Journal articles on the topic 'Goddess Magic'

This article analyzes the influence of radical and cultural feminist ideas on the writings produced by Zsuzsanna Emese Mokcsay (b. 1940), a seminal Pagan activist who spearheaded the development of the Dianic Witchcraft tradition during the 1970s and 1980s. An examination of Budapest's writings reveals the ideological background of Dianic Wicca, found in the specific aspects in the works of radical and cultural feminist thinkers such Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, Robin Morgan, Susan Griffin, and Susan Brownmiller, which suited Budapest's lesbian-separatists leanings. The article thus sheds light on the politics of Goddess Spirituality during its formative years that have made modern Paganism what it is today. This is particularly important in light of the challenges to Dianic Wicca (and Goddess Spirituality in general) in recent decades, as third-wave feminism and transgender rights highlight a generational gap between veteran and younger Dianic women.

Audiences in the United States recognize Pagan elements like the use of magic and animism in the Disney film Frozen 2. This article discusses such Pagan ideas in the Frozen films and then applies two archetypal themes from Goddess spirituality to Elsa’s characterization. Scholars like Carol Christ and Starhawk of nature-based Pagan Goddess movements in the United States are employed to compare Elsa in Frozen 2 with notions about the fifth element and rebirth. The article engages neo-Pagan religious ideas about female independence, balance, and transformation, providing a comparison to Elsa’s heroic journey. A discussion about Elsa’s deification in popular culture and body image conclude the article.

We describe two unique fi nds from the 2018 excavations at the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya settlements of Pervomayskoye and Chekon in the Krasnodar Territory: a pendant and a clay figurine of a goddess, respectively. The parquet ornament on the pendant is paralleled by that on a cylindrical pendant-seal from Chekon. Such ornamentation is frequent on Near Eastern button-seals, and occurs on Anatolian artifacts symbolizing the fertility goddess and the magic related to her. Therefore, the Pervomayskoye and Chekon pendants, too, may be associated with the fertility cult. The figurine of a goddess from Chekon can be attributed to the Serezlievka type of the Late Tripolye culture. It testifies to ties between Maikop and Tripolye in the late 4th to early 3rd millennia BC. Both finds shed light on the vastly diverse beliefs of the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya tribes at the middle and late stage of that culture.

Abstract The present paper focuses on healing rituals from Greco-Roman Egypt, where medicine and religion were inextricably linked to each other and further connected to the art of magic. In Pharaonic Egypt, healing magic was especially attributed to the priests who served a fearsome goddess named Sekhmet; although Sekhmet was associated with war and retribution, she was also believed to be able to avert plague and cure disease. It then comes as no surprise that the majority of healing spells or other types of iatromagical papyri dating from the Roman period are written in Demotic, following a long tradition of ancient Egyptian curative magic. The extant healing rituals written in Greek also show substantial Egyptian influence in both methodological structure and motifs, thus confirming the widely accepted assumption that many features of Greco-Egyptian magic were actually inherited from their ancient antecedents. What is particularly interesting about these texts is that, in many cases, they contain magical rites combined with basic elements of real medical treatment. Obviously, magic was not simply expected to serve as a substitute for medical cure, but was rather seen as a complementary treatment in order to balance the effect of fear, on the one hand, and the flame of hope, on the other.

