Festivals dedicated to ancient heroes and heroines and modern saints, and private burials mirror each other, and after being lamented and buried, memorial rituals must be performed at the tomb, combined with the offering of material gifts, in order to obtain reciprocal benefits. After a certain period, the bones are exhumed. Depending on the colour of the bones—their unusual size and sweet smell also being important evidence of sanctity—as well as on the dead person’s status or power while alive, the deceased person may be a mediator in the literal sense of the word, through this second burial in the ossuary (where the bones are placed after the exhumation), or in a mausoleum or church. Both in earlier times and now, the living are dependent on the mediator’s successful communication with even stronger powers in the subterranean world, to assure the continuity of their own lives through the fruits of the earth. Based on the results of first-hand fieldwork carried out by the author since the 1980s to the present in conjunction with ancient Greek sources, the article will examine rituals dedicated to deceased persons in which pilgrimages and offerings of food and other gifts—such as ex-voto offerings—at tombs are central for the preservation of the community, including peoples’ health.

The most notable religious figures in leadership positions are overwhelmingly men. Women have often held supporting roles in religious institutions, which lack the prestige and privilege of their male counterparts. The structure, culture, and systems of religions have been accused of sex bias regarding positions and equity among members. This trend is no less true for the African American religious community. Although Black women represent a majority of Black church congregations, their membership and service have not resulted in restructuring reflective of their contributions. This invites questions concerning participation, recognition, and satisfaction. This commentary examines the role Black women have within the Black Church in the United States. It briefly explores the history, perceptions, various roles, and adaptations of Black women as religious figures within the church. Despite historical subordination and reduced visibility, Black women continue to be the foundation on which the Black church is built. They simultaneously nurture and challenge the networks and traditions that comprise the Black church, and as such, their power is more real than apparent.

In this article, the recent development of a popular and lay audience oriented “Roman Provenance” school of thought is examined both for its historical merits, and also as a part of a wider “outsider” historical and religious “research” phenomenon. These lay authors often pose as experts or historians (or otherwise attempt to gain some kind of academic acceptance) from the outside, while proposing their own, often radical, ideas about the past. Being both potentially harmful for misleading the public, and also an excellent case study for how academics can better interact and correct public misunderstandings, this article attempts to demonstrate both the need and how to address these various arguments from outsider religious studies persons, principally Joseph Atwill, Roman Piso and Jay Gallus, and Henry Davis.

This study examines the role of internet trolls in contemporary culture. It argues that an digital culture primarily based in anonymity and defined by sadistic humor took two ideological turns. As many others have noted, troll culture has become associated with violent right-wing extremism. However, much less attention was given to Gnostic religious language and behaviors amongst internet trolls. To illustrate this change, we examine Andrew “weev” Auernheimer’s political and religious history to show that he was influenced by the Christian Identity movement, Miguel Serrano’s “Esoteric Hitlerism,” and other extremists. We then analyze the sense in which trolls have formed a community, believe the religious ideas they circulate, and how conversion occurs—how people are drawn from spaces primarily dedicated to humor into a violent esoteric ideology which I call Gnostic Neo-Nazism.

Among horror films and books, The Exorcist has attracted a disproportionate amount of commentary from a variety of perspectives, ranging from gender studies and psychoanalysis, through to the histories of medicine and science. This article delves into two aspects of the book and film phenomenon to highlight its cultural significance, especially in the United States, and particularly among Roman Catholics. First, it investigates the background of the book and film and positions it within the type of ethnic melting pot Catholicism from which its author, William Peter Blatty, emerged and its vernacular beliefs about the devil and exorcism, focusing on the type of “Catholic supernaturalism” which Blatty drew on in writing The Exorcist and his own ambivalent relationship with this type of devotional Catholicism. Second, it examines the reaction to the book and the film amongst Catholic audiences, focusing on the extensive commentary provided on the film by several Catholic priests, all of whom found themselves pastorally and professionally challenged by the film’s impact in various contexts. It concludes by discussing how The Exorcist has become an iconic example of the dark side of the American Catholic imagination.

