The Social Function of Curses in the Hebrew Bible

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2003

Modern Social Theory: an introduction, Oxford …, 2005

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World, 2020

Love, wish for revenge, fear, hope: ancient cursing rituals managed to embrace a vast spectrum of emotions. They were prompted by emotional experiences, they manipulated feelings, and their result could have been a renewed emotional state. This paper intends to look at how the archaeological and ritual settings contributed to shape the emotional and bodily experience of individual participants. Active compounds such as frankincense could have helped the uplifting of negative emotions, but lead exposure could have provoked health damage. Sensory deprivation could have enhanced the sense of being in contact with the divine or could have distorted perception. The case studies include a selection of documents from the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore in Corinth (I-II CE), the sanctuary of Isis and Magna Mater in Mainz (I-II CE), and that of Anna Perenna in Rome (II-V CE). From these texts and their contexts, it is possible to attempt a sketch of the cognitive and embodied aspects of cursing rituals as a multi-sensory experience. 1 Introduction The historian who intends to illuminate the history of emotion in antiquity could hardly avoid to look at the epigraphical evidence. Among the various typologies of inscription, curses offer a base for studying the description and Acknowledgement: I would like to thank the editors for their invitation to Eisenach for the opportunity to reflect on this topic and the days of constructive discussions. I would like to thank also Therese Fuhrer for inviting me to the University of Munich, where I presented a version of this paper receiving useful feedback, and Angelos Chaniotis for his comments on my oral presentation. Yulia Ustinova kindly read and commented on a draft of this chapter, helping me to fine-tune my argument. I am also grateful to Esther Eidinow for her fruitful suggestions. I would like to warmly thank Laura Baroncelli for discussing with me the research in neurobiology here cited. Any error remains mine. This research has been generously funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at the University of Gottingen, Collaborative Research Centre 1136 Bildung und Religion, sub-project C01 'Aufgeklärte Männerabergläubische Frauen? Religion, Bildung und Geschlechterstereotypen im klassischen Athen'.

Witchcraft Continued, 2018

This chapter is concerned with a special form of witchcraft that is practised, to my knowledge, only amongst Hungarians living in Transylvania. It is possible that it is common among the Romanian population of Transylvania as well, but so far I have not found any relevant information in the Romanian literature. My analysis is based on fieldwork conducted several years ago with my university students in Csíkkarcfakva and Csíkjenofalva, two villages in the old county of Csík inhabited by Roman Catholic Hungarians. 1 The two villages are in Transylvania, in the Hungarian block of the Székely land bordering on Orthodox Romanian areas. The Hungarians here have scarce cultural contacts with Romanians; indeed, the cases described below are almost the only examples of any connection between their respective religions. The time spent in the field was unfortunately insufficient for a comprehensive survey of the system's functioning or for the elucidation of its social and mental environment. What we have managed to observe and record was in fact not so much the practice as the narratives about it, from which we can make only indirect and conditional inferences about the real situation. What follows is a preliminary overview of the findings based on around one hundred collected narratives. Until recently, little was known about the religious variant of witchcraft described here. 2 In Csík the priest actively participates in the system of witchcraft. He not only helps remove bewitchment from the sick, but helps carry out bewitchment as well. In this form, witchcraft as a social system regulating personal conflicts, and as an ideological system, has several features that distinguish it from other forms known in Central and Western Europe including aspects of divine jurisdiction, ordeal and divination; in fact, in many respects it functions subordinated to them. The classic West European suspicion-accusation bewitchments can be found in Hungarian and Transylvanian witchcraft trials from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and some of its features are still discernible among the twentieth-century Hungarian population of both Hungary and Transylvania. 3 Witchcraft as a

Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religion 5

Journal for Semitics, 2018

Book reviews/Boekresensies possessive metaphors: cultura culturata, processual metaphors: cultura culturans, see also pp. 23-30). The volume closes with select bibliography (437f.), list of authors, indexes of persons, concepts, and subjects, as well as an index of metaphors (468). This Handbuch offers inspiration and guidance for biblical scholars who often use the same terminology and concepts, although, in many cases, they use and define them differently. The essays offer an excellent introduction to the wider discourse (in the central European tradition) and help biblical scholars to appreciate and to contribute to the academic discussion of issues which also appear in the Bible and in its examination and application to current issues. In addition, the Handbuch also provides clarification and demands care and caution when "culture" (defined nationally, ethnically, or racially) is often naively and uncritically adduced as the final and nonquestionable argument in various discussions in society and the academy. Culture and arguments by culture are by no means harmless concepts!

