Blood Sacrifice Research Articles

Redemption of Sins in Christianity: Analysis of the Holy Bible Texts

Sin has been a frequently discussed topic in the context of Christianity. The concept of inherited sin is viewed as a barrier between humans and God. Christians believe in the redemption of this sin through the sacred blood of Jesus Christ. This concept was prophesied in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New Testament. This research focuses on the fundamental question regarding the forgiveness of sins through the blood of Jesus, which, over time, evolved from the practice of redemption through priests to the inclusion of indulgences. The objective of this study is to examine and comprehend the sacredness of Jesus Christ's blood, which is the centerpiece of Christian belief, where His blood is seen as the means of sin redemption. A critical descriptive analysis method is employed to explore these the means of sin redemption. A critical descriptive analysis method is employed to explore these viewpoints, revealing various dilemmas arising from Paul's interpretation of this concept. The research findings indicate that the concept of sin in Christianity is a core element of Christian faith, wherein inherited sin can only be absolved through the sacrificial blood of Jesus. However, contemporary Christian teachings have undergone transformations that alter original aspects of the doctrine, where Paul's interpretations, seen as introductions to Christian teachings, influence the original meanings and give rise to the practice of indulgences, which have become part of the evolving Christian doctrine.

Elements of Luo Traditional Sacrifice: An Anthropological Approach

Every religion has some form of sacrifice. In fact, sacrifice is the most widespread of all rituals. It derived from two Latin words: “sacer”, which means holy, sacred or set apart and “facere,” which means to do or to make. So, to sacrifice is to make holy or to set something apart for supernatural powers. Most rituals imply an offering and quite often a blood sacrifice. A blood sacrifice is a displacement of mystical forces made possible by God himself, thanks to the intercession of a spirit, divinity or ancestor and the mediation of a priest for the satisfaction of the sacrificing community. The blood of the victim, when poured on the altar, releases the vital force contained in it and feeds the spiritual beings directly alerted by the words of the priest. We have here an offering of food given to the sacred forces, which gives life to the sacrificing community through a common meal. We also have the words of the priest to the divinity or ancestor who intercedes to God. The response of God comes in an inverted way: it goes to the sacrificing community through the ancestor and the priest. Note here that God does not feed on the blood of the victim; God is the very source of the vital force; for him the vital force does not diminish. It is the whole community, which performs what we can call the rite of diverted violence. When the animal is killed, sometimes very cruelly, the violence, which would be directed to people is done on the animal, which is their substitute. It is at the same time an elevated violence since it is transported from the profane to the sacred. It is also a transcended violence since it enables the community to transfer the grudges, rivalries, hatred, tension and the tendencies of aggression within it to an animal victim. This is the way the community “deceives” its own violence by directing it to victims which do not call for vengeance. All in all, sacrifice in whatever form is for respect of life, that is, in sacrifice, life is not lost; it just becomes sublime. Sacrifice occupies a fundamental place in the practice of African traditional religion. It is through sacrifices that the African relates to the spiritual. The religious nature of African ritual, as historians of religions have stressed, is such that: “A ritual is religious, if it carries an ultimate value, meaning, sacrality and significance for someone, that is, if it somehow functions for someone as the foundation of what is considered real and sacred” (Richard 1978: 65).

The Framing Revolt: The Role of Unlimited Punishment in the (So-Called) Culture of the Limit

"What is the role of unlimited punishment in a (so-called) limit culture? What is the point of narratives that tell of endless, futile labors and sufferings? Trying to find their role in a dimension that involves much more than an obvious “moralizing” contribution, in the manner of a satire, the unlimited punishment will be researched, by reference to bios and thanatos, at the intersection of public cult, blood sacrifices and mysteries from ancient Greece, looking for its source in civic religion as a punishment for wandering. Keywords: bios, thanatos, thambos, hybris, Sisyphus, Prometheus "

DecolonialMovidas: María Lugones's Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through Cosmologies

