Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10249
P. B. Koch
This study investigates the way in which different concepts of contemplation and seclusion are negotiated in Jewish spiritual literature. Focusing on (early) modern examples, it particularly addresses the functions and goals of physical and mental exercises designed to achieve detachment from worldly concerns. It shows how practices denoted by the terms perishut (lit. “separation”) and hitbodedut (lit. “solitude”) serve as preparatory steps that enable individuals to approach the divine, with the ultimate goal of bringing about various experiences of oneness with the deity. Against this background, it elucidates how perishut and hitbodedut were considered by some authors instrumental to gain divine knowledge, and how this idea relates to earlier Jewish conceptions of prophecy. Lastly, it will illustrate how in contemporary sources, contemplative seclusion is presented as a practice that transcends the temporal framework to which humans are bound.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-20DOI: 10.46586/er.11.2023.10810
Ionuț-Valentin Cucu
This paper scrutinizes how three seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century authors associated with the Anglican Church – Henry Lord, Thomas Hyde, and Humphrey Prideaux – inserted their understanding of the teachings of Zoroaster and the religion of the Parsis into the argumentative arsenal they regularly employed against what they perceived as the rigidity, excessive ritualization, and incomprehensible language found in contemporary Roman Catholic practices. These authors are tied to and reflect the consolidation of the Anglican Church and British colonial expansion. The two processes not only overlapped for a considerable period, but were also entangled, indirectly leading to an increase in scholarly knowledge about different cultures and religious communities, while in the long term also providing discursive ammunition against the Catholic Church and the Pope. This enquiry seeks to contribute towards a better understanding of an often-neglected middle ground between inter- and intra-religious debates, on one hand, and missionary activity, on the other.
{"title":"Neither Zarathushtra nor Pope: Zoroastrianism as a Front for the Anglican Church’s Attacks on Catholicism","authors":"Ionuț-Valentin Cucu","doi":"10.46586/er.11.2023.10810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.11.2023.10810","url":null,"abstract":"This paper scrutinizes how three seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century authors associated with the Anglican Church – Henry Lord, Thomas Hyde, and Humphrey Prideaux – inserted their understanding of the teachings of Zoroaster and the religion of the Parsis into the argumentative arsenal they regularly employed against what they perceived as the rigidity, excessive ritualization, and incomprehensible language found in contemporary Roman Catholic practices. These authors are tied to and reflect the consolidation of the Anglican Church and British colonial expansion. The two processes not only overlapped for a considerable period, but were also entangled, indirectly leading to an increase in scholarly knowledge about different cultures and religious communities, while in the long term also providing discursive ammunition against the Catholic Church and the Pope. This enquiry seeks to contribute towards a better understanding of an often-neglected middle ground between inter- and intra-religious debates, on one hand, and missionary activity, on the other.","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"160 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73329177","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}
Pub Date : 2023-05-17DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10309
P. Krüger, M. Radermacher
The paper discusses the Australian artefacts in the collection of the Institute for the Study of Religion at the University of Münster. The collection was established in the 1950s with the intention to exemplify, for students of Catholic theology, the wide variety of material expressions developed by different religious traditions in the world. The collection also highlights zones of missionary contact and their inclusion in theological thinking about non-Christian traditions. The Australian objects were given to the collection in the second half of the 1950s by the Pallottine missionary Ernest Worms. It is not the goal of this paper to attempt a thorough ethnological analysis of the objects; instead, we discuss how these objects from indigenous Australian cultures were included in a collection of religious artefacts owned by the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Münster and to what extent the founder of the collection, Anton Antweiler, considered these objects expressions of the religions and religious history of Australia. To this end, the correspondence between Worms and Antweiler has been analysed, particularly where Worms discusses these objects extensively from both a missionary perspective and from his point of view as a scholar researching Australian cultures. In addition, his German treatise on the religions of Australia (*Die Religionen der Südsee und Australiens*) was consulted. Based on these sources, Worms’ perception of the religions and cultures of Australia and how it informed his collecting activities can be reconstructed at least partially. At the same time, the paper attempts to direct the focus at the objects themselves as bearers of information. The material artefacts that were collected, described and finally sent to Münster to be exhibited tell their own stories about cultural and religious contact, in Australia as well as in Germany, where they were shown to students of Catholic Theology and are accessible for students and staff members until today.
