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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > History of religion
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Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority - Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E. (Hardcover)
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Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority - Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E. (Hardcover)
Series: Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The people of the late ancient Mediterranean world thought about
and encountered gods, angels, demons, heroes, and other spirits on
a regular basis. These figures were diverse, ambiguous, and
unclassified and were not ascribed any clear or stable moral
valence. Whether or not they were helpful or harmful under specific
circumstances determined if and what virtues were attributed to
them. That all changed in the third century C.E., when a handful of
Platonist philosophers-Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and
Iamblichus-began to produce competing systematic discourses that
ordered the realm of spirits in moral and ontological terms. In
Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority, Heidi Marx-Wolf recounts
how these Platonist philosophers organized the spirit world into
hierarchies, or "spiritual taxonomies," positioning themselves as
the high priests of the highest gods in the process. By
establishing themselves as experts on sacred, ritual, and doctrinal
matters, they were able to fortify their authority, prestige, and
reputation. The Platonists were not alone in this enterprise, and
it brought them into competition with rivals to their new
authority: priests of traditional polytheistic religions and
gnostics. Members of these rival groups were also involved in
identifying and ordering the realm of spirits and in providing the
ritual means for dealing with that realm. Using her lens of
spiritual taxonomy to look at these various groups in tandem,
Marx-Wolf demonstrates that Platonist philosophers, Christian and
non-Christian priests, and gnostics were more interconnected
socially, educationally, and intellectually than previously
recognized.
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