scholarly journals CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE MYTHMAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT

2019 ◽  
pp. 137-142
Author(s):  
Denis D. Pyzikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
New England ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Western Esotericism

H.P. Lovecraft created an original mythology that has not only become science fiction and fantasy classics, but also determined horror genre development in general. In his literary works, Lovecraft used images derived from both ancient religious traditions and contemporary western esotericism, filling his imaginary worlds with mysterious cosmic creatures. The writer’s cultural and historic environment played a very important role as the cultural landscape of New England and theosophical concepts widespread at that time had a great impact on the author’s work and writing. The original “mythology” invented by Lovecraft later played a key role in development of some new religious movements. Besides, Lovecraft’s mythology and images are reflected in the modern popular culture. The paper analyzes Lovecraft’s works and religious motives that are used or reflected in them, cultural factors that influenced the writer and Lovecraft’s heritage place in occult concepts, practices and subcultures of today.

scholarly journals The esoteric milieu in Finland today

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 204-216
Author(s):  
Jussi Sohlberg
Keyword(s):  
Religious Community ◽  
Research Network ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
Religious Associations ◽  
Evangelical Lutheran Church ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
Evangelical Lutheran

As in the other Scandinavian countries, so in Finland an exceptionally high percentage of the population belongs to a religious community. Today, about 82 per cent of Finns are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. However, the picture of the Finnish religious and spiritual landscape is more complex than it may at first appear. The project ‘Religions in Finland’ was started in 2003. The project is a joint-effort of the Church Research Institute and the Research Network for the Study of New Religious Movements. The aim is to create an electronic database for describing, mapping and analysing religious associations and communities in Finland (active ones and also those that no longer exist). In August 2007 there were 777 communities and organizations listed in the database. They are classified into ten categories representing religious traditions according to their historical and cultural background. There are 29 organizations classified under the category Western esotericism. This article presents a general overview of the major and recently founded esoteric groups in Finland, most of which are registered associations.

Dialogue or Confrontation?

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ringo Ringvee
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Neoliberal Governance ◽  
Religious Associations ◽  
Liberal Attitude

The article focuses on the relations between the state , mainstream religions and new religious movements in Estonia from the early 1990s until today. Estonia has been known as one of highly secular and religiously liberal countries. During the last twenty years Estonian religious scene has become considerably more pluralist, and there are many different religious traditions represented in Estonia. The governmental attitude toward new religious movements has been rather neutral, and the practice of multi-tier recognition of religious associations has not been introduced. As Estonia has been following neoliberal governance also in the field of religion, the idea that the religious market should regulate itself has been considered valid. Despite of the occasional conflicts between the parties in the early 1990s when the religious market was created the tensions did decrease in the following years. The article argues that one of the fundamental reasons for the liberal attitude towards different religious associations by the state and neutral coexistence of different traditions in society is that Estonian national identity does not overlap with any particular religious identity.

Strangers of Popular Culture – The Verbal and Pictorial Aesthetics of Mythological Metal Music

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
János Fejes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extreme Metal ◽  
Northrop Frye ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

AbstractExtreme metal music is held to be a destructive genre of popular culture, treated as a pariah for many. Being a seriously misunderstood genre, I would like to highlight that metal music is a result of conscious work process that cannot only be noticed on the level of the music but on the level of verbal and pictorial expressions too. In my paper, I would like to show the working mechanisms of the so-called “(neo)pagan/mythological metal” movement, focusing on the rhetoric side of its mentioned expressions, searching for the ways these bands rewrite ancient myths and legends.For my research, I will use three main threads: 1) history of religion (looking for the connections of the reception of ancient topics in contemporary society, e.g. New Age Cults and New Religious Movements); 2) reception theory, as the thoughts of Northrop Frye, Wolfgang Iser (1972), and John Fiske (2011) all should help to understand the general processes behind reading and producing texts; 3) subculture studies – e.g. the works of Richard Schusterman and Deena Weinstein (2002) to have a deeper insight to the genres standing on the edge of mass and high culture.After a general introduction, I would like to demonstrate the above mentioned through some case studies. The chosen mythological cultures are going to be the world of the ancient Middle East (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Old Testament), the classical Roman world, and the Viking Era, also showing some Hungarian and Romanian examples in the last section. In each section, the following issues should be examined: band and stage names connected to the topic, album titles, lyrics, and album covers. All these together will show us many clear patterns from romantic nostalgia to allegoric concepts, all revolving around the essence of metal music: being a Stranger in a familiar society.

Media, Technology, and New Religious Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon Trosper Schorey
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Information Control ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Significant Distinction ◽  
Media And Technology

Since the first edition of theOxford Handbook of New Religious Movements(2004), the growing field of media, religion, and culture has moved at a rapid clip. The previous emphases on theoretical approaches that imagined a significant distinction between online and offline practices has been largely replaced by approaches that attend to the entanglement of digital and physical worlds. Research within this new analytical turn speaks about the Internet and religion in terms of third spaces, distributed materialities or subjectivies, and co-constitutive histories and locations. Highlighted within these works are the negotiations and intersections of consumer practices, popular culture, information control and religious pluralism online. As the field continues to develop, theoretical approaches that emphasize entanglement will help disclose the various relationships of power by which the material practices of religion, media, and technology are produced - allowing scholars to trace robust histories of multiplicity by which the contemporary imaginaries of religion, media, and technology are inherited.

