Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte最新文献

{"title":"Shedding Light on Early Christian Domestic Cult: Characteristics and New Perspectives in the Context of Archaeological Findings","authors":"Verena Fugger","doi":"10.1515/arege-2016-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2016-0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Focusing primarily on findings from late antique housing structures in Asia Minor this paper approaches the complex phenomenon of early Christian domestic cult from an archaeological perspective. In correlation to pagan house sanctuaries from the east and west of the Greco-Roman world, Christian domestic cult sites are analyzed according to architectural and decorative features as well as to their spatial distribution in the house. Thereby the synopsis of already well known monuments and recent archaeological findings reveals a great diversity of different characteristics of Christian domestic cult sites which has not been taken into account yet.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"18-19 1","pages":"201 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2016-0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46324770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theoi Soteres","authors":"Fritz Graf","doi":"10.1515/arege-2016-0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2016-0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Sōtēr is a frequently used cultic epithet of Greek gods, as is its feminine form, Sōteira. The epithets describe a superhuman agent who saves a human worshiper in a crisis that often involves a threat not just to one’s well-being, but one’s life. Both words are also used as simple names for a superhuman power, and there is a generalizing plural (theoi) sōtēres, “savior gods”. This study looks at the pre-Christian use of these terms and tries to answer a few basic questions: who were the divinities that received these epithets, how were they used, and what did they imply? The corpus of texts on which this study relies will be almost exclusively epigraphical.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"18-19 1","pages":"239 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2016-0013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67354438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Religious Life of Greek Automata","authors":"Clara Bosak-Schroeder","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper examines the religious lives of Greek automata. An automaton is an object that has been constructed to move on its own.¹ I argue that ancient Greek automata at first had a solely magical life, later attained a mechanical life, and that this change from magical to mechanical allowed automata to proliferate in religious contexts. While automata were originally imagined as purely magical, the advent of advanced mechanics later in antiquity made it possible for automata to be realized and also caused Greeks in the Hellenistic and Roman ages to reinterpret magical automata as mechanical. Later Greeks’ projection of mechanical knowledge onto the magical automata of the past mirrors twentieth and twenty-first century scholars’ tendency to reinterpret ancient automata as “robots” in line with technological advances in their own time. Changes in mechanics in antiquity and the response of people to those changes leads me to advance the concept of “relative modernism.” I argue that modernism is a mind-set that recurs throughout history rather than one that emerges in a unique period of history.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"123 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67354199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: The Religious Life of Things","authors":"I. Moyer","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0001","url":null,"abstract":"The critique and historicization of “religion” as a universalizing category defined in terms of beliefs, ideas, and meanings has reoriented many scholars to materiality as a ground for the comparative study of religions within and across historical, social and cultural contexts.1 For students of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions, as in many other fields, the landscape of religion has always been well populated with material things: statues, altars, figurines, amulets, papyri, tablets, baskets, pots, knives, garments—the list could go on. Such religious objects have often been studied as the tools and furniture of ritual, or treated as instances of symbolic communication—evidence that points elsewhere to ideas and beliefs (and in earlier times, perhaps the deficiencies therein). The collection of papers presented here are the results of an invitation to focus attention on the things themselves. In organizing the annual conference of the Midwest Consortium on Ancient Religions for 2013, Celia Schultz and I encouraged participants to explore the “The Religious Life of Things.” The aim of this title was not only to shift the focus from the various human subjective orientations of “religious life” to its material dimensions, but also to exploit the ambiguity of “life” itself: life as biography, and life in a more ontological sense, as animate existence. That ambiguity was borrowed along with the template for our title from The Social Life of Things, the justly famous volume edited by Arjun Appadurai (Appadurai 1986a). In his introduction to that collection, Appadurai argued for the advantages of tracing the lives of things: “even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context. No social analysis of things ... can avoid a minimum level of what might be called methodological fetishism” (Appadurai 1986b: 5). This methodological fetishism seeks to turn commodity fetishism inside out. Rather than a mystifying reification of commodities as though they possess autonomous lives in the market, Appadurai’s methodological fetishism endows things with lives in order to follow their movements as they become or cease to be commodities, revealing how human subjects endow objects with value across a variety of cultural contexts. Igor Kopytoff, in his contribution to The Social Life of Things, proposed writing the cultural biographies of things in order to follow them not only through the homogenizing economic processes of commoditization, but also through the countervailing processes of singularization—of","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"10 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67353510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prostitution and Panhellenism in Aristophanes’ Peace","authors":"Donald Sells","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While most contributions to this volume look at the religious life of actual objects, the present chapter examines religious life from the opposite perspective, the concretization of one institution of religious practice in ancient Greece, festival attendance, in the specific genre of Old Comedy. In his comedy Peace (421 BCE), Aristophanes represents the graphic sexual objectification of Theôria (Festival), one of two personified attendants accompanying the goddess Peace, whose return initiates a new golden age in Greece. By implicitly characterizing Theôria as a prostitute, i.e., as an occasional, sexually available, and fungible object for the enjoyment of festival attendees, the comedy reestablishes the subjectivity of a nominally male Athenian audience whose opportunities to enjoy publicly funded and culturally affirmative religious festivals were radically curtailed by a decade of brutal war. With an embodied Theôria, Aristophanes evokes for his audience the longed-for pleasures of the festival circuit now made permanent in the glorious postwar utopia provided by divine Peace.