Ancient Pagan Research Articles

A emergência do homem de desejo: sobre o curso Subjectivité et vérité, de Michel Foucault

O artigo tem como objeto principal o curso de Michel Foucault no Collège de France, Subjectivité et vérité, ministrado em 1980-1981 e editado em 2014. Pretende-se mostrar de que maneira e mediante quais argumentos Foucault chega à afirmação de que a relação entre sujeito e verdade na experiência antiga dos aphrodisia é da ordem da incompatibilidade. Na pederastia grega os atos sexuais e seus prazeres foram considerados obstáculos para o acesso à verdade e para a constituição do sujeito ativo. No entanto, o confisco da experiência sexual legítima no interior da reconfiguração do matrimônio romano, bem como a suspeita crescente em torno dos atos e prazeres, provocaram dois processos: a subjetivação dos aphrodisia, o que resultou em uma relação constante do sujeito com sua experiência sexual; e a objetivação do desejo, no sentido de que ele deixa de ser somente um elemento intempestivo e incontrolável situado ao lado da natureza, passando a ser algo problemático e objeto de conhecimento. Ainda que na Introdução aos dois últimos livros de Histoire de la sexualité Foucault escreva que pretende fazer a história do homem de desejo na cultura pagã antiga, o artigo sugere que não é propriamente nessa formação histórica que pode ser identificada sua emergência, e sim no monaquismo cristão dos séculos IV e V, objeto de seu livro inacabado Les confessions de la chair. Pelo menos no domínio da experiência sexual, o homem de desejo não teria surgido na erótica masculina grega ou no matrimônio romano, mas na sexualidade solitária do monaquismo cristão.

Bilder der Tugend Fides im Tre- und Quattrocento

In the visual arts the personification of Fides is typically found in combination with the two other Christian virtues of Caritas and Spes – a triad which is often completed by the four theological virtues of Prudentia, Iustitia, Fortitudo and Temperantia. Compared to other virtues such as, for instance, Caritas, Fides was soon rendered according to a comparatively codified iconographic convention. As early as in the first half of the fourteenth century, the cross and the chalice irrevocably established themselves as its chief attributes – both representing easily comprehensible signs of the will to believe in the rationally incomprehensible message of Christian salvation. The belief in God was therefore central from the very beginning, whereas the possibilities of further differentiating between the semantic field of fides (belief), fiducia (trust) and fidelitas (loyalty) were hardly made use of. This essay discusses two alternative iconographic solutions. First and foremost, they include the Fides representations of the Augustinian Hermits – a mendicant order that had been established not before 1256 upon the initiative of the Church and which made it its special mission to use learned arguments against the dissemination of heresy. Consequently, it developed a sustained interest in representations of the true faith. Furthermore, the essay will analyse two representations of Fides that can be found in a picture-book (Vorbilder-Buch) that was printed in Venice in 1465. The iconography of these representations is driven by a wish to provide easily applicable prototypes on the one hand, and to demonstrate the possibility of reconciling pagan Antiquity and Christian contemporary culture, on the other.

Relativism in the Long Middle Ages

Christians in the Long Middle Ages (ca. 200–ca. 1700 ce) in Western Europe often thought about paganism, especially that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, such as Aristotle and Virgil, who provided the foundations of their intellectual culture, but also contemporary pagans (that is to say, people who were neither Christians, Jews, nor Muslims), such as the Lithuanians, Mongols, and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “Indians,” both of America and of India itself, the Japanese, and the Chinese. This article will set out and explore one of the surprising features of these discussions, their use of relativistic approaches, which few would associate with medieval thought. With regard to pagan knowledge, in particular, that of the ancient pagans, some writers develop a strictly relativistic approach, which becomes one of the most important (and often hardly noticed) features of medieval intellectual life. With regard to the question of the virtues of pagans (both ancient and contemporary), the approach is also relativistic, but in more subtle and looser ways.

