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Just as we speak of "dead" languages, we say that religions "die
out." Yet sometimes, people try to revive them, today more than
ever. New Antiquities addresses this phenomenon through critical
examination of how individuals and groups appeal to,
reconceptualize, and reinvent the religious world of the ancient
Mediterranean as they attempt to legitimize developments in
contemporary religious culture and associated activity. Drawing
from the disciplines of religious studies, archaeology, history,
philology, and anthropology, New Antiquities explores a diversity
of cultic and geographic milieus, ranging from Goddess Spirituality
to Neo-Gnosticism, from rural Oregon to the former Yugoslavia. As a
survey of the reception of ancient religious works, figures, and
ideas in later twentieth-century and contemporary alternative
religious practice, New Antiquities will interest classicists,
Egyptologists, and historians of religion of many stripes,
particularly those focused on modern Theosophy, Gnosticism,
Neopaganism, New Religious Movements, Magick, and Occulture. The
book is written in a lively and engaging style that will appeal to
professional scholars and advanced undergraduates as well as lay
scholars.
In the second century, Platonist and Judeo-Christian thought were
sufficiently friendly that a Greek philosopher could declare, "What
is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?" Four hundred years later, a
Christian emperor had ended the public teaching of subversive
Platonic thought. When and how did this philosophical rupture
occur? Dylan M. Burns argues that the fundamental break occurred in
Rome, ca. 263, in the circle of the great mystic Plotinus, author
of the Enneads. Groups of controversial Christian metaphysicians
called Gnostics ("knowers") frequented his seminars, disputed his
views, and then disappeared from the history of philosophy-until
the 1945 discovery, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of codices containing
Gnostic literature, including versions of the books circulated by
Plotinus's Christian opponents. Blending state-of-the-art Greek
metaphysics and ecstatic Jewish mysticism, these texts describe
techniques for entering celestial realms, participating in the
angelic liturgy, confronting the transcendent God, and even
becoming a divine being oneself. They also describe the revelation
of an alien God to his elect, a race of "foreigners" under the
protection of the patriarch Seth, whose interventions will
ultimately culminate in the end of the world. Apocalypse of the
Alien God proposes a radical interpretation of these long-lost
apocalypses, placing them firmly in the context of Judeo-Christian
authorship rather than ascribing them to a pagan offshoot of
Gnosticism. According to Burns, this Sethian literature emerged
along the fault lines between Judaism and Christianity, drew on
traditions known to scholars from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Enochic
texts, and ultimately catalyzed the rivalry of Platonism with
Christianity. Plunging the reader into the culture wars and
classrooms of the high Empire, Apocalypse of the Alien God offers
the most concrete social and historical description available of
any group of Gnostic Christians as it explores the intersections of
ancient Judaism, Christianity, Hellenism, myth, and philosophy.
Just as we speak of "dead" languages, we say that religions "die
out." Yet sometimes, people try to revive them, today more than
ever. New Antiquities addresses this phenomenon through critical
examination of how individuals and groups appeal to,
reconceptualize, and reinvent the religious world of the ancient
Mediterranean as they attempt to legitimize developments in
contemporary religious culture and associated activity. Drawing
from the disciplines of religious studies, archaeology, history,
philology, and anthropology, New Antiquities explores a diversity
of cultic and geographic milieus, ranging from Goddess Spirituality
to Neo-Gnosticism, from rural Oregon to the former Yugoslavia. As a
survey of the reception of ancient religious works, figures, and
ideas in later twentieth-century and contemporary alternative
religious practice, New Antiquities will interest classicists,
Egyptologists, and historians of religion of many stripes,
particularly those focused on modern Theosophy, Gnosticism,
Neopaganism, New Religious Movements, Magick, and Occulture. The
book is written in a lively and engaging style that will appeal to
professional scholars and advanced undergraduates as well as lay
scholars.
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