A Batak Pustaha Looted from the Last Singamangaraja

Magic Squares in ReligionsrnThroughout the history, magic has been used in all religions and religious movements. In this thesis, magic squares which are among the main elements of the ritual practices of magic are examined. In addition to this, a survey about how and why religious traditions use the magic squares is held. In spite of being constituted with the numbers in the beginning, magic squares, which are thought to come into being with a legend existing in the tradition of ancient Chinese people approximately 4200 years ago and considered to be one of the most prominent elements of ancient Chinese cosmology, started to be constituted with the letters within the development of the numerology and giving numerical values to the letters. People of ancient times blended the magic squares with the philosophical and mystic systems, occult knowledges and magical practices. They attributed various philosophical and mystic meanings within the religious and cultic traditions they have and allocated a wide range of use in magical practices. Magic squares are being carried and used as talismans, amulets, rings and seals against the evil, diseases, beast of preys and harmful animals, jinns, malicious spirits, demons, enemies etc. in world religions and traditions.rnKeywords: Magic, Wafq, Magic Square, Numerology, Gematria, Abjad, Astrology, Chinese cosmology.

It has become a critical commonplace that an important element in the ingenious symmetry of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the pairing of the pentangle and the girdle, the two tokens or signs that the hero carries on his journey to the Green Chapel. In a recent study the poet's design is epitomized thus: 'Gawain leaves Camelot armed with the golden pentangle. He leaves Hautdesert armed with the green girdle'; the girdle is read as placed in opposition to the pentangle, a 'symbolic contrast' seen as 'obvious'.1 Interpretation often focuses on the contrast between Gawain's true faith as expressed in the pentangle and the superstitious trust he places in the girdle. However, the contrast may be more obvious to twentieth-century readers than it would have been to the Gawain-poet's contemporaries, for whom many details in the poem would have resonated with echoes of popular pious practices that blur what may seem to modern judgement a clear distinction between Christian faith and superstitious beliefs. I Following tradition, the poet attributes the figure of the pentangle to Solomon, and, as Richard Hamilton Green long ago observed, documentary evidence for Solomon's pentangle in the Middle-Ages concerns its use in magical practices that were systematically condemned by the Church.2 Green reads the poet's 'wholly original' appropriation of the pentangle for 'a token of inner virtue' as a master-stroke of ambiguity: 'the poet transforms a suspect magical sign into an emblem of perfection to achieve the simultaneous suggestion of greatness and potential failure' (p. 186). Recent scholarship, on the other hand, stresses the philosophical and mathematical uses of the number five and five-sided figures in scholastic Aristotelian thought, hence inferring a medieval understanding of the pentangle as a symbol of rational perfection; and on the strength of this argument, Helen Cooper excludes any association of the pentangle on Gawain's shield with magic.3 But are these opposed meanings necessarily exclusive? A shield, after all, has the double function of declaring the bearer's identity and of warding off attack; thus it would seem in principle quite appropriate for the pentangle to be seen both as the cognizance of Gawain, the perfect knight, and as a magical symbol used to ward off evil. This is not to suggest that Gawain's pentangle actually functions as magic: as Cooper points out, 'it does nothing within the poem that Gawain himself does not do in his own person' (p. 279); but if the pentangle was understood by the poet's contemporaries to be a symbol with magical associations outside the poem, it might indeed have been meant to be seen as having the potential for double meaning on Gawain's shield.4 lt is hard to recover the pentangle's accepted meaning in fourteenthcentury England, for there is very little discussion outside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but an examination of what evidence there is permits some conclusions to be drawn. William of Auvergne had described the design of Solomon's pentangle in great detail in his De legibus (c.1240) as he used scholastic argument to expose the irrationality of attributing supernatural power to any such device: Exempli autem causa ponemus pentagonum, quem dicunt Salomonis: necesse igitur est, vt iste pentagonus habeat hanc virtutem mirificam ex ista lineatione, qua intus habet quinque angulos obtusos, et extra quinque acutos quinque [ed. cit. acutos, quinque] triangulorum exagorum [ed. cit. exagonorum], quibus circundatur interior pentagonus. Vt autem, vel angulis, vel angulo attribuatur diuinitas, nullus patitur intellectus.5 (Now, for instance, let us cite the pentagon, which they call Solomon's: it is inevitable, then, that that pentagon possess this marvellous power by reason of that very diagram, by which it has five obtuse angles within, and outside the five acute [angles] of the five triangular enclosed spaces by which the interior pentagon is surrounded. …

The article is devoted to Pomor’s magical practices, omens, prohibitions and regulations related to fishing and hunting. They are considered in diachrony, records of ethnographers and folklorists of the 1930s are compared with the field materials of the expeditions of the Pushkin House in 2007–2019. The supplement contains a large publication of materials from the archive of R.S. Lipets. She was one of the first to study the fishing and hunting folklore of the Pomors. In Soviet folklore studies, omens were studied as a text, isolated from the rite, which was considered outside of religion. Publishing them in the way they were deposited in the archive, combining the appeal to the saints in a dangerous situation and the use of magical practices, allows us to better represent the tradition as a whole, without considering separately Christian and non-Christian ideas. Among the trends that can be traced in modern records, compared with the records of the 1930s and 40s, which we can talk about on the basis of interviews, is a fine line between faith, compliance with certain prescriptions and evaluating them as fun.