FORTUNE AS A SYMBOL OF THE CHANGEABILITY OF LIFE IN EUROPEAN CULTURE FROM ANTIQUITY TO MODERN TIMES

The article analyzes the evolution of the symbol of Fortune as one of the characters reflecting the changeability of the human existence in the world. It is shown how from the symbol of blind luck in pagan antiquity Fortune is merging into the system of symbols of the Christian universe, reflecting, on the one hand, the justice of the divine ruling of the world, and, on the other hand, the opening of the "inner human" in Christianity whose own life becomes the subject matter of the constant reflection. The article analyzes the understanding of Fortune in the period of European Renaissance. It should be noted that the notion of Fortune of that period includes contradictory motives of submission as well as active interaction with Fortune and its subordination to the will of the acting individual. According to the author, the decreased attention to Fortune as a symbol of changeability of destiny is connected with the processes of secularization of the world and the loss of perception by human beings of the "hand of God" over them on the one hand, and on the other hand – understanding of the world as a perfectly adjusted mechanism driven by natural laws, cognized rationally and leaving no place for the sacrament of human existence, which would instantly be grasped in intuition and perceived in the symbol.

Leibniz, China, and the Problem of Pagan Wisdom

Leibniz, China, and the Problem of Pagan Wisdom Daniel J. Cook (bio) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ mature years coincided with the first major European encounter with the thought and civilization of China. From the 1660s onward, many European thinkers and theologians were especially fascinated with this pagan culture. Although Christendom had previously encountered the pagan traditions of Greece and Rome, they had been incorporated into European thought since the origins of Christianity. From the time of the Church fathers, Christendom had developed various strategies to appropriate and reform classical philosophical thought for its own purposes. Leibniz echoes this Christianizing attitude when he says that “the doctrine of Plato concerning metaphysics and morality is holy and just. . . .”1 China represented a challenge to Christendom in that it was seen as an advanced civilization with its own highly developed belief system, which differed markedly from any of the Abrahamic religions. Whereas the ancient Greeks were long gone, Chinese wisdom threatened the monopoly of religious truth that the Christian West believed it possessed.2 “Freethinkers” would argue—as indeed they already had—that one could be ethical and civilized without believing in a Christian God. Joachim Bouvet—a French Jesuit serving in the court in Beijing and Leibniz’ main correspondent on matters Chinese—warns him that if their venerated texts are not somehow “sanctified,” there will be a living example of a highly civilized country being completely atheistic.3 Various solutions were offered to explain how pagans gained the wisdom thought to have been revealed exclusively to the Jews and Christians.4 Leibniz is the only major Western philosopher who attempted in various ways to accommodate the pagan wisdom of the Chinese to prevailing European philosophical and theological beliefs. His goal was to demonstrate that, when properly interpreted and reformed on the basis of reason, their relevant pagan texts were compatible with his own philosophy, that is, a natural theology that was in turn compatible with a Christian belief system. The implications for his lifelong ecumenical and irenic goals are clear. In his treatment of pagan wisdom, we see strong testimony to Leibniz’ belief in humankind’s intellectual ability to arrive at the basic truths of monotheism without compromising the singular truth and location of the Judeo-Christian revelation. Leibniz held to the literal biblical view that all of humanity originated with Adam. This monogenetic view of all humankind contributed to his basic belief in the natural ability of certain individuals of all eras to arrive at the same natural theology, that is, [End Page 936] those rational truths concerning the nature of God and the human soul. Justin Smith has argued that this contributed to Leibniz’ belief in the intrinsic equality of all peoples, though there may be great cultural and intellectual differences among them.5 Leibniz sought a path that could recognize the equality (let alone the superior mores that he thought Chinese society embodied) of pagan wisdom but at the same time support the unique and supreme nature of Christianity’s doctrines and mysteries. He believed that the superior scholarship and methodology developed by the Christian tradition to convert Jews could be used to this end. His European and Christian hubris on this point is apparent: It is not absurd for discerning Europeans . . . to see something today which is not adequately known by the Chinese erudites, and to be able to interpret their ancient books better than the erudites themselves. Who does not know in our own day that Christian scholars are much better interpreters of the most ancient books of the Hebrews than the Jews themselves? . . . This is even more likely concerning doctrines more than twenty centuries removed from the Chinese, who are quite possibly not as equipped with the interpretive aids as we, informed about Chinese literature, and especially aided by European methods.”6 I Unlike many of his contemporaries, who spurned classical learning, Leibniz, both temperamentally and philosophically, never ceased stressing the importance of classical texts. Arguments that appealed to ancient learning and wisdom should be attractive to Leibniz not only on purely intellectual grounds, but for polemical reasons as well. For example, he suggested to Bishop Huét that deepening our study of ancient pagan sources (especially...