In Babylonia, numerology was invented and Venus, as the goddness of fertility, was first depicted as a 6-comered star. But, as numerologically she was designated 15. As a -comered star, its make-up shows two opposite triangles interpenetrated. This was changed to two squares fused into one where geometrically the shape became a square. It created 9 cells which were so numbered that the numbers counted in any row gave the sum 15. Venus thus became a Magic Square of 15. Geometrically it was a Magic Square, but numerologically it was 15. In the make-up the squares were two and opposites. As goddness of fertility she especially helped the pregnant to an easy delivery. Some 8 variants of the Magic Square, with different arrangements of numbers, represented 4 cosmic elements and 4 cosmic qualities. The Magic Squares, which represented elements, had the numbers 1, 3, 5 and 8 near one another forming a miniature square by themseleves. A Magic Square representing a quality did not have the numbers 1, 3, 5 and 8, as a consolidated unit. This explains the importance of the numbers 1, 3, 5 and 8, a mystery which had remained unsolved. Venus was also the star of copper. When copper technology migrated from Babylon to China, the occult science associated with Venus also rached China. Here the 8 Magic Squares were translated into a system of whole and broken lines, called Pa-Kua, meaning 8 designs. An illustratio is offered showing that, given 3 lines are whole and 3 as broken and these combined with each other, the total result of combinations amounts only to 8. Figuure 10 is then best integrated with the help of Figure 7. Now each Magic Square and each Kua was a "living being" and thereby a source of blessing others. A candidate of longevity wears a robe decorated with Pa-Kua, the 8 designs which further carry at the center the symbol of Yang-Yin, the source of all existence, including those of the 8 kuas themselves. Such a robe of a Taoist priest has also been offered. Incidentially it may be mentioned that the interested reader may consult a previous article on Indian and Chinese cosmic elements (1979).

In the spring of 1946 L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Parsons performed a series of magical rituals with the aim of incarnating the Thelemic goddess Babalon in a human being. Hubbard’s cooperation with Parsons, known as the Babalon Working, remains one of the most controversial events in Hubbard’s pre-Scientology days. This article sets out to describe the content of the magical rituals, as well as their purpose. It is argued that in order to fully understand these events, it is necessary to approach the Babalon Working from the study of Western esotericism in general, and the study of Enochian magic in particular.

In the Far East, Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, is the one who "listens to the cries of the world". Depicted by gigantic white statues, she is the feminine personification of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara and represents an archetypal figure dear to Chinese women and men. In Hong Kong and in Taipei, Taiwan, she is consulted by throwing two moon blocks or ritual sticks according to the rules of Chinese divination. The goddess is a real presence who acts in a real way: when questioned, she answers, defying a synchronistic and extraverted field of knowledge and meaning. The author highlights the importance of approaching in a cross-cultural, sensitive way, such a slippery cultural phenomenon as the use of divination in that part of China, investigating a possible parallelism between this form of dialogue with the goddess Guan Yin and the Jungian method of active imagination. Developing a cross-cultural sensibility towards Chinese divinatory practices as Chinese clients do in their country, without either prejudicially declaring them superstition or considering them as a form of magic, can have transformative effects both on Eastern and Western imagery. In the case of Chinese people, this sensibility develops the ability to examine, psychologically, a phenomenon whose deeper meaning often remains unconscious. In the case of Westerners, this sensibility creates an experience of active imagination in extraverted form. In both cases, when approached from a Jungian perspective, the Chinese divinatory practice leads to experiencing the transformative reality of the extraverted and synchronistic imaginal action.

Charles Williams and his characters need no spaceship or enchanted wardrobe to enter the otherworld, for it is simply the hidden heart of this one. Its portal is awakened vision. As both a fervent Christian and a practicing ritual magician, Williams used magic to open the supernatural dimension that features so prominently in his novels. Once a potent magical object has been loosed into the world, where it unleashes havoc, the damage must be contained by a saintly character who surrenders to the Divine, restoring the cosmic balance. Williams establishes striking parallels between magical sight and contemplative vision, as also between the performance of magic and the act of prayer. Focusing on The Greater Trumps, this essay considers the Fool (the figure numbered “zero” in the tarot deck) as an image of Christ who stands at the center of the magical dance enacted by the cards. Two maiden aunts, seemingly with little in common, turn out to be parallel seers of the divine: Nancy's aunt Sybil, a saintly contemplative, and her fiancé’s aunt Joanna, a gypsy madwoman obsessed with the goddess Isis.