本文讨论了新西兰国立大学宗教研究所收藏的澳大利亚文物。该收藏成立于20世纪50年代，旨在为天主教神学的学生展示世界上不同宗教传统发展的各种各样的材料表达。该系列还强调了传教士接触的区域，以及他们对非基督教传统的神学思考。这些澳大利亚文物是在20世纪50年代下半叶由帕洛廷传教士欧内斯特·沃尔姆斯(Ernest Worms)捐赠给该博物馆的。本文的目的不是试图对这些对象进行彻底的民族学分析;相反，我们将讨论这些来自澳大利亚土著文化的物品是如何被纳入由m nster大学天主教神学院拥有的宗教文物收藏中的，以及该收藏的创始人Anton Antweiler在多大程度上认为这些物品表达了澳大利亚的宗教和宗教历史。为此，我们分析了沃姆斯与安特维勒之间的通信，特别是沃姆斯从传教士的角度和作为研究澳大利亚文化的学者的角度广泛地讨论了这些物品。此外，还参考了他关于澳大利亚宗教的德文专著(*Die Religionen der s dsee und Australiens*)。基于这些资料，沃尔姆斯对澳大利亚宗教和文化的看法，以及它如何影响他的收藏活动，至少可以部分地重建。与此同时，本文试图将焦点指向作为信息载体的物体本身。这些被收集、被描述并最终被送到国立 nster博物馆展出的材料，讲述了他们自己在澳大利亚和德国的文化和宗教接触的故事，在那里，它们被展示给天主教神学的学生，直到今天，学生和教职员工都可以访问它们。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-25DOI: 10.46586/er.13.2022.10535
J. Schmoller, K. Stünkel
In the introduction to this special issue, the editors are concerned with how the Russian state defines its national culture and history mainly with reference to Slavic civilisation, Orthodox Christianity and imperial glory. This post-Soviet discourse of nation-building may be understood as an attempt to cope with a sense of loss in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. That discourse also affects how nationalist-minded observers interpret space as naturally Russian and as part of the empire of the past (or the present). Regrettably, little consideration is being paid to Russia’s ethnic and religious minority cultures, which hardly seem to contribute to Russian history and culture and sometimes do not even feature in representations thereof. Critically engaging with the ideas of presence and absence—the presence of one culture or tradition to the detriment of others—, the editors suggest, can potentially help to decolonise accounts and illustrations of Russian culture and heritage. In the best case, the outcome of such an exercise would be a more adequate involvement of minority representatives in the process of negotiating Russian national culture.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-14DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10299
Bernd-Christian Otto
This article illustrates textual-ritual entanglements in Western learned magic across almost two millennia through an analysis of Frater Acher’s Arbatel experience. Frater Acher is a contemporary practitioner of ‘magic(k)’ who, between 2010 and 2013, performed a series of conjurations of six planetary spirits inspired by an early modern manual of learned magic named *Arbatel*. Frater Acher combined the Arbatel with ritual techniques from numerous further contexts, among them the late ancient *Greek Magical Papyri*, the Clavicula Salomonis tradition, Paracelsianism, Hermeticism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, theurgy, modern imagination techniques, as well as chaos ‘magic(k)’. As a consequence, Frater Acher’s Arbatel experience – as he frames his ritual diaries published online – reveals a strikingly entangled ritual that illustrates the breadth, depth, and complexity of Western learned magic, as well as its manifold entanglements across time and space. His diaries also demonstrate that, even while following largely formalistic premodern scripts of learned magic, contemporary practitioners may nonetheless display a high degree of flexibility, creativity, and innovation. The article closes by reflecting on whether it is likely that such strategies were also present in premodern practitioner scenarios. In doing so, it calls for taking the – extensive but hitherto almost completely neglected – data of experience reports by contemporary practitioners of ‘magic(k)’ into account when interpreting premodern sources of learned magic. As a consequence, this is the first systematic attempt to compare and juxtapose premodern and modern interpretations and mindsets of practitioners of learned magic. It is thus also the first scholarly article that aims at elucidating a premodern manual of learned magic through reading and analysing the experience report of a contemporary practitioner.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-14DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10439
Michael-Sebastian Noble
By the thirteenth century, philosophy, politics and occult science had become deeply entangled in the Persianate Islamic world. Two of the greatest luminaries in this intellectual milieu were Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d.1210) and Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Ibn Ḥabash Ibn Amīrak al-Suhrawardī (d.1191/2), who at one point were fellow students of philosophy under a certain Majd al-Dīn al-Jīlī in Marāgha in northeastern Iran. Both subsequently sought royal patronage, the former travelling eastwards to Transoxania to secure the generosity of the Khwārazm-Shāhs, the latter travelling eastwards to the Levant to gain the intimate trust of Malik al-Ẓāhir, the son of the Ayyūbid sultan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn—known in the West as Saladdin. Both composed works devoted to talismanic astral ritual. And crucially, both developed philosophical soteriologies coloured by their meditations on the “craft”—soteriologies with profound implications for the nature of political authority.
