Papers by Gerhardus A . van den Heever
Religion & Theology , 2023
This essay interacts with the call for papers for the "Magic and Mischief: Text and Practices in ... more This essay interacts with the call for papers for the "Magic and Mischief: Text and Practices in Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences" conference. It is a self-reflection on the theoretical frameworks and definitions guiding projects of reflection and theorising. Breaking the discourse of religion, theology, and science, as well as that of science and magic, down into its discourse-components to get at the speech acts performed, it shows the mythmaking inherent in particular historical understandings of religion and magic, and religion, magic, and science. By performing a kind of archaeology of discourse one gets to see the social, cultural, and political character of the discourse work. And thus, a study of discourse being a site for analysing social formations, the myths of Enlightenment, secularisation, and disenchantment become avenues for understanding the political and socially formative, and the culturally definitive, character of those acts we prefer to call thinking about religion.
Journal of Early Christian History, 2023
This programmatic essay builds on Jane Bennett's concept of material vitality (Vibrant Matter) in... more This programmatic essay builds on Jane Bennett's concept of material vitality (Vibrant Matter) in exploring "the agency of the things that produce effects in human and other bodies," while simultaneously broadening the perspective to take in the concept of discourse in order to elucidate human-matter interaction and the effects produced. Taking its bearings from critical spatiality theory, this essay argues that space (as arranged matter) is both constructed through discourse, and in turn, constructs and mediates discourse. In that sense, religious spaces exert agency in the construction and mediation of discourse. This is demonstrated by means of two case studies of "agentic" material religious spaces. The first case study concerns the material arrangement of the typical mithraeum with its cave-like structure and the astral symbolism embedded in the material structure, and how this materiality shaped the ritual performances and the discourse of integration into a cosmic order. The second case study concerns the material arrangement of the fourth-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem encompassing all the core events central to Christianity, and which material space is enlivened and made "agentic" through liturgical performances (particularly those of the Easter Octave), in effect creating the experience of resurrection. Some fifth century discourses (e.g., Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses) are drawn on to highlight how the intersection of material space and performance constructed a Christianity as mystery performance.
Religion & Theology 29, no. 3&4, 2022
This introductory essay takes recourse to the work of Edward Said on travelling theories and Mich... more This introductory essay takes recourse to the work of Edward Said on travelling theories and Michel Foucault on discursive formations, to highlight the historicity of all theorising, and the manufacturedness of all theoretical work. Particular attention is paid to experience as embeddedness, the construction of knowledge formations and disciplines, and the effects on knowledge formation of reappropriations and recontextualisations of theories and concepts. The metaphor of travel and of being in transit has been appropriated across diverse discourses and disciplinary domains to signal adaptions and re-applications of theories and concepts from one context to another, from one conceptual domain or discipline to another, and the embedment of theories and concepts in the concrete historical vicissitudes affecting the life of the theorist. This serves to frame the essays collected in this issue by the constellation of issues highlighted with appeal to discursive formations, retooling disciplines, and hosting travelling theories.
Religion & Theology 29, no. 1&2, 2022
This essay responds to the essays comprising the theme issue, Do Religions Die? Theorising Death ... more This essay responds to the essays comprising the theme issue, Do Religions Die? Theorising Death and Demise of Greek and Roman Religions. Reviewing various case studies and theoretical introductory essays of the volume, The Demise of Religion, and the special issue of Numen 68, no. 2–3 (2021), I argue that at stake are two desiderata: the first relates to defining religion (what counts as religion?), and the second relates to the historiography of the history of religions (who narrates the story of religion deaths, from which perspective, and with what rhetorical purpose?). It is shown how definition of religion and critical historiography in tandem enable an approach from the perspective of discourse theory. From this perspective it is possible to describe, explain, and theorise ‘religion deaths’ as shifts in culture, migration patterns and social formations, concomitant changes in religious formations, yet with continuity in functionalities.
Writing the history of the end of Greek and Roman cults is perennially complicated by the fact that it is done from the perspective of the ‘winners’ – early Christian historians like Eusebius, or contemporary historians of religion who repeat the emic viewpoints of early Christian writers’ triumphalist successionist histories. Along with that is the problem of defining religion: can one actually speak of Graeco-Roman religion, when before the emergence in the Mediterranean world of large-scale translocal religious formations, all cults only manifested in local cultic organisations? Even where the same deities were offered cult as in other locales, local iconographies, myths, ritual practices anchored such cults in their local community contexts.