The use of magic and religion in healing practices in Vietnam is relatively popular. In the folklore and folk religion of Vietnam, it is often said that “In case of sickness, follow any feasible cures [co benh thi vai tu phuong]” in the sense that all means, including using religious beliefs and rituals, will be used to get healing for oneself or one’s relatives. When people or their relatives get sick, besides going to medical facilities, they will look for a shaman, necromancer, monks, even priests, bishops, and pastors to cure the illness they or their relatives are suffering from. Based on Mircea Eliade’s theory published in The Sacred and the Profane (Eliade, 2016), the article has the ambition to offer a different perspective on the use of magic (sometimes considered as a religious ritual by the subject) to cure disease. We employ both the comparative and analytical methods of study as we explore concrete cases of treatment of patients with different religious beliefs (Ms. T’s case of treatment, following Buddhist practices in comparison with the healing cases of the Mother Goddess Worship and the Catholic Church). The authors propose that a uniquely Vietnamese philosophy of life (Life-philosophy) serves as a constitutive basis for the adaptation of magic in healing practices, being itself formed and influenced by these practices.

The labyrinth is beyond any doubt one of the most fascinating aspects of human societies. Though its magic forms and implications are well known and have been the subject of important analyses - the best known being perhaps P. Santarcangeli 's Il libro dei labirinti now with many translations in various languages, lately rediscussed by Krzak (1985) - there still are unrevealed aspects, some perhaps improperly understood. It is our purpose to examine here (1) the pre-Indo-European (hereafter pre-IE) family of the fundamental Greek form labýrinthos (a term sometimes labelled 'Mediterranean', which is not ultimately incorrect), (2) the pre-IE family of English forms maze/amaze and their unexpected south and southeast European parallels (noticed a long tirne ago, but unconnected to this context), and (3) the interpretation of the available data in the sense that the labyrinth was initially a projection of the Neolithic Goddess 's sacred body.

The word "baal" means "husband", and the plural form is "baoola". The wife is likewise called "baal" or "baala". "Baal" is a Semitic noun for a Canaanite god or a god's son and husband to goddess "baala" or "Asheera" or "Ishtaroot". He was known as the god Hood who was a god of fields and cattle fertility. In sum, worshipping "baal" was common among the peoples of the East in the old time; that is why, we find he had different names. The reason was that each nation used a name that was known among its people. Any of his names would often start with "baal" and end with the name of that land or city. Alternatively, it would start with something attached to it, such as "baalfaghoor" or "Beelzebub". "Baal" had many priests who used to cheat people with their magic and sorcery which they relate to their god.

Like in many countries of Europe, the 1st of February (Imbolk, the Brigid’day) in Ireland marks the beginning of Spring and is connected with some fertility rites. In old rural Ireland the people spent time watching hedgehogs (to see one was a good weather sign), preparing and eating special food, making straw girdles and caps, putting red ribbons on their houses (Brat Bride ‘Brigit’s cloak’), making special Brigit’s crosses and straw dolls, called Brideog, to visit a sacred spring which had a magic healing and anti-sterile power (wells and springs, worshiped in pagan Ireland, were prohibited by St. Patrick), and finally singing protective charms. In modern urban Ireland all these rites remind in the past, but the Brigid’day is not forgotten or abandoned. In this article, the author tries to outline three main ‘tracks’ of the old tradition: 1. Pseudo-folkloric (fake-lore): singing, dancing, making crosses, storytelling etc. 2. Pseudo (Vernacular)-Catholic: early mass and pilgrimages to the places connected with St. Brigit, especially – sacred wells. 3. “Neo-paganic”: special dresses, red ribbons, ritual dancing, fires, divinations of the future, bath in the sacred water etc. (in the most part – performed by women). Collecting material for the classification, the author outlined a special new direction of ‘shared spirituality’ representing presumably a new mode of collective behavior in modern urban societies.

From the cycle of the constellation symbolism we will approach the „Corona-Crown” constellation. The origin of these dress accessories gets lost in the darkness of time, standing testimony of the „Prehistoric Art”. The "Corona- Crown" is the small constellation Corona Borealis, visible in early summer, its brightest stars form a semicircular arc. The "crown" is a symbol and sign of belonging to the celestial world bearer, supernatural, divine, being worn at rituals of passage; of magic; of gratitude to heroes, to victors, to geniuses and to wise; of martyrdom; of coronation of kings, being a sign of immortality, honor, victory, greatness and joy. Archaeological discoveries will complete the mythological and ritualistic picture of these hairy ornaments, represented by „Moon Goddess” from Turdaș and „Bride of Trușești”. The story behind these clothing accessories represented in the Prehistoric Art and in the stars makes that the man to be closer to sky (heaven, deity), the microcosmic Earth merging with the macrocosmic Universe.

