Jarrod L. Whitaker examines the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the Rgveda, India's oldest Sanskrit text, arguing that an important aspect of early Vedic life was the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man. The Rgveda contains over a thousand hymns, addressed primarily to three gods: the deified ritual Fire, Agni; the war god, Indra; and Soma, who is none other than the personification of the sacred beverage soma. The hymns were sung in day-long fire rituals in which poet-priests prepared the sacred drink to empower Indra. The dominant image of Indra is that of a highly glamorized, violent, and powerful Aryan male; the three gods represent the ideals of manhood.
Whitaker finds that the Rgvedic poet-priests employed a fascinating range of poetic and performative strategies--some explicit, others very subtle--to construct their masculine ideology, while justifying it as the most valid way for men to live. Poet-priests naturalized this ideology by encoding it within a man's sense of his body and physical self. Rgvedic ritual rhetoric and practices thus encode specific male roles, especially the role of man as warrior, while embedding these roles in a complex network of social, economic, and political relationships.
Strong Arms and Drinking Strength is the first book in English to examine the relationship between Rgvedic gods, ritual practices, and the identities and expectations placed on men in ancient India."

Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of "sacred scripture" traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - David Carrasco, Harvard University

The contributions in this volume are focused on the historical origins, religious provenance, and social function of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, including so-called 'Gnostic' writings. Although it is disputed whether there was a genre of 'apocalyptic literature,' it is obvious that numerous texts from ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and other religious milieus share a specific view of history and the world to come. Many of these writings are presented in form of a heavenly (divine) revelation, mediated through an otherworldly figure (like an angel) to an elected human being who discloses this revelation to his recipients in written form. In different strands of early Judaism, ancient Christianity as well as in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Islam, apocalyptic writings played an important role from early on and were produced also in later centuries. One of the most characteristic features of these texts is their specific interpretation of history, based on the knowledge about the upper, divine realm and the world to come. Against this background the volume deals with a wide range of apocalyptic texts from different periods and various religious backgrounds.

In Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, Jennifer Newsome Martin offers the first systematic treatment and evaluation of the Swiss Catholic theologian's complex relation to modern speculative Russian religious philosophy. Her constructive analysis proceeds through Balthasar's critical reception of Vladimir Soloviev, Nicholai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov with respect to theological aesthetics, myth, eschatology, and Trinitarian discourse and examines how Balthasar adjudicates both the possibilities and the limits of theological appropriation, especially considering the degree to which these Russian thinkers have been influenced by German Idealism and Romanticism. Martin argues that Balthasar's creative reception and modulation of the thought of these Russian philosophers is indicative of a broad speculative tendency in his work that deserves further attention. In this respect, Martin consciously challenges the prevailing view of Balthasar as a fundamentally conservative or nostalgic thinker. In her discussion of the relation between tradition and theological speculation, Martin also draws upon the understudied relation between Balthasar and F. W. J. Schelling, especially as Schelling's form of Idealism was passed down through the Russian thinkers. In doing so, she persuasively recasts Balthasar as an ecumenical, creatively anti-nostalgic theologian hospitable to the richness of contributions from extra-magisterial and non-Catholic sources.

The formula 'for the life of' is often found in votive inscriptions, cast in Aramaic and other languages, which originate from the Syrian-Mesopotamian desert and adjacent areas and which roughly date from the first three centuries A.D. They belong to objects like statues and altars that usually were erected in temples and other structures with a ritual or sacred function. The inscriptions establish a relationship between the dedicator and one or more beneficiaries, those persons for whose life the dedication was made.
Since the social context evidently bears on both the meaning of the inscriptions as well as the status of the dedications, this volume deals with the nature of the relationships and the socio-religious function the dedications perform.

The volume presents a selection of research projects in Digital Humanities applied to the "Biblical Studies" in the widest sense and context, including Early Jewish and Christian studies, hence the title "Ancient Worlds". Taken as a whole, the volume explores the emergent Digital Culture at the beginning of the 21st century. It also offers many examples which attest to a change of paradigm in the textual scholarship of "Ancient Worlds": categories are reshaped; textuality is (re-) investigated according to its relationships with orality and visualization; methods, approaches and practices are no longer a fixed conglomeration but are mobilized according to their contexts and newly available digital tools.

This study presents a comprehensive treatment of a crucial aspect of Greek religion hitherto largely neglected in the English language. Simon Pulleyn makes a full examination of all the relevant literary and inscribed material available in order both to describe ancient Greek practices and to explain their significance.

This book approaches the religion and rituals of the pre-Islamic Arabian nomads using the Safaitic inscriptions. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. The author attempts to reconstruct this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context.

Open worship of the Roman Emperor with sacrifice, priests, altar and temple was in theory contrary to official policy in Rome. The cult of the living emperor by less direct means, however, might be achieved in various ways: the offering of cult to his companion "genius" or the divine "numen" immanent within him; the elevation of the Imperial house to a level at which it became godlike; the formal placing of the emperor on a par with the gods by making dedications to him "ut deo"; the conversion of divinities of every kind into Augustan gods that served as the Emperor's helper and protector; the creation of Augustan Blessings and Virtues that personified the qualities and benefactions of the emperor. Volume II, 2 completes the preliminary set of studies with a select bibliography, indexes and corrigenda to Vols. I, 1-2 and II, 1.

