Anthropomorphic God Research Articles

ON THE CLASSICAL SANCTUARY SPACE AND ITS NATURAL CONTEXT: NATURE AS EXTENSION OR CONTAINER?

Even though nature is accepted to be an integral part of classical architecture, there is limited scholarship on this aspect. This paper aims to contribute to this literature with a focus specifically on the transformation of attitudes towards nature in the classical culture and on the influence of this transformation to sanctuary planning. Through an argument focusing not only on architecture, but also on art and literature, it tries to establish an overall understanding of the natural in the classical culture. 
 
 An earlier attitude towards nature was a result of the mythological tradition, in which the boundary between gods and humans was blurred. Anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, who controlled the human destiny, resided in the nature. So as the boundary between gods and humans were blurred, the boundary between the man-made and the natural was also blurred. In the Archaic Greek literature and art, nature was not depicted as a space or a background, in which the events took place, but it was integrated into the narrative as an extension of the figures integral to them. Similarly, in the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, nature does not constitute a background/container, but it is an extension of the man-made, integral to the god’s abode made by humans. In this sanctuary, located at a magnificent landscape endowed with mythological significance, myth, nature and the man-made merge by way of an organizational logic that integrates gaze and movement as its major constituents. This paper attempts to explain this classical phenomenological logic by cinematic concepts. The seemingly haphazard planning of the sanctuary allows for multiple moving/viewing sequences, which can be thought of as multiple montages extending the space and time of the sanctuary to various geographies and times in history. These multiple montages are brought back to here and now through unifying frames resembling establishing shots in filmmaking. By these shots, the man-made is merged with the landscape in a single unified frame. 
 
 A later attitude towards nature was a result of the philosophical tradition, in which man separated himself from the almighty gods and defined himself as the constructor of his own order through democratization of the polis. As a result of this separation, uncontrolled nature became the container of the mythical, separate from the controlled man-made realm. In Roman landscape paintings rooted in the Hellenistic stage paintings, nature as the realm of the mythical is viewed from behind the architectural screens like in the Sanctuary of Athena at Lindos or the Sanctuary of Fortuna at Praeneste. In these Hellenistic sanctuaries, perspectival concepts could be thought as instrumental in creating a controlled man-made interior that is detached from its natural environment. This interior can be defined as a mathematical abstract construct exercising an obsessive control over how the point of view of the observer should be located in space. The calculated axial spatial organization of these sanctuaries, therefore, contrasts starkly to the psychophysiological space of the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, allowing various moving/viewing sequences in full integration with the surrounding nature.

A Psychological Analysis of the Imagery of Chinese Menshen

The prominent imagery of Menshen (门神door gods) within traditional Chinese culture has led to the development of a variety of cultural symbols, including military door gods, civil door gods, praying door gods, and other related ones, such as stone lions and Shigandang (stone tablets). This article studies the impact of the belief in Door Gods and their worship on Chinese psychology and behaviour on both a conscious and unconscious level. At the conscious level, from its first articulation to its development into a cultural image and related myths and legends, the belief in Door Gods can be said to have gone through four stages: a primitive worship of reproduction in ancient times, animal worship during the Zhou Dynasty, the worship of anthropomorphic gods during the Han Dynasty and the worship of hero gods worship during the Tang Dynasty. This process corresponds to the four specific symbols of ‘peach branch’, ‘tiger/chicken’, ‘Shēn Shū(神荼)’ and ‘Yù Lǜ(郁垒)’ (‘鬼’: the two spirits guarding the entrance of the house), and ‘hero’. On an unconscious level, the psychological symbolism of the belief in Door Gods belief is interpreted through the Door Gods sacrifice and the Fu(复)” hexagram. Closing the door is related to Kun (坤, the receptive, earth), while opening the door is related to Qian (乾, the creative, heaven). Together, Kun and Qian were held to be in a state of continual transition, one changing into the other, which reflects Chinese philosophy’s emphasis on movement. Traditionally, Chinese people held more than 10 kinds of door-related sacrificial activities every year. Although some of these activities have gradually fallen out of use, the traditional custom of pasting door couplets and images of Door Gods to doorways has been preserved. By repeating the ritual every year, the Chinese gain the strength to protect themselves and their family members. Clinical studies of sandplay therapy have found that the image of Door Gods constitutes a ‘patron saint’ on an unconscious level. Door gods guard the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness (the inner and outer worlds), thereby protecting the spiritual strength of those who supplicate them. This suggests that using their images in a therapeutic context could help individuals to maintain boundaries and protect themselves. The emergence of the Door Gods image can transform the guardian energy hidden at the border between unconsciousness and consciousness, help the clients keep the boundary and protect themselves.

