Academic literature on the topic 'Religions. Mythology. Rationalism'

The structuralist André-Weil–Claude-Lévi-Strauss transformation formula (CF), initially applied to kinship systems, mythology, ritual, artistic design and architecture, was rightfully criticized for its rationalism and tendency to reduce complex transformations to analogical structures. I present a revised non-mathematical revision of the CF, a general transformation formula (rCF) applicable to networks of complementary semantic binaries in conceptual value-fields of culture, including comparative religion and mythology, ritual, art, literature and philosophy. The rCF is a rule-guided formula for combinatorial conceptualizing in non-representational, presentational mythopoetics and other cultural symbolizations. I consider poststructuralist category-theoretic and algebraic mathematical interpretations of the CF as themselves only mathematical analogies, which serve to stimulate further revision of the logic model of the rCF. The rCF can be used in hypothesis-making to advance understanding of the evolution and prehistory of human symbolic behaviour in cultural space, philosophical ontologies and categories, definitions and concepts in art, religion, psychotherapy, and other cultural-value forms.

In literary, cultural and historical study of mythology, Johann Gottfried Herder is often portrayed as the bridge between the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. Myths for Herder were not only material for poetry, but the essential content of religion. Herder&rsquo;s new understanding of myth and religion did not, however, signify a rejection of the Enlightenment principle of rationality. On the contrary, this understanding expanded and transformed his understanding of rationality. Herder regarded man&rsquo;s mythopoetic activity as a genuine and natural form of man&rsquo;s cognitive appropriation of the world. The personification of natural forces in the cultural creation of gods did not denote a return to irrationalism, but an extended form of rationality. According to Herder, the Bible had to be read as a human mythopoetic creation. The Old Testament, which depicts the special relation of God to His people, was in Herder&rsquo;s <em>Vom Geist der ebr&auml;ischen Poesie</em> (1782&ndash;1783) the result of a poetic worldview characteristic of nomadic societies. Herder did question the validity of the Old Testament as a true source of religion and its usefulness even for modern man. Mythology did not have to be rejected as untrue imagination. Old Testament monotheism could be related to Spinoza&rsquo;s pantheism and the Law of Moses could be seen as a precursor of the modern constitutional tradition.

This paper explores the thoughts of Sutan Takdir Alisyahbana (STA). STA is referred to as a cultural practitioner, because it discusses more the cultures that enter Indonesia, such as Indian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and native Indonesian culture, even it also discusses western culture. He also wrote a lot such as poetry, novels, philosophy books and he was among the first to make Indonesian terms, so he was called a writer. This research is a type of library research (library research) by presenting qualitative-interpretative data. The purpose of this study is to reveal the fact that the religion of Islam in Indonesia is a religion that does not dichotomize between the reality supported by invoices and spiritual reality because Islam today is deeply engrossed in the history of the development of Islam in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, also today Islam is shackled with religious myths, so as to be able to resolve Islam in Indonesia, it cannot develop and is anti-Western rationality. STA thinking is rooted in the humanist understanding that developed in Europe from the Renaissance to the rise of new-positivism. Its humanism is built on human liberation from the shackles of mythology and religion.

The article analyzes the main ideas of Alan Gilbert Nixon, a contemporary sociologist of religion and researcher of the new atheism movement. The subject of the study is the ideology of the new atheism movement as a special anti-religious worldview associated with the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, which arose in 2006. Nixon himself, studying this movement, uses an original methodology, which he calls ‘grounded theory’ and explores the development of a new atheism in the actual contextual space of interaction between participants and the prospects of this interaction. The methodology of the authors of this article is based on the principle of the unity of the historical and logical interpretation of the key concepts and positions of A. Nixon in the process of a systematic analysis of historical background, ideological foundation, self-presentation of representatives of the new atheism movement. In addition, in the context of this study, a number of social changes (the globalization of capitalism, the development of the Internet and the related “leaps of communication”, the religious renaissance) are considered as a necessary context for the formation of a special “narrative mythology” of the new atheism, expressed in the idea of the greatness of Nature and Science. and suggesting a kind of piety within the worldview of the new atheism. As the main result of the presented analysis, one can single out the conceptual design of key aspects of the existence of a modern anti-religious worldview: hyperskepticism in the knowledge of the world, nihilism and the denial of classical metaphysics of rationality, criticism of the values of religious morality; a postmodern paradox that erases the boundaries between religious/non-religious and cancels the very possibility of discrimination on religious grounds, which nullifies the confrontational logic of the new atheism; the emergence of secular non-religious missionary work as a result of the process of competition of ideas in the space of “multiple modernities”; and, finally, the fact that the new atheistic message is gaining adherents because the anti-religious worldview is subject to the cultural logic of late capitalism with its postmodern spread of pluralism of cultures, discourses, organizations.

