Ancestral and chthonic cults at Tenos

This paper presents the material evidence from two neighbouring Early Iron Age sites at Xobourgo on Tenos, identified as sacred places, and comments on their religious character and evolution. The first, conventionally named the Pro-Cyclopean Sanctuary, has a purely mortuary character. It starts in the Late Protogeometric period with an ancestral cult on a pebble platform over an empty grave, continues with a number of pyre pits inside enclosure walls, and ends up with a chthonic cult at an eschara in the Late Geometric period to be replaced by a small sacred oikos in the 7th century. The second starts as an open-air shrine, named the Pre-Thesmophorion Shrine, with an eschara and a protected place for storing pithoi, and it is turned into a Demeter sanctuary, a Thesmophorion, with a small temple in the Classical period. After considering the development and phases of both sites, it is claimed that they have similar, though not identical, cultic roles. Their different architectural and religious evolution is considered as largely dependent on social changes and historical conditions. They are compared and discussed against contemporary archaeological evidence for ancestral and chthonic cults focusing on such evidence from Tenos.

Virkeligheder og religionshistorie: En introduktion til ontologier ifølge Philippe Descola

ENGLISH SUMMARY: A presentation of Philippe Descola’s model of four ontol-ogies (animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism) and six forms of attach-ment (gift, exchange, etc.) and an argument for their relevance for the academic study of religion. The four ontologies overlap partly with Robert Bellah’s stages of cultural-religious evolution: Animism and totemism dominate in tribal religions, analogism in archaic and post-axial religions, naturalism (or natura-culturalism) in the post-Christian modernity. DANSK RESUME: En præsentation af Philippe Descolas model over fire ontolo-gier (animisme, totemisme, analogisme og naturalisme) og seks relationsformer (gave, bytte m.m.) med argumentation for deres relevans for religionsvidenskaben. De fire ontologier relateres til Robert Bellahs religionshistoriske stadier: Animisme og totemisme dominerer i tribale religioner, analogisme i arkaiske og post-aksiale religioner og naturalisme i den post-kristne modernitet.

Hegel as an atheist and intuitivist in the interpretations of Alexandre Kozhève and Nikolay Lossky

The Russian exiled philosophers Alexander Kozhevnikov (Alexandre Kozhève) and Nikolay Lossky, who had to leave Russia in the 1920s, gave paradoxical interpretations of Hegel’s work: Kozhève treated Hegel as an atheist whereas Lossky interpreted him as an intuitivist. Both philosophers have influenced the development of Western European philosophy and contemporary understanding of Hegel’s texts. The history of Russian philosophy would be poorer if we forget that Kozhevnikov acquired recognition as a French philosopher Kozhève only at a mature age. A strong influence on Kozhève’s treatment of Christianity was exerted by Vladimir Soloviev’s philosophy, to which he devoted his first dissertation under the guidance of Karl Jaspers. His attention to the Christian understanding of love as an endless power over the finite manifestations of spirit, which was expounded upon/revealed in his course of lectures on Hegel, enjoyed great popularity in France and influenced the formation of eminent philosophers. Hegel’s atheism in Kozhève’s interpretation is not a denial of religion, since religion and philosophy have common interests applied to eternal themes; they differ only in methods of the cognition of the Absolute. The logic of the anthropological interpretation of Hegel led Kozhève to the rationalization of religion by elevating philosophy over it. Hegel’s atheistic anthropology turned his study into a summary of religious evolution, with theology eventually ousted by anthropology. Nikolay Lossky, who had written a book on intuitivism before the revolution, in his creative work abroad extended his notion of intuitivism by calling Hegel an extreme intuitivist. He based this conclusion on Hegel’s upholding of the principle of the identity of thinking and being, that is following the logic of an object in cognition. The possibility to eliminate the contradiction between knowledge and being, about which Hegel wrote, is interpreted by Lossky as intuitivism and even empiricism.

What we can learn from semiotics, systems theory, and theoretical biology to understand religious communication

If religion is a socio-cultural meaning system as part of the socio-cultural sphere, then how does it relate to mental, organic, and physical processes that belong to the environment of religion? The article contributes to answering this question by referring to semiotics, systems theory, and theoretical biology. The starting point is understanding religious evolution as a co-evolution to societal evolution, namely, as one of the latter’s internal differentiations. In turn, societal evolution is a co-evolution to mental, organic, and physical evolution. These evolutionary spheres mutually constitute one another’s environments. The eigenstate of the socio-cultural sphere consists of language activated via communication. Language is the replicator of socio-cultural processes corresponding to the function of the genome in organic processes. The differentiation of spheres in general evolution concerns respective organic, mental, and socio-cultural substrates, while the substrate-neutral structure of the two evolutionary dimensions of organic and societal processes, including religion, is revealed as semiotic patterns that organic and societal processes have in common. Organic and religious processes of generating information are isomorphic. Thus, semiosis mediates between religious communication and its environment.

New evidence of mid- to late- Holocene vegetation and climate change from a Neolithic settlement in western fringe of Central Ganga Plain: Implications for Neolithic to Historic phases

Here we present a continuous palaeoclimatic record of 5980 years (7230 cal BP–1250 cal BP) from Hetapatti, a Neolithic site situated on the western fringe of the Central Ganga Plain. The region was a center of reurbanisation following the decline of the Harappan civilisation and is considered a hub of economic, political and religious evolution since the sixth millennium BC. Hetapatti contains an uninterrupted sequence from Neolithic to Historic (Gupta) period. The study integrates two different approaches (phytoliths and carbon isotope analysis) to infer vegetational and climatic changes and to understand their relationship to the cultural sequence. Our results show a gradual transformation from a warm and humid climate into a warm and dry climate from the Neolithic to Historic (Gupta) period. We find an abrupt weakening of the ISM at ~2080 cal BP driving a warm and dry climate. The comparison of our data with other high resolution regional and global records led us to hypothesise a synchronicity in this warm and dry trend, coeval with the Roman warm period (RWP). The observed variation in vegetation and climate might have driven by the fluctuations in the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM). Additionally, the phytolith analysis provides evidence of cereal crops including rice, wheat, barley, millets, etc. suggesting a crop affinity with the earlier Indus crop package. It is interesting to note that the site displays an uninterrupted cultural sequence from Neolithic to Historic times, with artefacts of each phase exhibiting technological and stylistic developments from the preceding culture. From this we infer that the well adapted socio-ecological strategies and availability of perennial rivers may have helped the ancient civilisation to absorb the stress relating to a varying climate.