The Sacredness of Nature: Response to Six Objections to Religious Naturalism

The Sacredness of Nature: Response to Six Objections to Religious Naturalism

Поиски «истинного христианства» в истории русской религиозной мысли

This article explores the meaning of the quest for true Christianity in Russian philosophy as well as their critique of the traditional church Christianity. Russian thinkers acknowledged traditional Christianity to be false mainly because of the introduction in it of Judaic elements which radically distorted the true teachings of Jesus Christ. These elements essentially were: the concept of an anthropomorphic God; the concept of Creation; and the concept of the Fall. Russian philosophers borrowed their critical attitude towards historical Christianity from the German philosophy of the early 19th century and primarily from Fichte’s late religious and philosophical teaching. The analysis of the Russian thinkers’ views allows us to assert that they considered as true Christianity the religious tradition that Church persecuted as a Gnostic heresy. In the Gnostic version of Christianity, God is understood as an apophatic Absolute, having no attributes; instead, God epitomizes the deep essence of man and manifests Himself in the earthly world in the form of human people. This article demonstrates that, in this case, the meaning of human life consists of the maximum complete realization of God through that life, and the meaning of the history of mankind lies in the construction of the kingdom of God on earth. In this regard, the philosophical ideas of Pyotr Chaadaev and Fyodor Dostoevsky are considered as the exact expression of this tradition of Gnostic Christianity. The analysis of their works, in fact, reveals that both thinkers criticized the religiosity of Church. Consequently, any debate on how close their views were to Catholicism or to Orthodoxy – and such debates certainly occupied a large place in contemporary literary research – is of very little importance for a real assessment of their views.

The Hiddenness Argument and the Ground of Its Soundness

The paper refers to the argument from hiddenness as presented in John Schellenberg’s book The Hiddenness Argument and the philosophical views expressed there, making this argument understandable. It is argued that conditionals (1) and (2) are not adequately grounded. Schellenberg has not shown that we have the knowledge necessary to accept the premises as true. His justifications referring to relations between people raise doubts. The paper includes an argument that Schellenberg should substantiate its key claim that God has the resources to accommodate the possible consequences of openness to a relationship with finite persons, making them compatible with the flourishing of all concerned and of any relationship that may come to exist between them. At the end of the text, I propose to treat the argument as a rejection of an anthropomorphic God.

Religion without doctrine or clergy: the case of Ancient Greece

AbstractThe paper examines doctrinal and political reasons to explain why the Ancient Greek religion did not feature a distinct class of professional priests as suppliers of religious goods. Doctrinal reasons relate to worshiping a multitude of powerful anthropomorphic gods with flawed characters; absence of a founder of religion and of a scripture; lack of religious doctrine and of a code of moral behaviour and piety manifested as mass participation in rituals. These factors denied religious suppliers the opportunity to form a monopoly acting as an autonomous intermediary between humans and gods. Political reasons relate to the supremacy of the demos which watchfully guarded its decision-making powers and prevented other actors like a priestly interest group to challenge its authority.

