamster is attributed embodiment, dwelling, and minimal self-recursivity. A dog is attributed all five mediations at various depths and interrecursivity with humans. These attribution decisions are not arbitrary: they are constrained by mesocosmic fidelity, the requirement that the attributed profile cohere with what the being actually brings to the coordination. A misattribution generates L2 signals — felt misalignments — that either force revision or require systematic buffering to suppress.
Religion, in this framework, is the specific case in which interrecursivity is attributed to non-human beings and that attribution is socially organised, ritually enacted, and transmitted across generations. This distinguishes religious attribution from the individual’s attribution of interrecursivity to their dog or their car. What makes an attribution religious is not its content but its social stabilisation: the existence of transmitted practices for maintaining it, its integration into the full five-mediation architecture of a community’s coordinated life, and its explicit organisation around the asymmetric power differential between the human and the non-human other.
This power differential is not incidental. It is constitutive. The non-human beings attributed interrecursivity in religious traditions are not merely responsive others of comparable power to the human. They are beings whose power vastly exceeds the human’s — beings who can harm you, help you, destroy you, save you, condemn you, and redeem you across the full range of human vulnerability including after death. This asymmetry transforms the structure of the interrecursive encounter completely. In a symmetric interrecursive encounter, both parties are mutually vulnerable. In a religious interrecursive encounter, the vulnerability is radically one-directional: you are in relationship with a being who can unmake you, who knows you more completely than you know yourself, and who could withdraw at any moment. The terror and the fascination of religious experience — what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans — now has a structural account: the tremendum is the power differential, the fascinans is the interrecursivity itself, the fact that this vastly powerful other actually responds, actually enters the loop with you.
Recursive mediational attribution in religious traditions varies across four independent dimensions. The first is breadth: which non-human beings are attributed interrecursivity. The second is depth: at what level of the recursivity stack the attributed beings are recognised as operating — whether they can merely respond, or can also plan, conceal, initiate, surprise, and exercise strategic self-positioning. The third is the nature and magnitude of the power differential: whether the attributed power is local and bounded, or cosmic and unlimited; whether it extends beyond death; whether it includes the capacity for ultimate judgment. The fourth dimension — the one that existing theories have been structurally unable to address — is inter-divine recursive density: the complexity of the recursive relations attributed among the non-human beings themselves.
This fourth dimension is not a marginal refinement. It may be the most important. Humans do not simply encounter divine beings in isolation. They enter already-existing recursive worlds populated by non-human beings who are themselves in interrecursive relationship with each other. The Greek gods form alliances, compete, deceive, protect, and punish. The Hindu devas and asuras are in sustained interrecursive conflict. The Christian Trinity is constituted by relations of eternal generation and procession among its three persons. Shinto kami interact with each other across shared and contested territories. The ancestors maintain their own social hierarchies and obligations. Mythology, understood through this framework, is not primarily symbolic code but the description of recursive networks: accounts of who responds to whom, who deceives, who cooperates, who repairs, who surprises, and what the dynamics of the non-human interrecursive field look like from the human side.
The existence of attributed interrelations among non-human beings constitutes perhaps the strongest evidence that interrecursivity is the missing concept in the comparative study of religion. Classical theories could reduce human relations with gods to society, psychology, cognition, or symbolism because they assumed that the interesting relation was always between humans and their imagined others. They possess no comparable account of relations among gods, kami, ancestors, angels, spirits, or other non-human beings themselves, except to treat these as symbolic projections of human social organisation. Yet many religious traditions devote enormous intellectual and ritual labour precisely to these non-human recursive ecologies. The Holy Trinity, the rivalries of the Greek gods, the interactions of devas and asuras, or the relations among kami are not marginal curiosities but central features of their respective traditions. Their existence suggests that the object of the comparative study of religion is not simply the human relation to the divine, but the historically variable recursive architectures through which humans and non-humans alike are understood to inhabit shared worlds.