To address problems like these, one needs to change perspective and consider both the making of religion and the broader phenomenon of religious changes from the viewpoint of how religions are ‘manufactured.’ When viewed from the perspective of religion ‘building blocks,’ it is actually possible to see how religions and cults mutate, become transformed, get absorbed into larger formations, and generally, how cults and religions continue to have afterlives. In the context of the topic of Christianisation of the Roman Empire, one can actually say that Christianity is the way in which Greek and Roman religions continued to exist.
Keywords:
Discourse theory – redescriptive theory of religion – Christianisation – history of religion – Greek and Roman cults – critical historiography – cultural change
Ideas of Possession: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives, 2023
This is the unabridged version that will appear as an edited, shorter version in the volume, Andr... more This is the unabridged version that will appear as an edited, shorter version in the volume, Andrew J. Doole and Nicole Maria Bauer, eds., Ideas of Possession: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023)
Exorcising “Devilsdorp”: Demonization and Satanic Possession in South Africa
The recent South African four-part true crime documentary television series, Devilsdorp (lit. “town of the devil”), narrated and analysed a series of eleven gruesome murders perpetrated between 2012 and 2016 in and around Krugersdorp on the West Rand by a group called Electus per Deus (Chosen by God). The murders were alternatively labelled the “Appointment Murders” and the “Satanic Murders.” The latter because the main leader of the murder gang claimed she is a reformed satanist and collected money for foster care children rescued from Satan-worshipping families. Various commentators claimed that the group resembled and operated as a satanic cult and the members were possessed by evil spirits. This essay will not address the question of whether the members of the gang really were possessed by the devil or some evil spirit, so much as the discourse of why is it assumed to be so plausible to interpret inexplicable evil events as satanic, or even satanically possession events? This essay is about the discourse of satanic or evil spirit possession, using a discourse analysis approach. In this sense, the study of “discourse” is a way into investigating all the concrete operational sites of a given historical society’s sense of self – its self-understandings, its self-representations, and its self-reinscriptions, and the way in which these manifest in social and political institutions, public texts and literary traditions.
One of the commentators in the film, Col. Kobus Jonker, who resolutely interpreted the murders and the group as satanic, as evidence of the presence of the satanic in South African society, became famous in the early 1980s as the founder of the anti-cult unit of the (then) South African Police. As an influential public figure at a time of tremendous social stresses and anxieties (the states of emergency with their emergency police powers at the end of the apartheid era), he promoted a discourse of the presence of Satan and satanic possession that gripped large parts of white South African society. As a result, signs of the presence of Satan were “discovered” everywhere, one of the – at the time – most prominent “places” was the so-called backward masking, where satanic messages were supposedly coded into rock music and could only be decoded by playing the music backwards, but when listened to normally, would cause subliminal influencing and possession. The big “Satan scare” is largely over since the change to democratic government, existing only in some small pockets in society, religious and social/political. From time to time in contexts of social anxiety and stresses, possession discourses emerge in very contained local conditions, often leading to isolated individuals (mostly elderly women living alone) identified as witches and killed on that suspicion. The argument pursued in this essay is one that proceeds from the perspective that it is important to note the context in which possession discourses emerge, and the social, cultural, and ideological work performed by (and through) such discourses. The preliminary conclusion of the essay is that possession discourses translate other deeply submerged tensions and trajectories in society, manifesting in embodiments of discourse (a habitus of exposure to harmful supernatural agents) that govern social behaviour.