Zoomorficzne symbole ewangelistów w zabytkach piśmiennictwa ruskiego

The object of the analysis are the zoomorphic symbols of the Four Evangelists, presented in miniatures of Medieval monuments of Russian literature. The paper discusses three schemes of linking an Apostle with a symbol and presents iconographic realizations illustrating the scheme of St. Jerome that fairly early became fixed in the iconography of Western Europe and then became the obligatory one also in Russia. According to that scheme, the symbol of St. Matthew is a winged man/angel, St. Mark is symbolised by a lion, St. Luke by a bull/ox, and St. John by an eagle. The presence of animal symbols in images of the Biblical world (The Book of Ezekiel, St. John’s Apocalypse) was a source of many problems for researchers and theologians which they tried to resolve by referring to the Bible. However, the meanings referred to in the paper and hidden behind the symbols of the lion, the eagle and the ox are evidence that they had become cult (demonic) animals much earlier than the start of the Christ Era on the Earth. Their deep rooting in the human mind surely contributed to the use of those most powerful and the most universal symbols of the ancient (pagan) repertoire for the expression of new meanings which could not be expressed in a language intelligible to the common man. The symbols, in this case zoomorphic ones, became the sole specific language of religion at the initial stage of the Christian history of humanity.

The Poeta-Theologus from Mussato to Landino

Fundamental to the modern conception of historical perspective was the position that nature had its own integrity and that a common human nature underlay human action in history. The first tenet was an achievement of the Scholastics, the second of Italian humanists of the fourteenth century. In order to justify the reading of ancient pagan texts an early humanist Albertino Mussato (1261–1329) had resorted to the late ancient and medieval tradition that the pagan poets had been divinely inspired to predict the coming of Christ and a number of other revealed truths. Subsequently, however, Petrarch (1304–74), Boccaccio (1310–75), and Salutati (1332–1406) argued that if poetic genius was a divine gift to individuals, poetic creation was a product of human effort. The consequent desanctification of the ancient writers allowed them to be approached as historical human beings. Nevertheless, the new enthusiasm for Plato beginning with Bruni (1370–1444) initiated a retreat from this position and a return to the medieval confusion between the world of grace and the world of nature. By the second half of the fifteenth century, Plato’s “divine madness of the poets” was being interpreted to mean that the ancient poets had been divinely inspired to utter Christian truths.

Translatio and Remediation: Aby Warburg, Image Migration and Photographic Reproduction

Aby Warburg’s research on the heritage of Antiquity can be seen as an investigation into the hybrid forms through which it has been transmitted to us. This inquiry into Western cultural memory is constructed by a unique oeuvre, at the heart of which is the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the physical library Warburg created in Hamburg, which he saw as a medium for new modes of research. The organization of the library aimed to orient scholars to the modalities of the “afterlife” of the representations and gestures associated with pathos that derive from ancient paganism. We also know that Warburg sought to situate his work in the context of a Kulturwissenschaft—a science of culture seen as a “third” position, above the schism between the natural sciences and the humanities—a position whose horizon intersects Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, Max Weber’s comparative sociology of religion, and the perspectives opened by American anthropology as practiced by Franz Boas. In what follows, my hypothesis is that in Warburg’s work, the concept of Nachleben—the afterlife of ancient modes of representation— arises from a translatio in multiple registers: simultaneously migrations in space, transpositions in media and technique, and textual and figurative translation from one culture to another. The mapping of these transfers presupposes a mechanism of remediation able to make visible the stability and variations of that which, like the “pathos formulae” (Pathosformeln), have been “translated” and thus transmitted. In order to understand the specific role that photographic reproduction plays in this complex, I propose here a case study of the iconography of Saturn as developed by Warburg in a 1913 slide-lecture on the migration of planetary images, and later, in 1926, after the opening of his new library, in his first exhibition of orientalized illustrations from astrology. 1. From Image to Image: transpositio We cannot fully grasp Warburg’s concept of a “posthumous life” of antique representations until we become familiar with the unique organization of his library, and the media mechanisms established therein.

Византийские монеты VI–VII веков: античные влияния и традиции в раннем Средневековье

Some ancient pagan motifs still existed in the 6–7 cc. Byzantine coinage pattern. Part of them were gradually abandoned, the other part was incorporated into Byzantine monetary system and acquired a new Christian meaning. During two short-term rollbacks to paganism ancient iconography traditionally played more profound role in Byzantine provinces, than in the Capital city. This article is focused on comparative analysis of ancient symbols used in the Byzantine coinage. The author comes to conclusion that ancient motifs continued to exist alongside with new Christian symbols in coinage pattern throughout Byzantine early history. However, the ability of Byzantines to properly understand ancient motifs remains a question.