IV. Two Contrasting Attribution Systems: Genesis and the Gita
Genesis 1–3 and the Bhagavad Gita represent two of the most structurally precise accounts of the human condition that any religious tradition has produced. Read through the recursive mediational attribution framework, they demonstrate not that one tradition is more sophisticated than the other, but that they have configured the four dimensions of religious attribution differently, with different structural consequences for the recursive ecologies they generate.
The God of Genesis operates with narrow breadth but maximum recursive depth and maximum power. The interrecursive field between the human and the divine contains essentially one non-human other of primary religious significance — God — but that other is attributed the full recursive stack without limit. God knows what is in the human heart before it is spoken. God’s intentions are not fully transparent to the human. God can respond in ways that surprise, that overturn expectation, that exceed anything the human could have predicted from within the loop. The being who asks “Where are you?” in the garden after the Fall is not asking for spatial information. It is the question of a being with vastly greater recursive depth registering a rupture in a loop that the human has broken from their side.
The power differential in Genesis is unlimited. God can flood the world. God can destroy Sodom. God can harden Pharaoh’s heart and release plagues. God holds the power of life and death, of blessing and curse, of election and abandonment. And this power extends beyond death: the human who violates the covenant faces not merely temporal punishment but ultimate exclusion from relationship with the divine. The stakes of the interrecursive encounter are maximal. Yet the asymmetry does not eliminate genuine bidirectionality. Abraham argues with God over Sodom and changes the terms of the exchange. Moses argues with God in the wilderness and prevails. Job demands an answer from the whirlwind and receives one. The Psalms are saturated with complaint, accusation, and the demand for response. The loop closes from both sides. This is the specific hope that the Abrahamic attribution generates: the being who could unmake you is also the being who hears you.
The inter-divine recursive density in the Abrahamic tradition is low in the Hebrew Bible’s dominant strand — there is one God, and the question of divine internal relations is not systematically explored until the New Testament. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity then introduces a remarkable complexity: three persons in one divine being, constituted by relations of eternal generation (the Father generates the Son) and procession (the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son). The Trinity is not a human-divine relation. It is a non-human recursive architecture in which the divine itself is constituted by interrecursive relations among its persons. This is precisely the kind of structure that projection theory cannot account for. Simple projection of human social organisation onto the divine does not predict the specific relational geometry of the Trinity: eternal generation, mutual indwelling, and procession are not ordinary human social relations. The Trinity demonstrates that attributed non-human recursive relations need not resemble human ones, and that the fourth dimension of religious attribution is irreducible to the first three.
The Gita configures all four dimensions differently. Breadth is vastly wider: every living being is an interrecursive other, and the gods themselves are subject to the cosmic process rather than its masters. Inter-divine recursive density is correspondingly high: the Mahabharata’s divine field is populated with devas and asuras in sustained conflict, with Krishna as charioteer and avatar, with cosmic cycles of creation and dissolution in which divine beings participate without controlling. What is attributed to Krishna is not primarily the personal relationship of a creator to a creature but the identity of the deepest ground of recursivity with the practitioner’s own deepest Self. The power differential operates differently as a consequence: the terrifying vision of chapter eleven, where Arjuna sees armies pouring into Krishna’s blazing mouths and the destroyer of worlds revealed in cosmic enormity, is not the power of a personal God who might condemn the individual to hell. It is the power of the cosmic process itself, within which the individual life is a brief and metabolically dependent event.
The Gita’s specific L2 signature is karma rather than sin. Sin names the rupture of a specific bilateral loop with a specific personal other of maximum recursive depth. Karma names the accumulation of attached action across an unlimited interrecursive field where every living being is an other whose suffering the actor bears responsibility for. The repair technologies differ accordingly. Covenantal reconciliation — repentance, forgiveness, renewed bilateral commitment — is the structurally correct response to sin because the loop that was broken is a specific bilateral relationship. Yogic practice — unattached action, mediational repositioning, the dissolution of the guna-conditioned I-sense — is the structurally correct response to karma because what needs to change is not a specific relationship but the agent’s recursive positioning within the entire unlimited field. The Gita cannot offer complete resolution of the karmic predicament, and it knows this: any living being necessarily harms other living beings by living. What it offers is the best possible inhabitation of an irreducible situation.