Journal of Early Christian History, 2020
In January 2008, an application was made to the College of Human Sciences at the University of So... more In January 2008, an application was made to the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa to change the name of the then Department of New Testament to Department of New Testament and Early Christian Studies. A subsequent reorganisation at the university saw the department merge with the then Department of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies to become the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies (after the discipline of Classics was also incorporated into the department). As a result of recent academic debates and dialogues, these "Theses on Theory and Method" were written to express the understanding of what the discipline of New Testament and Early Christian Studies entails at the University of South Africa. Thesis 1: The phrase, "New Testament and Early Christian Studies," is a conjunction between two descriptors that each signifies a study field (a more or less bounded set of phenomena and topics; the objects, phenomena, and practices that form the fields of interest for such studies) and a discipline (a concert of methods and approaches; an institutionalised set of conventions of scholarship with an authorised range of conceptual language, authorised methodologies, authorised topics of research, canonical theorists and their theories; and publication outlets that serve to enshrine a particular disciplinary practice). However, the conjunctive "and" is not purely additive. It denotes a broader field of encompassment, "Early Christian Studies," and a narrower field of focus, "New Testament," which can be conceived of as the "e.g.," the "for example," of the broader field. In this conjunction, Early Christian Studies has priority in setting the theoretical and methodological agendas, while New Testament Studies is conceived as a particular focus on a delimited set of traditions, histories, practices, that constitute but a section of the broader field of Early Christian Studies. One can speak in this regard, then, of a "conjoined super-discipline." For the sake of brevity and convenience we take New Testament and Early Christian Studies as a discipline. Thesis 2: In light of the foregoing, while New Testament Studies is normally conceived as the set of literary objects (the artefactual remains of social interactions), phenomena, and practices that form the foundation for the development and emergence of early Christian traditions, the conjunction of New Testament and Early Christian Studies as understood above, actually inverts
Journal of Early Christian History, 2020
This essay traces the gradual development of an understanding of early Christian social formation... more This essay traces the gradual development of an understanding of early Christian social formations and Christ-cult groups as subsets of Graeco-Roman associations from the History of Religions School in the nineteenth century to the present day. It argues that such an etic perspective is indispensable for understanding the living reality of Christ-cult groups in their Graeco-Roman contexts. Categorising Christ-cult groups as associations enables comparative theorising of Christian origins and the functioning of Christian social formations. Such comparisons with associations lead to new experimental readings of early Christian literature.
This is the original manuscript of the edited and shortened version published as chapter 3 of Eli... more This is the original manuscript of the edited and shortened version published as chapter 3 of Elias K. Bongmba, ed. Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). The essay traces the construction of Christian discourses and social formations in the context of hellenistic Jewish discourses and Graeco-Roman culture in Alexandria and Egypt during the first centuries of the Roman Empire.
Acta Patristica et Byzantina, 2009
The pre-existence of Jesus of Nazareth in the narrative of the Gospel of John is argued and repre... more The pre-existence of Jesus of Nazareth in the narrative of the Gospel of John is argued and represented variously in the course of the narrative, inter alia with reference to the phrase that Jesus was 'before John' o|ti prw'tα∼ mou h|n (1:15, 30). While the pre-existence of Jesus is to be accepted as an inherent part of the Johannine portrayal of Jesus, this particular phrase does not unambiguously support such an interpretation. This essay argues that the phrase should be understood in the context of the Johannine polemics against followers of John the Baptist as a rhetorical tool in the service of ranking the two figures, thus in the first instance as a narrational element and not as theological statement. Understanding the phrase in this light allows its use as data source for a construction of the historical location and social history of the Johannine 'trajectory' or tradition in the midst of the complex religious innovations and tradition-making that characterised the Graeco-Roman world of the first century C.E.
Religion & Theology, 2014
In this introduction to the discussion on James C. Hanges,Paul, Founder of Churches, the signific... more In this introduction to the discussion on James C. Hanges,Paul, Founder of Churches, the significance of the comparative work on the cult founder-figure and typology of cult foundations is discussed. The essay argues that this serves to ground any interpretation of the cult founding work of the apostle Paul in an understanding of the materiality of religion. This gives impetus to a more concrete conceptualisation of Christian origins. Further reflection on this comparative enterprise is offered by means of three discussion foci, namely Discourse, imperial context, spatiality; Diaspora religion; and New Religious Movements. It is argued that the pervasiveness of imperial discourse and its spatial encoding allows us to see Paul’s cult foundations as sites of imperial resistance. Diasporas and diasporic religions provide key illuminations for understanding the broader context of the foundations of cult groups by Paul. Study of new religious movements will also aid in concrete descripti...
Religion and Theology, 2014
This paper is a response to the Spatialising Practices panel that was organised under the auspice... more This paper is a response to the Spatialising Practices panel that was organised under the auspices of the Greco-Roman Religions Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, November 2012. In the paper I respond to three foci represented in the presentations, namely spatiality theory, narrative space, and spatial practices. Overall the argument is made that conceptions of space arose already earlier in the 20th century with the rise of phenomenology, but that spatiality theories proper were epiphenomena of the emergence of cultural studies since the middle of the 20th century. It is argued that space is not so much an object of study and description but rather that space is a tool of analysis. Moreover, the essentially activist and political character of spatiality theory should continue to infuse studies of religion and space.