The Understanding of Symbols and Their Role in the Ascent of the Soul to God in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Nicholas of Cusa

This article considers the issue of changes in the understanding of symbols as an integral part of spiritual life in Neoplatonic philosophy. It seems that ancient Neoplatonic philosophers were the first who clearly realized the importance of symbols to spiritual life. However, it happened due to the influence of the mystical Chaldean and Egyptian thought transferred to philosophical investigation by the Chaldean oracles and Corpus hermeticum. The late Neoplatonic thought of Iamblichus and Eastern Neoplatonic schools used symbols and rituals as integral parts of philosophical investigation, understood as having a mystical goal. Especially mathematical symbols played a significant role, because they were used in the most advanced theurgical rituals. This analysis of the pagan Neoplatonic philosophy permits us to show properly the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who creatively transformed the teaching of his pagan predecessors, by incorporating ancient Neoplatonic tradition into Christian theology. Pseudo-Dionysius excludes liturgical symbols from the order of the cosmos and transfers them to the plane of Salvation grounded in Biblical Revelation. Only true symbols are used in the liturgy of the Church, and thus mathematical symbols are no longer needed in the ascent of the soul to unity with God. The third part analyzes the meaning of symbolism in the thought of Nicolas of Cusa. Thanks to the rediscovery of ancient pagan Neoplatonism and Pythagorean thought, Cusanus also brings new life to the mystical meaning of mathematics. Mathematical symbols once again become an important part of the mystical ascent of the soul, but this time without their ritual context.

Going green with algae

Going green with algae

Georgics of the Mind and the Architecture of Fortune: Francis Bacon's Therapeutic Ethics

This essay complements recent work by Soreana Corneanu situating Bacon's epistemology in a larger lineage of literature concerning ‘cultura animi’ in early modern Europe, by focusing on Bacon's conception of a therapeutic philosophical ‘Georgics of the mind’ in The Advancement of Learning, the Essays, and other texts. We aim to show firstly (in Part 2) how Bacon's conception of human nature, and the importance of habit and custom, reflects the ancient pagan thinkers’ justifications of philosophical therapeutics. Attention will also be paid in this connection to Bacon's sensitivity to another marker of ancient therapeutic philosophy as Pierre Hadot in particular has recently presented it: the proliferation of different rhetorical and literary forms aiming at different pedagogic, therapeutic, and psychogogic aims. Part 3 then will examine Bacon's changes in practical or ‘magistral’ philosophy, carried out on the therapeutic ethical grounds which Part 2 has examined, but proposing a much more active ‘architecture of fortune’ to philosophical and political aspirants.

«Ум ищет божества…»: Эволюция религиозно-философских воззрений Пушкина от французского скептицизма к немецкому идеализму

The article is devoted to the ideological evolution of Pushkin : from skepticism (bordering with atheism) – to religiosity. In this regard, the pagan antiquity as a whole (and skepticism generated by it, in particular), as well as the Christian culture are the two equal important sources of Pushkin's creative work. In this research the author proves the following theses: 1) the mature Pushkin `s works are deeply akin to Goethe's ones, his position in the history of Russian literature is isomorphic to that of Goethe in the history of German literature 2) the position of the majority of Pushkin scholars who argued that the poet despised German me-taphysics, is based on selective quotations and therefore wrong 3) towards the end of his life Pushkin inclined to German idealism, and some of his works of the 1830`s have sonata (dialec-tical in nature) form; some of them are built as a dialogue of opposites 4) the commonplaces of the modern Pushkin`s myths (Pushkin Voltairean, monarchist, an Orthodox-Christian) are the consequence of a unilateral approach 5) only holistic reconstruction of his philosophical and religious beliefs makes it possible to interpret his masterpieces adequately.

Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the secrets of antiquity

In 1655, after more than two decades of toil, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2-80) published his solution to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, a work that has been called one of the most learned monstrosities of all times. Here Daniel Stolzenberg presents a new interpretation of Kircher's hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages. Situating Kircher in the social world of baroque Rome, with its scholars, artists, patrons, and censors, Stolzenberg shows how Kircher's study of ancient paganism depended on the circulation of texts, artifacts, and people between Christian and Islamic civilizations. Along with other participants in the rise of Oriental studies, Kircher aimed to revolutionize the study of the past by mastering Near Eastern languages and recovering ancient manuscripts hidden away in the legendary libraries of Cairo and Damascus. The spectacular flaws of his scholarship have fostered an image of Kircher as an eccentric anachronism, a throwback to the Renaissance hermetic tradition. Stolzenberg argues against this view, showing how Kircher embodied essential tensions of a pivotal phase in European intellectual history, when pre-Enlightenment scholars pioneered modern empirical methods of studying the past while still working within traditional frameworks, such as biblical history and beliefs about magic and esoteric wisdom.

Isaac Newton and the left eye of history

Worried about being associated with the esoteric art of constructing ancient calendars and royal genealogies, Isaac Newton downplayed his interest in chronology, yet it was a topic that came to obsess him after his move from Cambridge to London in 1696. During the previous hundred years, chronology’s advocates had been pairing it with geography as the right and the left eyes of history, the essential soul that would restore its shapeless carcass to life. Only a few decades into the eighteenth century, chronological research was itself a discipline of the past, its demise accelerated by John Locke’s insistence that the role of education should be to broaden competence, not foster narrow erudition. Relatively ignorant of humanist learning after devoting himself to the sciences, Newton embarked on an intensive course of self-tuition, but remained convinced that ancient pagan chronologies should be made to conform to the timeline provided by the Masoretic Bible, the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Old Testament and the only one that he trusted to have a verifiable provenance. Despite his late start, in pursuing this quest Newton spurned the shoulders of giants, confidently sidestepping other scholars’ opinions in his conviction that only he could discriminate between reliable sources and those that needed to be discarded. Drawing heavily on scriptural authority, he repeatedly executed reasoned yet convenient data adjustments to create a version of humanity’s history that was internally consistent but differed from those of his contemporaries. As his one-time acolyte William Whiston remarked contemptuously, Newton ‘‘seems to have digged long in the deepest Mines of Scripture and Antiquity for his precious Ore himself; and very rarely to have condescended to make use of the Thoughts or Discoveries of others on these Occasions’’ (129). After 1936, when Newton’s manuscripts on alchemy were snapped up by the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes at a London auction, historians started

From The Gods in Exile

From The Gods in Exile HEINRICH HEINE (Translated by Diskin Clay) I will content myself with saying in a few words that, after the decisive victory of Christianity, the pagan gods of the ancient world came to grips with their difficult situation and the hard necessity they had already experienced in an early age. This was the age of the Revolt of the Titans, who burst the gates of Tartarus, heaped Pelion on Ossa, and scaled Olympus. These poor gods and goddesses were compelled to flee ignominiously with their entire court and they came to conceal themselves among us upon the earth and assume every manner of disguise. Most of the gods took refuge in Egypt, where for self-protection they transformed themselves into animal shapes, as Herodotus tells us. It is exactly in this same manner that the pagan divinities were obliged to flee and seek safety in all manner of disguise and in the most remote hiding places, when the true God appeared with his cross and when the zealous iconoclasts, a black band of monks, shattered their temples and cast anathemas upon the banned gods. A good number of these Olympian refugees had neither ambrosia nor a place of asylum and they had to resort to an honest occupation on earth to gain their daily bread. Some of these gods whose property and sacred woods had been confiscated were even compelled to work as day laborers in our native Germany and drink beer instead of nectar. In this extremity, Apollo seems to have resigned himself to enter the service of cattle farmers. Just as once he herded the cattle of King Admetus, he lived as a herdsman in Lower Austria. But there his melodious singing awakened the susarion 21.1 spring/summer 2013 picions of a learned monk who recognized that he was one of the ancient pagan gods and delivered him up to an ecclesiastical tribunal. Under torture he admitted that he was the god Apollo. He asked for permission to play his lyre and sing a last song before he was led to execution. Now he sang so tenderly and sweetly and there was something so powerful in his singing—and in addition he was so handsome and tall—that the women broke into tears. There were even some who had fallen ill from the intensity of their emotion. After some time had passed, the authorities wanted to remove his body from his tomb and drive a stake of holly through his stomach. They believed that be must be a vampire and that the women who had fallen ill would be cured if they administered this home remedy, which was generally recognized as successful. But, when the tomb was opened, they found it empty. As for Mars, the ancient god of war, I would be inclined to believe that during the age of feudalism he followed his former occupation as a robber knight. The tall Schimmelpenning , the nephew of the Munster executioner, encountered him in Bologna, where he served as Maître des Hautes Œuvres . Some time latter, Mars served as a lansquenet under the command of General Frondsberg and took part in the sack of Rome. No doubt, he must have felt cruel pangs of distress when he witnessed his beloved city, the temples where he himself had been worshipped and the temples of the gods who were cousins to him destroyed so ignominiously. After the Great Defeat, the fate of Bacchus, the handsome Dionysus, was happier than that of Mars and Apollo. On this subject, there is a medieval legend bearing on his fate. In the Tyrol there are great expanses of lakes, surrounded by forests whose trees touch the sky and are reflected in the lakes’ rippling blue waters. From these waters and woods emanate mysterious sounds; they provoke an eerie feeling in the solitary walker in these parts. On the shore of one of these lakes there was the hut of a young man who lived on the fish he caught; in addition to fishing he worked as a ferthe gods in exile 194 ryman whenever a traveler wanted to cross the lake. He had a large boat that he moored...