The author analyzes the transformations of Hellenic theologys content and forms in the epoch of early antique classics (1st half of the 5th century B.C.). The general orientation of such transformations is the generalization of mythological gods meanings into the abstract implications of the Absolute, which is not yet sacral in its full sense and not transcendent. Besides, this period is the end of the decentralization of consciousness. Cognitive limitations to the development of abstract conceptual thinking and the rational component of consciousness are removed. This processs main points transform mythology into artistic and aesthetic creativity (folklore, mythopoetic epic, etc.), religious consciousness, and theology. Rationalism is always critical. Critical rationalism inevitably leads to historicism. Therefore, the formation of a historical attitude strengthens at the sight of the critical approach. The world's mythological image is increasingly being questioned (first in parts, and then in general). Its content is being transferred to the past. Finally, the era of early classicism comes into play. It is a time when theology becomes a field of philosophical and theoretical reflection on myth and an area of its artistic and aesthetic experience. The most influential form of such an understanding of myth was the theater. The ancient theater served as a spiritual and practical form of ancient theology, a subject embodiment of theology in stage action.

The paper explores the genre of scarcely studied play by Russian minor writer Alexei V. Timofeev (1812-1883) Rome and Carthage (1837). Timofeev’s contemporary literary critic Osip Senkovskii treated like poet’s failure his use of romantic techniques in the play on ancient plot. Taking into account this opinion the paper analyzes the paratextual elements in the play, the way of describing characters, the division of the play into acts, the connection of the plot events with historical facts. The paper argues that the play approaches the kind of romantic drama, which the author suggests to call “historical fantasy” Its main feature is the coexisting in the plot mythology and religious tradition, on the one hand, and historical events, on the other, the heroes of historical chronicles and the heroes of folk legends, belief in miracles and rationalism. The goal of historical fantasy is to produce a generalized image of the time, to convey the spirit of the epoch while the dramatic action takes a secondary place. Samples of the genre were given in the works of Alexander A. Shakhovskoi, Alexander I. Gertsen, Apollon N. Maikov. Timofeev’s play was just in the way to this kind of drama.

The main research narratives of the article are: the influence of artistic strategy on the political communication in the condition of post truth; political imagination and regime of post truth; art and regime of truth; rationality of illusions in the political communication; the techniques of artistic suggestion in public dialogue. It deals with the principle of reliability, the legitimacy rituals in the hunting for the voters. It is analyzed the mythological transformation, imitative mythology of the modern medias. It is discerned the technological integration of art in religion and politics, communication actions that make its “generic” feature and the “generic” burden at the same time. Such notions as poetry, art and technology are connected with the unfolding of the technological refinement in all spheres of human activity. The author explains the need of the mythological distortion as the basis for the building of reality. It deals with the PR- technology transformation as the particular case of the cultural-political project into undeniable social value. It is defined the role of the artistic and political projects as the communicative prosthesis. Simultaneously the author traces the ouster of illusion in public communication. He analyzes the modalities of the communicative practice and communicative experience reduction in the socialization process as well as the technological perfection in the mythological representation. The special features of the mythological absorption as the negation of law and social subject are determined here. It is also defined the sense of the law rationality regarding the rationality of myth.

