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1. “On Sundays, my father takes me to Mass, and when the ladies sing Hosanna I think I won't get out of there in a thousand years. Hosanna, Hosanna, they screech, without letup, and nobody can put the brakes on them, not the Chief of Police or anybody […] The beautiful things about Mass are: all the lamps are lit, and all the flowers smell wonderful […] The bad things about Mass are: you have to kneel too long, it lasts too long at Easter […]”1 No one's tastes are the same, and so neither are their sense impressions. The Neapolitan grammar-school girl describes Sunday Mass in her…

Era 1: Late Antiquity: Paganism as formation of reaction to Christendom 253–268 Under the influence of his mentor Plotinus, Emperor Gallienus fosters Greek philosophy and the Mysteries of Eleusis Egypto-Greek philosopher Plotinus (205–270) devel…

Physical Ligh…

The Rumor of Orleans 1. On May 10, 1969, in the lovely French city of Orleans, a shop for women's clothing opened. Its name was provocative: Aux Oubliettes—Fr., “In the Dungeons.” The management had thought up something quite special that was certainly expected to stimulate attention: the changing cubicles were outfitted after the fashion of a medieval dungeon. This idea did not remain without consequence. A scant month later, a number of shops and city-centers began to display the motto: “Don't buy from Jews. They traffic in girls.” What had happened? Beginning in Catholic girls' schools, the rumor had spread, first among companions, then with pa…

1. Monte Verità (Ital., “Mount of Truth”) was a cultic site frequented by devotees of the European, especially the German-speaking, alternative culture of the first third of the twentieth century. The level elevation overlooking the village of Tessino and today's tourist center of Ascona, on the Swiss northern bank of Lago Maggiore, received its name from the homonymous sanatorium at the same location. From 1900 to 1920, Belgian industrial heir Henri Oedenkoven (1875–1935) and pianist Ida Hofman…

Human Beings in Crowds and Masses 1. ‘Mass,’ like ‘crowd,’ means first of all a multitude of persons. ‘Mass,’ however, goes beyond ‘crowd,’ and denotes a ‘perceptual’ form of crowd, special from without as from within: a multitude arising and understood politically, religiously, or aesthetically, as an independent social condition of aggregate. This aggregate is not defined in terms of an absolute number: the community of believers itself, in its → architecture, is a (prayer) mass. Human masses make their appearance in qual…

Heroldsbach 1949–1952 1. On October 9, 1949, four ten and eleven-year-old girls went to the park of the Castle of Heroldsbach, in Franken (Germany), to gather fall foliage.1 They had just participated in an evening meditation on Mary. Upon leaving the wood, first one of the girls, then the others, felt a sudden compulsion to pray. Immediately thereafter, they saw, first, a black figure between the trees, then the abbreviation ‘JHS’ (in the popular German reading, Jesus—Heiland—Seligmacher…

The Concept 1. Mysteries are ‘mysterious’—it sounds banal, and suggestive of a detective story: a “mystery t…

Icons (Greek, eíkon, ‘image’) are the sacred images of the Eastern Churches. Since the Byzantine image controversy (which began around 726 under Emperor Leo III and lasted, …

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 collec…

a) Festival Cycle of the Greek Religion: Example of Athens b) Festal Cycle of the Roman Religion…

Along with the statues, apparatus, and special attire of worship, material is an important, if often little noticed, component of worship and ritual. Material used in worship can be made of inorganic matter and products as well as organic ones, which find application within ritual activities. It is applied as sacrificial material, when entrails are burned in honor of the gods, or flowers are placed on graves for ancestors; as means of purification, when the body is cleansed before prayer with water or refined aromatic oils, sand, or even bare stones; as means of painting or marking, when, …

1. Machines (from the Doric Gk. machaná, or Attic mechané), are gears with movable parts serving for a power transfer. Normally, they stand in a fixed location, although, as in the modern traffic system, they can be ‘self-moving’ (Gk., auto-; Lat., mobile); cf. ‘locomotive’ (Lat., locus, ‘place’; movére, ‘to move’). ‘Robots’ (from the Czech robota, ‘compulsory labor,’ ‘drudgery’) and ‘aut…

The Power of Definition 1. a) The boundary between what religion is and is not, has important effects: it excludes it from undeserved privileges, and lays out its concerns as either illegitimate or unlawful. These issues arise in the debates over ‘fundamentalism,’ Islamic religious education, or over ‘sects and cults,’ as, for example, in the disagreement over whether Scientology is a religion or a (criminal) ‘economic undertaking.’ An example may clarify the point. In December 1992, Hindus destroye…

1. The term ‘reception’ derives from the Latin recipere, ‘to receive,’ ‘to take up.’ It is applied with various meanings in scholarship. In the cultural sciences, it found wide application after its adoption from the Constance theory of option in literary reception. In the area of anthropology and religious studies, it denotes any orientation of a cultural or religious current to a tradition. The bearers of the latter are varied. Correspondingly, religious receptions are identified as forms of religion …

* Introductory remark: The following survey is an attempt to present scientific trends and different schools and styles of research that have either been characteristic of the academic study of religion over the past century or that have recently entered upon the scene but have nevertheless already had an effect on religious research. This is, therefore, a study of the typical and the paradigmatic (which is not to imply that another approach would have been qualitatively inferior, this is simp…