Society, Spatiality, and the Sacred

The Essay provides space for scholars to present peerreviewed research in a manner that uses data studies and critical reflection as occasions for advancing currents in the broader academic study of religion. In this issue, we have two contributions. Umur Ko?al revisits Jerusalem’s Western Wall and submits that a spatial approach can help scholars reconsider the complex relation of sites classified as sacred. And Matteo Di Placido takes yoga studies as an example of a Foucauldian discourse formation and considers the historical and political textures that appear when examined under the light of recent research in the discursive study of religion.

A Handbook of a Kherep-Selket from the Tomb of Iufaa: The Book of Primeval Snakes

Summary The Late Period shaft tombs at Abusir are located in the North-Western part of the Abusir necropolis and were built during a rather short span of time at the very end of 26th Dynasty, between 530 and perhaps 525 BC. Among those, the tomb of Iufaa stands out by its size and by the extent of its interior decoration. Significant amount of the decorated space in Iufaa’s burial chamber were reserved for a series of texts and images that may be best denoted as a “Snake Encyclopedia”. The individual parts of this textual corpus cover the main parts of the arch of the western wall in the burial chamber of Iufaa. The opposite side of the burial chamber, the arch of the eastern wall, bears two texts (accompanied with images) that concern Underworld/divine snakes as well. Although this “encyclopedia” of Underworld serpentine beings still provides us with much more questions and puzzles than answers and insights, it also sheds a new light upon the religion, cult and afterlife beliefs of the Saite-Persian and Graeco-Roman Egypt. It witnesses the importance of giant snakes or primeval creatures in serpentine form that were believed to dwell in the Underworld and were directly linked to cosmogony and periodical renewal of the sun and of the world. As manifestations of Re and Osiris, the snakes become lords of life and death, hypostaseis of the cyclically rejuvenated Creator. The idea of renewal and rebirth is also closely connected with ritual purity and purification rites. Thus, the “Snake Encyclopedia” is accompanied by a corpus dedicated to the ritual cleansing of the pharaoh and of the deceased, which is represented textually and pictorially on the northern wall of Iufaa’s burial chamber and which features serpentine primordial beings as well. But the focus on not generally transmitted, pre-cosmological concepts is connected to yet another important aspect of the composition and other texts from Iufaa’s tomb, that have most probably served as a compendium of secret knowledge for the magicians of Selket. This motif helps us to interpret one of the main tasks of the composition in focus: it probably served to accumulate and transmit sacred knowledge and to use it to ensure that the deceased would be accepted into the blessed Afterlife.

Lava flow hazard of the 2018 Etna eruption: What happened and what could happen

<p>On 24 December 2018 a flank eruption started on Etna from an eruptive fissure opened on the eastern side of the New Southeast Crater (NCSE) at about 3,100 m asl, which in few minutes, propagated to the south-east, overcoming the edge of the western wall of the Valle del Bove (VdB), reaching an altitude of 2,400 m asl and a total length of about 2 km. The eruption, which lasted only three days, produced lava flows from different vents along the eruptive fissure that reached a distance of about 4.2 km and covered an area of about 1 km2. The satellite monitoring of the 2018 Etna eruption was performed using the HOTSAT system using mid and thermal infrared data acquired by the Spinning Enhanced Visible and InfraRed Imager (SEVIRI), which provided minimum and maximum estimates for the lava thermal flux, the effusion rate and the lava volume. The SEVIRI-derived effusion rate estimates were used as input of the MAGFLOW model to simulate the actual lava flow field, obtaining a very good fit. We also simulated different eruptive scenarios assuming the lava emission wouldn’t run out in only three days to forecast if, when and how the lava flow could reach the inhabited areas, causing possible significant damage. </p>

The Western Wall Controversy

Since 1988 a group of Jewish women in Israel, who later organized as the “Women of the Wall,” have been battling to realize what they see as their right to hold a public prayer service, while wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries and reading from a Torah scroll, in the women’s section of the Western Wall Plaza. Some of the Orthodox are fiercely opposed to the WoW and its project. This issue has reached the Israeli courts several times and has repeatedly engaged the political system. This article examines whether one of the two positions can draw on constitutional arguments that would justify a ruling in its favor.

Non-standart position of the false door in Giza tombs - a builing mistake or a least-evil solution?

In the chapels of a number of tombs in the Giza necropolis, both rock-cut and stone (mastaba), the false door – the main place of worship of the tomb – is sometimes not located on the west wall. Given that the tradition of placing the false door precisely on the western wall had deep roots for centuries, these cases raise a legitimate question about the reasons for such an anomaly. But the paucity of examples, both in Giza and in other necropolises, made it difficult to conduct a broad analysis of this phenomenon. This question has been repeatedly raised in the literature, but it is still debatable. And after the discovery of new examples at the site of the Russian Archaeological Mission at Giza of the Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS (RAMG), it became necessary to return to this problem to analyze it, to structure and summarize the early information, to try to understand the nature of the occurrence of such cases. A total of nine such cases are known in the Giza necropolis; all of them date from the time of the V–VI dynasties, when the necropolis is drastically compacted – and the tombs are occupied by any vacant space. It was not always possible to place false doors on the western wall of the chapels for each individual burial. As a result, sometimes the builders deliberately placed a false door not on the western wall but in the immediate vicinity of the burial to emphasise the connection between them.