This article interrogates how rituals and myths may reshape Pentecostal ideology and practice in ways that resonate with the practical concerns of born-again congregants in an exclusive foreign labour market. It draws on a series of field observations conducted in Johannesburg, at two congregations of the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa – a born-again movement with roots in Zimbabwe – between 2009 and 2016. The authors critically examine the shifting architecture of the ritual of Working Talents and its contradictory (...) use of myths. The authors consider the intended consequences of both the ritual of Working Talents and often contradictory myths used to bolster it, for the transnational growth of the church and its involvement in the development of the nation. A phenomenological observation qualitative research was utilised to establish the experiences, feelings and behaviours of the ZAOGA congregants regarding the gospel of Working Talents at two of their assemblies in Johannesburg. A key finding was that Working Talents contains ethical action and empowerment narratives, and it aspires to create Pentecostal congregants with collective cultural identities, disposed to give money to support the causes of the church. In doing so, myths and rituals have reshaped the ZAOGA Pentecostal ideology into a nuanced version of the Prosperity Gospel, one that emphasises notions of indigenisation, empowerment and self-propagation. (shrink)

In modern societies, educational philosophy concentrated on concept clarification and the structure of bodies of knowledge, especially science. This modernist project was found wanting, given its connections with ideologies of exploitation, violence and greed. Educational philosophy should, therefore, develop a “new key” for making the role of the aesthetic and ethical in cultural life and education meaningful. In particular, a study of ancient and traditional cultures reveals the centrality of sacred myths and rituals as means for creating coherent cultural patterns (...) which are inspirational and foster well-being. Because of the postmodern aversion to theology-as-ideology and the sensitivity to diverse perspectives and populations, the reclaiming and recreation of appropriate cultural myths and rituals is especially challenging. I present, in outline, what I think are reasonable approaches to that challenge. (shrink)

History of religion, in its beginnings, had to struggle to emancipate itself from classical mythology as well as from theology and philosophy; when ritual was finally found to be the basic fact in religious tradition, the result was a divorce between classicists, treating mythology as a literary device, on the one hand, and specialists in festivals and rituals and their obscure affiliations and origins on the other.