Decolonial<i>Movidas</i>: María Lugones's Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through Cosmologies

Animals in Assamese Neo-Vaiṣṇavism of India

AbstractEthical and theological concern for nonhuman animals has been a primary characteristic of the neo-Vaiṣṇava movement of Assam, India. This concern is reflected in its strict prohibition of blood sacrifice or any kind of cruelty toward animals. At the same time, theologically, this faith puts all living beings, human and nonhuman, on an equal ontological footing and urges its followers to see God in all creatures. The present article looks at some of these concerns/considerations of this faith for nonhuman animals and, at the same time, also takes into account neo-Vaiṣṇavism's historical backdrop and a few of its inner contradictions.

The Tablet of Destinies by Roberto Calasso

Reviewed by: The Tablet of Destinies by Roberto Calasso Arthur Willemse ROBERTO CALASSO The Tablet of Destinies Trans. Tim Parks. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 113 pages. ROBERTO CALASSO, the Italian writer and publisher, died in 2021. Most of his written work belongs within a sequence of studies on the role of sacrifice in modernity and in ancient religion, the first of which was The Ruin of Kasch (1983). This book, The Tablet of Destinies, the last volume to the series, is likewise a work about blood sacrifice and the genesis of meaning. Different from its predecessors, The Tablet of Destinies stages a dialogue, between Utnapishtim and Sinbad the Sailor. Utnapishtim the Remote, an immortal man, lives in Dilmun—a place where time assumes physical form. Eager to speak after centuries of solitary existence, he relates to Sinbad the extensive mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia: of the gods Apsu and Tiamat, Ea and Ishtar, and the heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The background to these stories consists in the creation of man—because the gods needed a substitute—and the Great Flood that almost ended mankind. Utnapishtim is called "the Remote." Indeed, Mesopotamian mythology is the oldest, most distant, in recorded history. While other contemporary ways of presenting ancient mythology will try to bring out their explanatory role—with regard to the structure of the cosmos, for instance—the telling of these narratives, in Calasso's hands, homes in on exactly this aspect of being remote. Just as time manifests physically in Dilmun, so the powers of the gods are worn as ornaments—the mes; both powers and laws. These mes are magical objects and crafts, and the gods vie for them. They have a solidity about them that refuses our modern, disenchanted conceptions of magic and religion; distant, they remain. Moreover, this solidity underlies the logic of blood sacrifice: for magical transactions, some real element—the most real, in fact—has to change hands. The most crucial of the mes is the Tablet of Destinies. This clay tablet is the one mes above all others; it is the summation of the gods' sovereignty. If the gods have the power to end life, this means nothing without the register where the significance of life and death is recorded. And yet the tablet is also written by men: "something was always being added to the Tablet." In fact, the logic of writing—the logic that demands that meaning will commit to clay—once it is conceived, will turn back and claim chronological priority over the gods: "When the Tablet of Destinies emerged from the Apsu and from Tiamat, it was already written on, in part." On Earth, time becomes manifest in stone, and this fact curbs the power of the gods; it heralds the epoch of men, and thus inaugurates modernity. The Tablet of Destinies, the irrepressible instrument of writing, continues to mediate our difficult comportments to the divine. Arthur Willemse Universities of Maastricht and Hasselt Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle

Reviewed by: Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle Mark Grimsley Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World. By Adrian Brettle. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 313. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4437-1.) Because we know that the Confederacy died in 1865, it can be easy to miss the fact that not only did Confederates anticipate victory on the field of battle, [End Page 150] but also they had specific ideas about the society that the blood sacrifice of their solders would conjure into being. This lucidly written, historically imaginative, and deeply researched study by Adrian Brettle weaves these ideas into a valuable picture of the postwar world envisioned by Confederate policy makers and opinion makers. Confederate ambitions fell into four main categories. The first was territorial expansion, which would carry slavery into the New Mexico Territory and parts of Mexico, replace Spain as the overseer of Cuban slavery, and resurrect southern dreams of a Caribbean empire. In a quixotic corollary, some Confederate expansionists believed that both the border states and the states of the Old Northwest would exit the Union to join them. Second, Confederates recognized the importance of internal improvements and better technology. Third, they disregarded indications that slavery was on the wane throughout the world and expected to rely on the slavery-based, staple-exporting economy that, in their view, had served the South so well. Finally, they believed that, despite the war’s carnage, interwoven economic interests and a common foreign policy goal of maintaining the Monroe Doctrine would lead the Union and Confederacy to forge an informal or even formal confederation, perhaps extending to include Mexico and Canada. Underpinning the Confederate program as a whole was confidence in the institution of slavery; an exalted view of southern history, culture, and religious faith; and a desire to play a major role on the world stage. The book’s subtitle, which speaks of “planning” for a postwar Confederate society, is a bit extravagant, since the word implies meetings and concerted thought by specific groups, and Confederate policy makers and opinion makers did not do this. Nonetheless, Brettle teases out strands of ambition from the writings of these Confederates. Some of these thinkers made extended arguments, but many of their ideas appeared here and there in correspondence, speeches, and so on, suggesting that such thinking was not fully fleshed out. It is nonetheless notable that the same basic ideas cropped up repeatedly and depicted a coherent worldview. The extravagance of Confederate ambitions is striking. Even given a victorious war of independence, it is difficult to see how many of their goals could have been achieved. By mid-1863, the military manpower necessary for territorial expansion had been squandered on the war’s battlefields. Plans for an economy based on specie derived from the export of cotton failed to recognize that during the war, Great Britain discovered major cotton sources in Egypt and elsewhere. And a slaveholding society badly disarranged by the advance of Union armies, even if those armies were beaten back, could not be easily stabilized—although Confederate thinkers convinced themselves otherwise by fantasizing that “African Americans would have a better future in the Confederacy than anywhere else in the world, especially that to be had in the United States” (p. 181). As the war progressed, the declining fortunes of the Confederacy forced a reimagining of these ambitions, but not nearly to the degree one would expect. Confederate thinkers apparently overlooked key issues such as an overhaul of the financial system, which failed the Confederacy so miserably during the war, and the expansion of higher education, on which the construction of a [End Page 151] modern infrastructure depended. Indeed, based on the skillful portrait the author creates, one would not be far wrong to argue that Confederate thinkers looked backward to a perfected antebellum world rather than forward to a realistic postwar world. Mark Grimsley Ohio State University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

A Mimetic Reading of the Passover

The use of sacrificial animal blood in the Hebrew Bible has generated much discussion. While various scholars have attempted to explain the significance of these blood rites, each of these attempts has proved problematic. The current paper employs mimetic theory to develop a more robust and plausible model for exploring biblical animal sacrifice. Using the Passover ritual as a model, I develop a model of sacrificial blood rites as pantomimes of mimetic violence. These pantomimes re‐create a violent yet transformative crisis from the community's collective memory. Such rituals allow the community to enter into and re‐experience the cleansing violence of a mimetic crisis, albeit in a more controlled manner. Through these pantomimes, the community attempts to appease the primitive sacred's blood lust and re‐discover the divine blessing secured through the original crisis. This model may prove helpful when applied to more opaque examples of biblical blood manipulation.

Echoes of Rituals of Initiation and Blood Sacrifice in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist Kurtz, of whom we do not, in fact, see much, is shown as connected with a native “sorcerer,” a “witch-man,” who had “antelope horns” on his head. Antelopes, or goats, are typical sacrificial animals, and the protagonist of this novella is a European who perishes in the midst of tropical forests, in spite of the high hopes that accompany his decision to try his luck in an exotic environment. Kurtz has promising beginnings, but later he gradually degenerates, carrying out what may be called a reversal of the ritual of initiation, comparable to the inverted ritual, to use V. Propp’s term, in folklore. In this sense, he may be regarded as a counterpoint to Conrad himself whose life can easily be described as a modern and uncommonly successful enactment of the same ritual. Meanwhile, Kurtz’s, and to a lesser extent also Marlow’s, failure as initiates is inscribed in the failure of the European civilization to construct a European empire in Africa.

