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Abstract
Contemporary conspiracism draws on both long-standing traditions and the current cultural and political environment as it constructs mythic knowledge that often includes apocalyptic prophecies. Such knowledge is constantly altered and reinterpreted by the conspiracy activists who invest in its transmission and reproduction. This article examines how conspiracist mythologies emerge in the use of these activists as mythic discourse that fluidly adapts both to include past sources and to comment on late modern phenomena. Illustrative cases of Christian and popular millennial conspiracist narratives are analyzed in terms of how they construct the actors, organizations, power positions, and historical trajectories of the world. The article highlights how different conspiracist myths share features and stances, influenced by the currents of late modernity, but also contest each other based on what their sources and purposes are, and how they differ in their evaluation of the apocalyptic event’s nature.
Abstract
This article concerns a representation of a temple festival in Tiruniḻalmāla, a major literary work in early Malayalam. The work in question focuses on a high-order Brahmanic temple of Āṟanmuḷa in the moment of a grave ritual and operational crisis. It emphasizes the restorative role of rather lowly rites of exorcism and purification including elements of dance, song, and drama. The article pays close attention to the structure of its textual matter and the literary strategies deployed by its author in meeting the performative exigencies of the genre. The festival itself seems today to have been long forgotten in the place of its origin. The article attempts to understand the socioreligious functions of the festival by exploring the inner logic of its literary representation, drawing parallels to other cultural institutions of medieval Kerala and showing how its afterlife in folk possession dance rituals contributed to the transmission of a text that gave the festival its literary form.
Abstract
In this article we provide a contribution to answering the question of how religious communication is possible. Religious communication is confronted with the essential paradox that statements about a principally inaccessible transcendence have to be made by immanent, known means. Metaphors, which we understand as mapping of a known source domain onto an unknown target domain, are particularly suitable for this purpose. We apply these assumptions to the Sumerian story Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld to examine how the text is to be understood as religious communication. We identify the familiar physical and social spheres as the source domains and the netherworld as the unknown target domain. We show how the conceptual metaphor The netherworld is a physical place is elaborated by means of different slots, namely where the realm of the dead is located, how to get to and how to return from there, in which shape one is able to return from the netherworld, as well as how things are ordered there.
Abstract
This study traces material movement across human–nonhuman animal bodies (henceforth human–animal) during ritual performances in which patients from Hittite Anatolia spat into an animal’s mouth. It explores the transference of pollution through the lens of theoretical approaches that reflect on bodily margins and orifices as potent symbolic points of human bodies, as well as on bodily fluids as substances that can threaten inside/outside, subject/object distinctions. An examination of Hittite compositions from this theoretical perspective suggests that ritual patients were able, through spitting, and spittle, to release evils characterized primarily by being in between corporeality, social, and divine encounters, instead of freeing them principally from physical afflictions.
Abstract
In the preface to the recent Festschrift in honor of Armin W. Geertz, the editors state that “in recent years consilience has become a catchword for designating the attempt to increasingly bring the natural and behavioural sciences into closer dialogue with the humanities,” adding that historians of religions and cognitivists need to “engage in conversation with each other, as well as dialogue with colleagues in all neighbouring disciplines.” Should consilience dictate the agenda for future scholarship in the science of religion(s), or should hermeneutics and history still provide resilience against the “scientification of religion?” This review essay aims to contribute to this current debate.
Abstract
Some Kind of Liberating Effect is a documentary dedicated to research freedom in the academic study of religion in Central and Eastern Europe. This essay examines the techniques used to develop a script and a screenplay. It will show how the documentary integrates screenwriting with the question of freedom of research in this academic field and region. First, the essay presents the raw footage filmed between 2022 and 2023, then the screenwriting techniques used for plotting a story. Finally, it discusses the shift from the history of the academic field to storytelling, particularly with regard to the frame story included in the film. In conclusion, it presents some remarks concerning the interdisciplinary and intersectoral approaches between religious studies and the film industry implemented in the documentary.