The universe is full of mystical things. Since ages, the belief that God became the Universe is a theological doctrine that has been developed. Evolutionary biologists and Modern scientists still believes in Big Bang theory. Many thinkers, theologians, philosophers, and scientists are unable to confirm the exact process of the origin of the universe. Hence, this paper focuses on analyzing the history of theologians, mythologists, philosophers, cosmologists and scientists research evidences, insights, theories, and rationales to find out about the origin of the universe. The study uses metaanalysis of universe origin scriptures, research, insights, and bibliographies which was put forth by theologians, philosophers, cosmologists, and scientists. The study found that as per Bhagavad-Gita, God is the source of all spiritual, intellectual, and material world. In 1996, Pastor Bob Burridge of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies reveals that as per Christian theology, God becoming the universe is not accordant with it. In the 1940s, Charles Hartshorne identified pandeism as a possible model of God’s nature as God is capable of changing. In 2001, Scott Adams surmised that an omnipotent God annihilated himself in the Big Bang. This is considered as per mythologist’s world created from dead deity physical substances. All Catholic scientists reported that God’s light and love revealed his creation. Physicist Bernard Haisch in his book entitled “The God Theory” concluded that the deity became the universe. Alan Dawe's (2011) book titled “The God Franchise” concludes that human knowledge is a briefly separated piece of God’s skill. Raphael Lataster (2013), Australian religious studies Scholar, projected that "Pandeism is the future God-concept of all". There is a long list of Catholic scientists who in their quest for learning maintained God at the origin of all existence. Theology and mythology proofs are not conforming with both science and philosophy. The Evolving God concept is also a wrong idea of metaphysics. If it is so, man would have been found under developed state. Jafree Ozwald explains that based on human request, the universe is not able to fulfill it but God does. The universe is not God. God is God. The study concludes that God created the universe from nothing and He is yet to manifest Himself. God is a supernatural power and has a divine holy nature that is omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. The study suggests that the sharing of knowledge, debate, discussions, and consensus based on their evidences and perceptions among theologists, philosophers, mythologists, and scientists on the universe origin is a future task.

