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Rituals play a prominent role in Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest religious traditions of mankind. In this book, scholars from a broad range of disciplines make the first ever collective effort to discuss Zoroastrian rituals in different historical contexts and geographical settings.
In a wide arc from the Paleolithic to the present day, this book explores the changing structure of human experience and its impact on the dynamics of cultures, civilizations, and political ideas. The main thesis is a paradigm shift: the structure of human experience is not a universal constant but changes over time. Looking at the entire range of human history, there are a total of nine transformations, beginning with conscious perception and imagination in the Paleolithic and ending, for the time being, in modern times with the discovery of the unconscious. In between, this book explores six more transformations that took place in different regions and at different times, which include a sense of order, self-reflection, the eye of reason, spiritual experience, as well as the experience of creativity and of consciousness. As such, The History of Experience presents both a cross-cultural and comparative theory of experience and cultural dynamics, and an exploration of rich materials from East and West. This book is of great use to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the relationship between history, human experience, culture, and political order.
Centered around a text-critical edition of three Old Avestan chapters of the Zoroastrian Yasna litrugy, the book explores aspects of their transmission, their past and present ritual setting, and of their exegetical reception in the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) tradition.
This volume covers the transition period stretching from the reign of Justinian I to the end of the 8th century, focusing on the experience of individuals who lived through the last decades of Byzantine rule in Egypt before the arrival of the new Arab rulers. The contributions drawing from the wealth of sources we have for Egypt, explore phenomena of stability and disruption during the transition from the classical to the postclassical world.
At an international symposium in Norway, the 100 years’ anniversary of the academic study of religion was celebrated. This volume contains the papers that were presented at this conference. A major part of the papers deals with the situation of this discipline around the turn of the last century, focussing especially on the work of the Dutch-Norwegian scholar W. Brede Kristensen (1867-1953) and on other founding fathers in the Scandinavian countries. Other contributors discuss methodological questions relating to the idea of a phenomenology of religion. Furthermore, an attempt is made to compare the study of religion at the end of the twentieth century with the situation a hundred years earlier, and to trace some of the lines of development. The book includes a bibliography of publications by W. Brede Kristensen.
The theme of divine judgement has often been treated, but usually with a concentration on one it its two main aspects: either that which is seen in the present life and in history or that which is believed to occur only after death. This new study seeks to combine the two aspects. It also tries to cover the whole spectrum of the ancient religions. Special attention is given to Israel, Greece, and Egypt. Israel's neighbours are also considered, and there are discussions of Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. In several areas, notably in Egypt and Israel, it is shown that punishment in this life is sometimes presented as a fate that man brings upon himself rather than as one imposed by God, though always against a moral background derived from religion. The origins of judgement after death in the Judaeo-Christian tradition are examined in some detail and elements are traced to Egyptian, Zoroastrian, and Judaic sources.
A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer. Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities su...
In Religion, Culture, and Politics in Pre-Islamic Iran, Bruce Lincoln offers a vast overview on different aspects of the Indo-Iranian, Zoroastrian and Pre-Islamic mythologies, religions and cultural issues.
Comparison is an indispensable intellectual operation that plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge. Yet comparison often leads us to forego attention to nuance, detail, and context, perhaps leaving us bereft of an ethical obligation to take things correspondingly as they are. Examining the practice of comparison across the study of history, language, religion, and culture, distinguished scholar of religion Bruce Lincoln argues in Apples and Oranges for a comparatism of a more modest sort. Lincoln presents critiques of recent attempts at grand comparison, and enlists numerous theoretical examples of how a more modest, cautious, and discriminating form of comparison might work and w...