Il s’agit du troisième volume des Collected Essays de Jan N. Bremmer (J.N.B.) et il s’inscrit dans la même perspective que le deuxième volume (The World of Greek Religion and Mythology) dont j’ai rendu compte entre les pages de Kernos en 2021. Mythes et rituels sont à nouveau convoqués, et l’intention de l’A. était d’ailleurs de ne publier qu’un volume sur ce thème. Mais l’ampleur de cet ensemble l’a dissuadé d’aller en ce sens (p. xix) et c’est un ouvrage séparé, (...) davantage thématique, qu’il... (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Some original forms of state emerge from the clan structures in central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries, beyond the reach of any European influence. The oral epic traditions which echo these events draw from the founts of Bantu mythic thought. The Luba national epic recounts the dramatic origin of its sacred royalty and describes the passage from a primitive culture to a refined civilization, from an uneventful history to one full of movement; but above all it abandons itself (...) to a singular meditation on the ritual usage of fire, on family and death, on time and space, on the rainbow and lightning. If we take the fantastic seriously, symbolic patterns appear which filter the historical tradition and transform it into metaphysics. The reeling King Woot seems to play in reverse the Luba role, on the royal scene of Kuba mythology, where almost Biblical figures could be recognized: the tower of Babel throws its shadow on the adventures of an African Noah who first abandons himself to drunkenness, then to incest, delivering society to the diversity of languages and plunging the universe into primordial chaos. A transition between the myth and the tale, the founding epic of the Lunda state is bathed three times in blood: the blood of the warriors, of the women, and of the beasts who fall prey to a marvelously seductive hunter. Looking closely, we see that this Prince-stranger, initiator of a line of anointed royalty, carries on his shoulders, as does his Luba counterpart, a part of the universe. The cosmogony is veiled in the myth but transparent in the ritual, in the actions and mysterious words of the initiates into mungonge religious society: men with eyes of light are the counterpart of animals with eyes of darkness, as the star of day is opposed to the sinister hyena-moon. The founding epic of the Bemba state tells, like the Kuba myth, of the fascination of the principle of pleasure among a migrating aristocracy, somewhat decadent in comparison with the rude warrior or hunter heroes in the Luba and Lunda epics. But all these narratives, in the final analysis, form one sole myth, which develops its autonomous structures under the turbulence of an historical adventure each time different. More than unfolding the particular story of each kingdom, these legendary chronicles of Zaïre, Zambia and Angola reveal that the powerful political organisations set up by the Bantu to the south of the great forest are not isolated from eacb other: they administrate in common an intellectual patrimony which breaks loose from the ideological role that the kings, whether drunk on palm wine or on military ambition, try to make them play for their own glory: myths and rites obey their own codes, recognize no master but one, which they give themselves in their own kingdom: the Imaginary. The text which follows here is concerned in particular with the epic of the Bemba people, whose dominating aristocracy imposed an anointed royalty on some 100,000 people formerly grouped in matrilinear clans. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-StateSheila MurnaghanSeaford, Richard. Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xx + 455 pp. Cloth, $75.00.In his stellar commentary on Euripides’ Cyclops, and in a string of impressive and suggestive articles, Richard Seaford has already established himself as our era’s leading expert on a question that is both perennial and (...) currently pressing: what does tragedy have to do with Dionysus? Whatever that question meant to the ancients who first raised it in the form of the proverbial complaint “ouden pros ton Dionuson,” to us it expresses a felt need to contextualize tragedy, to overcome our habits of reading the surviving plays solely as self-contained literary texts. Our starting point for this inquiry must be the setting of tragedy’s original performance in the Great Dionysia, and a fully satisfying answer must address the character of the Dionysia as simultaneously religious and political, a ritual in honor of a god that was also a self-conscious expression of the Athenian polis. In a study that is explicitly framed as a historicist counter to the prevailing literary (or as Seaford has it “formalist”) approaches to tragedy, Seaford here excavates that junction of religion and politics, locating the origins—and thus the essence—of tragedy in a weaving together of several rituals, all of which promoted the emerging city-state.The core of Seaford’s argument, and the central contribution of his study, is in this resolutely ritualist theory of the origins of tragedy. Drawing on a deep and detailed knowledge of Greek religion, and building on his own previous demonstrations of the pervasiveness of ritual themes in the extant plays, Seaford argues that tragic drama was created through the making public of rites of initiation into the Dionysian mysteries; these rites were originally the secret practices of the all-female thiasos but were converted into tragedy through their public revelation and their enactment by male performers. The plots of tragedy dramatized the aetiological myths that grounded Dionysian cult, such as the myth of Pentheus, but also other rituals, especially hero-cult, that similarly fostered the creation of the polis.For Seaford, the defining feature of the polis is the transcendence of the autonomous household in the creation of a larger and cohesive civic identity. Dionysus is, above all, the deity who presides over that process, and this accounts for his central role in tragedy. Dionysus is a foreigner without internal allegiances; he traverses the space between the city’s margins and its center, thereby defining the city’s shared territory; and he draws women out of the household into his thiasos, thereby countering the possessiveness and exclusivity of the individual household. But the creation of trans-familial social cohesion is also key to the non-Dionysian myths and rituals incorporated into tragedy. Hero-cult, for [End Page 316] example, transforms the divisive private funeral into a unifying experience of general lamentation that leads to benefits for the whole community. Many of tragedy’s non-Dionysian myths, especially those of the Theban cycle, rehearse the destruction of the introverted royal family with positive results, usually through the foundation of a cult, for the community as a whole. This last point is among the most breathtaking in the book, and it helps to solve one of the main mysteries surrounding tragedy, which is why the polis would sponsor a form of art dedicated to representing terrifying, irremediable disasters.What makes this theory so compelling is the way Seaford manages to avoid a reductive identification of tragedy with any one ritual while finding a consistent thread among the many rituals that converge to shape the genre. He argues persuasively for seeing the suffering heroes of tragedy as reflecting simultaneously the cult hero, whose universal lamentation binds a community together; the scapegoat, whose expulsion also reinforces community; the initiate, whose isolation and confusion precede his reintegration into society; and the grasping monarch, whose downfall frees up the circulation of women and goods. He is able to find unforced connections between what have often seemed like irreconcilable clues to tragedy’s origins... (shrink)

To explain Strepsiades' initiation in Aristophanes' Clouds, recent scholars have referred to a thronosis ritual at the Eleusinian mysteries to describe the process wherein the initiate sits on a stool with head covered. The term thronosis, however, properly belongs to Korybantic initiation ritual, not to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Not only are the terms employed to describe the rituals different, but the iconographic representations of the ritual and the mythic paradigms are different as well. The purificatory silent sitting (...) of the Eleusinian initiate should not be confused with the bewildering and terrifying treatment of the enthroned initiate in a Korybantic initiation. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking study, Jean Pierre-Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture one of slavery, of masks and death, of scapegoats, of ritual hunting and ecstasies.Vernant's provocative discussion of various institutions and practices including war, marriage, and sacrifice details the complex intersection of the religious, social, and political structures of ancient (...) Greece. The book concludes with Vernant's authoritative genealogy of the study of myth from antiquity to structuralism and beyond.Jean Pierre-Vernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the Collège de France in Paris. Janet Lloyd is a translator and writer living in England. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected by the scholar. From Plato and Fontenelle to Schelling and Bultmann, philosophers and theologians have proposed innumerable definitions of myth. But all of these have one thing in common: they (...) are based on the analysis of Greek mythology. Now, for a historian of religions this choice is not a very happy one. It is true that only in Greece did myth inspire and guide epic poetry, tragedy and comedy, as well as the plastic arts; but it is no less true that it is especially in Greek culture that myth was submitted to a long and penetrating analysis, from which it emerged radically ‘de-mythicised’. If in every European language the word ‘myth’ denotes a ‘fiction’, it is because the Greeks proclaimed it to be such twenty-five centuries ago. What is even more serious for an historian of religion: we do not know a single Greek myth within its ritual context. Of course this is not the case with the paleo-Oriental and Asiatic religions; it is especially not the case with the so-called ‘primitive’ religions. As is well known, a living myth is always connected with a cult, inspiring and justifying a religious behaviour. None of this of course means that Greek myth should not figure in an investigation of the mythical phenomenon. But it would seem unwise to begin our kind of inquiry by the study of Greek documents, and even more so to restrict it to such documents. The mythology which informs Homer, Hesiod and the tragic poets represents already a selection and an interpretation of archaic materials, some of which had become almost unintelligible. In short, our best chance of understanding the structure of mythical thought is to study cultures where myth is a ‘living thing’, where it constitutes the very ground of the religious life; in other words, where myth, far from indicating a fiction , is considered to reveal the truth par excellence. (shrink)