100 × Congo: A Century of Congolese Art in Antwerp

Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation

The article aims at the identification of new religious groups with a specific focus on local religious communities. Various sources were utilized in the research, including audio recordings of seminars held within one of the groups, interviews, participant observations, photographs, personal correspondence with former members, and sacred literature. The primary objective of the study was to determine the group’s place within the established classification of religions. The analysis revealed that relying solely on self-identity and cult practices is inadequate for establishing the religious identity of the community. To address this, the author opted to analyze the doctrines of the groups as the basis for identification. The most stable and frequently mentioned categories were selected for consideration. The findings indicated that while the groups claimed affiliation with the Christian tradition, this association was formal and limited to traditional imagery and narratives. Both teachings examined contained a significant number of elements borrowed from other religions, particularly in terminological aspects. Additionally, they extensively employed mythological principles to describe the world and acknowledged the use of magical practices. The incorporation of non-religious techniques and forms of activity, along with secular terminology and popular scientific data, led the author to conclude that these groups cannot be defined as religious solely. Instead, they occupy a liminal position in the social space and represent a new model of people’s consolidation.

This study investigates the use of magical practices in marital relationships in Egyptian rural communities of the Dakahlia Governorate.

Noel Erskine’s book, From Garvey to Marley, is an excellent study of the social origins and significance of the Rastafarian religion in Jamaica. It is Erskine’s ability to make clear the social significance of this religion, its roots in the disinherited and racialized lumpen stratum of Jamaican society that is really impressive. Consequently, the text is marked by an almost seamless unity between the material, socio-historical, and spiritual dimensions of Rastafarian life. As the book unfolds, the Rastafarian religion emerges as a powerful spiritual response to the dehumanization that European colonialism had imposed on this particular stratum of Jamaican society. Yet there is no way in which one can say that Erskine’s text is sociologically reductionist. The successful negotiating of this particular tension is a very important key to the intellectual achievement of this work. Erskine’s text opens with a masterful historical analysis of the roots of Rastafarian theology. He locates these roots in a tradition of religious resistance to slavery and colonialism that dates back to the period of plantation slavery in Jamaica. The first phase in this tradition of religious resistance was obeahist. It is distinguished by its use of magical practices to bring harm and misfortune to slave owners. Obeah, together with the more spiritually oriented religion of Myalism, constituted the first major phase in Afro-Jamaican religious history.

According to an international study3, alternative medicine has grown significantly in popularity over the past 30 years in most Western coun- tries. The Covid-19 pandemic and the realities associated with it have meant that the use of non-medical practices has increased significan- tly. The timing of the Covid-19 pandemic compounded people’s negative experiences of operating in a risk society. In order to reduce these fears, more and more people are turning to alternative medicine. This is becau- se people are increasingly starting to look for medicines and preventive measures on their own, with the emotional aspects of the perception of the pandemic and the increasing mediatisation being important here, but also the poor state of healthcare in Poland. The text is an analysis of the results of a study conducted on the Facebook group ‘Homeopathy Po- land - classical, clinical. Detoxification’. The group is a closed one, where every member must be involved in order to participate. This makes it possible to analyse a group of people using non-medical practices and not just declaring these activities. This article attempts to analyse the phe- nomenon of unconventional medicine and its social consequences using the example of homeopathy. An additional very important factor, the correlation of which we decided to investigate, is the level of belief and magical practices of homeopathy users.

From today's perspective it is hard to comprehend just how complex the relationship was between religion and magic in the Middle Ages. Many unofficial rituals and beliefs existed alongside ones sanctioned by the Church. Educated clergy condemned some as magic, but it wasn't always easy to do this because many magical and superstitious practices employed religious language, rituals or objects. Charms recited over the sick to cure illnesses often invoked God and the saints; spells for love and other purposes might use consecrated substances such as the Eucharist. The people reaching for them could even justify their actions by citing biblical precedent. In this book Catherine Rider unearths previously unpublished evidence and new information concerning the widespread use of magical practices and the clergy's response. She asks how educated churchmen, when faced with a wide range of popular religious practices, decided which were acceptable and which were magic. How did they persuade others of their views? This book traces the change in the Church's attitude to vernacular forms of magic from the turbulent era of King John to the time of Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. These three centuries brought educated clergy into closer contact than ever before with unofficial religious practices and prompted them to draw up more precise guidelines on how to distinguish magic from legitimate religion. Magic and Religion in Medieval England provides a detailed picture of religious and lay life, including clerical education and pastoral care.