Book Review: God's Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament, by Andreas Wagner

Book Review: <i>God's Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament</i>, by Andreas Wagner

Works, Days, and Divine Influence in Hesiod’s Story World

Throughout the Works and Days (WD), Hesiod reaffirms and promotes his audience’s belief in the reality of the supernatural — that is, the gods of Olympus, whose power the poet clearly takes seriously, given the somber warnings that populate the final calendrical portion of the piece. Drawing on S.I. Johnston’s recent The Story of Myth, as well as the work of folklorists K. Hänninen and G. Bennett, I outline the techniques Hesiod employs to render believable the influence of the divine in both the distant past and the contemporary period. Hesiod constructs a story world familiar to his audience in order to bolster the credibility of the supernatural events, both mythical and contemporary, that he reports. When speaking of the gods’ influence in his own time, Hesiod remains firm on the fact of the gods’ continued intervention only in concrete, mundane phenomena experienced by each of his audience members. Otherwise, the poet tends toward vague language, leaving his audience to come to their own conclusion about the influence of the divine. To encourage a positive conclusion, Hesiod creates an analogy between abstract concepts, such as Strife, and the anthropomorphic gods of myth. Using these strategies, Hesiod imbues WD with belief in divine influence in the world, past and present.

The Relationship Between Healing Goddesses and Healing Women in the Ancient Greek and Roman World

There are inscriptions in the ancient Greek World that have confirmed the work of female healers since the middle of the 4th century BC. Starting from the 3rd century BC, women’s healers’ mention of their professional identities, especially in the inscriptions, helps us to get more detailed ideas about them. In Rome, the epigraphic traces pointing to the professional identities of female healers have been found since the 1st century BC. The lack of the records of women healers does not mean they do healing since the 4th century BC in the ancient Greek-Roman World, but from the 1st century BC. Metaphors of the healer goddess confirms the existence of women healers and the treatment of various diseases in the earlier Greek and Roman worlds, gain importance. Indeed, people have used idealized human forms to create many anthropomorphic gods and goddesses in line with their needs. In this context, it should be taken into consideration that when people create healer goddesses, they model women healers that were known before. From this point of view, it will be possible to determine the areas in which the women healers were working through the healer goddesses of the early period of the Greek-Roman World.

The Continent of the Gods

It first occurred to me some thirty years ago that Shenzhou 神州, translated “continent of the gods,” was a perfect way of talking about “China in the Daoist mirror.” It made it possible to think of China as a series of concentric spaces, going from the self to the cosmos, all structured in the same away around nodal points occupied by gods. Because it revealed a dense organization at every level, this space-based approach led me as well to call into question the classic distinction between “diffused” and “organized” religion. Subsequent work, both historical and in the field, gradually enabled me to see this as a long evolutionary history which begins with elite attacks on spirit-medium religion in the Warring States and culminates with the emergence of popular religion in the Song. This religion includes popular versions of the Three Teachings, but it is built around the local, anthropomorphic gods whose primary task was the protection of bounded territory and whose natural servants were the ever-maligned spirit-mediums.

God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament, written by Andreas Wagner

God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament, written by Andreas Wagner

Rice Ecology and Ecological Relations: An Ontological Analysis of the Jiangjunya Masks and Crop Images from China's East Coast

Depictions of human faces and rice-crop images found at the Jiangjunya rock-art site in Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province, China, reveal entangling relationships between spiritual and economic aspects. Drawing on the relational ecology model and animist ontology theory, the author provides an analysis of the Jiangjunya rock art in its economic, social, spiritual and historical contexts, proposing that prehistoric farmers along China's east coast perceived rice plants as relating to persons. Rice was conceptualized not in utilitarian terms as a means of subsistence (used and consumed by humans) but rather as subjects capable of action. The human masks of Jiangjunya hence suggest a personhood for rice, rather than representing humans or anthropomorphic gods. Furthermore, the history of the Jiangjunya rock-art site corresponds with the history of local economics. The relational ontologies might have transformed gradually from human–animal interactions in the Late Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic periods to human–plant interactions in Late Neolithic societies. The author concludes that the art site was possibly treated as a mnemonic maintaining interpersonal and intersubjective relationships across thousands of years.

Theories of God: Explanatory coherence in religious cognition.

Representations of God in art, literature, and discourse range from the highly anthropomorphic to the highly abstract. The present study explored whether people who endorse anthropomorphic God concepts hold different religious beliefs and engage in different religious practices than those who endorse abstract concepts. Adults of various religious affiliations (n = 275) completed a questionnaire that probed their beliefs about God, angels, Satan, Heaven, Hell, cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, human suffering, and human misdeeds, as well as their experiences regarding prayer, worship, and religious development. Responses to the questionnaire were analyzed by how strongly participants anthropomorphized God in a property-attribution task. Overall, the more participants anthropomorphized God, the more concretely they interpreted religious ideas, importing their understanding of human affairs into their understanding of divine affairs. These findings suggest not only that individuals vary greatly in how they interpret the same religious ideas but also that those interpretations cohere along a concrete-to-abstract dimension, anchored on the concrete side by our everyday notions of people.

