Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Beyond the polis: rethinking Greek Religion
- Chapter 2 Parmeniscus’ journey: tracing religious visuality in word and wood
- Chapter 3 On tyrant property turned ritual object: political power and sacred symbols in ancient Greece and in social anthropology
- Chapter 4 Rethinking boundaries: the place of magic in the religious culture of ancient Greece
- Chapter 5 The ‘local’ and the ‘universal’ reconsidered: Olympia, dedications and the religious culture of ancient Greece
- Chapter 6 ‘The sex appeal of the inorganic’: seeing, touching and knowing the divine during the Second Sophistic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Parmeniscus’ journey: tracing religious visuality in word and wood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Beyond the polis: rethinking Greek Religion
- Chapter 2 Parmeniscus’ journey: tracing religious visuality in word and wood
- Chapter 3 On tyrant property turned ritual object: political power and sacred symbols in ancient Greece and in social anthropology
- Chapter 4 Rethinking boundaries: the place of magic in the religious culture of ancient Greece
- Chapter 5 The ‘local’ and the ‘universal’ reconsidered: Olympia, dedications and the religious culture of ancient Greece
- Chapter 6 ‘The sex appeal of the inorganic’: seeing, touching and knowing the divine during the Second Sophistic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But what is ‘social energy’?…We identify energia only indirectly, by its effects: it is manifested in the capacity of certain verbal, aural, and visual trances to produce, shape, and organize collective physical and mental experiences.
Stephen GreenblattThere is no innocent eye, seeing is an active and not a passive process.
Hans Gerhard KippenbergINTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 identified the focus on the polis and its socio-political institutions as a paradigm in current scholarship on ancient Greek religion and offered a critical appreciation of this approach. I argued that the neglect of religion as a personal experience and as a matter of thought is one of the unfortunate side effects of the polis-religion model on scholarship in the field, which frequently favours religious agency. This chapter explores a dimension of ancient Greek religion that takes the individual believer – and the student of ancient Greek religion – well beyond the boundaries of the polis and its socio-political institutions, both physically and intellectually. The goal is to demonstrate the benefit of a perspective that is not focused primarily on religious agency, control and power as mediated and overseen by the polis. Instead, I investigate the modes of thinking that informed ancient Greek religion as well as some of the concepts that underlay it: what we might want to call the ‘cognitive dimension’ of ancient Greek religion.
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- Information
- Rethinking Greek Religion , pp. 36 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012