Was Grundtvig’s New Discovery in 1832 A Tragic Event?By Bent ChristensenThe title of this lecture for the Degree of Divinity has been given its provocative wording by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. In his thesis for the Degree of Divinity, published in 1987 and reviewed in Grundtvig Studies in 1988, Bent Christensen has described and evaluated Grundtvig’s attitude in the field of church policy over the years from 1824 to 1832, a critical period of time for himself, in such a way as to give the reader the impression that the writer regards the attitude taken by Grundtvig in the comprehensive Introduction to his ’’Norse Mythology”, 1832, towards the thoughtful people of his time, as a step backward compared to the attitude taken by Grundtvig in his great autobiographical poem, "New Year’s Morning", 1824, and in the preface to it. In this preface Grundtvig wrote that the goal which God "surely wants to be achieved" is "the revival of the heroic spirit of the North to Christian deeds in a direction suited to the needs and conditions of the time."In a book "The Land of the Living 1984", a series of lectures held in the 200th anniversary of Grundtvig’s birth, Professor Aage Henriksen proposed the view that the poem "New Year’s Morning” is the crowning achievement in Grundtvig’s writings. However, already in 1963 Dr. Kaj Thaning had advanced the idea that the Introduction to "Norse Mythology", 1832, was a decisive turningpoint in Grundtvig’s literary career since, from 1832 onwards, human life and the human world acquired an entirely different position and importance in his understanding of Christianity than was the case before that crucial year. Bent Christensen is inspired by both these writers, but adopts a critical attitude to Kaj Thaning.In part 1 of his lecture Bent Christensen describes the entire progress of his Grundtvig studies and the problem he has posed: What is it really that the Introduction has which was not already present in the inspiration behind the poem "New Year's Morning’? In the answer to this question he particularly emphasizes the sermons from 1823 to 1824, which are influenced by Irenaeus, and which are imbued with the thought that man was created in God’s image and has preserved this image of God also after the Fall. According to Bent Christensen they represent "a Grundtvig who is at least as good as the Grundtvig we got".Next he asks "if the ’Grundtvig of 1832* is in any way better than the ’Grundtvig of 1824’"? - Before he answers this question he presents a survey of the development from 1824 to 1832. He agrees with Thaning that "the deeds came to nothing". There was a general atmosphere of stagnation, but in the meantime the situation in the Church came to a head: members of a so-called "godly assembly" in Funen were positively persecuted. And at the University of Copenhagen the popular Professor H.N. Clausen propagated his "Protestant Christianity", diluted beyond recognition. In opposition to this, Grundtvig pointed to "the real Jesus Christ’s Church on Earth" and published his "The Rejoinder of the Church" against Professor Clausen’s latest book. "This was where the tragedy began. For instead of entering into an ecclesiastical discussion, Professor Clausen brought an action for libel against Grundtvig!" According to Bent Christensen the full extent of the tragedy was that the country had a state church which everybody had to be a member of, and which was bound to Lutheran Christianity, but in reality it also had a clergy whose leading circles represented a rationalism and idealism, which was completely at variance with Christianity. This was the situation which Grundtvig described as "the legal Hell", Bent Christensen says. He describes Grundtvig’s writings on church policy in this situation as a development consisting of 3 phases:1. The time from the discovery of the Apostles’ Creed in July 1825 and the Rejoinder in September 1825 until his resignation from office in May 1826. At this time Grundtvig thought that the anomaly could be redressed once it was clearly pointed out.2. The time from September 1826, shortly before the sentence was pronounced, until winter 1830/1831, when Grundtvig presented various proposals for church organization with a Christian state church, while those who did not want to join such a church could leave it in complete freedom of religion.3. The time from April 1831 when Grundtvig declared himself willing to be in charge of the organization of a free-congregation church, thus agreeing to the ’’amicable settlement” which, towards the end of February 1832, led to his permission to function as a free evensong preacher in Frederick’s Church.During the time up to this "amicable settlement”, Grundtvig had worked his way through the numerous drafts for the Introduction to his new ”Norse Mythology”, and in the process, according to Bent Christensen, ’’had managed to construct an entirely new model of church policy”, characterized by peaceful coexistence and competition between the real Christians and those Grundtvig called the "Naturalists”, "within the framework of what Grundtvig continues to term a ’’church”, but what is in reality a common, public religious service system". In the same year he drafted his proposal for "sogneb.ndsl.sning" i.e. abolition of the obligation to use the vicar in the parish where one is a resident, for all church ministrations.According to Kaj Thaning, Grundtvig had now finally "found himself, having learnt to distinguish rightly between what is "human” and what is "Christian”, so he could now call off the ecclesiastical controversy and instead throw himself into a cheerful effort to turn his new view of life to practical use”. ”In my opinion, I have invalidated this evaluation," Bent Christensen says. Grundtvig’s concept of Christianity was optimistic already in 1824, as was the factual distinction between the intrinsic value of life and the salient feature which is Christian salvation. The question now is what it was that Grundtvig managed to free himself from in the years 1831 to 1832. Bent Christensen’s thesis is that he 1) managed to free himself from the ecclesiastical controversy that he could not win, and 2) from the feeling of obligation to be in charge of an illegal organization of free-congregation churches which would isolate him from ordinary public and cultural life.In the context of church policy, Bent Christensen describes what happened with the Introduction to "Norse Mythology" as an emergency solution. - But is this the same, then, as "a tragic event”? - No, he answers. The tragedy was that Grundtvig’s dream from ’’New Year’s Morning” did not come true, but was on the contrary followed by the nightmare of the libel lawsuit and the church controversy. ”But there is another tragedy which we suffer from even today – namely the failure of influential circles to properly understand what it was Grundtvig found himself obliged to do in 1832, so that it has almost come to be regarded as the only right way to practise church organization! In that perspective what happened in 1832 may be seen as a tragic event, Bent Christensen claims in the conclusion of part 1 of his lecture.Part 2 of the lecture is a discussion of key passages in the two main texts, "New Year’s Morning” and the Introduction to ”Norse Mythology”. The intention is to show that the fundamental ideas in the Introduction (and in The Rejoinder of the Church) have been anticipated in the great poem from 1824: ’’Indeed, themythical-biographical descent of this poem through Danish history to the Land of the Living ... stands out as a great "a human being first!'"What the Introduction has ... to a fuller extent and in a clearer form than ’’New Year’s Morning" is the fully developed view of evolution and explanation and the scientific programme connected with it. Thus the Introduction provides a unique contribution to the understanding of what it means that the world exists, and that we exist in it as human beings!”In the concluding part 3 of his lecture, Bent Christensen poses the question "whether what happened in 1831/32 really and truly meant that Grundtvig gained himself, or whether it meant that he lost at least part of himself’. Like Aage Henriksen, Bent Christensen considers "New Year’s Morning" to be a culmination in Grundtvig’s writings, and incidentally the point from which Grundtvig’s comprehensive influence on the Danish people stems, and he sees the Introduction as a point, from where Grundtvig moves on by leaving something behind. Aage Henriksen blames Grundtvig that from being a personal poet he changed into a reformer. Bent Christensen asks instead "from the point of view of the church - whether it was after all the right programme with which Grundtvig attempted to save his dream that had been crushed by the outside world."The alternative he mentions is that Grundtvig could have left the Church with whoever wanted to follow him, and could have worked with unflagging solidarity on this basis for the public life of the people as well as for "universalhistorical scholarship". At least he did not have to make quite so much good fortune of necessity - with the tragic consequences for the Danish Lutheran Christian congregation’s self-conception that it has to this day.He concludes by emphasizing a passage towards the end of Grundtvig’s book, "Elemental Christian Teaching" (Den Christelige B.rnel.rdom), where Grundtvig imagines the situation that church and state were completely separated. In that case the Christians would have to establish their own educational institution for clergymen. But this would have to be a "Christian high school", i.e. a whole university. Bent Christensen finds there is good reason to turn one’s attention to this thought from 1861 - as well as to Grundtvig’s dream from 1824, when one seeks inspiration in Grundtvig.