In Heaven as it is On Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. By Samuel Morris Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 396 pp. $34.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In Heaven as it is On Earth: Joseph Smith and Early Mormon Conquest of . By Samuel Morris Brown . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xii + 396 pp. $34.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesSamuel Brown begins his new monograph with a sigh-inducing, pedestrian line: Death has presided over life for all of human history (3). The remainder of his work, though, is remarkable. Brown, a professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine, provides most original and insightful reinterpretation of Joseph Smith and early Mormonism to emerge in last twenty years. Rather than retread familiar routes, Brown contextualizes early Mormonism within what he calls nineteenth-century culture of dying and explains Smith's seemingly fragmented theology and sacraments through this illuminating prism. In process, Brown not only reveals an aspect of early Mormonism that has been largely overlooked by other historians, he also highlights a part of antebellum American culture little studied--its frequent, sustained, and normalized ritual confrontations with in era before funerary industry. Additionally, Brown unveils an early Mormon theological system more eclectic in its origins, more systematically coherent, and more literal in its idiosyncratic biblical exegesis than most scholars previously imagined.Brown's focus on conquest of is not simply an account of Mormonism's quest for salvation. It is more particularly a focus on early Mormonism's negotiations of when and under what circumstances life ends, how much of earthly experience will persist, and what constitutes preparation for death (8). Brown's study of these negotiations transforms how historians can understand Joseph Smith and early Mormonism: Book of Mormon becomes a grave artifact and Smith's seerhood translates into a vocation to break death's silence. Joseph Smith's later theological innovations come into a new focus, too. By time of Smith's death, Mormon prophet had revealed a polyvalent family system [polygamy and ritual adoption], a utopian communitarianism grounded in mystical traditions about Enoch, a temple liturgy that taught his followers how to negotiate afterlife and promised them postmortal divinity, and a scandalously anthropomorphic God whom all humans could call Father (8). All of these seemingly disparate theological innovations found coherence in Smith's attempts to address problems posed by culture of holy dying--how one could be reassured of her eternal destiny, how one could know that earthly connections endured, and how one prepared for her own and hoped for assumption of immortality.Central to Smith's project was creation of what Brown calls a radical rejection of monogamous Victorian family. In heaven family, Mormons were bound together through sacramental links that stretched across time, as ancestors were connected through baptism for dead, and space, as new, complex families were created through sealings of ritual adoption and plural marriage. All of this sacramental welding could be comprehended within Smith's revision of the Great of Being, what Brown calls Mormon Chain of Belonging. Whereas Renaissance musings on Great of Being various static orders of species, heavenly and earthly, from God down to archangels and humans, Smith erased these traditional ontological distinctions and recast them all as variations in eternal glory, not substance or species, within one grand family that was dynamic, able to embrace possibility of progress (222). …

The Biggest Star of All

In 2010, the Indian elephant (elephas maximus indica) was declared a National Heritage Animal, in view of its contribution to Indian culture and history. It is not surprising that the elephant features in Hindi film, but it is striking that it features in a range of genres, including the mythological, the historical, the social film and features in several children’s films, a rare genre in Indian cinema. In these films the elephant is shown to have a complex status, being divine, especially in association with the elephant-headed god Ganesha, as a moral and noble animal with human qualities, as well as a working animal participating in warfare and in circuses. The elephant’s qualities are often contrasted with those of humans, with the elephant always esteemed for its moral rectitude, its devotion, its dedication and its sense of joy. The elephant has names and characters but it does not appear as an animal outside the realms of humans and anthropomorphic gods (with even Ganesha having a humanlike body). However, although the Hindi film cannot feature the elephant’s current status as an endangered species whose only predator is man, it does create an interest and empathy for this symbolically significant animal. This article explores these representations in films, including animated films (My friend Ganesha, 2007), mythological films about Ganesha (Shri Ganesh Mahima, 1950); children’s films (Haathi mere saathi, 1971; Safed haathi, 1978); historical films (Mughal-e Azam, 1960; Jodhaa Akbar, 2008), and as a forestry worker (Munimji,1955; Pakeezah, 1971), including in one of the earliest feature films shot in India, which produced India’s first international star, Sabu: Elephant boy, 1937.