In this paper, I explore the creative use of biblical traditions in so-called "magical" texts through a detailed analysis of the crucifixion tradition on Brit. Lib. Or. 6796(4), 6796, a seventh-century CE spell for exorcism. I examine three overlapping ways in which the practitioner interacts with the crucifixion story: selection and arrangement of pre-existing traditions; invention of new elements of the story; and the juxtaposition of word and image. I then reflect on the implications of the crucifixion tradition in this spell for analyzing the relationship between biblical traditions and metonymy in "magical" texts, more generally.

Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 1993

The history of Religions is in need of subdisciplines. Those that it has are mostly derived from other academic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, or, to mention a more recent invention, aesthetics. Interdisciplinary studies are in many ways a characteristic, inherent feature of the humanities, and certainly not to be resented or mistrusted. It is, however, worth noticing that the History of Religions has only one discipline entirely of its own: a comparative, cross-cultural, religio-specific discipline sometimes called the phenomenology of religion. The study of ritual is more than just the study of a very broad. It is with a view to the further exploration of the way meaning and form are put to work in ritual, and the way ritual determines and conditions the form of representations, that ritualistics can be suggested as a new discipline.

István Czachesz and Risto Uro (eds.). Mind, Morality and Magic: Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies, 2013

This chapter introduces a revised version of Lawson and McCauley (1990)'s action representation scheme, after reviewing its linguistic background, the concept of thematic roles. Subsequently, it applies this framework to Judaism and Jewish rituals, such as circumcision and the immersion in the ritual bath (mikveh). It turns out that Jewish rituals are not rituals according to the narrow definition of Lawson and McCauley. A number of possibilities are raised that broaden the original framework. Note that the sibling paper "When Judaism became boring" (2013) complements this paper, applying McCauley and Lawson's theory of balanced and unbalanced ritual systems to the history of Judaism.

At the following paper I am going to discuss about the creation of symbols and about the role and the symbolism of the body in rituals and generally in human societies. It is generally known that the members of human societies communicate with each other with symbols that are formed in proportion with the cultural environment in which they live and stay. Definitely the creation and definition of symbols does not mean a procedure that can accept changes, but it composes a continuous movement, negotiation in public and private field that takes a lot of different forms according to the cultural and historical environment 2 .

Four of the curse-tablets from the temple of Isis and Mater Magna in Mainz presented earlier in this volume by Jürgen Blänsdorf, and securely dated between 70 and 130 CE, 1 use compound forms of the verb vertere in idiosyncratic ways that suggest that their authors were improvising new uses for familiar 'persuasive analogy' formulas. In most cases the change in strategy seems to involve a shift away from the traditional concrete understanding of the trope (to invert or reverse the victim's body, mind or speech) to a more abstract one that takes greater account of the fi gurative meanings of these compound words, namely personal hostility, bad luck and even death. Alerted to this development by Professor Blänsdorf's publication of the Mainz texts, we began to look for similar cases in the published literature. Of the total of nine we found, six (including the four from Mainz) are located in Germania Superior, the others are widely scattered between central Italy, western Aquitania and the middle Danube. We also found three other analogous texts, equally scattered in space, from Carthage, Poetovio and the Brenner Pass area. Th is wide distribution of analogous strategies suggests that the phenomenon is independent of handbooks or models and represents the spontaneous adaptation of an image of reversal drawing on stock-phrases such as mentem or animum avertere, to alienate someone's sympathies but also to drive someone mad or distracted, or aversus esse a, to be hostile to, to be strongly opposed to. As so oft en, areas already worked for tropes and fi gures in a given culture prove most productive in the creation of new 1 See pp. 141–89 above. Preliminary discussions of these new materials can be found in Blänsdorf 2005 and M. Witteyer, Curse-tablets and Voodoo Dolls from Mainz. Th e Archaeological Evidence for Magical Practices in the Sanctuary of Isis and Magna Mater, MHNH 5 (2005) 105–124. Note that our translations of the texts we discuss are deliberately literal rather than idiomatic.