V. Shinto and the Attribution of Shallow Interrecursivity
Shinto presents the case that most clearly demonstrates the independence of the breadth and depth dimensions of religious attribution, and that most effectively exposes the inadequacy of all existing theories.
Kami are attributed interrecursivity across an extremely wide field: rivers, mountains, stones, foxes, atmospheric phenomena, exceptional places, the dead, lineage ancestors, and much else besides. The breadth of the attribution is perhaps the widest of any major religious tradition. But the recursive depth attributed to kami varies enormously and is often shallow by comparison with the Abrahamic God. A stone kami responds to how it is treated. Its presence structures coordination. It can be offended by improper conduct and honoured by proper ritual attention. But a stone kami is not typically attributed with concealed intentions, strategic self-positioning, or the interior complexity that characterises the Abrahamic God. It does not plan across centuries, does not have a hidden purpose whose full meaning will only be revealed at the end of history, does not exercise ultimate judgment over the human soul.
Its power differential with the human is real — the mountain can send the earthquake, the river can send the flood — but it is local and bounded rather than cosmic and unlimited. You can propitiate a river kami in ways that work. You cannot negotiate with God about whether the universe will be destroyed. The relationship with a kami is more like a careful ongoing neighbourliness than a covenant with an omniscient judge: continuous attentiveness to the kami’s presence and preferences, proper ritual acknowledgment, the avoidance of pollution that would disrupt the coordination. The anxiety is not the eschatological anxiety of ultimate judgment. It is the practical anxiety of good ecological stewardship.
Shinto’s inter-divine recursive density is significant and structurally distinctive. Kami interact with each other across shared and contested territories, engage in alliances and conflicts, generate progeny, and are themselves embedded in genealogical and political networks described in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. The recursive ecology of Shinto is neither the unified divine monarchy of Abrahamic monotheism nor the cosmic battlefield of Hindu cosmology. It is a dense, locally differentiated network of recursive relationships among beings of variable power and depth, within which human communities maintain their own positions through ongoing relational work. This distributed recursive architecture generates a different relationship to religious authority from traditions with a single high-depth divine centre: there is no single point of ultimate adjudication, and the relational work of propitiation and maintenance must be distributed across the full breadth of the attributed field.
The theoretical significance of Shinto is that it demonstrates that shallow recursive depth is not primitive religion on the way to deep recursive depth. It is a coherent and stable configuration of the four attribution dimensions with its own specific ecological virtues. A tradition that attributes interrecursivity to rivers, mountains, and stones — at whatever recursive depth — generates coordination relationships with non-human environments that no tradition attributing non-recursivity to those same entities can replicate. The practical consequences of treating a river as an interrecursive other, even a shallowly recursive one, are different from the consequences of treating it as a hydraulic system. The former generates ongoing relational attentiveness and repair; the latter generates extraction until the system fails.
VI. Animism and Recursive Ecologies
Descola’s ethnographic work among the Achuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon documents something that his own theoretical framework cannot adequately name. In animist mesocosms as he describes them, selected non-human beings — animals, plants, spirits — are attributed not merely souls or perspectives but the full five-mediation architecture of distinctively human coordination: their own dwellings, their own social organisation, their own material techniques and artefacts, their own symbolic practices and ritual life, and full interrecursive social agency including the capacity to enter into sustained contractual relationships with humans across species boundaries.