Slavery to Hiroshima and beyond: African-American art and the apocalypse

In his book of poems God’s Trombones (1927), James Weldon Johnson revealed his debt to Black preachers, whose powers of oratory and apocalyptic beliefs were conveyed in sermons that he remembered from childhood. Congregations had been ‘moved to ecstasy’ by visions of an anthropomorphic God and a belief in a millennial order that offered solace and strength in dealing with the abuses of the slave condition. Such values had also been put across in direct and unmediated visual language in two quilts by Harriet Powers expressing her visionary gaze and her belief that human beings are at the mercy of both cosmic circumstances and divine intervention. Clothed in consciously aesthetic overtones, the same faith in millennial redemption permeated Johnson’s poems and Aaron Douglas’s visual interpretation of them, providing a paradigm for Harlem Renaissance ‘New Negro’ aesthetics, as seen in the work of William H. Johnson and Archibald Motley, for instance. The conceptual world embodied in Harriet Powers’s quilts remained a cornerstone of the African-American experience throughout the twentieth century. As the social circumstances of African-Americans began to change in the 1960s, the use of such biblical texts also changed, to endow a much wider range of human experiences with meaning. Particularly in his later work, Jacob Lawrence extended his apocalyptic concerns beyond immediate racial questions to concentrate on wider ethical issues, including environmental ones, making them relevant to humankind as a whole.

Relics and Remains in an Ancient Greek World full of Anthropomorphic Gods

Sacred relics are the guarantee that the supernatural powers are available to humans. In religions where God is thought of as being in significant respects what man is not (omniscient, omnipotent, immortal, ineffable, and incorporeal), God's interest and involvement in the world is demonstrated by the existence of material objects charged with supernatural power by their association with individuals closer to the divine than ordinary men. But in ancient Greece the gods were, although immortal and very powerful, in almost all other significant ways just like men; in particular they had bodies. The gods intervened on earth in their own interests and might give material objects to mortals to use. In this chapter I look at the statues and gifts that came to be associated with gods, and at remains of the heroes who were thought to be unusually close to the gods, and ask how the associations came about. The images of the gods, the remains of heroic mortals who enjoyed particularly intimate relations with the gods, and objects associated with gods and heroes, were, I argue, important in this world both in life and in discourse; but what men could show to other men by the way they treated these objects was very much more important than what they could show about the gods.

Anthropomorphic God Concepts Engender Moral Judgment

Violations of religious doctrine may not only be perceived to violate the laws of one’s religion, but also to be morally wrong. Just as actions considered acceptable outside of social contexts are often considered unacceptable when they affect other people, believers perceiving God in anthropomorphic terms were more likely to judge violations of their religious doctrine to be morally unacceptable than believers not perceiving God in anthropomorphic terms. Devout Christians reported the extent to which they endorsed the Christian theological God concept and an anthropomorphic God concept before rating the extent to which they considered actions prohibited by the Ten Commandments to be theologically and morally wrong. Endorsement of both God concepts influenced the extent to which those acts were perceived to violate the tenets of participants’ religion. Only endorsement of the anthropomorphic God concept, however, determined the extent to which those actions were considered morally wrong.