Baptism and Cosmic Allegiance: A Brief Observation

For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, as Ferguson's book exhaustively illustrates, baptism was understood as nothing less than a personal rebellion against the cosmic, political, and spiritual order of ancient paganism. As pagan culture slowly disappeared and was replaced by a Christian culture, the baptismal rite's explicit transfer of a new Christian's allegiance from the old gods to the risen Lord became less necessary and, ultimately, largely unintelligible. The gradual introduction of infant baptism reflected the transformation of the ancient religious milieu, as the understanding of baptism as renunciation of evil gods and demons gave way to a concern to nurture souls from birth until death within the Christian community. Changes in baptismal meaning and practice in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages suggest that further developments lie ahead, as late modern Christianity confronts a post-Christian future in the developed world.

Christopher Dawson's Influence on Bernard Lonergan's Project of "Introducing History into Theology"

THIS ARTICLE FOCUSES on Bernard Lonergan's project of bringing as its own field and specialty, into conjunction with Biblical, foundational, doctrinal, and systematic forms of knowledge. In this endeavor, he was deeply influenced by Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), British cultural historian and philosopher of history who was Catholic convert. (1) An examination of Dawson's influence offers broad context for opening historical dimension of Lonergan's contribution to Catholic theology and provides significant approximation and example of what Lonergan proposes in Method in Theology as critical history, or history as it explains the meaning going forward in tradition. I.1 Christopher Dawson's Method The initiation of Dawson's life-long work as historian of culture had its promising start during Holy Week 1909, when, at age of 20, while still student at Oxford, Dawson joined his longtime friend Edward Watkin, himself recent convert, for his first visit to Rome. Having attended Holy Triduum ceremonies at different basilicas, he was stunned by synergy of ambience of Roman pagan antiquity and living Catholic faith that he found there. He was already familiar, and agreed with Lord Acton's hypothesis that religion is key to history. There, in Rome, immediate sense of flow of historical existence awakened in him desire to serve important recovery of step-by-step process by which Christianity had transformed collapsing empire into new creation of Christian culture. Dawson was both familiar and impressed with Edward Gibbon's, Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, (2) and had keen appreciation both of Gibbon's style of writing and of his broad historical knowledge. (3) While rejecting Gibbon's claim that Christianity had been cause of collapse of empire, Dawson had not yet worked out his own upper blade for translating Acton's vision into practice in regard to Gibbon's claims. On Easter Sunday he climbed steps to church of Ara Coeli, situated on Capitoline hill, where Gibbon had stood when he was inspired to take up his project of history of Roman Empire. Christina Scott, Dawson's daughter, reports that there is note in her father's journal sometime late in 1909 recalling a vow made at Easter at Ara Coeli and that Dawson had been thinking of how vow might be fulfilled, noting that he had in meantime gotten great light on way it may be carried out. However unfit I may be, I believe it is God's will I should attempt it. (4) There would be four difficult years before Dawson would follow steps of John Henry Newman and his friend Watkin and enter Roman Catholic Church, being baptized on feast of Epiphany, January 6, 1914 by Fr. O'Hare, SJ, at St. Aloysius Church, Oxford. (5) By this time, Dawson's image for fulfilling his plan was taking shape as result of his research and reading that was part of his preparation of study of world civilizations and with intention of writing five-volume history of culture. By 1922 he had worked out theory of cycles of civilizations before having read Oswald Spengler's work, The Decline of West, with which he was to be in serious disagreement because of its failure to grasp dynamic interactions of different cultures. Dawson's own approach to theory proposed schema that would analyze dynamic interconnection of civilizations from 4000 B.C. to twentieth century. His conclusion was that civilizations were result of parent (often primitive) cultures, which had distinct stages of origin, progress, and maturity, leading, in turn, to emergence of new cultures. This heuristic had been identified by means of massive research that he had done for his first major book published in 1928, The Age of Gods: A Study in Origins of Culture in Pre-historic Europe and Ancient East. …