This study explores the new strands of an emerging theodicy among Uyghurs living in diaspora. This study is based on material collected from recorded discussions generated during online introductory classes on the Qur’an, and from interviews with Uyghur Imams residing in Canada and Turkey. The ongoing persecution of Muslims in the Uyghur Homeland by the Chinese government (recently recognized as a “genocide” by the governments of eight countries) has led many Uyghurs to attempt to explain these atrocities through an Islamic religious lens. Similar strategies have been noted in the Jewish theodicy that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust—where the suffering of victims of genocide were interpreted as either a divine test or punishment. Using to these new examples of theodical thinking found among Uyghurs living in the diaspora, we have crafted a typology of four different approaches to the problem of evil and suffering. These include the gnostic argument, the mythic argument, the apocalyptic argument, and the mystery argument. Special attention will be given to the mystery argument because it appears to be an incipient pastoral theodicy that poses a challenge to the test-or-punishment paradigm by valorizing political activism and emphasizes the intergenerational transmission of Uyghur identity. Affinities between Uyghur theodicy and certain Jewish Holocaust theodicies are explored, with a focus on covenantal paradigmatic thinking, the political quietism of Hasidic Hungarian borderland Grand Rabbis in the early 1940s, and the dynamic “broken theodicy” of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman Shapiro.

This article explores the role of evolved pattern recognition in the development and divergence of mental frameworks underlying creative and metaphysical thought in Hominid species. It examines the emergence of figurative artistic expression through the lenses of Darwinian evolutionary theory and Gaboran honing theory, testing the limits and overlap of these methodologies when applied to humanity’s archaic relatives. This is contrasted with complex philosophical and artistic traditions of a relatively recent human society, Early Modern Persia. There is something of a taboo around the application of evolutionary psychology in some sociological circles due to its frequent misuse in pop science to dismiss societal change: an appeal to antiquity rebranded as biological determinism. This article will expand the use of evolutionary psychological methodologies in moderation as an additional tool in the study of archaic humanity and its relatives. It finds there is an evolutionary substratum to the development of creative thought, but that its recognisable features for a modern human were unlikely to have initially been selected traits themselves: this evolutionary substratum is a basis of sensory and conceptual pattern recognition traits, generating a mental atmosphere conducive to the development of collective strata of conceptual association, and is traceable to prehistory.

When P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) is noted today, it is generally as a quondam pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff (c.1866–1949), and the author of In Search of the Miraculous, an account of his time with Gurdjieff. Ouspensky had a considerable reputation in Russian esoteric circles before he had met Gurdjieff, and it is sometimes asserted that Ouspensky’s standing as an independent thinker has been underestimated. The English translation of his book Tertium Organum has been cited as evidence that Ouspensky had already anticipated some of Gurdjieff’s leading ideas. However, a comparison of the 1911 Russian-language edition with the 1920 English translation of the 1916 Russian revision of Tertium Organum establishes that the 1911 original lacked key ideas found in later editions, most of which are distinctively Gurdjieff’s. This shows the extent of Ouspensky’s debt to Gurdjieff, and casts a different light on the relationship between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; namely, that there was more collaboration than previously known, and that Ouspensky’s account of his agreement with Gurdjieff about committing Gurdjieff’s ideas to writing, was tendentious, if not misleading.

This article discusses Orara, a religious festival in Oye-Ekiti which is lacking in scholarly attention. Orara was conceived to appease the spirits and pray to Olodumare through rituals and public performances. The study used sociology, ethnography, anthropology, and historical research methodologies to elicit data. These include primary and secondary sources. The primary data included oral tradition, participant observation, in-situ field notes (i.e., record­ing immediately after observations of events), conversations and interviews, and photographs of the embodied experience of the festival and survey. Secondary sources comprised journal articles, textbooks, and other relevant documents. Using qualitatively analysis, the study engaged Victor Turner’s theory of per­formance in explaining the functionality of Orara in enabling social order in Oye-Ekiti society.