Religion & Theology, 2014
If experience can be defined as the affectively charged interaction with the world by means of th... more If experience can be defined as the affectively charged interaction with the world by means of the body as agency or medium, various sites of such affectively charged interaction mapped on to the body may be fruitfully analysed to explain the operations of religion as discourse. Baptism is one such site. In fact, baptism as the shorthand for of collective noun denoting a spectrum of ritual practices is a particularly apposite example. Baptism as ritual practice has had a varied history, both in terms of originary context as well as interpretive or discursive trajectories. This essay primarily tracks two such significant trajectories: the one being baptismal practices as purification rites operating in socially ‘heterodox’ early Jewish and early Christian groups within an apocalyptic, dissociative framework; the other being ‘orthodox’ baptismal discourse as expressed in, for instance, Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogical Catheceses. In the former, the strong affect of dissociation is co...
Journal of Early Christian History, 2020
The essay traces the gradual development of an understanding of early Christian social formations... more The essay traces the gradual development of an understanding of early Christian social formations and Christ cult groups as subsets of Graeco-Roman associations from the History of Religions School in the 19 th century through the present day. It argues that such an etic perspective is indispensable for understanding the living reality of Christ cult groups in their Graeco-Roman contexts. Categorising Christ cult groups as associations enables comparative theorising of Christian origins and the functioning of Christian social formations. Such comparisons with associations lead to new experimental readings of early Christian literature.
The essay was published as: Gerhard van den Heever, "Once Again: Modelling Early Christian Social Formations and Christ-Cult Groups among Graeco-Roman Cults," Journal of Early Christian History.
To cite this article: Gerhard van den Heever (2020) Once Again: Modelling Early Christian Social Formations and Christ-Cult Groups among Graeco-Roman Cults, Journal of Early Christian History, 10:3, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/2222582X.2021.1950998
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2222582X.2021.1950998
Journal of Early Christian History, 2020
According to the conventional construction of the religious history of the Roman Empire, the dens... more According to the conventional construction of the religious history of the Roman Empire, the dense variety of Greek and Roman religions had ceased to exist sometime around the fourth to fifth centuries CE, during the so-called Constantinian Revolution. Certainly, at some point in Late Antiquity, there were no longer functioning cult centres for deities like Apollo, Dionysus, Isis, Cybele, and the like. However, far from indicating the triumphal supersession of Greek and Roman religions by Christianity, the evidence of religious history is more complex. Christianity/ies is, one can say, an epiphenomenon of processes of cultural shifts and demographic changes (helped along by the changes wrought by migrations and the emergence of diasporic religions as the main manifestation of cultic formations) that swept the circum-Mediterranean world. The "old religions," woven into the cultural fabric of inhabitants of the Mediterranean world as they were, did not suddenly cease to exist-the discourses, the practices, the iconographies, cultic performances continued to shape nascent Christian discourses and practices. This process was not an even one, it differed in pace and shape from one geographic locale to the other, and from one epoch to the other-therefore the plural, twilights. Hence one can say that Christianity was the big sponge that absorbed all the others (which does not exclude that from time to time there were indeed legislation and mob action aimed at destroying the vestiges of "pagan" cults). Thus, reading the evidence from outside the triumphalist framework characterising early Christian writers on the nature and fate of "paganism," one is left with the unavoidable impression, now strongly asserted in Late Antique scholarship, of the interpenetration of "paganism" and Christianity. Christianity was born as a syncretic phenomenon in a process of cultural bricolage. This has some implications, not only for how we conceived of the origins of Christianity, but also for how we conceive of religion as object of theoretical reflection. Twilights of Greek and Roman Religions: Afterlives and Transformations Gerhard van den Heever,
The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017)., 2017
This essay explores the disciplinary intersections between spatial theories, human geography, urb... more This essay explores the disciplinary intersections between spatial theories, human geography, urban anthropology, cultural sociology, classical and religio-historical studies, and text analysis. Recent studies of ancient history, social and religious formations in antiquity, and classical culture have begun to appropriate spatiality theory and human geography as analytical tools for the interpretation of classical traditions (like epic) and cultural and social formations (like the way in which constructions of space[s] produced religious changes). Textual representations of space feature alongside other representational practices like ritual, procession, sacred architecture, as one in a range of spatialising practices in the production of social space. This essay will show how textual representations of space are embedded in a wider encompassing set of spatialising practices. As specific example this essay will analyse the representation of religious space in a foundational early Christian text (the Gospel of John) in the manner in which it represents both the city of Jerusalem and the temple in it, as well as locating its readers in the discursive context of the Roman Empire. In addition, the reception history of the Gospel in its dual effect of anti-imperial and imperial text will get attention it this diachronic study in the history of space and spatial history.
