Devotion and Artifice : : Themes of Suspension in the History of Religions / / Peter Jackson Rova.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2023 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Jackson Rova, Peter,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Religion and Reason : Theory in the Study of Religion , 57
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XI, 205 p.)

How have humans sought to prevent viable assumptions about themselves and their world from being in force, how does this propensity manifest itself, and in what terms has it been theorized and criticized throughout the ages? Through a diversity of discrete case-studies spanning a vast time-scale (including topics such as paleolithic personal ornaments, pre-ancient ritual economy, ancient philosophy, and modern artful science), this study explores the means by which humans voluntarily suspend habitual patterns of judgement and disbelief in order to perceive the world differently. In recognizing how such modes of suspension can be variously traced back to religious comportments and institutions, a new sense of religious participation is identified beyond the credulous subjunction to artifice and its critical dismissal. The relevant outcome of this long-term comparative approach is that sincere devotion to a (practical or theoretical, scientific or spiritual) cause and the temporary affirmation of artifice are not mutually exclusive comportments, but rather genealogically akin to the discretely sacred (alchemical, ataraxic, epistemological, spectacular, thaumaturgic, etc.) concerns of a pre-modern world.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- A Note on Transliteration and Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Theoretical Preliminaries -- I Pre-Ancient Themes (Reservoir) -- 2 Hyperboles of Identity and Difference -- 3 Fame and Social Eating -- 4 Itinerancy and Afterlife -- II Ancient Themes (Confluence) -- Resumé and Preamble -- 5 The Stargazer’s Sacrifice -- 6 Apparitions and Apparatuses -- 7 Antinomies of the Cross -- III Nascent Modernity (Reflux) -- Preamble -- 8 The Return of the Pagans -- 9 Postscript: Survivals of Religion in the Western Imaginary -- Bibliography -- Index