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[German Version] I. Religious Studies Developed during the European Enlightenment and in a Christian context, the concept of theism serves to characterize religious beliefs. While the concept of deism denies any lasting relationship between God and world, and atheism even denies the very existence of God, theism upholds the notion of an interaction between God and the world created by him, between the divine person and the individual human being. This expression, which is not only shaped by a Christi…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies The term theophany (“appearance/manifestation of God”) stands between the poles of revelation and epiphany (“transfiguration, illumination”) or hierophany (“manifestation of the holy”), a term often used in 20th-century phenomenology of religion. In various monotheistic and polytheistic contexts and periods, we find narratives that recount the sudden overpowering advent of God and the resulting catastrophes or terror befalling the world. As a literary genre, theoph…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies In archaic cultures, the wellbeing of the community is determined by a fatal power that can be influenced by religious rituals but is ultimately incalculable. In the context of advanced early urban cultures, however, there emerged religious worldviews in which universal concepts of order played a central role. In this historical context, a “functioning world order” (Klimkeit) became the structural principle for models explaining the world. The connection between …

Shifting from Tradition to Modernity Until the 19th century, themes, motifs, and forms in the literature composed in modern languages in India were largely traditional. Artistic refinement and literary individualism were achieved through the ways and means of how given subjects were treated, and how repetition and mannerism were avoided in dealing with them. Subjects were mostly taken from the huge stock of religious imagination developed in the Sanskrit Purāṇas and in Sanskrit epic literature or from the bardic and folklore tradition.Within the framings of tradition, a hig…