scholarly journals What Comes to an End When a “Religion” Comes to an “End”? Reflections on a Historiographical Trope and Ancient Mediterranean History of Religion

Numen ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 204-229
Author(s):  
Jörg Rüpke
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Mediterranean History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Dimensions

Abstract This article argues that the neglect of narratives about the end of religious traditions is due to a complex entanglement of our positions as historical narrators and specifics of the sources for histories of religions, that is of emic and academic narrators. Typically, academic histories are not only based on emic narratives, but also tend to accept their conceptual frameworks with regard to the unities of description. It will be shown that such an entanglement has consequences for the neglect of the end of religious practices or groups. Against this background an analytical grid for change and discontinuation of different dimensions of “religion” will be offered and exemplified in an analysis of the “end of Paganism” in the late ancient Roman Empire. The most problematic implications of such narratives, the article will argue, are assumptions about the coherence of the religious protagonists brought center-stage.

R.E.C.A.M. Notes and Studies No. 5 A Roman Family in Phrygia

1979 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts

The history of Roman and Italian businessmen in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, and especially in Asia, during the first century B.C. is a familiar one. There is ample evidence of many kinds for their emigration and activities after the formation of the province of Asia, interrupted by the hegemony of Mithridates, but resumed on a larger scale after he had been driven back from Asia into Pontus. This evidence can be placed into two broad categories. First, there are allusions in the contemporary literature, inscriptions and historical accounts of the period which provide direct information about individuals and families active in the province. Then there is the evidence of inscriptions of the Imperial period, especially the second and third centuries AD., which reveal both established settlements of resident Romans in the cities and an extraordinary number of families with Roman and Italian names, which could clearly trace their origins back to the Republican period of emigration and settlement. Opportunities to study particular families or groups of emigrants at both periods are unfortunately rare, since usually one or the other category of evidence is lacking. Although the record is far from complete, and it is necessary to rely more on conjecture than one would wish, the object of this study is to investigate one such emigrant family, the Sestullii, whose presence in Asia is attested both in Republican literary sources and in Imperial inscriptions. It is clearly impossible to write a continuous history of the gens, or even to reconstruct its stemma in outline, especially since there is a notably large gap in our knowledge between ca 50 B.C. and A.D. 150, a two hundred year span from which only a single relevant inscription survives, but the family name is so rare that it can reasonably be assumed that all its bearers are related to one another in some way. It must be stressed that this assumption underlies the whole reconstruction offered here.

scholarly journals Peak-experience and the entheogenic use of cannabis in world religions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Ferrara
Keyword(s):  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Peak Experiences ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Abraham Maslow ◽  
Peak Experience ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unitive Consciousness ◽  
Self Transcendence

AbstractThis paper demonstrates that cannabis can evoke “peak-experiences”—the name psychologist Abraham Maslow gave to fleeting moments of expanded perception indicative of self-transcendence—when used alongside more traditional religious practices such as meditation, fasting, contemplative prayer, and sacramental ritual. For that reason, religious seekers around the globe have deployed cannabis as a deliberate psychoactive to trigger the peak-experiences that stir feelings of ecstasy, wonder, and awe and resolve the “dichotomies, polarities, and conflicts of life.” As such, peak-experiences exemplify a form of spiritual revelation that has played a pivotal role in the history of religion, and because of its ability to elicit unitive consciousness at the heart of mystical insight, cannabis has been utilized as a mild entheogen across culture and tradition for millennia.

Images of Mithra

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Adrych ◽  
Robert Bracey ◽  
Dominic Dalglish ◽  
Stefanie Lenk ◽  
Rachel Wood
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
History Of Use ◽  
Historical Accounts

Images of Mithra begins with the seemingly simple question: what’s in a name? With a history of use extending back to Vedic texts of the second millennium BC, derivations of the name Mithra appear in the Roman Empire, across Sasanian Persia, and in the Kushan Empire of southern Afghanistan and northern India during the first millennium AD. Even today, this name has a place in Yazidi and Zoroastrian religion. But what connection have Mihr in Persia, Miiro in Kushan Bactria, and Mithras in the Roman Empire to one another? Over the course of the volume, specialists in the material culture of these diverse regions explore appearances of the name Mithra from six distinct locations in antiquity. In a subversion of the usual historical process, the authors begin not from an assessment of texts, but by placing images of Mithra at the heart of their analysis. Careful consideration of each example’s own context, situating it in the broader scheme of religious traditions and ongoing cultural interactions, is key to this discussion. Such an approach opens up a host of potential comparisons and interpretations that are often sidelined in historical accounts. What Images of Mithra offers is a fresh approach to figures that we identify as ‘gods’, and the ways in which they were labelled and depicted in the ancient world. Through an emphasis on material culture, a more nuanced understanding of the processes of religious formation is proposed in what is but the first part of the Visual Conversations series.

scholarly journals Tradition, experience, interpretation: a dialectical model for describing the development of religious thought

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-226
Author(s):  
Heikki Räisänen
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
New Situation

