The Brill Dictionary of Religion
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Subject: Religious Studies
Edited by: Kocku von Stuckrad
The impressively comprehensive Brill Dictionary of Religion (BDR) Online addresses religion as an element of daily life and public discourse, is richly illustrated and with more than 500 entries, the Brill Dictionary of Religion Online is a multi-media reference source on the many and various forms of religious commitment. The Brill Dictionary of Religion Online addresses the different theologies and doctrinal declarations of the official institutionalized religions and gives equal weight and consideration to a multiplicity of other religious phenomena. The Brill Dictionary of Religion Online helps map out and define the networks and connections created by various religions in contemporary societies, and provides models for understanding these complex phenomena.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
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The impressively comprehensive Brill Dictionary of Religion (BDR) Online addresses religion as an element of daily life and public discourse, is richly illustrated and with more than 500 entries, the Brill Dictionary of Religion Online is a multi-media reference source on the many and various forms of religious commitment. The Brill Dictionary of Religion Online addresses the different theologies and doctrinal declarations of the official institutionalized religions and gives equal weight and consideration to a multiplicity of other religious phenomena. The Brill Dictionary of Religion Online helps map out and define the networks and connections created by various religions in contemporary societies, and provides models for understanding these complex phenomena.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Hair
(1,132 words)
1. Regarded physiologically, hair is one of the derivatives of skin. Being without a nerve, it cannot directly communicate sensory impressions. Nevertheless, it is the material basis of the metaphorical description of experiences, in linguistic applications like ‘hairsbreadth,’ or even ‘hairy [situation].’ In its quality of being bound to the body, and yet separable from it, hair is everywhere to be found as a component of the symbolism of the body.
Coiffure as Characteristic of a Group 2. The various symbolical meanings communicated by ‘headscarf’ can in general be seen…
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Handicapped
(1,157 words)
1. Human life is always accompanied and endangered by the impairment of health. One speaks of a handicap rather than of an illness when the impairment cannot be overcome by therapeutic measures, and a person's life is permanently marked by it. In this sense, handicap is an umbrella concept for physical, mental, and spiritual impairments. The World Health Organization (WHO) distinguishes three levels on which a handicap affects a person's life: first, directly, as an organic damage (impairment), …
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Hare Krishna Movement (ISKCON)
(1,153 words)
1. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda inaugurated the Hare Krishna movement, which calls itself
International Society for Krishna Consciousness. It belongs to the Vishnuite group
Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Saṃpradāya (“Bengali Vishnuitic Tradition”) that goes back to the Bengali Bhaktisaint Caitanya. In the sixteenth century the latter founded a Krishnaitic missionary movement whose way of salvation was the recitation (Sanskrit
japa) and communal singing (Sanskrit
saṃkīrtana) of the names of Krishna. Around 1850, this movement was reestablished in Bengal in the
Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Mā…
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Hasidism
(1,307 words)
Hasidism—a Jewish Awakening Movement 1. Hasidism, a mystical awakening movement in Judaism, arose in Eastern Europe around mid-eighteenth century. Since the → Shoa, it has maintained its centers in New York and Israel. Israel ben Elieser (“
Ba'al Shem [Tov],” c. 1700–1760) is the founder of the movement, which was systematically organized by his successor Dov Ber (d. 1772), the
Maggid (“Preacher”) from Mesritsh, and propagated through emissaries. A variety of directions from the very outset, ordinarily named for their European cities of origin (e.g., Lub…
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Heathen
(316 words)
Heathen are always the ‘others’: Muslims, freethinkers and atheists, cannibals—even Catholics or Protestants, as you prefer. ‘Heathen’ is a collective, ‘exclusive’ (excluding) concept: in the Hebrew Bible, the ‘others’ are the
goyim (Gen 10:5, Isa 14:26); in the Greek New Testament, they are
ta éthne (‘the tribes’), or, as the part for the whole,
hoi Héllenes (‘the Greeks’: John 7:35, Mark 7:26), the ‘(other) peoples,’ those who do not belong to one's own (religious) community. ‘Heathen,’ then, is one of those collective appellations that sets up a …
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Heaven/Sky
(1,966 words)
Dimensions of the Concept 1. The conception of heaven, together with its possible antitheses (earth, hell) and overlaps (paradise, the beyond), belongs to the most important group of influential religious symbols in the history of ideas and piety. Adapted in depth by the folk culture, it permeates many religions, and is further developed even outside explicitly religious traditions. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, this conception combines several dimensions of meaning. (a) First of all, in terms of daily human experience of the world, even today heaven or the …
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Hell
(1,595 words)
1. The word ‘hell’ (from Old English
hel, in turn from
helan, ‘to cover,’ ‘to conceal’) in Germanic languages denotes a ‘hidden’ realm of the dead. The corresponding words in romance languages mean, more precisely, a ‘subterranean realm’ (Lat.,
infernum, akin to Eng. ‘infernal’; Fr.,
enfers). In the earliest traditions, the underworld is the region where all of the dead continue their existence—where earthly existence endures in reduced format (Heb.,
sheol; ancient Gk.,
hades [Homer]). Punishment and retribution are not yet the foremost connotations. A further basic …
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Hereafter
(323 words)
A
hereafter, in the raw sense of ‘the other side,’ necessarily corresponds to the fact that a boundary is traced when a dead person must be withdrawn from the world of the living, to be buried
beyond a boundary, a stream, or a cemetery wall, in a special area. Here, in ambivalent reciprocity, are both the ‘disposal of’ the corpse, lest the living suffer the peril of contamination (→ Purification/Hygiene/Bodily Grooming), and the ‘provision for’ the departed in the life after death. But the conceptualization of a life after death als…
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Heresy
(795 words)
The concept of
heresy (Gk.,
haíresis, ‘choice’) originally denotes the opportunity of a selection to be made among various ancient philosophical schools. With the appearance of the Christian → Church and its orthodoxy, the word receives the polemical meaning of ‘false teaching,’ along with that of ‘particular direction’ or ‘tack.’ The struggle with the heresies (Arianism, Donatism, → Gnosticism) helped a Christianity in the process of formation, itself a particular direction of Judaism, to produce an…
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Hermeneutics
(227 words)
The expression “hermeneutics” (from Gk.,
hermeneuein, ‘to translate,’ ‘to interpret’) denotes the methods of interpretation of a text (→ Text/Textual Criticism) when seen as part of its exposition. Hermeneutics is of key importance especially for religion, when the latter is no longer temporally and locally embedded in the context in which a proposition or relation has found its
Sitz im Leben. One way of ‘translating’ such a text into the present consists in expounding its ‘deeper’ sense, its meaning for times and places other than those of its original …
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Hermetism/Hermeticism
(1,380 words)
The Term “Hermetism” “Hermetism” is a term used today to describe the authors of Late Antique instructional texts which feature the personage of Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice-great Hermes”) as instructor or interlocutor. In these texts, Hermes discusses and describes magical, astrological, alchemical, philosophical, and mystical ideas and practices. The variety of Hermetic subjects testifies to the absolute dominion of Hermes over every sort of learning: he was a personification of knowledge itself.…
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion
Hero/Heroism
(1,919 words)
Leading Figure 1. A hero (Gk.,
heros, ‘hero,’ originally ‘free man’) is an individual who stands out from the crowd of ordinary persons by his corporeal or spiritual assets, and who provides a model for ethical orientation. The heroic charisma rests on extraordinary (or superhuman) traits, and it draws human beings into the spell of the hero's personality. The hero constitutes a type: thus, the stories of heroes' life and works follow similar patterns in different religions, and make real or fictitiou…
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The Brill Dictionary of Religion