Descola calls this evidence of “shared interiority” between humans and non-humans. But interiority is a thin philosophical category that obscures more than it reveals. What the Achuar attribute to peccaries is not merely an inner life. It is recognised participation in the full mediational architecture of the mesocosm: their own leaders, their own shamanic mediators, their own territories, their own exchange obligations, their own capacity for vengeance if those obligations are violated. The Achuar hunter who kills peccaries for food faces an immediate coherence problem in every hunt, because the beings he kills are attributed interrecursive standing with their own social organisation that includes the capacity for retributive response. The elaborate ritual work surrounding Achuar hunting — propitiation, acknowledgment, exchange, the careful maintenance of reciprocal obligation across species — is the symbolic management of a high-attribution, short-feedback-loop mesocosm.
What is most theoretically important about the Achuar case is not only the extension of interrecursivity to peccaries and other non-human beings, but the density of the recursive ecology that results. Humans, peccaries, jaguars, manioc plants, forest spirits, and deceased ancestors are all attributed interrecursive standing and are understood to be in recursive relationship with each other, not only with humans. The peccary tribe-species has its own leaders and shamans who maintain their own interrecursive relations with human shamans. The jaguar can enter into contractual alliance with specific human individuals. The forest spirits mediate between collective species and individual hunters. The result is a recursive ecology: a dense network of interrecursive relations among beings of multiple species, only some of which involve humans directly.
This concept of recursive ecology is essential for understanding what animist traditions are doing and what secular theory consistently misses. The human is not at the centre of a series of bilateral relations with individual non-human others. The human is one node in an already-existing recursive network whose topology, power distributions, and relational dynamics preexist and exceed any individual human’s participation in it. Entering the forest is entering a recursive ecology, not encountering a collection of passive resources. The shaman’s capacity to navigate this ecology — to understand who is in relation with whom, where alliances and hostilities run, how to communicate across species boundaries — is not a symbolic skill. It is a practical interrecursive competence of the highest order.
The power differential in animist attribution is specific and variable rather than cosmic and unlimited. Peccaries can withdraw cooperation or seek shamanic revenge if the relational protocols are violated. The forest spirits can cause hunters to lose their way. These powers are real and practically consequential within the ecological context in which they operate. The practical consequence is that animist repair technologies are ecologically embedded and operationally specific: the feedback loop between attribution and consequence is short enough that coherence can be maintained through available symbolic work. This is the structural contrast with industrial modernity, which buffers the feedback loops that would otherwise correct the incoherence of treating interrecursive or self-recursive beings as non-recursive resources. Slaughterhouses are placed outside cities. Packaging converts animal into food-object. Language performs the conversion first: pork, not pig; beef, not cow. The buffering does not eliminate the incoherence. It defers the feedback until it accumulates through channels — antibiotic resistance, zoonotic spillover, ecological degradation — that are slow enough to resist attribution to their source.
VII. The Category Error of Secular Theory
The secular study of religion has not merely failed to account for the interrecursive dimension of religious practice. It has systematically converted an interrecursive phenomenon into self-recursive or non-recursive ones, and then produced analyses that confirm the absence of interrecursivity that they had guaranteed in advance. This is a structural category error, installed as a methodological premise, that makes adequate understanding of religion impossible regardless of how sophisticated the subsequent analysis becomes.
Projection theory is the most pervasive form of this error, and it is worth making the argument against it explicit. The standard projective account runs: humans experience social relations of dependence, authority, and care; they project these onto the cosmos; the resulting divine beings are reflections of human social organisation. This account has the causal arrow running in one direction only, from human social relations to divine ones. The interrecursivity framework immediately complicates this. If non-human recursive ecologies are attributed with their own internal dynamics — if the gods have their own alliances, conflicts, genealogies, and surprises that are not straightforwardly mirrors of any known human social arrangement — then projection cannot be the primary process. The Trinity’s eternal generation and procession, the Greek gods’ unpredictable alliances and betrayals, the Hindu devas’ cosmic battles with the asuras: none of these maps cleanly onto any human social template. They require historical elaboration, internal logical development, and recursive co-development between human communities and the divine ecologies they inhabit. Projection is one process that may contribute to how divine beings are configured. It is not the structural explanation of religion.