The Myth of Historical Narrative: Margaret Murray's The God of the Witches

An important area of contention that arises when the scholars of today approach the religions of Witchcraft and Paganism concerns the origins of modern Witchcraft and whether any historical continuity exists between contemporary Pagans and the ancient pagan religions of Europe.

Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley (review)

Reviewed by: Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley Stephen Harrison Keith Bradley. Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Phoenix supplementary volume 50. Pp. xviii + 397. US$75. ISBN 9781442 644205. Bradley here collects a series of important essays on the historical and cultural context of Apuleius, which forms a welcome counterpart to the largely literary study of this author in the last generation. His general claim is that the works of Apuleius, not only the forensic oration Apologia, which has an established date and place in Roman North Africa in 158/159 ad and the Florida, extracts from speeches made in Carthage in the 160s, but also the novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, which he dates to the 160s, can tell us more about the cultural and social context of their composition than has previously been recognized. This is undoubtedly so, and Bradley, as a distinguished Roman social historian, is well placed to argue the case. The 12 essays in this book fall into three categories: those on the Apologia, those on the Metamorphoses, and those on the other works and the more general cultural context. The three essays focusing on the Apologia (Chapters 1, 3, and 8) rightly emphasize the importance of this speech as “a document of social and cultural life” (3) and give us a good idea of the kind of community for which the speech was written. In Chapter 1 Bradley (alongside others, at least for Apuleius’ wife, Pudentilla) is keen to flesh out the social positions of the characters involved in the court case and brings in some new and fascinating local evidence. Here and elsewhere Bradley makes good use of art and archaeology alongside literary sources, a key benefit of this book, as of his knowledge of ancient magic, a major element in the speech. Especially important is his insistence that Apuleius was perceived as a “hostile intruder” into the local elite: Bradley’s expertise in Roman family history allows him to tease out in Chapter 3 a tight local structure of property and marriage, which the interloper disturbed (in particular his suggestion that levirate [End Page 119] marriage was a local custom is attractive), and he rightly sees that Apuleius in the speech presents himself as a model of elite Roman culture in order to impress a provincial audience. Chapter 8 provides an interesting analysis of Apuleius’ presentation of his own dress and appearance in the speech as befitting a hard-working orator as well as an ascetic philosopher, pointing to “the code-like capacity of dress and demeanour” in the Roman Empire (151) and rightly suggests that Apuleius sought impact by claiming to embody the Roman tradition of the learned orator as established by Cicero and Quintilian. These essays are an important addition to the literature on the speech. The five essays focusing on the Metamorphoses (Chapters 2, 4, 5, 11, and 12) look at some important cultural and historical themes of Apuleius’ fiction. Chapter 2 argues that religious conversion to the cult of a particular deity, so often deployed in analyzing Metamorphoses 11, is a Christianising anachronism not really appropriate to polytheistic pagan antiquity, and points to the switch between Isis and Osiris in Book 11 as evidence; this is certainly worth thinking about, though some may think that it does not do justice to Lucius’ intense (if sequential) monotheism. Chapter 4 brings in another part of Bradley’s expertise, looking at the analogy between slaves and animals as subhuman in Roman culture and as recipients of bad treatment in the novel and elsewhere: Lucius-ass’s retention of human feelings and values is nicely seen as mirroring the retained human dignity of the resistant slave. Chapter 5 again employs Bradley’s family researches in arguing that “the diversity of family life on display in the Metamorphoses is to be regarded as an authentic representation of the diversity of family life in the Roman world of the high imperial age in which Apuleius lived” (88). Here one can agree that the cultural values and models deployed are indeed those of Antonine Rome, but the particular prevalence of adultery in the novel (for...