The Way from Force to Freedom in Grundtvig’s Life and WritingsBy William MichelsenAs it was shown by Kaj Thaning in Grundtvig Studies, 1981, Grundtvig, in 1825, made the discovery, new at the time, that the Christian church is older than The New Testament. He utilized the discovery to claim that the Apostolic Confession is the criterion of genuine Christianity, and the same year, in .The Rejoinder of the Church., he used it against H.N. Clausen, Professor of Theology, in an attempt to force him to lay down his office if he did not admit and apologize for his ‘scandalous teaching’. However, Grundtvig was charged instead, and, in 1826, received a sentence for libel of Clausen, and therefore resigned his office as a clergyman himself. Nonetheless, from 1832 to his death in 1872, Grundtvig became the most unswerving supporter of freedom in Danish spiritual life. The standpoint is clearly expressed in .Norse Mythology., 1832, and the same year Grundtvig was permitted to preach in the state church, from 1839 until his death as a vicar of Vartov Church. How can this change of attitude on Grundtvig’s part be explained?The assertion of the present article is that the apparently dramatic changes in Grundtvig’s attitude to freedom are consistent on a more fundamental level, partly depending on his religious development, partly on his concept of freedom which differed from the usual philosophical thinking of his time.Already before his birth, his parents had decided that Grundtvig was to become a clergyman, and in 1810, when his father demanded that he should make a personal application to the King for permission to be his father’s personal curate, he consequently felt force to submit, though it had always been his own wish to be a historian. So he saw himself as obliged through his ordination to defend genuine Christianity against any kind of Rationalist falsification - first on the basis of Luther scripturalism, and from 1825 on the basis of the Apostolic Confession. When H.N. Clausen did not lay down his office, Grundtvig had to lay down his.How then can it be explained that already in 1831 Grundtvig admitted that one must allow one’s opponent the same freedom to speak as one demands for oneself - the following year, even within the same state church. The explanation is to be found in Grundtvig’s experiences from his journeys to England, perhaps in particular from a conversation with Clara Bolton in 1830. More particularly the present article claims that his attitude rests on the assessment of John Wesley’s withdrawal from the state church, proposed by Grundtvig in his ‘Prospect of the World Chronicle’, 1817: it was not necessary because Wesley was not - like Luther – ‘excommunicated’ from the church, but only ‘excluded from the office of teaching’ - the same situation as Grundtvig felt he was in from 1826 to 1832.Grundtvig’s characteristic concept of freedom can be traced as far back as to 1814 (cf. Grundtvig Studies, 1986, pp. 8-9): Man is created with a will of his own, which may be either obedient or disobedient to the will of the Creator, and which is therefore free. Man, however, is not an independent being in the universe. Grundtvig was an opponent of the usual notion that the human personality is free by virtue of his reason.