Drum Rhythms and Golden Scriptures: Reasons for Mormon Conversion Within Haiti's Culture of Vodou

Drum Rhythms and Golden Scriptures: Reasons for Mormon Conversion Within Haiti's Culture of Vodou

Global Capitalism as Blood Sacrifice: Mainstream American Comic Books and Depictions of Economic Inequality.

The past few decades have witnessed unprecedented global economic catastrophes that exacerbated pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities. Although many scholars have attributed the resulting social harms to the failures of neoliberal capitalism—and recognize it as criminogenic—the logics upholding the economic order continue to hold sway among the public. Given that these logics are commonly reinforced through media and popular culture narratives, in this paper we explore how economic inequalities are portrayed in American comic books. We employ a thematic analysis of comic book depictions of mass economic destruction and economic inequality from the financial crisis of 2008 through the Occupy Wall Street movement to the more recent characterization of a post-capitalist existence under the throes of a global plutocracy. In doing so we recognize the potential for re-imagining alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, taking a critical criminological lens to the comic books. We then place The Black Monday Murders, a culmination of portrayals of economic inequality and related violence, in the context of more mainstream comic book depictions and discuss how this particular work exemplifies a rising theme in comics—a purported trade-off between global capitalism and human life, a discussion point that explicitly entered American public discourse during the coronavirus pandemic.

Suro Nipa (fear humans)

The article examines suro nipa, a popular maxim of the Akan people of Ghana, against the backdrop of a fictional tale told in the popular Akan novel by A. E. Asiamah titled Suro Nipa. An ambitious young man named Kwabena Anson who owned a flourishing business was driven by arrant desire for instant fabulous wealth to engage in a fiendish act. He sought the assistance of a money-making spiritualist who requested him to spiritually sacrifice the life of a beloved relative for great wealth. For the ritual, Kofi Asomani was spiritually slain by Kwabena Anson who then became fantastically affluent. Throughout the story, Kwabena Anson’s demeanor did not change, giving no clues about the abhorrent act he had committed. Many people were flabbergasted about his instant, fantastic wealth. In the end, Anson inadvertently consumed pork, violating the money ritual’s biggest taboo. He became violently ill and confessed his misdeeds before dying a wretched death. No one in Anson’s social circles ever suspected that Anson’s newfound wealth was attributable to blood sacrifice and that he had spiritually caused his uncle’s untimely death. This shocking story confirmed many people’s perception of human nature as vile, and therefore, needing to be feared.&#x0D;

Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire

Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire Sara Dybris McQuaid (bio) Ireland is at a key moment of rethink. Between 2012 and 2022 Ireland is officially marking a "Decade of Centenaries" in which the country reflects on seminal events that led to the birth of the state. The Third Home Rule Bill passed in the British Parliament in 1912, effectively paving the way for Irish independence (albeit within the empire). After a tumultuous decade, 1922 saw the final establishment of the Irish Free State, with the island having been partitioned in 1921. The most significant single event in this decade was arguably the Easter Rising of 1916. At that point Ireland was still governed under the Union with Great Britain, and the constitutional path to Home Rule had been postponed because of the outbreak of World War I. In this context the Easter Rising was staged by a relatively small group of radicals who took over key buildings in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish republic. A short week of fighting with the British Army ensued, during which Dublin was completely devastated and the leaders of the Rising were imprisoned. The subsequent execution of the leaders outraged the public and rallied more widespread sympathy for a radical agenda. The historiographical agreement—to the extent it exists—has largely been that as a military maneuver, the Rising was a spectacular failure, but as a symbolic performance of blood sacrifice it was a roaring success.1 While the Rising itself failed to achieve its goals of a united, Gaelic, and socialist republic, historian Diarmaid Ferriter has argued that it came to be seen as the point from which all subsequent Irish history begins.2 [End Page 110] Prologue In 2016 the state marked the centenary of the Easter Rising, and in April of that year I brought a group of MA students on a fieldtrip to do participant observation of the commemorations in Dublin. Getting to an old friend's house out near Kilmainham Gaol (where the leaders of the rising were executed in 1916), I asked the taxi driver whether he was already tired of "remembering the Rising"; he said, "Not at all!" On the contrary, he had enjoyed it immensely, with so many new aspects of the Rising being explored. I asked him what he had been especially impressed by, and he said the RTÉ radio documentary An Easter Re-rising about a 1930 uprising in Chittagong in prepartition India (now Bangladesh) apparently modeled closely on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland.3 I downloaded the radio program, which was made by Pranjali Bhave, an Indian woman who had lived in Ireland for ten years.4 The idea for this article began to take shape. While the Decade of Centenaries is about reaffirming and recharging (and to some extent critically reassessing) the national community, imperial and postcolonial relationships have also been pivotal points of renegotiation. One dimension of this is how commemorations are used to position Ireland in relation to the imperial experience, which it may be understood to be both part of and subjected to. Another emerging dimension relates to how commemorations are used to come to terms with other former colonial populations, now living in Ireland, and how they and the transnational, imperial pasts they represent are incorporated in local and national commemorations. At the same time certain forms of remembering, particularly those rehearsing antagonistic relations to Great Britain, have been submerged as a wide variety of other focuses have risen to the front of official remembrance. In this article I consider An Easter Re-rising in the context of these wider forms of remembrance, spurred by the Decade of Centenaries, to show how it at once brings a globalizing and transnational dimension to remembering the Easter Rising, while at the same time through a series of displacements reenables a narrative that has largely been eschewed in national commemorations. [End Page 111] Introduction Centenaries are occasions in which all remembrance is necessarily disembodied (since almost none of the people who lived the historical experience are still alive) and therefore must be reembodied by new generations and populations through their participation in memorializing and imagining the nation.5...

Sacrifice of Humans and Animals in Religious Practices

The main practice of the ancient Mediterranean religion was the sacrifice of animals, including the slaughter and the gifting of one or more animals. Traditional blood offerings were part of a life and death cycle that should thrive both animals and humans. Throughout the Empire Christians and pagans alike rejected such sacrifices. This article discusses the pagan and Christian critiques of Greco-Roman blood sacrifices. Authority was founded on the cultural killing of animals and the distribution and eating of their flesh in an old sacrificial discourse. In the new soteriological discourse, power was founded on a symbolic capital of moral and physical pureness and intellectual insights, and the goals of spiritual perfection and redemption. Some of the religions that participated in the new conversation, although Christianity banned it, continued to practice animal sacrifice. Direct human body screening for medicine and future study, as well as electronic medical data, are both useful in minimizing biomedical research sacrifice for animals. These techniques and strategies of research may be more economical and applied to a range of human health issues.

Patience, Suffering, and Tolerance: The Experience of Defeat and Exile among the Jesuits of Ethiopia (1632–59)

Abstract This article explores the last letters written by the Catholic patriarch of Ethiopia in exile Afonso Mendes, which illustrate that, in the face of defeat, Mendes has chosen to write the history of martyrdom, the sacrifice, and shedding of blood for the sake of faith. A group requires a sense of connection through a temporary axis. Mendes’s choice in these last years corresponds to the will of generating cohesion in space and continuity in time in a group that has confronted rupture, disillusionment, and deterioration. Mendes might have attempted to establish a framework that would allow him to alleviate the tension caused by the clash between the original aspirations and the flawed fulfillment of the objective. Therefore, the redaction of the processes of martyrdom and the creation of a calendar allows the transition into a place where a harmonious relationship between the past and the present is generated.

