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[German Version] (May 19, 1877, Riga – Feb 28, 1974, Munich), specialist in religious education and politician. During the Empire, she was involved in restructuring the educational system for girls and campaigned for denominational religious education based on the Bible. From 1921 to 1930, she served as a German National People’s Party delegate in the Prussian Landtag and from 1930 to 1933 in the Reichstag. As president of the Vereinigung Evangelischer Frauenverbände from 1923 to 1933, she appealed to the theology of F. Gogarten, with whom she collaborated a…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies As with many animals, purification is a basic area of human behavior. Mutual purifying implies and generates expectations, trust, solidarity, and hierarchy. Religious actions (e.g. the purifying of statues and pictures of gods) go back to identical structures. Purifying is a fundamental element of ritual actions. Ritual objects, but also the actors themselves, are purified. This process is often self-referential: purification happens not with regard to something unclean, but for the ritual. Purifica…

[German Version] I. Comparative Religion In differentiated religious systems or cultures, the categories of clean and unclean, or purity and impurity, represent a key classificatory-communicative distinction which determines the course of inner boundaries (e.g. those between clergy and laity or women and men) and outer boundaries (e.g. between believers and “pagans,” in-group/out-group). It enjoys particular plausibility in the context of dualistic models such as Zoroastrianism, for example (Zarathu…