Academic literature on the topic 'Spiritual healing – Greece – History'

This chapter argues that tuning up reorganizes the experience of time, enacting a transcendent interruption of musical temporality. In so doing, this irruptive practice reproduces the incarnation of Christ, sonifying the divine’s appearance in the material world. Smallwood’s paraphrase of the spiritual “Calvary” anchors this chapter, doing for its argument what the crucifixion does for the Gospel Imagination. The chapter’s first section examines the song’s 2001 live recording, a performance whose particularly urgent interpenetration of musical, liturgical, and historical temporalities summons one of tuning up’s most common manifestations—a trope colloquially referred to as “the Baptist close.” Then the chapter turns to three of the gospel tradition’s most canonical renderings of Christ’s Passion, Margaret Douroux’s “He Decided to Die,” David Allen’s “No Greater Love,” and Andraé Crouch’s “The Blood.” These performances reveal an incarnational approach to time: a belief that Jesus’s interruption of human history can be rearticulated through song. As these songs move back and forth between their site of contemporary performance and various scriptural narratives, between conception and crucifixion, and between crucifixion and resurrection, what they offer is no mere retelling: they assert a critique of linear temporality, producing kairos, a transcendent instant that links time and eternity. Kairos is especially evident in the holy dance, a performance of physical ecstasy that is formalized in the gospel vamp. As they tune up, vamps pursue kairos through concurrent movements away from linear time, toward the collective, into the body.

Cos, home of Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, is the third largest island of the Dodecanese (Twelve Islands). In antiquity its population was 120,000, eight times that of today. Its fame derived from the renowned Asclepeion of Cos, a healing center and religious shrine devoted to Asclepius, the god of healing. Tourists still come to marvel at this spectacular architectural structure, and international medical conferences are conducted on the island in memory of Hippocrates. Cos (also spelled Kos) lies only 3 miles off the coast of Turkey, near the Bodrum peninsula. Connections are available to the Turkish mainland by ferry, and a fascinating circuit of biblical sites can be made from Athens through the Greek islands to Cos and then up the western coast of Turkey for a departure from Istanbul. Access to Cos by air is available from Athens (three flights daily), or by ferry from Piraeus, Rhodes, or Thessaloniki through Samos. Hydrofoils are available from Rhodes and Samos for faster trips. (Always check ferry and hydrofoil schedules closely; frequent and erratic changes occur, particularly with hydrofoils in the event of high winds.) Cos was settled by the Mycenaeans in 1425 B.C.E., and Homer described it as heavily populated (Iliad 14:225). Pliny referred to it as a major shipping port (Natural History 15:18). Among its exports were wine, purple dye, and elegant, diaphanous fabrics of silk (raw silk; pure silk from the Orient did not reach the west until the 3rd century C.E.). Aristotle wrote that silk fabric was invented on the island of Cos: “A class of women unwind and reel off the cocoons of these creatures [caterpillars] and afterward weave a fabric with the thread thus unwound; a Koan woman by the name of Pamphila, daughter of Plateus, being credited with the first invention of the fabric” (The History of Animals 5.19). Cos reached the pinnacle of its prosperity and power in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C.E., but by the end of the 6th century B.C.E. it had come under the control of Persia.

The final chapter pulls together central threads that characterize this pilgrimage network. Pilgrimage gives a particular ritual form to individuals’ quest to seek recovery, healing, meaning, and connection in their lives. The Norwegian pilgrimage network offers various experiences, narratives, and strategies for pilgrims, hosts, locals, and tourists to engage in rediscovering and reinventing history, making meaning, seeking cultural experiences, reclaiming indigenous history and spirituality, and reconstructing spiritual traditions. The figure of St. Olav provides a prism through which contemporary Norwegians can reflect on the ambivalence of the past, as well as critique present practices and narratives of what it means to be Christian, pushing the boundaries of what it means to be Norwegian, and what saintly lives in the context of climate change might look like. Nidaros Cathedral facilitates such engagement as an adaptable space anchoring widely diverse engagements with both heritage and contemporary society. Thus, these and other ritual practices serve to reconstruct heritage critically in a pilgrimage network that is remarkably open for the transformative reconstruction of spiritual practices and narratives in a shifting sacred geography.

The global drug trade and its associated violence, corruption, and human suffering create global problems that involve not only the use and abuse of substances that have traveled across great geographic spaces but also political and military conflict and policy, economic development, and indigenous and ethnic minority rights in the production regions. Drug production and eradication efforts directly affect the stability of many states and relations between states, shaping and sometimes distorting foreign policy (McCoy 1991, 1999; Bagley and Walker 1996; Meyer and Parssinen 1998; Albright 1999; Rohter 1999). Drug production and the efforts to halt it often derail national and local development (Westermeyer 1982; Smith 1992; Goodson 2001) and create potential human rights violations as small-scale producers get caught in the legal crossfire between their dangerous harvest and economic hardship (Sanabria 1992; Kent 1993; Clawson and Lee 1998). External demand and influence, not indigenous cultures, have transformed apparently simple, local agricultural activities into very complex global problems. Psychoactive plants have always played important cultural roles in indigenous and ethnic minority landscapes. After a history of coevolution and experimentation, indigenous societies came to use psychoactive substances derived from plants in a range of religious and healing rituals. Traditional healers, or shamans, consume psychoactive plants to consult with the spiritual world in order to foretell the future and assist patients; patients ingest psychoactive substances to rid themselves of demons or diseases; and indigenous cultures use psychoactive substances in semiritualistic social situations to reinforce social and political bonds or simply as recreation. However, as these traditional cultures come into contact with the outside world, nonindigenous societies often mimic these practices, trying to reach a “new level of consciousness.” The poppy is an example of a psychoactive plant taken out of a traditional context and adopted by cultural outsiders for nonsacred use. In turn, globalization alters the plant’s use and symbolic meaning within its traditional-use hearth area. Several chapters in this volume show that heroin, a derivative of poppies, is used and abused worldwide and in its original hearth, where the plant was once viewed as a sacred medicinal and ritualistic plant. The profane use of opium leaves a trail of destruction in its wake in the form of addicts and soaring HIV rates as the virus spreads through shared heroin needles.