Introduction: The Study of Religion and Emotion

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Emotional Component

This book is about religion and emotion. It explores the emotional component in religion within the framework of a certain tradition, focusing on emotion in new religious movements. There are essays on Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Japanese religions, Buddhism, and Islam. The book remarks on ways that emotion has been overlooked in the study of religious traditions, and how a focus on the emotional can lead to fresh understandings about how persons create, through religion, relationships with nature, deities, and each other. It also includes essays that address the emotion component in various areas of religious life, including ritual, gender, sexuality, music, and material culture. The book shows that emotional life is profoundly shaped by religion, and that religion, in turn, directs and reinforces the construction of emotional ideologies having to do with a wide array of behaviors. In addition, it addresses specific emotions such as ecstasy, love, terror, hate, melancholy, and hope.

scholarly journals TOWARDS A JOINT FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS IN AFRICA: RESPONSE TO J. D. Y. PEEL

Africa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 628-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Meyer
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Intervention

The main point of John Peel's intriguing critical intervention is to warn against what he sees as an overemphasis on similarities between Christianity and Islam. Making these religions look all too similar, he argues, may come at the expense of paying due attention to the distinctiveness of each of these religious traditions and hence to their intrinsic differences. He suggests an analogy between the stance taken by ‘somewhat left-wing and anti-establishment discourse’ to equalize Islam and Christianity under the label of fundamentalism on the one hand, and a strand of Africanist work on West Africa that pleads for the close similarities between these two religions to be acknowledged on the other. For the latter, he takes the article ‘Pentecostalism, Islam and culture: new religious movements in West Africa’ by Brian Larkin and myself (2006) as paradigmatic. For my part, it is difficult to see how the use of the notion of fundamentalism in current debates and the position ventured by us converge. I would certainly refrain from using the notion of fundamentalism (even if invoked to balance Huntington's equally problematic notion of the clash of civilizations) as a category that serves to draw out similarities between certain radical movements in Christianity and Islam both past and present – a use I view as highly problematic. The fact that Peel converges the levels of general public debate about political Islam and research regarding Christianity and Islam in African studies makes it quite difficult for me to grasp what his main concern is. Is it a worry about a – in his view – problematic, broader trend of denying actual intrinsic differences between Christianity and Islam, a trend that spills over from critical opinion into current Africanist scholarship, or vice versa? Is it the problem that foregrounding certain formal – and to him ultimately superficial – similarities favours an ahistorical stance with regard to these traditions? Or is it a concern – albeit not explicitly articulated – that the insistence on similarities with regard to Christianity might draw a too positive picture of Islam, pre-empting it from the critique that he considers necessary?

Invention in “New New” Religions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole M. Cusack
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Western Society ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Church

This chapter discusses the concept of invention and applies it to the study of New Religious Movements (NRMs). Invention plays a part in all religions and is linked to other conceptual lenses including syncretism and legitimation. Yet invention is more readily detected in contemporary phenomena (so-called “invented,” “hyper-real,” or “fiction-based” religions), which either eschew, or significantly modify, the appeals to authority, antiquity, and divine revelation that traditionally accompany the establishment of a new faith. The religions referred to in this chapter (including Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, and Jediism) are distinctively “new new” religions, appearing from the mid-twentieth century, and gaining momentum in the deregulated spiritual market of the twenty-first century West. Overt religious invention has mainstreamed in the Western society, as popular culture, individualism and consumerism combine to facilitate the cultivation of personal spiritualities, and the investment of ephemeral entertainments with ultimate significance and meaning.

scholarly journals Perspective: What Are We Studying?

2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Barker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Traditional Religions

The objective of this article is to encourage scholars of religion to retain an awareness of the significance of new religious movements (NRMs) being new. It arises as a response to three propositions made by J. Gordon Melton in this issue. The first of these is that NRMs have more in common with their religious traditions of origin than with each other. The second is that NRM is a residual category——it is not a church, a sect or an ethnic religion. Melton's third proposal is that NRMs might best be defined as religions that are greeted with antagonism by significant elements of the wider society, including traditional religions. My response is, first, that however related or unrelated they are to their respective traditions, NRMs are likely to share certain characteristics with each other merely because they are new. Second, these characteristics are deserving of attention in their own right and cannot be reduced to their not being various types of other religions. Third, rather than being used as a defining characteristic, the antagonism with which NRMs are met can be more usefully thought of as a consequence of their newness.

Western Esotericism and New Religious Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Bogdan
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
Four Discourses ◽  
Absolute Knowledge

The study of Western esotericism is a comparatively new field of research that covers a wide range of currents, notions and practices from late antiquity to the present. Esotericism is often understood as the “rejected knowledge” of Western culture, which often centers on claims of absolute knowledge or gnosis. This chapter discusses four discourses that can be found in many esoteric NRMs, namely “secrecy and unveiling”, “initiation and progress”, “the higher self”, and “Secret Masters”. In the second part of the chapter four examples of esoteric NRMs are briefly discussed, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Thelema, and Wicca.

What are the New Religious Movements Doing in a Secular Society?

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan R. Wilson ◽  
Eileen Barker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Secular Society

This chapter discusses one of the major social changes that have taken place in late twentieth-century Britain — secularisation — the process whereby religion loses its social significance. In the second half of the twentieth century there was a major decline in Britain in formal church membership and attendance, although the decline in religious belief is less well established. The chapter also discusses the emergence of new religions in the secular society. They derive from a wide variety of sources: some such as the Jesus Army from the Baptist tradition of Protestant Christianity, others such as the New Jerusalem claim to represent the true Orthodox tradition; many others have a non-Christian character, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and the Brahma Kumaris have their roots in Hinduism, while Buddhism has given rise to Soka Gakkai and Shinto to Konkokyo; and also Paganism, Wicca, Satanism and traditions deriving from science fiction. The most important point to be made about these new religious movements is that because of their diversity, any generalisation concerning them can almost certainly be shown to be untrue for one or another of their number.

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