En el ámbito de la filosofía neoplatónica de Proclo el Diádoco, representante destacado de la escuela de Atenas, la figura de la diosa Hécate es de una importancia fundamental, ya que se configura como elemento central de la tríada noérica que separa el Intelecto paterno del demiúrgico, del que manan la Virtud y el orden material de las cosas. Este planteamiento bebe directamente de los oráculos caldeos, un compendio fragmentario de respuestas divinas recopilado en época de Marco Aurelio (segunda mitad del siglo II), en el que Hécate aparece como diosa profética y de sumo poder. Para llegar a comprender cómo una entidad que nunca formó parte del panteón olímpico más extendido en época clásica o helenística llegó a ser uno de los seres más poderosos en la Antigüedad tardía, hace falta estudiar el complejo y rico proceso de asimilación y convergencia que experimentó con otras divinidades, gracias, sobre todo, a los cultos orientales y mistéricos y a la expansión del helenismo por el territorio egipcio. Así pues, el objeto del presente artículo es revisar la evolución del papel de la diosa Hécate desde una perspectiva diacrónica, estableciendo como límites el siglo VIII a.C. y elIV d.C. Si bien analizaremos los diversos testimonios literarios y epigráficos en los que sea mencionada, el centro de atención serán los Himnos órficos y el Papiro Mágico IV 2785- 2890, que permiten conocer de primera mano el proceso de asimilación producido. In the context of the Neoplatonic philosophy of Proclus the Successor, a prominent representative of the school of Athens, the figure of the goddess Hecate is of fundamental importance, since it is configured as a central element of the noeric triad that separates the paternal Intellect from the demiurgic, from which the Virtue and the material order of things flow. This approach drinks directly from the Chaldaean oracles, a fragmentary compendium of divine responses compiled at the time of Marco Aurelio (second half of the second century), in which Hecate appears as a prophetic goddess of great power. In order to understand how an entity that was never part of the most widespread Olympic pantheon in Classical or Hellenistic times became one of the most powerful beings in Late Antiquity, it is necessary to study the complex and rich process of assimilation and convergence that it experienced with other divinities, thanks,above all, to the oriental and mystical cults and the expansion of Hellenism through the Egyptian territory.Thus, the purpose of this article is to review the evolution of the role of the goddess Hecate from a diachronic perspective, setting the eighth century B.C. as limits, and the fourth A.D. Although we will analyze the various literary and epigraphic testimoniesin which it is mentioned, but the focus will be the Orphic Hymns and the Magic PapyrusIV 2785-2890, which allow us to know first hand the assimilation process produced.

Introduction. The article is devoted to analyzing the specific type of Byzantine phylacteries (amulets), which are a vivid manifestation of folk beliefs that combine pagan, magical and Christian components. The author talks about the so-called “coils” – pendants with the image of a head with reptiles instead of hair or simply in combination with snakes. Many of them have a magical inscription mentioning “hysteria” (uterus), which can be understood as this particular organ, as well as various harmful entities. For this reason, there is a problem of correlation of the image and the magic inscription. But the article attempts to interpret the serpentine composition in the context of its functional purpose. Methods. In historiography, there are many opinions about what the images could represent on this type of monuments. At different times, researchers saw in the image of a head with snakes Medusa Gorgon, the dragon-Satan, Russian Aphrodite – goddess Lada, Abrasax, Sophia of Ophites, Moses’ brazen serpent, Eve and the devil, the seven-headed serpent and seven deadly sins, sisters-Likhoradkas, the dragon from the Apocalypse, the serpent of Aesculapius transformed into Satan. In addition, the composition was recognized as a “portrait” of the demon and his machinations elevated to the image of Khnubis and was considered the personification of the hysterical uterus itself. Analysis. In the article, the meaning of the serpentine composition is considered in the comparative analysis with other images on amulets. This is possible due to the presence of stereotypes and general principles in the construction of magical drawings applied to the amulets, as well as the general meaning that is associated with the functional purpose of the phylacteries. In different types of the images on amulets, semantic emphasis is placed on reproducing the desired action. For this, phylacteries were made and used, and magical texts, signs, images of saints, the Mother of God and even Christ himself were applied to the amulet. Results. The symbolism of the serpentine composition is revealed within the same sign system. The drawing combining a head (face) and wriggling snakes clearly represents the desired effect – the outcome, the flight of illnesses or the forces of the evil symbolized by reptiles from a person.

