Sarah Iles Johnston

Religions of the ancient world : a guide

Materials from ten different cultures and traditions that arose and developed in Mediterranean religions are presented side by side in an incisive study of the complexities of the ancient spiritual world, which interprets these specific beliefs, rituals, practices, gods, and cults in comparison with

CHARMING CHILDREN: THE USE OF THE CHILD IN ANCIENT DIVINATION *

In the 1982 film Poltergeist, the arrival of spirits in a suburban neighborhood first manifests itself to a little girl who is watching TV in a darkened living room: “They’re here,” she announces, gazing at images that only she can see on the glowing screen. The director, Tobe Hooper, represents the television as a window through which the inhabitants of another world can be seen. The little girl is our medium—a human agent who has a special ability to look through that window and tell us what she sees. What makes the incident especially intriguing is not just the possibility of stealing glimpses into this other world but the nature of the medium who does so. Using a child in such a role, to quote Henry James, gives the effect another “Turn of the Screw.” Both James’ tale and Hooper’s film, however, build on quite a tradition: in many cultures around the world, both modern and ancient, children have been credited with a special ability to see spirits, either spontaneously or when induced by a spell.

Hekate soteira : a study of Hekate's roles in the Chaldean oracles and related literature

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Animating Statues: A Case Study in Ritual

This article argues that the practice of ritualized animation developed only late in Greek and Roman history, within a particular intellectual climate—the Platonizing religious system called theurgy. Ritualized animation enabled theurgists to work within a worldview that sharply distinguished between the physical and spiritual realms. I use my reconstruction of animation rituals as a platform to make some observations about how we should study ancient rituals, suggesting that scholars need to listen more attentively to what our sources say about their rituals than we have been accustomed to do in the wake of the theoretical legacies of social anthropology. Reconstruction of ancient animation rituals and their intentions “from the inside” aligns well with recent theories of ritual, even as the two offer different sorts of insights.

The Greek Mythic Story World

In the last article of Arethusa, I took up the question of how the highly polished nature of Greek mythic narratives—the vivacity and expressive power that earned so many of them an enduring place in the pleroma of world literature and art—contributed to the creation and sustenance of belief in the gods, heroes, and a divine world more generally. In that arti- cle, I focused particularly on how the characters in Greek myths evoked emotional and cognitive responses from their audience members that were virtually indistinguishable from those evoked by people in the real world, and on how the ancient modes of narrating myths (which typically treated them episodically and through a variety of different media), helped to keep the stories and their characters alive in an audience members mind and heart long after a narration was over, thus further sustaining the beliefs that the stories had encouraged. One issue that I temporarily set aside in that article was why the narration of a wide variety of myths focusing on a wide variety of charac- ters was appropriate for recitation at a wide variety of festivals dedicated to a wide variety of gods. In many cases, of course, there is an obvious link between the myth and the festival: the story of Apollos foundation of the Delphic Oracle makes intrinsic sense for performance at a Delphic festival in honor of Apollo (as in Aristinouss paean to Apollo and, probably, the second part of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo). In other cases, thematic or

The Great God Pan

This essay starts from the premise that ghost stories of the late 19 th and 20 th centuries often engaged the same issues as older ‘gnostic’ treatises did (taking a particular line from Emanuel Swedenborg), but had the advantage of being able to describe encounters between humans and higher entities far more vividly than the treatises, and the corollary advantage of suggesting new ramifications of such encounters. It focuses on how such stories explore the possibility that, through encounters with higher entities who emerge as negative, protagonists discover that the divine world is either corrupt and ill-intended or (worse) completely meaningless. The first case, Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890), is contextualized not only within contemporary reactions to Darwin’s theories of evolution (developing Adrian Eckersley’s study) but also contemporary conceptualizations of the debt that modern civilization owed to ancient Greece and Rome. The second examines how H.P. Lovecraft developed Machen’s ideas in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1929), where mastery of ancient languages unleashes horror. The third case, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979)—an homage to Lovecraft and Machen—delivers an even darker ‘gnostic’ message: entities whom we assume to have purposes (even if dark purposes) have none at all; only the well-skilled narrative can bring them into order and save himself from perdition.

The Authority of Greek Mythic Narratives in the Magical Papyri

Abstract I begin by summarizing work that has been done concerning a persistent question in the study of ancient magic: how did practitioners balance empirical reality against their own imaginations? I go on to suggest that my recent work on Greek myths, which uses ideas developed in media studies and social psychology, can help. This work suggests that myths’ authority rested in large part on their effectiveness as lively, cognitively-engaging narrations, which in turn enabled audience members to build strong relationships with the myths’ characters, who were the gods and heroes worshipped in cult. For purposes of the present article, the most important point to emerge from my work is that each name of a mythic character instantly evokes for the audience a large, vivid history of that character and of his or her interactions with other characters. I then go on to examine what amounts to ‘Greek myth’ in many magical papyri of later antiquity-not stories per se, but the listing of characters’ names. Extending my earlier observations, I suggest that the vivid story-world that these names created for each person who spoke, read or heard the spells, gave those spells enormous authority by evoking larger narratives or complexes of narratives. To illustrate this, I examine PGM IV.1390 -1495, a spell that lists a large number of Underworld divinities. I offer variations of my approach by examining PGM IV.3209-54, a ‘Saucer Divination of Aphrodite,’ and PGM IV.2891-2942, a ‘Love Spell of Attraction.’

Ancient Mystery Cults

Introduction 1. Personal Needs in This Life and after Death 2. Organization and Identities 3. Theologia and Mysteries: Myth, Allegory, and Platonism 4. The Extraordinary Experience Abbreviations Bibliography Notes Index of Greek Terms General Index