The Shamanism in Altai and Tuva from past to present: Universal and Local Aspects

Shamanism is a system composed of various elements of culture and belief, created by people to understand life and come to grips with what is happening around them. It has an elaborate structure in terms of existing in well-rounded communities. It has various features that have different aspects compared to the different times and conditions of the society. It also adopts local beliefs and the beliefs of the surrounding tribes. Shamanism allows everyone to have a religious concept and to have his or her own God or Gods. The technique of trance, also called «ecstasy», is an essential part. It is based on the worship of magic, curses, divination, polytheism, ancestral spirits and nature beings. Those who practice and teach shamanism are called Kam/Shaman. To some they are magicians, witch doctors, illusionists and to others they are oracles, doctors, sages, philosophers, pagan priests, fortunetellers and storytellers. Attempts have been made to either control or abolish shamanism and shamans because many of their characteristics are in opposition to other belief systems such as Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and communist ideology. In addition, the economic suffering caused by the constant blood sacrifices of the society who live on herding led to the emergence of Burhanism among the Altaians, another factor that weakened shamanism from within. Over time, shamanism acquired a status that the oppression of the shamans who led their communities sought to end. Despite all this, shamanism resisted the pressure and disguised itself when necessary. It always managed to update itself and has survived with some changes until today

Old Norse Rite Blótweitzla

A serious problem in the study of the cultural characteristics of archaic Scandinavia is the verification of the sources. The main questions that arise: to which extent pagan ritual practices continued to exist after the beginning of mass Christianization, and what Christian ideas were extrapolated by later sources to the pre-Christian era. One of the major rituals mentioned in the sources – the feast of sacrificial blood, which was a crucial element of the structures of everyday life in pagan society, seems to be very important. A sufficiently detailed description of the ritual in the sources allows us to draw a number of conclusions about its role in the life of the ancient Scandinavians. The correspondence between the songs of the “Elder Edda” and the ancestral and royal sagas in the designation of objects of worship and their functions, as well as the preservation, even after the baptism of Iceland, of the traditional formula of the legal oath, which was originally given on the sacred ring of the godi, and after 1000 – on The Bibles, and the ancient formula of the agrarian cult (“for a harvest year and peace”) in a similar ritual of drinking beer in Norway at Christmas, according to Gulathing, with a high degree of probability confirms the historicity of ancient Icelandic information about a pre-Christian temple and a feast of sacrificial blood – blotweizl. In a broader context, it provides additional confirmation of the historicism of Icelandic sources and their extraordinary value for the process of reconstruction of the way of life in archaic Scandinavia.