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"69 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67354265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Apotropaic Autographs: Orality and Materiality in the Abgar-Jesus Inscriptions","authors":"A. M. Henry","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper, I explore the late antique tradition of inscribing the Abgar-Jesus correspondence on stone for protection as attested by seven inscriptions from Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. I first argue that the correspondence’s perceived protective efficacy stems from its claim to preserve an autograph of Jesus. I then explore the implications of embedding such an autograph into an urban landscape. Drawing on recent research on the orality and materiality of epigraphy, I suggest that the epigraphic attestations of the Abgar-Jesus correspondence join in a broader tradition of deploying oral formulae to protect domestic and civic space from harm, and therefore, should be viewed as ritually powerful objects that were “performing” the correspondence at their respective liminal spaces.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"165 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67354309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Speech Acts and Embedded Narrative Structure in the Getty Hexameters","authors":"Kathryn Caliva","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Getty Hexameters are an enigmatic text that reveals a conception of the pragmatic force underlying mythic narratives. Although some scholars have concluded that the text is a composite of multiple spells, this paper argues for reading the text as a unified narrative marked by a hierarchy of authoritative speech acts that draw on the authority of three apotropaic divinities: Paean, Hecate, and Heracles. These layers of narrative acts follow a sequence of revelation, mythological analogy, and aitiology, all of which come together to demonstrate the efficacy of the text as an apotropaic charm.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"139 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67354290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Utility and Variance in Late Antique Witnesses to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence","authors":"J. Given","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes two sets of late antique witnesses to the Abgar-Jesus correspondence: the discussion of the letters in the literary record of the 4th-6th centuries and the Coptic version of the correspondence, as preserved in amulets and ritual formularies. I approach each of these sets with a particular interest in how the texts’ forms-both the textual variants contained within them and the physical objects upon which they are inscribed-may reflect practices of engagement with the letters, drawing attention to the ways in which ancient readers, scribes, and ritual specialists grappled with questions about these texts’ source, attribution, stability, and reliability. The available evidence suggests that ancient readers, hearers, and users of the Abgar-Jesus correspondence were not particularly concerned with questions of “canonical authority” and “genuineness;” these texts were put to use not because they were demonstrably “authentic,” but because they worked. While a number of features suggest the letters’ origins as part of an “epistolary fiction,” these texts were nevertheless received as efficacious in matters of life and death. Their utility for particular scriptural practices trouble the modern distinctions between “authentic” and “forged,” “real” and “fictional,” “canonical” and “apocryphal,” and demand a recalibration (if not total overhaul) of these analytical categories as applied to antiquity.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"187 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67353913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gold Has Many Uses","authors":"F. Graf","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper, I discuss a group of gold tablets from graves in Judaea-Palaestina from about 200 CE. I connect the text in these tablets with a well known funerary acclamation that originated in the East and was brought to the Latin West by immigrants and argue, against earlier scholars, that these tablets mark the very home of this acclamation and express a peculiar eschatology. I end with remarks on the multiple uses of inscribed gold tablets in ancient religions.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"11 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67353712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Furniture of the Gods: The Problem with the Importation of ‘Empty Space and Material Aniconism’ into Greek Religion","authors":"Henry S. Blume","doi":"10.1515/arege-2015-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2015-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The field of aniconism has begun to receive more attention within the past 20 years. In Travis Mettinger’s No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context (1995), he subdivided the field into two distinct categories: material aniconism and empty space aniconism. The former typically refers to stelai, unhewn pieces of wood etc., whereas the latter may refer to empty thrones, a saddled horse without a rider, or the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. In short, empty space aniconism refers to a space where the god is perceived to be positioned. This paper seeks to answer the question: how useful are these categories? To answer it, the altar is offered as one possible type of aniconism. This was first proposed by Milette Gaifman in her 2005 dissertation, refined and expanded in Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (2012), where she makes the case that some altars can be considered as examples of material aniconism. This paper starts from the opposite premise: that altars can be considered forms of empty space aniconism. After demonstrating many instances where altars do fit the criteria of empty space aniconism, examples that might fit Gaifman’s premise are addressed as well. This paper ultimately arrives at the conclusion that altars fall into both categories, thereby showing that these categories are insufficient. Altars, like so many other forms of aniconism, are merely a means to denote divine presence.","PeriodicalId":29740,"journal":{"name":"Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte","volume":"17 1","pages":"55 - 68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/arege-2015-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67354089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}