In world folklore, both the Myth of the Snake-woman and the motive of the birth of “wonderful children” from half-humans-half animals are widespread. Melusine is a fairy, a heroine of a folk tale of Celtic origin. Often depicted as a female-snake or female-fish from the waist downwards, sometimes with two tails. The Legend of Melusine goes back to the mythological motif of the “sacred marriage” of a chthonic being with a celestial deity, which was then transformed into the fabulous motif of the “wonderful spouse” (AaTh 400-459). The folk legends we have considered about mermaids and other travesty of female characters in snakes reveal a direct connection with the cult of the goddess of love and fertility. All similar characters, like Melusine, reveal a connection with lunar symbolism, as well as with the other world. The moon and stars have a sacred symbolic meaning in the work of A. Remizov and accompany fragments of Melusine’s appearance, and are also present at all important and fateful events, such as the death of Emery, the Meeting of Raymond and Melusine at the source, and the Wedding. We have revealed the similarity of Melusine’s image with fish-like and snake-like characters in Armenian folklore and mythological texts. The large luminous stone on Melusine’s forehead echoes the motif of the magic stone on the head of the king of snakes or frogs. In the beliefs of the people, snakes personify spirits, the souls of ancestors. They live in their old homes and protect them. Both the serpent and the spirit of the ancestor are interested in the fertility of the clan and the fertility of the fields. Structurally A. Remizov’s Story consists of three parts: “The Story of the Story”, “Melusine”, “Kolovorot”. In his treatment of the legend of Melusine A. Remizov introduced psychological motivations for the actions of the heroes. As a result of the study of the Legend of Melusine in the literary processing of A. Remizov, we can conclude that Melusine reveals the closest connection with the pagan deities of fertility, as well as all three fairy sisters are in one way or another connected with the Armenian Kingdoms and Armenian mythology.

Remarks on Derveni Papyrus, col. XXI, Orphic Hymn 55 (1-14), and PGM IV (2898-2935 and 3207-3252), focused on the features of the goddess emphasized in each text, with a proposal concerning the coincidences.

The article deals with the evolution of female demonic characters appearing in literature since the classics to this day. In Russian classics, infernal females with magical powers were not uncommon: described by V. Zhukovsky, O. Somov, N. Gogol, A. Kuprin, etc., they were mostly treated as ‘abnormal’ or negative. The perception has changed dramatically in modern literature: a woman with connections to infernal powers (e. g. princess Tichert in A. Ivanov’s novel The Heart of Parma [Serdtse Parmy] or Rogneda in M. Galina’s Mole Crickets [Medvedki], etc.) is no longer a manifestly negative character. A. Guskova discovers that the contemporary infernal (or demonic) female character is not so much part of a love theme but is rather connected to the magic of the story’s location: the Urals in A. Ivanov’s book and Transdniestria in M. Galina’s, respectively. Also transformed is the nature of the contact between the heroine and the male protagonist: the impossibility of a constructive interaction and mortal danger (in classic prose) are replaced with a positive tone, granting the protagonist an opportunity for development.

