Academic literature on the topic 'Life and death, Power over – Religious aspects'

This chapter examines the role of grammatical gender in daily religious experience by focusing on androgynous gods in ancient Rome. It shows that the grammatical gender of a god's name matches the perceived sex of its imagined incarnation. This observation is extended to an analysis of the indigetes, a set of minor deities who seem to have ruled every aspect of daily life, and to whom the Romans appealed, in particular at significant transitional stages such as birth, marriage, and death. A tendency to group gods in sexed pairs is evident in the numerous extant allusions to these deities, as well as to other divine powers. The chapter concludes by showing how this originary state of divine androgyny—whether historical or the product of intellectual speculation—collapses over time in ways analogous to the loss of fluid gender for nouns.

This chapter deals with the two-year period of Kierkegaard's grappling with his own despair, which lasted from May 1836 to 1838. Kierkegaard had held a desolate impression of these two years, in which he intimated that the “powerful religious impression of my childhood acquired a renewed power over [him]” after the death of his father, only now it was “softened by reflection.” Thus, in a sense these two years were a continuation of the events of the previous chapter, in which Kierkegaard was still on the “path to perdition.” This time, however, the chapter looks at how Kierkegaard spent these two years retracing it. This chapter also chronicles Kierkegaard's further engagements with philosophy during his time at the University.

The splendour of John’s court may have fallen short of those of the early modern French kings at Versailles or his own Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian successors, but he presided over an impressive establishment. He had an extraordinary hunting establishment, with scores of men; dozens of highly trained birds of prey; hundreds of hunting dogs; and a large network of hunting lodges, parks, and forests. His court boasted a luxurious material culture, with rich stores of gold and silver plate, hundreds of pieces of jewellery studded with gems, and exotic and costly textiles. Though some aspects of court culture left fewer traces in the surviving records, enough survives to show the patronage of art and music, entertainment and spectacle, and books and learning. John also sponsored chivalric practices such as heraldry, and though he was a notable sexual predator, the influence of new ideas about love and romance was not entirely absent from his court. Despite John’s reputation for impiety, he carried out the religious activities expected of a king, and religion was an integral part of court life. The royal records reveal the ongoing efforts to provide the court with good and often expensive food and wine throughout the year, and John was particularly admired for his generous distribution of robes, food, and drink at his feasts. A significant portion of the court’s time was spent on the road, but this too was an important cultural site for court life and display, particularly in formal processions and royal entries, in which peacock hats, lavish decoration on horses, and lances gilded with gold might make an appearance. The constant itineration of the court meant that there was no one great palace on which John lavished resources, but he still invested heavily in his castles, palaces, and hunting lodges, and on the landscapes around them. Court culture was already highly developed in the early thirteenth century and surviving sources from other realms show this was true not only of the Plantagenet dynasty....

This chapter follows the development of Inca imperial power across the lifetimes of three famous rulers: Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, Tupa Inca Yupanqui, and Huayna Capac. Life histories of these rulers reveal the political and ceremonial aspects of the male ruling title, Inca, and how territorial growth created tensions between the two. Reading between the lines of colonial documents, the chapter also considers the power of Inca women and the evolving role of the paramount woman, or Coya. The growing empire made it difficult for Inca rulers to lead campaigns and also preside over rituals at the capital, while the increasing number of powerful women in the royal palace increased the likelihood of factional competition and succession crises. Over time, Inca rulers spent more time on campaigns, which became more brutal, even after the ruler Huayna Capac moved his court to the northern frontier to try and retain control over the army, palace, and state ceremonies. His untimely death there helped to generate a succession crisis, which blew up into a civil war between two half-brothers: Huascar, the Inca crowned in Cuzco, and Atahuallpa, who took control of the frontier armies.

A few lines before the end of The Tiller of Waters, the protagonist, Nicholas Mitri, wakes up after his death in a void. Once he orients himself, he realizes that this void is actually the center of Beirut that he has inhabited alone during the 1975–1990 civil war and that he has been desperately trying to narrate and preserve throughout the novel. Mitri, a Greek Orthodox man from the predominantly Muslim West Beirut, had been forced out of his house by Shiite Muslim refugees from South Lebanon who had, in turn, been displaced by an Israeli invasion. Homeless, he drifts to his father’s textile shop in downtown Beirut, the contested battle zone between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut. There, he lives alone like Robinson Crusoe in the wilderness of the city center and recounts his family’s story and the history of the different peoples and religious groups that inhabited his life and the prewar city. The house where he lived with his Greek Alexandrian parents and with the Kurdish maid he loved, the shop owned by a Sunni Muslim next to his father’s in the bazaar of downtown Beirut, and the parlor where his mother was trained by an Armenian piano teacher are all eventually wiped out—not by the war but by the reconstruction project. The void, at the end of the story, represents the futility of his efforts to preserve the places. The buildings and streets, it turns out, are more fragile than the memories that inhabit them. The civil war that entrapped Mitri was triggered in 1975 by disagreements between Lebanon’s Christians and Muslims over the presence and power of the Palestinian militias in Lebanon. The war would briefly stop in 1977, with the intervention of Arab forces led by Syria, only to be resumed again, this time with the participation of the Syrians on the side of the Palestinians and Muslims. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 to support the Christians and expel the Palestinians, the war took on an international scope with a failed American and European military intervention.