The Brill Dictionary of Religion

Get access Subject: Religious Studies
Edited by: Kocku von Stuckrad

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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.


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Occultism

(2,179 words)

Author(s): Pasi, Marco
The Term ‘Occultism’ The term ‘occultism’ has been defined in a variety of manners since its first appearance in France (as occultisme), in the first half of the nineteenth century. The earliest occurrence appears to be in a ‘dictionary of new words’ by Jean-Baptiste Richard, Enrichissement de la langue française (1842), but it was thanks to the pen of Eliphas Lévi (ps. of Alphonse-Louis Constant, 1810–1875), that the term acquired an increasing popularity since the 1850s. Later on, and mostly under the influence of Lévi's writings, the term p…

Oedipus

(1,328 words)

Author(s): Stingelin, Martin
1. The West knows no figure, transmitted from Greek antiquity, more important, and susceptible of being read in religious history as a prism, than Oedipus. In him, an era's respective religious and nonreligious images of the human being fail. Sophocles's tragedy “Oedipus Rex,” as presented in a framework of the annual dramatic contest in honor of Dionysus, in Athens about 430 BCE, portrays Oedipus's self-revelation. The special urgency with which this piece of dramatic work was presented, has gi…