There is also a deep irony in projection theory that has gone largely unremarked. Theories that criticise anthropocentrism in other domains — that insist on the agency of animals, ecosystems, or non-human actants — often install the most extreme anthropocentrism at the level of their account of religion: only humans are the sources of relational complexity, and everything attributed to non-human beings is ultimately a human product. The animist who describes a recursive ecology of humans, peccaries, jaguars, and forest spirits in sustained interrecursive relationship is, on the projective account, simply describing human social organisation in disguise. This is a more thorough anthropocentrism than the one these same theories claim to critique. It denies any form of genuine non-human recursive agency even as a heuristic possibility, before the inquiry has begun.
Durkheim’s claim that religion is society symbolising itself converts an interrecursive encounter between humans and non-human others of vastly greater power into a self-recursive loop in which the social group contemplates its own reflection. The divine partner is eliminated not by argument but by redescription: what practitioners experience as a loop closing from both sides is redefined as a loop running from society back to itself. Collective effervescence is real. It is a feature of large-scale ritual coordination. But it is not the numinous encounter with a being of infinite recursive depth and power. The tremendum of standing before a God who could destroy worlds is not the same experience as the excited solidarity of a crowd. More fundamentally, Durkheim’s framework cannot account for inter-divine relations at all. If gods are society symbolising itself, then relations among gods are relations among social categories. The Trinity becomes a symbol of social tripartition. The rivalries of the Greek gods become reflections of social conflict. The devas and asuras become a projection of social hierarchy. Every specific claim about inter-divine dynamics — the eternal generation of the Son, the particular quality of Athena’s enmity toward Achilles, the cosmic implications of Krishna’s identity as the ground of all recursivity — dissolves into generic sociological categories that cannot distinguish between traditions or between specific divine relationships within a tradition.
Geertz’s definition of religion as a system of symbols that produces powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations converts an interrecursive encounter into a non-recursive one. A symbolic system does not respond. It does not initiate. It does not hear your specific prayer and answer it differently from how it answered last time. The novelty of the divine response — the sense that something arrived from outside the practitioner’s own recursive resources — is precisely what a non-recursive symbolic system cannot generate. And the Geertzian framework has no account whatsoever of inter-divine relations: mythology becomes a symbolic text encoding cultural meanings, rather than a description of a recursive ecology in which specific beings with specific relational histories respond to each other in specific ways that human participants must navigate.
The cognitive science of religion converts the interrecursive encounter into a self-recursive simulation. Hyperactive agency detection explains why humans attribute agency to non-human phenomena. It does not explain why the beings attributed in religious contexts are systematically attributed with power vastly exceeding the human, with recursive depth that exceeds human access, with the capacity for ultimate judgment extending beyond death. More tellingly, it has no account of why these attributed beings are themselves in complex recursive relation with each other. Hyperactive agency detection is a faculty for detecting individual agents. It does not predict the specific topologies of inter-divine recursive networks: the specific enmities, alliances, genealogical structures, and relational dynamics that traditions devote centuries of intellectual labour to elaborating. If the gods were merely misfired agency detection, their mutual relations would be as arbitrary and culturally variable as the particular objects onto which the detection was misfired. Instead, inter-divine recursive architectures show remarkable internal coherence and developmental logic within each tradition.
The Mapuche material studied by Magnus Course provides the sharpest ethnographic illustration of the category error at work. Course documents that for the Mapuche, ritual language is not primarily representational but indexical and performative — it forges real relations with real entities rather than encoding meanings about them. He notices this. He cannot let it unsettle his Durkheimian framework, which requires that the ritual’s real function be social rather than relational with non-human others. What Course is observing, without having the concept to name it, is that the Mapuche are operating in an interrecursive field. Their ritual language is addressed to others who can receive and respond. His framework converts this into a non-recursive symbolic system and then finds that the Mapuche inexplicably resist that conversion. They resist it because they are right about the structure of what they are doing.