Aniridia and the Ocular Surface

©2004 Ethis Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. everal thousand years ago, Homo sapiens began to produce sounds to express verbal symbols of concrete and abstract concepts. They were sometimes mesmerized by the rainbow, which must have represented a happy moment: the tempest was over, it was still day, the sun was shining, and some very beautiful colors formed a perfect geometrical arc. What to call it? They used some preexistent name, which eventually was modified to iris. There is speculation about the original root. It may have been auri(aurora or dawn, aureole, aurous [luminous]), orient (where the sun is born), or Horus (Egyptian god of the horizon or rising sun). Or, it may have been hydor(water), or some other preexistent term. Whatever the nomenclature, the meaning of the rainbow was obvious to ancient humans: Some of the anthropomorphic gods had provoked a tempest in a moment of wrath, but finally peace has been restored by the victory of some of the gods or the benevolence of other gods, returning to homo sapiens his precarious and unstable security. The concept of iris radiated an aura of calm, and iris became a root for new terms related to peace, color and beauty: Iris, the young and lovely messenger of the gods. Iris, the beautiful and aromatic fleur-de-lys. Iris, the colored disc placed in the uncolored surface of the human eye. However, just as the bad gods of the tempest sometimes prevailed, depriving the landscape of a rainbow, they sometimes deprived the newborn baby of an iris. The doting mother of that babe gazed fascinated into its eyes and became troubled when she saw something strange—an eye surface without the colored disc. As the child grew, new and more evident manifestations of the wrath of the gods appeared... photophobia, poor vision...maybe complicated with some other ocular and extraocular manifestations. Barratta1 was the first author to describe this congenital anomaly in 1818, when diseases were usually named not because of their pathogenesis (almost always unknown in those times), but because of the most illustrative symptoms and signs. Because the most obvious clinical expression of the anomaly (although usually not the most severe) was the apparent lack of iris, it was called irideremia (irid= iris; eremia = lack), the preferred term in the 19th century, or aniridia (an= negative prefix, irid = iris), as was more frequently used during the 20th century. A genetic tree of four generations of families with aniridia was published by Gutbier2 in 1834, and of three generations by Cunier3 in 1845. Risley (1915)4 reported 221 eyes with aniridia in a genetic tree of 119 persons. More than one-and-a-half centuries later, it was discovered that the first target of the attack in hereditary aniridia was the mutation or deletion within the Pax6 gene on chromosome 11p13 (Ladde 1974,5 Riccardi 19786). Subsequently, some associated conditions were described that initially seemed to be casual coincidences, but eventually some of them were shown to be genetically linked: ectopia lentis,2,4,7,8,9,10 cataract,3,7,8,9,11,12,13 ciliary body hypoplasia,7,8,14 glaucoma,7,8,10,11 macular and optic nerve hypoplasia,9,15 detachment of the retina,8 vitreous body opacities,4, 8 microphthalmos,3,16,17,18 strabismus,9,19 nystagmus,3,9,15,20,21 ...and ocular surface damage. More recently, extraocular associations such as WAGR syndrome (Wilms tumor, aniridia, genitourinary anomalies, and mental retardation),22,23 Gillespie syndrome (aniridia, cerebelar ataxia and mental retardation),24 and others have been reported.

Chivalry and romance in the eighteenth century: Richard Hurd and the disenchantment of the Faerie Queene

[Introduction]. In the middle years of the eighteenth century, Richard Hurd decided that the whole previous history of literary criticism was a chronicle of obsessions with non-problems. It was in his search for an actual problem that Hurd hit upon the Middle Ages. The result, Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance of 1762, has long been a primary exhibit in the story of how the eighteenth century rediscovered medieval literature and culture. In this set of essays, Hurd canvasses what he takes to be the central characteristics of medieval courtly life, then discusses several postmedieval epic poems and their relationship to this medieval (gothic) world. In his remarks on Ariosto, Tasso, Milton, and above all Spenser- whose Faerie Queene stands at the theoretical core of the argument - Hurd elaborates a new, poetics supposed to be based in the conditions of medieval culture itself, and which Hurd contends is better suited to these poems than Aristotelian (classical) poetics with its demand for a particular kind of narrative unity. Hurd is also diffuse on the virtues of the idea of poetry in its own right, particularly on the pleasing effects of fairies and other elements of superstition. which he considers aesthetically superior, qua superstition, to the anthropomorphic gods in Homer (48-55). In short, says Hurd, the gothic style affords an ideally wide scope to the poetic imagination and is peculiarly suited to the views of a genius; if Spenser and his fellow poets were seduced by the gothic barbarities of their forefathers, theirs was a fortunate fall (4).