Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World PDF Author: Blanka Misic
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781009355520
Category : Cognition and culture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Transcending conventional script-based approaches to rituals, readers are guided into an accessible and diverse realm of embodied religious experiences. Cognitive and sensory approaches connect mind (cognition) and body (senses), exploring a variety of ritual experiences (pagan & Christian) in the Roman world"--

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World PDF Author: Blanka Misic
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781009355520
Category : Cognition and culture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
"Transcending conventional script-based approaches to rituals, readers are guided into an accessible and diverse realm of embodied religious experiences. Cognitive and sensory approaches connect mind (cognition) and body (senses), exploring a variety of ritual experiences (pagan & Christian) in the Roman world"--

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World PDF Author: Blanka Misic
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009355554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How do the senses shape the way we perceive, understand, and remember ritual experiences? This book applies cognitive and sensory approaches to Roman rituals, reconnecting readers with religious experiences as members of an embodied audience. These approaches allow us to move beyond the literate elites to examine broader audiences of diverse individuals, who experienced rituals as participants and/or performers. Case studies of ritual experiences from a variety of places, spaces, and contexts across the Roman world, including polytheistic and Christian rituals, state rituals, private rituals, performances, and processions, demonstrate the dynamic and broad-scale application that cognitive approaches offer for ancient religion, paving the way for future interdisciplinary engagement. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience

Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience PDF Author: Esther Eidinow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316515338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Explores the religious rituals and beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, using modern research into human cognition to better understand the experiences of men and women. Integrates literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. Accessible to those without prior knowledge either of cognitive theory or of the ancient world.

Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy PDF Author: Emma-Jayne Graham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351982451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand ‘religion’ to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency – place, objects, bodies, and divinity – and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

SENSORIVM: The Senses in Roman Polytheism

SENSORIVM: The Senses in Roman Polytheism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900445974X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
SENSORIVM publishes the first results of a collective investigation into how Roman rituals smelled, sounded, felt and struck the eye. It brings Roman religious experience into the realm of the senses.

The Roman Mithras Cult

The Roman Mithras Cult PDF Author: Olympia Panagiotidou
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472567404
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The Roman Mithras Cult: A Cognitive Approach is the first full cognitive history of an ancient religion. In this groundbreaking book on one of the most intriguing and mysterious ancient religions, Roger Beck and Olympia Panagiotidou show how cognitive historiography can supplement our historical knowledge and deepen our understanding of past cultural phenomenon. The cult of the sun god Mithras, which spread widely across the Greco-Roman world at the same time as other 'mystery cults' and Christianity, offered to its devotees certain images and assumptions about reality. Initiation into the mysteries of Mithras and participation in the life of the cult significantly affected and transformed the ways in which the initiated perceived themselves, the world, and their position within it. The cult's major ideas were conveyed mainly through its major symbolic complexes. The ancient written testimonies and other records are not adequate to establish a definitive reconstruction of Mithraic theologies and the meaning of its complex symbolic structures. Filling this gap, The Roman Mithras Cult: A Cognitive Approach identifies the cognitive and psychological processes which took place in the minds and bodies of the Mithraists during their initiation and participation in the mysteries, enabling the perception, apprehension, and integration of the essential images and assumptions of the cult in its worldview system.

Ritual, Performance and the Senses

Ritual, Performance and the Senses PDF Author: Jon P. Mitchell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0857854976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Ritual has long been a central concept in anthropological theories of religious transmission. Ritual, Performance and the Senses offers a new understanding of how ritual enables religious representations – ideas, beliefs, values – to be shared among participants. Focusing on the body and the experiential nature of ritual, the book brings together insights from three distinct areas of study: cognitive/neuroanthropology, performance studies and the anthropology of the senses. Eight chapters by scholars from each of these sub-disciplines investigate different aspects of embodied religious practice, ranging from philosophical discussions of belief to explorations of the biological processes taking place in the brain itself. Case studies range from miracles and visionary activity in Catholic Malta to meditative practices in theatrical performance and include three pilgrimage sites: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the festival of Ramlila in Ramnagar, India and the mountain shrine of the Lord of the Shiny Snow in Andean Peru. Understanding ritual allows us to understand processes at the very centre of human social life and humanity itself, making this an invaluable text for students and scholars in anthropology, cognitive science, performance studies and religious studies.

Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion

Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion PDF Author: Robert Vinten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350329363
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists. Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology and religion undermine the frameworks and practices of cognitive scientists of religion. Employing philosophical tools as well as drawing on case studies, contributions not only illuminate psychological experiments, anthropological observations and neurophysiological research relevant to understanding religious phenomena, they allow cognitive scientists to either heed or clarify their position in relation to Wittgenstein's objections. By developing and responding to his criticisms, Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion offers novel perspectives on his philosophy in relation to religion, human nature, and the mind.

Senses of the Empire

Senses of the Empire PDF Author: Eleanor Betts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317057287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The Roman empire afforded a kaleidoscope of sensations. Through a series of multisensory case studies centred on people, places, buildings and artefacts, and on specific aspects of human behaviour, this volume develops ground-breaking methods and approaches for sensory studies in Roman archaeology and ancient history. Authors explore questions such as: what it felt like, and symbolised, to be showered with saffron at the amphitheatre; why the shape of a dancer’s body made him immediately recognisable as a social outcast; how the dramatic gestures, loud noises and unforgettable smells of a funeral would have different meanings for members of the family and for bystanders; and why feeling the weight of a signet ring on his finger contributed to a man’s sense of identity. A multisensory approach is taken throughout, with each chapter exploring at least two of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The contributors’ individual approaches vary, reflecting the possibilities and the wide application of sensory studies to the ancient world. Underlying all chapters is a conviction that taking a multisensory approach enriches our understanding of the Roman empire, but also an awareness of the methodological problems encountered when reconstructing past experiences.

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World PDF Author: Valentino Gasparini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110557940
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 622

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Book Description
The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.