Self-determination of a woman is important for her self-realization at the beginning of the XXI century. A modern woman successfully combines two careers. She presents herself as a specialist and wife / mother. French writer S de Beauvoir drew attention to this in her novel "Magic Pictures" in 1966. Her heroines make it possible to understand the psychological problems of women. The classification of archetypes of goddesses in accordance with the stereotypes of modern women was applied. This concept logically complements feminist criticism and helps to investigate the way the archetypes of the goddesses are manifested in the images, respectively, "feminine", "feminist" and "female" concepts. This will contribute to the clarification of the parable in the works of S. de Beauvoir. S. de Beauvoir uses psychoanalytic approaches to distinguish conscious and unconscious in heroines of literary works, and great attention is paid to unconscious motives and feelings. The writer distinguishes psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions of women to display their personal "psychodrama", which is reflected in literary conflicts. S. de Beauvoir interprets conflicts as external and internal. During the analyses of the writer’s works we also differentiate the conscious and unconscious in her heroines, observe conflicts between men and women, between generations, between the desires of one person, in order to understand better the "mental" state, which promotes character’s development as an existant. The writer made an extremely important artistic and aesthetic contribution into the creation of "feminine" artistic images, which reveals the archetype of Aphrodite, that through the issue of choice introduces the idea of the importance of "love", deprives of feelings and the status of the "Оther" as an inferiority complex, reaching the level of self-realization of an existant.S. de Beauvoir explores the phenomenon of literary existentialism as a problem of choice which a character has to face and contributes to its evolution. S. de Beauvoir’s creation of influential characters, according to "feminine" concept, achieves the highest resonance in the mid ХХ century and extends to the beginning of ХХ–XXI century.

The paper is devoted to the study of the internal, “invisible” structure of the representative horseshoe of the concept SUPERSTITION in the Anglo-Saxon culture, reflecting the main categories of magical thinking. The novelty of this research is that it is performed within the framework of Theolinguistics, namely, in its section – Theolinguoconceptology [Postovalova, 2016]. For the analysis of the language representatives of the concept under study, the method of ontological concept analysis, developed by the author of the paper, is used [Stepanenko, 2006; Stepanenko, 2015. P. 185–195; Stepanenko, 2019. P. 467–488]. The history of the horseshoe is rooted in antiquity, dating back to the pre-Christian civilization. As an ambivalent symbol it is interpreted in terms of the pagan and Christian conceptual systems. The astronomical attribute of the pagan goddesses – the crescent moon – was translated into the language of the Christian theology with a change in the semantics of its symbol, thanks to which the Gospel story of the transcendental world is rendered into the immanent language. Modern culture reduces the sacral in the horseshoe to the level of a profane, a kind of simulacrum for mass consumption. The word horseshoe itself has not changed its shape over the centuries. As for its content, it has gone a difficult semantic way, cumulating both profane and sacral meanings and eventually turning into a wordmythologem, the smallest unit of the myth about the Good and the Evil. This mythologem is actualized in various legends, fairy tales, parables, telling about the magic of the horseshoe, which can bring both good and bad luck, and which can protect against the evil spirits or become an instrument against a man. Our research has shown that the word-mythologem horseshoe keeps on a peculiar framework the pillars of which are five logical ontological categories, the objective universal forms of magical thinking and being. Besides, the analysis of the examples with the word horseshoe allowed us to distinguish nine pairs of dichotomies, each consisting of two ambivalent concepts: assertion and its negation, thus creating antinomy, i.e. a logically unsolvable contradiction. This is but a favorable condition for the survival of the superstition associated with the horseshoe.

Indrajāla (literally “Indra’s net”) has the meanings of “illusion”, “deception”, “witchcraft” and belongs to the basic concepts associated with the magic in Indian culture. The paper offers a translation from Old Tamil and commentaries to a fragment of the poem “Kalingattupparani” by the poet Jayankondar (12th century), containing description of “witchcraft”. In that poem the demonesses (Tamil pēy), who make up the retinue of the victory goddess Kottṟavai, are deceived by a sorceress who creates illusory pictures of the battle. The demonesses, feeding on the corpses of warriors, horses and elephants who died in battle, are so exhausted by hunger that they are glad to be deceived and cannot distinguish a magical mirage from reality. The presented fragment of the poem shows the demonesses as comic characters.