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) is usually remembered for his experiments in natural philosophy and celebrated for his isolation of the gas we now call oxygen. However, Priestley had a wide range of interests and published extensively on education, history, politics, political philosophy, language, theology and religion. He dedicated his life to elucidating a coherent set of epistemological, metaphysical and theological principles which he believed explained the human mind, the natural world and the nature of God and revelation. Recent studies of Priestley have emphasised the difficulties that arise from isolating the various aspects of his thought and the fruitful outcome of uncovering the many connections between his diverse areas of study. With this in mind, the present dissertation aims to elucidate the relationship between two aspects of Priestley's thought that have not previously been studied together. It examines his theory of language and argument alongside his work on theology and the evidences of revelation. Chapter One provides an overview of Priestley's epistemology, focusing on his work on induction, judgment and assent. Chapter Two looks at Priestley's analysis of the role of the passions in our assent to propositions and the progressive generation of the personality, while paying particular attention to the origins of figurative language. Chapter Three examines Priestley's theory of language development including the relationship between figurative language and the extension of vocabulary and the close connection between language and culture. Chapter Four demonstrates that Priestley's discussion of the evidences of revealed religion is structured around his theory of assent and judgment. It also explains how assent to revelation is essential for the generation and transcendence of the ‘self'. Chapter Five brings all the themes of the dissertation together in a discussion of Priestley's rational theology and examines his analysis of figurative language in scripture.

My thesis seeks to address the continuity, change and the syncreticism of ideas regarding post-mortem existence in the wake of the Reformation. Prior to reform, the late Medieval world view of the afterlife was very straightforward. One either went to Heaven via Purgatory, or straight to Hell. In the exempla literature of the period, ghosts were seen to provide evidence of the purgatorial system. However, this doctrine was dismantled by reformers who rejected Purgatory wholesale. Reformers then put forth a multiplicity of eschatologies which included various strands of mortalism, none of which allowed for the possibility that the dead could return to the living. In theory therefore, the ghost should have disappeared from the mental landscape, yet it not only survived, but it thrived in Protestant culture. This raises three key questions which are absolutely central to this thesis. Firstly: by what mechanisms did commitment to ghosts continue in lay and elite discourses in early modern England, when religious authority denied the possibility of their existence? Secondly: what opportunities were there to incorporate ghosts into Anglican or wider Protestant belief? Finally: Why would many Protestant elites want to elide the doctrinal problem of their existence and assert that ghosts existed? The ghost must have served a purpose in a way that nothing else could. It is therefore the purpose of the thesis to examine the shifting role of the ghost in early modern Protestant England.

Si le mythe est devenu aujourd'hui une donnée incontournable pour comprendre l'âme humaine et ses différentes formes d'expression, il reste cependant équivoque et difficilement conceptualisable. En effet, le mythe est à la fois compris comme un récit fictif qui ne repose sur aucun fond de réalité mais aussi comme un discours vrai et hautement significatif. Pour bien marquer le sens philosophique de notre travail, nous avons commencé par poser le problème du mythe tel qu'il évolue dans la pensée européenne. Le mythe souffre d'une trop longue histoire, il a été déchiré entre rationalisme et romantisme. Puis nous avons questionné d'autres civilisations - les Fon du Dahomey, au Bénin - pour qui le mythe représente tout ce que les hommes doivent savoir et comprendre pour bien s'ancrer dans l'existant. Elles nous donnent à voir un mythe authentique, vivant, inséparable d'une gestuelle magico-religieuse. Ainsi le vrai sens du mythe ne se trouve pas dans nos livres, dans un Homère ou un Hésiode, mais dans le vécu même des hommes. Il est d'abord élaboré par les sociétés primitives, par des groupes d'hommes qui ne vivent que par et pour lui, avant d'être écrit, classé, interprété et réinterprété. Il semblerait à cet égard que Gaston Bachelard, à la fois poète et épistémologue, se soit intéressé au mythe. Il nous livre ainsi une réflexion originale, libre et ouverte qui nous en donne une autre image. Il pose le problème du mythe en soi, au cœur de l'écrit et, riche de ses lectures, il jette les bases d'une nouvelle mythanalyse. La compréhension du mythe semble pour nous incontournable aujourd'hui, car notre civilisation a irrémédiablement coupé entre les informations portées par des images et celles portées par les systèmes d'écritures. Cette rupture est sans doute la cause de cette grave crise spirituelle que nous traversons. Le mythe semble à cet égard salutaire : il nous reconduit directement vers les grands principes de la création, création du monde ou bien création poétique, il ré-enchante le monde.