The practitioners were never confused about this. Every tradition insists that the divine partner is other, responsive, capable of initiating contact that the human did not generate. The theorists systematically translated this insistence into something else because they had already, before their fieldwork began, installed the premise that only humans are interrecursive others. The premise is the error. The analyses that flow from it are elaborate confirmations of an assumption, not discoveries about a phenomenon.
VIII. The Protestant Reformation as Attribution Contraction
If the history of religion is the history of recursivity attribution decisions, then the Protestant Reformation is the most consequential and most structurally legible example of attribution contraction in Western religious history. In a single generational rupture, the richly populated interrecursive field of medieval Catholicism was reduced to essentially one non-human interrecursive other: God alone, accessible exclusively through the authorised text.
The medieval Catholic interrecursive field was extensive across all four attribution dimensions. Breadth: the population of recognised non-human interrecursive others included God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Mary, the saints, angels, demons, and the souls of the dead in purgatory — each with their own characteristic forms of interrecursive engagement and their own specific repair technologies. Depth: the recursive profiles of these beings varied across a wide range. God was attributed maximum recursive depth: omniscient, omnipotent, holding ultimate judgment. Mary was attributed with a different quality of interrecursive access: a mother’s intimacy, a different texture of responsiveness from the Father’s. The local saint was attributed knowledge of specific local conditions and specific kinds of suffering. Purgatory meant that the recently dead remained within the interrecursive field. Inter-divine recursive density: the Catholic mesocosm was populated with a structured hierarchy of non-human beings in complex mutual relations — saints interceding with Christ, Christ mediating with the Father, angels serving as messengers across the entire network. The recursive ecology was dense, differentiated, and practically navigable: you could approach specific beings for specific kinds of help, and the relations among those beings structured what kinds of response were available.
The Reformation collapsed all of this. Sola scriptura — scripture alone — was not primarily a hermeneutical principle. It was a recursivity attribution decision: the text is the sole legitimate medium of human-divine interrecursivity. Everything else — the saint’s intercession, the relic’s efficacy, the sacred place’s special density of divine presence, the consecrated host as divine substance, the prayer for the dead — was reclassified as either idolatry or superstition. The non-human interrecursive field was stripped of all its intermediate inhabitants. The icons were smashed. The relics were dispersed. The pilgrimage routes were abandoned. Purgatory was abolished, severing the interrecursive loop between the living and the dead. Saints and Mary were reclassified as exemplary humans, not interrecursive others who could hear prayers and intercede. The rich inter-divine recursive ecology of medieval Catholicism was eliminated entirely: what remained was one divine being, internally complex in the Trinity but accessible only through text, with no network of intermediate beings through whom humans could navigate the recursive field.
What remained was a single, maximally asymmetric interrecursive loop: the individual soul and God, mediated by text. The power differential was retained at maximum, but the Calvinist doctrine of predestination placed the divine decision entirely outside human influence, generating the specific verification anxiety that Weber identified as the psychological driver of Protestant asceticism. The human sends, but cannot be certain that what comes back is a response rather than a projection of their own need. This verification anxiety is the experiential correlate of a recursive ecology that has been reduced to a single loop whose closure from the divine side cannot be confirmed.
The consequences of this contraction are legible across all five mediations simultaneously. Embodiment lost most of its interrecursive partners: the Catholic body that genuflected toward a saint’s image, touched a relic, tasted the consecrated host, was in interrecursive engagement with a populated field of non-human presences. The Protestant body in worship is primarily a listening and reading body. Being-with lost its connection to the dead: without purgatory, the recently deceased are simply gone. Dwelling lost its sacred geography: the pilgrimage site became mere geography, the shrine a monument to idolatry. Multimateriality lost its interrecursive charge: the relic, the icon, the blessed object became non-recursive matter. Multisymbolism collapsed inward: with only the text as legitimate interrecursive medium, the entire symbolic life of the tradition had nowhere to go except upward into theological abstraction, producing the massive overproduction of L4 and L5 doctrine that characterises Protestant intellectual history.