In 2016, Lemonade was lauded as “Black girl magic” for the ways the hour-long HBO special (and subsequent album) celebrated Black women and the Southern gothic tradition. It also was the first hint of Beyoncé paying homage to West African Yoruba traditions. At the 2017 Grammys, her performance was both an invocation of the sacred in Western art history and further homage to Yoruba. The performance opened with poetry by Warsan Shire, and snapshots of her daughter, Blue Ivy, but the highlight was Beyoncé’s gold gown, and crown, and gold accessories, all of which symbolized the African goddess Osun. Released just before her Grammys performance, the I Have Three Hearts photo-series circulated as pregnancy images (she was pregnant with twins), but it also functioned as a repository of Beyoncé’s invocation of the sacred in Western culture, as embodied in Venus, and the African goddess, often labelled as “Black Venus.” This article is an examination of three images in the I Have Three Hearts series, taken by Awol Erizku, and the series’ accompanying poetry by Shire. I argue that it raises important questions about the role of visual culture in fashion and popular culture. Is Beyoncé the Venus of the twenty-first century? Does this photographic series remap Western visual culture to reimagine Black womanhood in the discourse on sexuality? Or, it is an example of pastiche in postmodern culture wherein truncated information is authorized, making everyone an expert without the demand for historical context?

AbstractIn the first part of the article, the question of Theocritus' treatment of magic in the 2nd Idyll is being discussed. The author's view is that Theocritus not only accurately depicted the contemporary magical practices, but that the very composition of the poem was influenced by the magical texts. The second part of the paper pays attention to a special class of magical texts, the defixiones influenced by the prayers for justice. The author argues that Simaetha's confession to Selene bears close resemblance to the prayers for justice and that Simaetha's argumentative strategy in the description of her short love affair with Delphis serves the purpose of portraying her as the betrayed party, thus enabling her to put the blame on Delphis and demand of the goddess that the justice (e.g. the return of Delphis to Simaetha) should be done. Finally, the effect of Simaetha's magical practice and her prayer is being discussed. Since the motif of ϕαρμακον connects the 2nd with the 11th Idyll, a comparison between Simaetha and Cyclops is called for and some general conclusions about the motif of the healing properties of poetry in the Theocritean corpus are suggested.

Topic: polymorphic iconography in Egyptian religious iconography - special and separate types of mixed, theriomorphic and combined images / icons / forms, always with animal heads, double pairs of wings, phallus, and other magical symbols. Archaeological evidence: images appear on small size flat amulets, papyri fragments (also serving as amulets), bronze statuettes and magical healing statues. Textual evidence: lack of distinctive proper names Place: Egypt, without special area of provenance Date: Late Period (7th – 4th centuries BC), Ptolemaic and Roman Periods (from 4th century BC) Important terms:Pantheistic as an idea of all-embracing god (Pantheos)ba as an emanation / form / manifestation of a god, significantly associated with the image of the god. The animals were ba of gods.bau - strength, power, good and bad at the same time, affecting the whole world, and humans in particular. With the help of magic bau can be manipulated, to ensure people health and success. DeitesBes – Egyptian god – demon, present in magical context, protector of maternity, life, music, safety, with strong solar interpretation, often depicted as a dwarfTutu (Tithoes) – popular especially as Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt deity; main role was to repel negative powers and to protect people in danger; depicted as sphinx with mixed animal and magical attributesLamashtu – female Mesopotamian goddess / demon, who preys on mothers and children, depicted in magical context with animal elementsPazuzu – male Babylonian and Assyrian demonic god with rather beneficent, magical role, depicted with animal elementsNine–Shaped (Enneamorfos) – figure present in written Greek Magical Papyri, defined as composed of nine forms, especially of animal origin with magic function and Egyptian genesis Key problem: distribution of polymorphic iconography in other cultures, parallels, influences on the visual level (codification of symbols) and also on the ideological level (magical activity hidden / symbolised in a representation) Question of the talk: to define potential influences in the Near Eastern perspective - is the polymorphic idea specific to one culture or common to all ancient religious thinking about deities?

AbstractAlthough aging is not a metamorphosis stricto sensu, it is a process that affects the shape of the body. This paper explores the ambivalent representation of old age and its interplay with the ostensible theme of Ovid's encyclopedic poem on bodies changing shapes. Aging in the Metamorphoses is mainly a physiological process, which affects men and women alike, but may be reversed by means of magic. It is also one of the trappings of divinity: gods and goddesses often disguise themselves as old women, in order to deceive or advise humans. Even the poem's narrator, 'Ovid', frequently assumes the persona of the elderly in an act of self-transformation.

On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.

IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. 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