Embodied Compression, Probability, and the Emergence of Religion

Religious symbols in ancient Egypt operated as multilayer probabilistic compressions of embodied experience. Visual meaning, phonetic articulation, and semantic field coexisted within a single glyph, forming a dense informational knot. This paper integrates embodied cognition, predictive processing, and probability theory to argue that gods emerged as ultra-stable priors minimizing prediction error across ecological, physiological, and social domains. The transition toward monotheism is analyzed as an over-compression of probabilistic structure that destabilized a cognitively plural system adapted to multiple attractors. The Egyptian case illustrates how symbolic systems function as Bayesian architectures embedded in bodily life.