到13世纪，哲学、政治和神秘科学已经深深纠缠在波斯伊斯兰世界。这一知识分子环境中最伟大的两位杰出人物是Fakhr al- d n al-Rāzī (d.1210)和Shihāb al- d n Yaḥyā伊本Ḥabash伊本am rak al- suhrawardi (d.1191/2)，他们一度是伊朗东北部Marāgha某Majd al- d n al- jj ā l的哲学同学。两人随后都寻求皇室的庇护，前者向东前往Transoxania以确保Khwārazm-Shāhs的慷慨，后者向东前往黎凡特以获得Ayyūbid苏丹Ṣalāḥ al- d - n的儿子Malik al-Ẓāhir的亲密信任，后者在西方被称为Saladdin。两人的作品都致力于护身符星界仪式。至关重要的是，两人都发展出了哲学上的救世论，这些救世论都受到了他们对“工艺”的思考的影响——这些救世论对政治权威的本质有着深远的影响。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-14DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10389
Dirk Johannsen
Among modern practitioners of magic, the “psychologization of magic” has become a common strategy to adapt practices such as rituals of invocation to naturalistic thought. In this article, I discuss what was probably the most elaborate attempt to bridge the gap between the magic of the past and magic suited for the present that took place within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888–1903). Approaching the Order’s teachings through the lens of contemporaneous literary discourse, the Irish poet and magician William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) attempted to consolidate supernaturalist and naturalist understandings of magic throughout the 1890s. In 1892, he made the concept of the “immortal moods” a key to both his poetry and his magical practice. Evoked through symbols in a ritual or a poem, these moods would descend “like a faint sigh into people’s minds” and move them to action, causing “all great changes in the world.” Yeats explored this concept in theoretical writings, poetic experiments, and his ritual practice, finding his own imagination entangled with past imaginations. Serving a brief term as the Golden Dawn’s Imperator and Instructor in Mystical Philosophy in 1901, he condensed the insights gained from this work in the doctrines of the “great mind and great memory.” Presenting a study of Yeats’ psychology of the universal mind, this article shows how his amalgamation of literary and folkloristic theorizing paved the way to connect magical and poetic practice to the emerging psychological discourse.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-14DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10457
Bernd-Christian Otto
The introduction to this special issue outlines the concept of Western learned magic and suggests to analyse it as an entangled tradition, thus calling for an interdisciplinary, transcultural and transreligious perspective on its history. A working heuristic of seven different types of entanglement in the history of Western learned magic is proposed, whereas special emphasis is placed on processes of ritual hybridisation. Entangled rituals are one of the most unique characteristics of Western learned magic and often mirror millenia-long processes of textual-ritual transmission across numerous cultural and religious boundaries. Inspired by this working heuristic of different types of entanglement in the history of Western learned magic, the introduction summarises the six contributions to this special issue. These contributions represent the fruits of a workshop on *Western learned magic as an entangled tradition* that was held at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at the University of Bochum on September 14–15, 2019.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-14DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10440
O. Davies
The relationship between print and manuscript in the entanglement of ‘western learned magic’ provides valuable insights regarding the complexity of cultural transmission across societies and social strata. Through exploring the influence over time of two print books containing conjurations, one in English the other French, we can trace how seemingly tenuous relationships reveal unlikely global frames of reference with regard to learned magic.
{"title":"Print Grimoires and the Democratization of Learned Magic in the Later Early Modern Period: Bricolage Tradition and the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Knowledge","authors":"O. Davies","doi":"10.46586/er.14.2023.10440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.14.2023.10440","url":null,"abstract":"The relationship between print and manuscript in the entanglement of ‘western learned magic’ provides valuable insights regarding the complexity of cultural transmission across societies and social strata. Through exploring the influence over time of two print books containing conjurations, one in English the other French, we can trace how seemingly tenuous relationships reveal unlikely global frames of reference with regard to learned magic.","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"210 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77064923","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}
Pub Date : 2023-04-14DOI: 10.46586/er.14.2023.10246
Sophie Page
This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women – a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.
{"title":"Entangled Magic in the Medieval Latin West","authors":"Sophie Page","doi":"10.46586/er.14.2023.10246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.14.2023.10246","url":null,"abstract":"This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women – a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87657778","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}
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