The article examines the discursive practices of modern Russian public discourse, which includes political communication as a necessary part. The author considers first of all those discursive practices and the corresponding speech acts that are magical in nature. Such types of speech acts are proposed to be called “the acts of magical embodiment”. The pronunciation of the act of magical embodiment leads to a change in the world, resulting from the release of mystic forces associated with both the speaker’s supernatural abilities and the participation of mysterious forces. Among the acts of magical embodiment, there are vows, curses, tabooing and overcoming the taboos (use of euphemisms and concealment), prohibitions, benevolence, spells, and others. The use of magical practices in public discourse has a long tradition in political communication, especially in the creation of slogans. In modern public communication, many speech practices of magical nature have a legal basis. Current practice suggests that every mention of a prohibited political actor is accompanied by an indication of the prohibition. The curse as an act of magical embodiment sometimes adjoins the practice of imposing restrictions on “foreign agents”. Concealment (tabooing and overcoming the taboos) is enforced by the law on the “right to be forgotten”.

The study is dedicated to the issue of identification of local religious communities that have emerged in recent decades and that seem to be syncretistic. The main research question of the article is how to establish basic identification criteria that could become the basis for compiling a classification or typology. Two strategies for identifying communities are explored: one is based on using a number of external markers, another one relies on self-identification of the bearers of religious consciousness and their internal definitions. The first strategy was chosen as the key one due to being less subjective; the second one was utilized as a means of additional verification. As research objects that can be defined as belonging to the same series, two local communities have been selected that arose at the end of the last century on the territory of the outer Kama region and evolved from Orthodox communities to another type of associations. Methodologically the study is based on the materials resulting from the author’s field research (participant observation, expert interviews, semi-structured interviews with former community members and its current leaders, excerpts from the author’s personal correspondence with believers), data from journalistic investigations, statutory documents and websites of both organizations in different periods of time. The doctrinal part of the teachings of both groups and lived rituals practiced by them were chosen as primary objects for analysis. The research shows that both communities in question cannot be defined as belonging to the Christian tradition due to the specifics of the dogma, the use of some magical practices, and the presence of elements of secular culture. The specificity of the ideas and rituals of each of the groups demonstrates that classifications and broad definitions are not applicable to associations of their kind. It seems more appropriate not to place these groups into a class of religious associations of a new type (new religious movements), but to define them as new social groups positioned at the junction of religious and non-religious spheres of public life.

Introduction The religious currents that are usually called Hermetism and Gnosticism flourished in the Greco-Roman world of the first centuries of our era, but their impact on Western culture is still being felt today. Both proclaimed a salvific spiritual knowledge ( gnosis ) about God, the world, and man meant only for an elite (i.e., those who were worthy of receiving it). Accordingly, both currents showed distinct esoteric features, but that did not prevent their adherents from writing numerous books propagating these ideas. Although their views on the origin and destiny of human beings have much in common, there are also considerable differences, especially regarding the nature of the material world and the manner of salvation. To a certain extent, Gnosticism shows a radicalization of ideas that are also present, though not dominant or structural, in Hermetism. Hermetism Late Antiquity left us an extensive literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It consists of magical, astrological, and alchemical texts (the so-called technical or practical Hermetica) and philosophically inspired religious treatises (the philosophical Hermetica). In the Greek world, Hermes Trismegistus was considered a sage of the remote Egyptian past, but originally he was the Egyptian god Thoth, the god of writing, culture, cosmic order, and magic. Already in the fifth century BCE, the Greeks identified Thoth with their god Hermes, who faintly resembled the Egyptian god. The predicate “Trismegistus” (“Thrice-Great”) derived from the Egyptian manner of expressing the superlative “greatest,” by repeating the word “great” three times. There is no reason to assume that the technical and philosophical Hermetica once belonged together as successive parts of one great hermetic teaching program. But the adepts of religious-philosophical Hermetism had no objections to making use of magical practices and astrological calculations. The main sources for our knowledge of Hermetism are the following: 1. The Greek Corpus Hermeticum (= CH ), a collection of seventeen treatises, of which CH I ( Poimandres ) and XIII ( On Rebirth ) are the most interesting. 2. The Latin Asclepius , the only complete hermetic text that was known during the Middle Ages. Some fragments of the Greek original have been preserved in later authors, and its final hymn is known from a Greek magical Papyrus. There are also Coptic translations of chapters 21–29 and of the final hymn, found in Nag Hammadi Codex (= NHC) VI.