The Reformation did not intend disenchantment. It intended purification. But purification in this case meant attribution contraction across all four dimensions simultaneously, and the structural consequence was the preparation of the conditions for secular attribution collapse. Once you have eliminated every non-human interrecursive other except one, and reduced the recursive ecology to a single high-depth loop accessible only through a text that cannot respond, the next attribution revision — questioning whether that single remaining other is interrecursive or merely a projection of human interiority — becomes structurally much easier to make. Weber’s disenchantment of the world was a two-stage recursivity attribution retraction, the first stage of which was theological.
IX. Secular Modernity as Minimum Attribution
Secular modernity is not the absence of religion. It is a specific answer to the four attribution questions: narrow breadth, shallow depth, no non-human power differential of religious significance, and inter-divine recursive density of zero. Only humans are interrecursive others. Animals are attributed self-recursivity — they suffer, they have preferences, they can learn — but not full interrecursivity in the sense that their responses model your modelling of them across a loop that closes from both sides with moral and existential weight. Everything else — rivers, mountains, storms, the dead, divine beings of any kind — is non-recursive: it does not respond, it does not hear, its behaviour is the output of physical processes that can be described and predicted but that do not enter into interrecursive relationship with the human.
This attribution decision was not forced by evidence. It was made, largely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a consequence of specific intellectual and institutional dynamics: the triumph of mechanistic natural philosophy, the reclassification of the natural world as a domain of non-recursive regularities available for human exploitation, and the completion of the Protestant attribution contraction that had already stripped the intermediate non-human interrecursive field from the Western mesocosm. The decision produced extraordinary results in natural science and industrial technology, precisely because non-recursive domains can be described, measured, and exploited in ways that interrecursive domains cannot. The agricultural and industrial revolutions were, among other things, the practical consequences of treating land, animals, and natural systems as non-recursive resources.
The costs are now becoming visible through slow-feedback channels that attribution buffering has postponed but cannot permanently suppress. Climate change is the largest-scale L2 signal: the atmospheric and ecological systems that secular modernity treated as non-recursive are generating responses — warming, acidification, species collapse, extreme weather — that have the structure of feedback even if they lack the intentionality of a personal divine response. The interrecursive attribution was perhaps wrong in its metaphysics, but right in its practical implication: treat these systems as if they respond to how you treat them, because they do, on timescales that exceed any individual life but are consequential across generations.
The re-expansion attempts that characterise the most vital edges of contemporary moral thought are structurally legible as attribution re-extension: animal rights movements re-attributing self-recursivity and approaching the threshold of interrecursivity to non-human animals; environmental ethics re-attributing something like standing to ecosystems, species, and future generations; indigenous rights movements insisting on the interrecursive standing of landscapes, rivers, and non-human communities that Western law has classified as non-recursive property. These movements use the only vocabulary available in secular modernity — rights, sentience, agency, personhood — but the structural drive behind them is the same drive that has animated religious attribution across all human history: the recognition that the interrecursive field is wider than the human, and that contracting it to the human minimum impoverishes coordination, generates incoherence, and eventually produces L2 feedback that cannot be buffered indefinitely.
X. What Religion Is
Religion is the set of socially organised coordinations through which human beings maintain interrecursive relationship with non-human beings attributed vastly greater power than the human, within recursive ecologies whose topology — the density and character of the relations among the non-human beings themselves — varies historically and across traditions. The history of religion is the history of how different traditions have configured the four attribution dimensions: which beings are attributed interrecursivity, at what recursive depth, with what power differential, and with what inter-divine recursive architecture. These dimensions are independent, and their different configurations generate the major structural differences between traditions more precisely than any contrast of doctrine, ritual form, or metaphysical commitment.