The present paper is a commentary on an article by Larry Churchill [1]. Churchill has argued that the negative attitudes and adverse behavior we commonly encounter in connection with AIDS patients may be understood in terms of a dualistic myth inspiring a ritual avoidance of dirt, of dirt as something that does not belong to a clean world order. The deep-seated mythical character of attitudes and behavior here makes them less accessible to the kind of rational argument commonly (...) employed in ethics. Churchill also proposes a remedy for the dualistic mythical-ritual behavior he has focused — a remedy that may be overly intellectualistic.Three further comments are made: on the metaphorical meaning of myth, on a reductionist tendency in Churchill's deep-looking project, and on an ethically crucial ambiguity in the meaning of the other person's otherness. These comments do not, however, detract from a positive overall evaluation of Churchill's basic idea that we will understand more about adverse attitudes and behavior in connection with AIDS if we think in terms of myth, ritual, dirt, and cleanliness. (shrink)

Poseidon has recently benefited from renewed scholarly attention, contributing to re-evaluate his role in ancient Greek imaginary. By opening the research previously limited to literary evidence to the archaeological and topographical evidence, new perspectives on “Poseidonian landscapes” have emerged. Arcadia, a land-locked region where Poseidon Hippios is celebrated with fervour, is here taken as a case study to try and go further in identifying the god’s realm of action. Areas with floods seem to be his preferred worship places, while in (...) other areas he plays a crucial part in myths but is hardly worshipped alone. There also seems to be a connection between his patronage over freshwater and horses. Overall, natural observation seems to have been instrumental in choosing the location of his worship places. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study of (...) class='Hi'>myth from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

Ritual and Myth in the International Corona-Drama. A Conversation with Jeffrey Alexander.

The articles assembled in this volume present an important selection of Professor Jao Tsung-i’s research in the fields of comparative mythology, early Chinese hemerology and the interrelation between divination, morals and ritual in early Chinese thought.

In This Book The Author Have Tried To Present A Historical Study Of Vedic Interpretation Confines Ourselves To The Study Of These Various Parts Of The Vedic Literature As Some Interpretation Of The Vedic Samhita. The Author Observed The Vedic Myth, Rituals And Philosophy As Interpreted By Madhvacarya The Founder Of Dvaita School Of Vedanta.

One of the most enduring contributions of the Middle Ages to the history of Western intolerance is the myth that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian children. From the twelfth century to the twentieth and from eastern Europe to North America Christians have accused Jews of conducting sanguinary rituals. These have included charges of sacrificing Christian children and collecting their blood for ritual purposes, as well as the commonly associated accusation of desecrating the body of Christ (...) in the form of the host sanctified in the mass. Not surprisingly the recent flowering of scholarly interest in the history of anti-Semitism and Christian-Jewish relations has yielded numerous studies of these charges in both medieval and modern times. (shrink)

I argue that Herodotus consciously and cunningly incorporates elements of myth and initiatory ritual into his story of Cleobis and Biton. The brothers' "blessed" death takes place in the context of an Argive initiatory festival, at the unintentional bidding of their mother, who thus embodies the link between maternity and mortality attested in early Greek hexameter poetry. The posthumous dedication by their fellow citizens of statues of the brothers at Delphi signifies both an honorary initiation into the class (...) of adult male warriors and a mitigation of mortality (another fundamental concern of early Greek myth). (shrink)

The structuring and transformation of myth is presented as a function of a number of brain “operators.” Each operator is understood to represent specifically evolved neural tissue primarily of the neocortex of the brain. Mythmaking as well as other cognitive processes is seen as a behavior arising from the evolution and integration of certain parts of the brain. Human ceremonial ritual is likewise understood as the culmination of a long phylogenetic evolutionary process, and a neural model is presented (...) to explain its properties. Finally, the mechanism by which ritual is used to resolve the antinomies of myth structure is explored. (shrink)