The Development of the Meaning of the Term "Liturgy" in the Twentieth Century

The Development of the Meaning of the Term "Liturgy" in the Twentieth Century Richard A. Nicholas (bio) ABSTRACT The term "liturgy," inherited from the ancient world, gradually fell into disuse in the Latin West. With the advent of the Liturgical Movement, the term not only grew in usage but in depth of meaning. The paper traces how the definition and meaning of the term developed throughout the twentieth century. Pius XII in Mediator Dei emphasized liturgy as the worship rendered by the Church in union with its Head. The Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium developed the term in reference to the sacraments and the sanctification of their recipients. The Catechism of the Catholic Church complemented the roles of the Father and the Son in the liturgy by amplifying the role of the Holy Spirit. KEYWORDS Liturgy, Mediator Dei, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Liturgical Movement INTRODUCTION The final vision in the last book of the New Testament has a depiction of the heavenly liturgy that the Church's earthly liturgy reflects (Rev 22:1–17). In the ancient earthly Jerusalem, the Temple was the focal point of liturgical worship. It was there that the presence of God dwelled. Now in the heavenly Jerusalem, the [End Page 45] Temple is replaced with God and the Lamb, whose glory permeates the city as the river of life, from which all the faithful may drink. On the river's banks, the tree of life heals the nations and bears much fruit. Nothing will be cursed because all sin will be healed and washed away, allowing the faithful to worship God face to face without the intrusion of evil. The Spirit of God and the Bride, the Church, call the faithful to worship. It is the responsibility of all those present to assist in the Church's liturgy, whereby God the Father is worshipped through the Lamb, God the Son, and in the Spirit of God. While all three persons of the Godhead are actively engaged with the Church in this vision of worship, it is interesting to note that the meaning associated with the Latin Church's use of the term "liturgy" did not reflect the Johannine vision of worship until late in the twentieth century. This article will trace how the definition and meaning of the term "liturgy" developed throughout the twentieth century to include and explicate the roles of each person of the Godhead, as well as the Church and her members, in the act of worship. PRE-TWENTIETH CENTURY MEANINGS OF THE TERM The term "liturgy" is derived from the ancient Greek word λειτουργία (leitourgia) and it pertained to any work or action that was done for the well-being or welfare of the people or general public, such as defense, city services, recreation, education, etc.1 It had no specifically religious significance until the term was used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. There it was the term most frequently used for a public service, usually led by the priests and Levites, by which God was worshipped (Ex 28:43; Num 4:33; 2 Chr 31:2; [End Page 46] Jdt 4:14; 1 Mac 10:42; Sir 4:14, 45:15). Far less frequently, it was used for an action done on behalf of the people by the Jewish theocratic state as a representative of God (1 Kgs 19:21; 2 Chr 17:19, 22:8). In the New Testament, the term was also used to describe a public service of Jewish worship, for example, the liturgy administered by Zechariah in the Temple (Lk 1:23) and the sprinkling of sacrificial blood by Moses (Heb 9:21). The term was also employed for a non-cultic service (Phil 2:17), a charitable gift (Phil 2:30; 2 Cor 9:12) and a liturgist, servant, or minister of Jesus Christ (Phil 2:25; Heb 1:7, 8:2; Rom 15:16). "Liturgy" was used in its most specific Christian sense to describe the worship offered by the Christians in Antioch (Acts 13:2) and more significantly the priestly work of Jesus Christ in Hebrews 8:1-6. The author...

Hackers of the heart: digital sorcery and virtual intimacy in Côte d'Ivoire

AbstractThis is an ethnography of internet scams in Abidjan through which I attempt to develop a theory of digital sorcery. Thebrouteursof Côte d'Ivoire impersonate Europeans in social media profiles and seduce others into falling in love with them. After months of flirtatious messaging and photo exchanges, disaster strikes their avatar and they ask for an emergency wire transfer from their digital lover. While millions of euros of income are sent to Abidjan every year, thebrouteurssay they can no longer succeed without the use of occult forces, and they turn to marabouts for assistance. During my fieldwork in 2015, rumours circulated thatbrouteurwealth depended on the blood sacrifice of children for its success. As Ivoirians increasingly employ smartphones and social media in their daily life, the anxieties concerning the illusions and manipulations of the virtual world become enmeshed with those of the occult second world. I suggest that the overlap between hacker technology, con artistry and occult power outlined in Ivoirian urban rumour suggests a model for rethinking the space of virtuality in the global economy as a form of magical semiosis, one that can be every bit as vitality draining as witchcraft itself.

Seme divination in Burkina Faso. II

The Seme of Burkina Faso attribute all the problems they encounter to interventions from the invisible world. They identify the cause and the appropriate remedy (blood sacrifice) through divination. The diviner, called by the invisible, is intimately linked to a bush spirit through an initiation. This bush spirit becomes his divination assistant and thus his intermediary to the invisible world. The Seme have developed particularly precise representations of the invisible world. The successive sequences that make up the divinatory rite were identified in the first part of this study. This second part links each of these sequences observable in the visible world, to simultaneous actions performed by beings and powers in the invisible world. It presents the notions mobilised by the Seme in their divinatory practice, notably that of the human person and of individual destiny. Seme divination is an exercise in figuration of the invisible of great virtuosity.