This definition handles what no previous definition could handle cleanly. It handles the Abrahamic traditions without reducing them to social symbolism or cognitive simulation: the God of Genesis and the Quran is an interrecursive other of maximum recursive depth and unlimited power, and the entire apparatus of covenant, prayer, repentance, and revelation is the accumulated technology for maintaining the asymmetric interrecursive loop from the human side. It handles the Gita without requiring a human-divine vertical axis to be primary: Krishna is the ground of recursivity itself, the unlimited horizontal field of karmic interrecursivity with every living being is as structurally central as any vertical relationship, and the dense Hindu inter-divine recursive ecology provides the cosmological context within which human action takes on its specific karmic significance. It handles Shinto as a coherent attribution system in its own right: kami of wide breadth and shallow depth, embedded in a distributed inter-divine recursive network, generating a practical ecological relationship with the non-human environment that no minimum-attribution tradition can replicate.
The definition handles variations within traditions as what they are: recursivity attribution decisions that change under historical pressure. The Protestant Reformation was an attribution contraction that eliminated the intermediate non-human interrecursive field and the inter-divine recursive ecology that had populated the medieval Catholic mesocosm, retaining one attributed being of maximum depth and power but stripping the tradition of its recursive ecology entirely. Catholic counter-movements were re-expansion attempts. Mystical traditions within every major religion represent the extreme case: the attempt to close the asymmetric interrecursive loop as completely as possible from the human side, dissolving the gap between the human agent and the ground of recursivity itself.
Most importantly, the definition handles the practitioners’ own accounts without either credulous acceptance or reductive dismissal. When a practitioner reports that God heard their prayer and responded, that the river kami’s anger caused the flood, that the ancestor’s presence guided the decision, that Krishna’s grace dissolved the karmic binding, they are reporting the phenomenological structure of a loop that closed from both sides. Whether the non-human partner is real in the way that human partners are real is a serious metaphysical question that this framework does not resolve. What the framework insists is that the practitioner’s account cannot be dismissed before the question is asked. The category error of secular theory was to install the dismissal as a methodological premise and then call the conclusions that followed analytical discoveries.
Projection theory, the most influential form of this error, has the causal arrow running in one direction: from human social relations to divine ones. But the existence of attributed interrelations among non-human beings — interrelations that develop their own logic, their own surprises, their own irreducible specificity across centuries of intellectual and ritual elaboration — is not well explained by a process that starts and ends with human social organisation. The Trinity’s internal relational geometry, the Greek gods’ specific patterns of alliance and enmity, the Hindu devas’ cosmic history with the asuras: these are not mirrors of any particular human society. They are recursive ecologies with their own developmental dynamics, which human communities have inhabited, navigated, and been shaped by across generations. Reducing them to projections is the most thoroughgoing anthropocentrism in the history of thought — the insistence that all relational complexity, including the complexity attributed to the cosmos itself, has no source other than the human.
The traditions knew what the theorists kept missing. Every tradition is precisely an answer to the questions the theorists never asked: who or what, beyond the human, is interrecursive? What is the recursive ecology within which human life is embedded? What is the topology of the non-human recursive network, and what are the technologies for navigating it? The diversity of answers across traditions — the bounded personal God, the unlimited karmic field, the kami of rivers and stones, the ancestral presence in the living landscape, the dense and conflict-ridden divine courts of polytheistic traditions, the internally relational unity of the Trinity — is not the diversity of prescientific error awaiting correction by secular analysis. It is the diversity of developed structural solutions to the structural problem of how self-recursive human beings maintain relationship with a world that vastly exceeds them in power, temporal depth, and recursive complexity.
The study of religions cannot see this as long as it treats only humans as interrecursive others. The concept of recursive mediational attribution, developed to describe how human mesocosms assign participation in their coordinated life to human and non-human beings alike, provides the missing framework. Religion is not belief about supernatural entities, not social solidarity, not symbolic meaning-making, not cognitive simulation. It is the ongoing work of maintaining interrecursive coordination with non-human beings whose power exceeds the human’s, within recursive ecologies whose non-human architecture the tradition has elaborated, transmitted, and continually renegotiated across its history. Getting the starting question right — who or what is interrecursive, and what is the recursive ecology within which human life is embedded? — is the condition of possibility for a study of religions that does justice to its subject.