Easter, Culture, and the Sense of Agency — A Decolonial Neuroscience Reading

In neuroscience, the sense of agency is the experience of perceiving that “I am the one doing this” and that the effects of an action are related to my own intention. But this sense does not arise from an abstract, isolated, and pure will. It emerges from the encounter between intention, prediction, correction, bodily feedback, and social context. We do not act only “from within”; we also act from what has been incorporated. And this is precisely where the discussion gains depth: many times, the individual is agented in the name of a verb. A word, a narrative, a commandment, a promise, a guilt, a salvation. At this point, the old formula “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh” can be reread in a neurocultural sense: the word does not remain an abstract idea; it descends into the body, organizes posture, breathing, gesture, silence, song, pain, hope, submission, and belonging. The Word becomes flesh when a narrative begins to live in the body even before it is critically reflected upon.

When we bring this into a Decolonial Neuroscience, the question ceases to be only “was it the brain that decided?” and also becomes: who shaped this body to feel a certain action as its own? Who taught this organism to obey in a certain way, to be moved in a certain way, to kneel before certain symbols, to tremble before certain guilts, to await redemption within a specific calendar? Body, culture, territory, and mind cannot be separated without a serious loss of reality. What we call “my will” very often already arrives crossed by collective rhythms, inherited words, repeated rites, and gestures trained over generations.

That is why Easter is such a powerful example. Easter is not only a belief; it is a bodily script. It organizes processions, songs, fasts, pauses, choral responses, vigils, dramatizations of suffering, expectations of rebirth, and shared celebrations. It orders attention, voice, breathing, posture, the symbolic weight of the body, and the feeling of belonging. But a decolonial reading asks us to go further: in the same period of the year now known as Easter time, many peoples of the American continent were already holding celebrations linked to the equinox, the renewal of the cycle of life, blossoming, planting, harvesting, fire, sky, and the relationship between body and cosmos. In other words, Christian Easter did not occupy an empty space. It came to dominate a segment of the calendar that, in many regions of the Americas, was already lived as a sacred time of passage, reorganization of life, and belonging to nature.

This point is decisive. Before European domestication, the American continent was not spiritually silent, nor ritually empty. There were many seasonal, cosmological, and territorial festivities. What colonization did, in many cases, was not to “create” the sacred in the calendar, but to cover over, replace, rewrite, and discipline already existing festive rhythms. Thus, when we speak of Easter, we are not speaking only of a particular religious tradition, but also of a profound dispute over who has the power to name time, organize the body, and say which passage of life deserves ritual, memory, and reverence. The Word became flesh — but we must ask: which word? And in the service of which civilization, which power, and which domestication?

For this reason, Easter can be read in two ways at the same time. On the one hand, it can function as cultural capture. A person enters a narrative so powerful that they begin to perceive themselves mainly as what the tradition determines: guilty, obedient, saved, unworthy, redeemed, faithful. In this case, the ritual may approach a Zone 3: high salience, high normativity, much bodily narrowing, and little critical margin. The body becomes rigid within a single narrative. The person no longer consciously participates in the story; they are carried by it. The Word has already become flesh, but the flesh has lost the possibility of perceiving where the word that moves it comes from.

On the other hand, the same Easter can open another possibility. When there is consent, relational safety, inner space, non-coercive belonging, and room to metabolize the experience, the ritual may favor a Zone 2. The narrative remains strong, but the body is still able to vary, breathe, feel, observe, and reflect. The person begins to perceive in their own organism what comes from them and what comes from culture; what is living faith and what is automatism; what is presence and what is repetition. In this case, the ritual does not produce only submission. It may produce awareness of being shaped. And that is already a real gain in agency: the imposed role ceases to be invisible.

It is here that the sense of agency reaches its most mature form. Agency is not merely saying “I did it.” Agency is perceiving how I was led to do it, by which words I was organized, which narratives entered my body, which gestures I repeat without noticing, and at what moment I can critically return to myself. In a Decolonial Neuroscience, this is central. Culture imposes itself not only through ideas; it imposes itself through calendars, songs, rewards, guilts, collective synchrony, motor repetitions, and existential promises. The “self” is not only spontaneous; very often it is a trained way of responding to the world.

In our vocabulary, this can be described simply. Zone 1 is when the narrative organizes the body to act: to walk, sing, kneel, respond, fulfill, participate. Zone 2 is when the narrative remains present, but the body still preserves variation, breathing, perception, and reflection. Zone 3 is when the narrative hardens so much that the body loses critical margin and begins to operate almost as if hijacked by a single salience. Therefore, the sense of agency is not merely voluntary movement; it is the capacity to perceive: “I am participating in this narrative,” instead of merely “I am being carried by it without noticing.” This passage from being led to perceiving oneself being led may be one of the most important forms of critical freedom.

The decolonial reading of Easter, then, does not require destroying the ritual, but illuminating it. It shows that the human being does not always act from pure autonomy and is not always simply dominated. Very often, they live between these two forces: between the word that captures them and the consciousness that begins to perceive the capture; between the rite that organizes them and the bodily presence that restores a margin of choice; between the tradition that traverses them and the possibility of critically metabolizing that passage. The point is not to reject every narrative, but to recover the capacity to feel, in the body, when the word that became flesh turned into living presence — and when it turned into domestication.

At bottom, the great neuroscientific question of Easter may be this: am I living this narrative, or am I merely being lived by it? And, broadening the historical memory of the continent even further, the question unfolds: what other ways of celebrating the renewal of life, the equinox, the earth, the cosmos, and belonging were silenced so that a single word could occupy this time of year? Decolonial Neuroscience is valuable precisely because it helps restore to the body this capacity to perceive how narratives enter, what they do to us, and when they leave space for a more living, more critical, and more embodied sense of agency.

To read well is to feel in the body what the mind is beginning to understand.

References

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