Religio

The term Religio refers to the phenomenology of relevance-realization in terms of meaning-making. Religio is “the sense of a pre-egoic and ultimately post-egoic binding that simultaneously grounds the self and its world. ” It is the generalized reference of something like religion. This overlaps with the kind of meaning-making that has been gathered together in many discourses in the term “spirituality”.

Religio is the entire right hand side of this Relevance realization diagram

Religio means connecting things together into an epistemic small-world network.

Vervaeke google doc
Salient features/aspects of religio that relevance-realization can account for: The possibility of complexification, of self-transcendence The possibility of self-deception, bullshitting Connectedness Perspectival knowing Participatory knowing Caring, significance The cognitive continuum from fluency, to insight, to flow, to altered states of consciousness, to higher states of consciousness. Fundamental framing

The term religio is being used deliberately. It recalls the word “religion” and its connotations, but its meaning is not identical to the word religion. Religio is one of the purported etymological origins of the word “religio”, coming from the latin “Religare”, meaning literally “to read back”, or “to bind together”, “reconnect”.

Wikipedia article
The Latin term religiō, the origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin ), is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the end of the Roman Republic, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus". In classic antiquity, it meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty towards anything and was used mostly in secular or mundane contexts.

Etymology
The classical etymology of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from relegere: re (again) + lego (read) where lego is in the sense of "go over", "choose", or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell have argued that religio is derived from religare: re (again) + ligare (bind or connect), which was made prominent by Augustine of Hippo, following the interpretation of Lactantius in Divinae institutiones, IV, 28.

Newer research shows that in the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religio was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general, religio referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God. Religio was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, fear; feelings of being bound, restricted, inhibited; which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context. The term was also closely related to other terms like scrupulus which meant "very precisely" and some Roman authors related the term superstitio, which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame, to religio at times. When religio came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders.

Examples of usage
Cicero connected lego read, i.e. re (again) with lego in the sense of choose, go over again or consider carefully. The definition of religio by Cicero is cultum deorum, "the proper performance of rites in veneration of the gods."

Julius Caesar used religio to mean "obligation of an oath" when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors""Thus the terror raised by the generals, the cruelty and punishments, the new obligation of an oath, removed all hopes of surrender for the present, changed the soldiers' minds, and reduced matters to the former state of war.""

The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, used the term religio to describe elephants' supposed veneration of the sun and the moon. ""The elephant is the largest of them all, and in intelligence approaches the nearest to man. It understands the language of its country, it obeys commands, and it remembers all the duties which it has been taught. It is sensible alike of the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare among men even, possesses notions of honesty, prudence, and equity; it has a religious respect also for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon.""

St. Augustine, following the interpretation given by Lactantius in Divinae institutiones, IV, 28 derived religio from re (again) and ligare bind, connect, probably from a prefix. ''

The medieval usage alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: "we hear of the 'religion' of the Golden Fleece, of a knight 'of the religion of Avys'".