The term "experience" points to that "something" which stands "between" a tradition and its reinterpretation. From one point of view that means new situations or new contexts. But reinterpretation is accomplished by persons and groups. "New experience" equals "new situation" as perceived by persons or groups. Tradition and experience are inseparably connected. Both in trying to work out a history-of-religion account of early Christian thought', and in trying to understand the Qur'an with empathy, the author has often found it useful to envisage religious thought in terms of a dialectic between tradition, experience and interpretation. This means that religious thought develops in a process in which traditions are time and again interpreted in the light of new experiences, and vice versa: experiences are interpreted in the light of traditions. In other words, elements of the tradition are reinterpreted, but this happens in the framework of the very tradition in question. The emphasis can be put on different sides, either on tradition or on experience. The point is to underline the "process" and its dynamics — to call attention to change, reinterpretation, actualization and reapplication of traditions.

scholarly journals Central Anti-Religious Museum in Moscow: Historical Landmarks (1929–1947)

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Ekaterina A. Teryukova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Team ◽  
Ussr Academy ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
History Museum ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Highly Skilled ◽  
Gradual Disappearance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The study focuses on the activities of the Central Anti-Religious Museum (CAM) in Moscow – an issue previously overlooked by historians. The article considers different aspects of its work during the brief period from 1929 to 1947 relating to the establishment and closure of the museum as well as provides an overview of the key areas of its collection, expedition, research and exhibition work. The article also follows the development of the CAM’s highly skilled research team that investigated rudimentary religious practices of ethnicities inhabiting the USSR and the gradual disappearance of these practices. The growing research potential of the CAM and the museum’s evolution from a propagandist institution into a history museum led to the renaming of the CAM to the Central Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism in 1942, upon which the museum passed from the auspices of the League of Militant Atheists into the charge of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

scholarly journals ESCAPING PURITY: LESSONS FOR CHILD AND YOUTH CARE FROM RELIGION

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Scott
Keyword(s):  
Youth Care ◽  
Change Processes ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Child And Youth Care ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of

By taking up the suggestion of Michel Serres (1991) to use the history of religion to study change processes, this paper explores the development of the field of Child and Youth Care (CYC) and its current state of change. It draws on Karen Armstrong’s (2001) portrayal of the history and development of fundamentalism across religious traditions to serve as a mirror for this reflective exercise, calling on CYC to risk the complexity of a self-reflective critique in moving forward to the next stage of development professionally and academically.

scholarly journals Textual Erasures of Religion: The Power of Books to Redefine Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation as Secular Wellness Practices in North American Public Schools

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Candy Gunther Brown
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Stress Reduction ◽  
North American ◽  
Mindfulness Meditation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
History Of

This essay argues that books, broadly defined to include print and internet publications, played a crucial role in the cultural mainstreaming, including adoption by public schools, of non-Christian religious practices such as yoga and meditation. Promotional books, tactically and ironically, played on the textual bias of Christianity, and especially Protestantism, to re-brand practices borrowed from religious traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, as scientific techniques for exercise and stress-reduction, thereby reintegrating religion into public education. The essay begins with a brief history of religion in U.S. and Canadian public education, explains the textual bias of North American assumptions about religion, and analyzes how twentieth-century promoters of practice-centered religions tactically wielded books to increase public acceptance of non-Christian religious practices. The essay focuses on two twenty-first-century examples of religion-based, textually mediated public-school curricula: the Sonima Foundation’s Health and Wellness program of Ashtanga yoga and The Hawn Foundation’s MindUP program of mindfulness meditation.

Possessing Christianity in Northeast India: Kelkang, 1937

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
KYLE JACKSON
Keyword(s):  
Northeast India ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Logics

Abstract In 1937, a spirit moved in the mountains of Northeast India. It presented local villagers with a visceral anticolonial vision, laicized religious practices, and offered alternative definitions of expertise and literacy that sidelined colonial and missionary authorities. Its message pulled together a complex range of clans, pilgrims, and roadworkers, and reconciled them according to contemporary local logics. This article uses the ‘Kelkang incident’ of the Lushai Hills District (today: Mizoram) to reverse the polarity of conventional writings on prophetic rebellion in two ways. First, it asks not how the colonial state dealt with a prophetic rebellion, but how a prophetic rebellion dealt with the state. Second, it asks not what the moving spirit of Kelkang symbolized, but what it did and how people interacted with it. Placing upland spirits, humans, terminology, and concepts at the centre of the analysis, the article argues that a more open-minded approach to the history of religion can better reveal processes of mediumship and rapidly indigenizing Christianities as well as the much broader malleability of concepts like ‘conversion’, ‘revival’, and ‘Christianity’.

From Milton to Modern Satanism: The History of the Devil and the Dynamics between Religion and Literature

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Bernd Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religion And Literature ◽  
Positive Direction ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Devil

AbstractThe article explores the dynamics between literature and religion with the examples of Lucifer and modern Satanism. With John Milton's poem Paradise Lost (1667), the originally Christian myth of Lucifer evolved in a positive direction. Having been adopted by so-called 'literary Satanism,' this character became the basis for a new non-Christian religion, the 'Temple of Set' (founded by Michael Aquino in 1975). The article also argues for a remodelling of the conception of the dynamics between religion and other systems of meaning in the 'European history of religion': not only do religious traditions affect the medium of literature; literature can also affect the religious tradition.

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