‘Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry

Abstract

This chapter argues for an approach to modernist production and religion that more emphatically considers ethnographic and experiential particulars—gestures, traditions, customs, material forms, and patterns of behaviour—and treats religions in their inherent on-site interaction. It focuses on Constantine Cavafy’s opus to explore the modernist engagement with different belief systems and their interrelation over longue durée and the effects of the moments of belief transition on embodied experiences of those living through them. Egyptiote Cavafy activates in his poetry poly-faith and interreligious cultural accretions and repeatedly returns to the key moments of integration, transformation, and disintegration of communities and belief systems at his home-site—those in which the Egyptian belief system interacted with the religious beliefs and practices of ancient Hellenes and Judaism, then with Christianity and Islam, and further, the transitional moment in which he himself lived, where the varied models of belief and unbelief interrelated and attached themselves to the political future of Egypt. His poems are read as multi-framed palimpsests of mythic, historical, and religious texts that articulate the varied models of belief-knowledge production and the structure of belief-affects, everyday practices, and bodily reactions that accompany them across more than twenty centuries