Secular discourse relocated sacred inspiration into natural bodily capacities while preserving the mythic structure.

Evidence

Regardless of the adequacy of such explanations from the perspective of a later century, a secular discourse of inspiration now referred entirely to the abilities of “the natural body” and to their social demonstration. The genius, like the shaman, was at once object, performer, and reproducer of myth. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 252

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Cooper-vault read: as ‘secular modernity’ naturalizes Christian moral structure of inspiration under physiological terms, Cooper’s Christian-conservative family values get recoded as natural economic imperatives within ostensibly secular neoliberalism.
• DEFINE: Asad provides the precise sense in which ‘secular’ here is not the opposite of religious but a refashioning — inspiration becomes genius in the same gesture that makes prophetic ecstasy natural-bodily.