This work discusses the decline of Greek religion and the christianization of town and countryside in the eastern Roman Empire between the death of Julian the Apostate and the laws of Justinian the Great against paganism, c. 370-529. It examines such questions as the effect of the laws against sacrifice and sorcery, temple conversions, the degradation of pagan gods into daimones, the christianization of rite, and the social, political and economic background of conversion to Christianity. Several local contexts are examined in great detail: Gaza, Athens, Alexandria, Aphrodisias, central Asia Minor, northern Syria, the Nile basin, and the province of Arabia. It lays particular emphasis on the criticism of epigraphy, legal evidence, and hagiographic texts, and traces the demographic growth of Christianity and the chronology of this process in select local contexts. It also seeks to understand the behavioral patterns of conversion.

Traditionally, in the year 312, the Roman emperor Constantine experienced a "vision of the Cross" that led him to convert to Christianity and to defeat his last rival to the imperial throne; and, in 394, a divine wind carried the emperor Theodosius to victory at the battle of the Frigidus River. Other stories heralded the discovery of the True Cross by Constantine's mother, Helena, and the rise of a new kind of miracle-maker in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. These miracle stories helped Christians understand the dizzying changes in their fortunes during the century. They also shed light on Christianity's conflict with other faiths and the darker turn it took in subsequent ages. In A Century of Miracles, historian H. A. Drake explores the role miracle stories played in helping Christians, pagans, and Jews think about themselves and each other. These stories, he concludes, bolstered Christian belief that their god wanted the empire to be Christian. Most importantly, they help explain how, after a century of trumpeting the power of their god, Christians were able to deal with their failure to protect the city of Rome from a barbarian sack by the Gothic army of Alaric in 410. Augustine's magnificent City of God eventually established a new theoretical basis for success, but in the meantime the popularity of miracle stories reassured the faithful - even when the miracles came to an end. A Century of Miracles provides an absorbing illumination of the pivotal fourth century as seen through the prism of a complex and decidedly mystical phenomenon.

Mystery Cults in Visual Representation in Graeco-Roman Antiquity aims to fill a gap in the study of mystery cults in Graeco-Roman Antiquity by focusing on images for investigating their ritual praxis. Nicole Belayche and Francesco Massa have gathered experts on visual language in order to illuminate cultic rituals renowned for both their "mysteries" and their images. This book tackles three interrelated questions. Focusing on the cult of Dionysus, it analyses whether, and how, images are used to depict mystery cults. The relationship between historiography and images of mystery cults is considered with a focus on the Mithraic and Isiac cults. Finally, turning to the cults of Dionysus and the Mother of the Gods, this work shows how depictions of specific cultic objects succeed in expressing mystery cults.

Over the past 20 years, Boeotia has been the focus of intensive archaeological investigation that has resulted in some extraordinary epigraphical finds. The most spectacular discoveries are presented for the first time in this volume: dozens of inscribed sherds from the Theban shrine of Heracles; Archaic temple accounts; numerous Classical, Hellenistic and Roman epitaphs; a Plataean casualty list; a dedication by the legendary king Croesus. Other essays revisit older epigraphical finds from Aulis, Chaironeia, Lebadeia, Thisbe, and Megara, radically reassessing their chronology and political and legal implications. The integration of old and new evidence allows for a thorough reconsideration of wider historical questions, such as ethnic identities, and the emergence, rise, dissolution, and resuscitation of the famous Boeotian koinon. Contributors include: Vassilios Aravantinos, Hans Beck, Margherita Bonanno, Claire Grenet, Yannis Kalliontzis, Denis Knoepfler, Angelos P. Matthaiou, Emily Mackil, Christel Muller, Nikolaos Papazarkadas, Isabelle Pernin, Robert Pitt, Adrian Robu, and Albert Schachter.

This book is the first full cognitive history of an ancient religious practice. In this ground-breaking study on one of the most intriguing and mysterious cults, Olympia Panagiotidou, with contributions from Roger Beck, shows how cognitive historiography can supplement our historical knowledge and deepen our understanding of past cultural phenomena. The cult of the sun god Mithras, which spread widely across the Graeco-Roman world at the same time as other 'mystery cults', offered 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 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. The Roman Mithras Cult identifies the cognitive and psychological processes which would have taken 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.

Rather than viewing the Graeco-Roman world as the "background" against which early Christian texts should be read, Abraham J. Malherbe saw the ancient Mediterranean world as a rich ecology of diverse intellectual traditions that interacted within specific social contexts. These essays, spanning over fifty years, illustrate Malherbe's appreciation of the complexities of this ecology and what is required to explore philological and conceptual connections between early Christian writers, especially Paul and Athenagoras, and their literary counterparts who participated in the religious and philosophical discourse of the wider culture. Malherbe's essays laid the groundwork for his magisterial commentary on the Thessalonian correspondence and launched the contemporary study of Hellenistic moral philosophy and early Christianity.