This article explores aspects of visualisation and healing practices found within Tibetan Tantric traditions of deity yoga, with particular focus on the deities Avalokiteśvara, Parṇaśavarī and Tārā. The article looks at some innovations and continuities between contemporary developments of these practices and their more ancient counterparts, through the lens of their use for healing. It explores the relationship of Tantric visualisation practices to waking life, dreamtime, and death processes, identifying some ways in which they were employed in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Concepts from memory studies and place/ space studies are here used to explore how narratives and history are interpreted, particularly locations with mythic dimensions. These locations are of importance to distinct communities, from treasure seekers to those who claim Indigenous belonging to the land. Sites have memories and stories attached to them, but in some cases recent interpretations have superseded older meanings. New narratives and stories have overlaid traditional understandings. From sites of ancient importance and Indigenous ownership, through veneration of the dead, to locations of conspiracy ideology, multiple narratives are created and adopted by differing groups. Where one person might only see the historical, another with a different view will see other aspects of the same site. I situate these locations and narratives within a dual framework of memory studies and place/ space studies to analyse how narratives are created and developed to facilitate new identity formation. New narratives are adopted or made prominent, and in some cases are claimed to be the only acceptable history of a location, even sites with multiple contested histories. Such claims are crucial for those whose identity is entangled with the new story, and whose goals may be communal, individual, political, or religious.

This article serves to expand several points in the recently published “The Many Gods of Deuteronomy,” including noting a number of potential readings of Deuteronomy 32:1–43 which overtly indicate a polytheistic origin for the hymn. This includes several references to both named and unnamed deities, which have gone neglected in the discussions on whether or not the passage indicates Israel’s earlier phases of polytheism. Further, the works attempting to reread Deuteronomy 32 as non-polytheistic are critiqued for a number of other failings in their methods and specific data points.

This article explores the historical and contemporary entanglements of race, religion and media as it plays out through a four-part documentary series about deviant, dangerous and criminal Christian group Electus Per Deus, who were responsible for a spate of murders known collectively as the Krugersdorp Killings. Headed by a self-proclaimed powerful ex-Satanist witch, who was actively involved in on-going spiritual warfare, the group’s primary religious activity was to help educate about and assist with escape from the ‘Occult’ in general and Satanism in particular. A curious element of Electus Per Deus’ modus operandi was that the group’s members often masqueraded as Satanists, in order to advance their cause and secure the legitimacy of their claims. The community in which they were positioned vehemently rejected the Christian status of the group despite members claims to the contrary. This article argues that within the historical and contemporary political economies of race, religion and media, White Afrikaans Christian communities, such as those featured in Devilsdorp were inordinately favoured through the policies and practices of the apartheid regime and more recently the Afrikaner capture of commercial media. This re­ligious and racial privilege is reproduced by the series and serves as a reminder of the importance of intersectional, contextually informed approaches to the study of religious diversity, deviance, and danger.

Contemporary new religious movements—originating from early in the 1960s—gained substantial following in the past half century. Rooted in an era characterised by accelerated social and technological advancements, as well as major historical events, these movements incorporated meanings and qualities anchored in Cold War internal and external tensions. Effects of globalization and rapid urbanization, alongside novel—and in large part still unsolved—challenges posed by individual and collective alienation and the decline of conventional micro, meso, and macrosocial structures affirmed a gradual depletion of inherited collective identity, which was even more apparent in highly urbanized settings. Early societal reactions towards these new constellations—emerging from said turbulent and transitory times—varied greatly by regional and cultural contexts. While in the United States, an initial, generally inclusive, and pluralistic attitude was detectable—overshadowed by a short lived, yet intense cult and moral panics period—in the ‘future post-Soviet’ countries of Central and Eastern Europe the opportunities to deal with the challenges and congested social arrears by history were not available until the early 1990s. After the demise of the Soviet Union, simultaneously with the immediate and pressing challenges of regaining—and retaining—national identity, the opening towards an often-idealized Western world and the appearance of new religious movements brought about even more complex issues. This article provides a brief interpretation of the contexts of new religious emergence, and their receptions in United States around from 1960s. Through outlining region-specific traits of Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, the authors contribute to a parallel understanding of new religious attitudes and of the inherent differences between the two regions.

This article surveys intersections between art, religion, and society in three periods of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand: 1) Polynesian settlement, 2) British colonization and 3) a contemporary multicultural society built on a bicultural base. Using a material culture framework which traces changes in the uses and significance of artistic objects as they pass through the hands of members of various religious and secular communities, it illustrates, through a variety of examples from the fields of popular art, fine arts and architecture, that art has, and can, play a large part in negotiations between religious traditions, particularly when they encounter one another in conflict, reconciliation and hybridization.