Abstract Under peaking market pressures in the 1820s and 1830s, Americans found religious salvation more compelling than political salvation. With a Second Great Awakening doubling the 18oo rate of church affiliation, diaries and letters of ordinary folk breathed an everyday spiritual preoccupation that politics interrupted only sporadically. Hope for God’s grace and a better world to come sustained them through this world’s tribulations. Only by headlong flight into domesticity, benevolence, and feeling could they tolerate the market’s calculating egotism. Their pessimistic piety belies our historical mythology of capitalist transformation as human fulfillment Unitarianism reshaped Christianity most fully to the market mentality. Emerging around Boston, where Puritan rationality had long fused Calvinist calling with arminian effort, it engaged the new Brahmin elite of intermarried Cabots, Lowells, Appletons, and Perkinses. Having risen from the outports by rational calculation, these enterprising merchant princes no longer found credible the trinitarian Christian God who mystically blended a divine Son with Father and Holy Ghost. Amid commercial boom and nascent industrialization at the turn of the century, the most fashionable urban congregations were taken over by believers in a unitary, remote, and benign creator-God. Their God endowed people with enough rationality and prudential morality to win for themselves-if they tried the salvation of earthly happiness.

Abstract Among the dichotomies which the dichotomic theme of this volume inevitably generates is the opposition–all too easily posited–between the rational and the irrational. For the present paper I have taken a theme, the mythology of technology, which seems to bridge that opposition. Whatever Plato might have thought and said about it, technélars was, for most of antiquity, a procedure about which rational discourse was the rule. It is not surprising that in the late nineteenth century the development of technology in Greece was inscribed into the paradigm ‘From Mythos to Logos’: together with science, technology was seen as being emancipated from religion to constitute a new and independent field. In more recent times the process has been described by Jean-Pierre Vernant as a ‘laïcisation des techniques’: Vernant did not himself completely reject the older, ‘From Mythos to Logos’ view, but rather modified it, differentiating between the theoreticians with whom full rationality set in during, at the latest, the age of Aristotle, and the practitioners who worked by trial and error and were thus always exposed to a trace of irrationality and unpredictability.1 In this article I shall not argue about Vernant’s assessment (his concept of rationality is Platonic and might therefore not do full justice to all the facts). What I intend to do is more limited in scope: I shall concern myself with the intersection of myth and technology, more precisely that of myth and metallurgy.

Memoir, dedicated to the memory of Alexander Blok, Z.N. Gippius titled My moon friend. About Blok (1922). In this title, attention is drawn to the epithet lunar, which needs clarification. The semantic basis of the concept of the moon is a complex interweaving of subject conceptuality with mythical imagery and various centuries-old cultural associations. In Slavic mythology, the moon has long symbolized the female intuitive principle. In the era of the Silver Age, the experiments of the metaphorical, symbolist correlation of this heavenly body with the problems of gender, religion and culture are actualized. The author of the article focuses on two significant components of the memoir text of Gippius: firstly on the “lunar” connotations present in the writer’s creative thinking, and more broadly — in the philosophical consciousness of the Silver Age; and secondly, the central concept of the memoir is “the lost child”. These components determine the intentional orientation of the memoir image of Alexander Blok, created by Gippius. Her idea of the “lunar” in the character of the poet’s personality is determined by the mystical “femininity” with its spiritualism, melancholy, deception of opportunities that can be productive for the development of art, but which, due to the immaturity, and the inconsistency of the creative “rationality”, may turn out to be detrimental to the “right” choice of the model of social behavior by the artist.