Julian Hensold, Jordan A. Kynes, Phillip Öhlmann, Vanessa Rau, Rosa Coco Schinagl, and Adela Taleb, eds., Religion in Motion. Rethinking Religion, Knowledge and Discourse in a Globalizing World (Basel: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2020)., 2020
Decolonial and postcolonial knowledge regimes are typically endorsed as multi-, inter-, and trans... more Decolonial and postcolonial knowledge regimes are typically endorsed as multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary in character. This is because a significant segment of the current encyclopedia of disciplines in the human and social sciences are products of the late 18th to early 20th century European imperial project, such that critique of the imperial project also entails envisioning new ways of knowing, constructing objects of study, and inventing new scholarly discourses. Thus, the definition of religion (as sui generis phenomenon), the invention of world religions, indeed the invention of religions such as Hinduism or the indigenous religions of Southern Africa (to name some historical examples), bear the imprint of the imperial and colonial context which gave rise to these discourses, but also constitute the sites of decolonial revisioning of scholarly discourses on these phenomena. This paper will reflect on contemporary theorizing of religion which embodies an explicit critique of the imperial project, specifically the work of Craig Martin, Russell McCutcheon, Kocku von Stuckrad, and for ancient religion, that of Jörg Rüpke, Guy Stroumsa, John Scheid, and Brent Nongbri. The golden thread that ties their work together is the concept of discourse. In this sense, I am proposing a discourse approach [in the Foucaultian, Bourdieuan, and Lefebvrean sense] is proposed that translates all the most prominent terminologies in the study of religion, like ritual, belief, faith, etc. into redescriptive moves. But simultaneously, all these terms, e.g., faith, beliefs, theologies, rituals, myths, ethics, sacred texts and narratives, secularisation, institutions and institutionalisation, modernism and modernity, postmodernism, gender, race-and nowadays one could add space and spatiality, also appear in more critical and interdisciplinary oriented theological studies. This brings about a most extraordinary situation where the outsider perspective and the insider perspective 'speak about' and 'speak with' the same set of vocabularies, and yet are practised either in isolation from each other as distinct theoretical and disciplinary bounded/defined study fields, or-the other and almost direct opposite-religious studies being performed in the context of theological study, situated in and offered by theological faculties. What complicates the matter is that religious studies as a disciplinary field of study is also conceived in some scholarly circles as what amounts to an insider, theological perspective, vide the current debates between Roberto Orsi and Russell McCutcheon [to name two scholars famously connected as symbols of the discusive clash]. This contribution, then, aims at a kind of metatheoretical reflection on the study of religion and theology both as discourses that serve mythmaking, identity formation, culturally strategic purposes. That is, from the discourse perspective that is proposed here, it is possible to move beyond the definitional divide between religious studies and theology-even beyond 'religion' itself-to focus on the mundanely material practices that constitute that which is called religion. None of the terms used for studying religion [or theology] are insider terms and are imported from outside of the folk practices to describe these practices. And in the way in which the terms are used-plus the history of the growth of these very uses and definitions-it is clear that the terminologies themselves bear the imprint of historical social discourses that occasioned the rise of their use. This proposal, then, is something of a metacritique of the language of the study of religion-beyond religion, beyond the study of religion and theology. And this, it is maintained, is in line with the aims of decolonial and postcolonial studies of the discourse of the study of religion and theology.
Journal of Early Christian History 10/1, 2020
In January 2008, an application was made to the College of Human Sciences at the University of So... more In January 2008, an application was made to the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa to change the name of the then Department of New Testament to Department of New Testament and Early Christian Studies. A subsequent reorganisation at the university saw the department merge with the then Department of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies to become the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies (after the discipline of Classics was also incorporated into the department). As a result of recent academic debates and dialogues, these "Theses on Theory and Method" were written to express the understanding of what the discipline of New Testament and Early Christian Studies entails at the University of South Africa. Thesis 1: The phrase, "New Testament and Early Christian Studies," is a conjunction between two descriptors that each signifies a study field (a more or less bounded set of phenomena and topics; the objects, phenomena, and practices that form the fields of interest for such studies) and a discipline (a concert of methods and approaches; an institutionalised set of conventions of scholarship with an authorised range of conceptual language, authorised methodologies, authorised topics of research, canonical theorists and their theories; and publication outlets that serve to enshrine a particular disciplinary practice). However, the conjunctive "and" is not purely additive. It denotes a broader field of encompassment, "Early Christian Studies," and a narrower field of focus, "New Testament," which can be conceived of as the "e.g.," the "for example," of the broader field. In this conjunction, Early Christian Studies has priority in setting the theoretical and methodological agendas, while New Testament Studies is conceived as a particular focus on a delimited set of traditions, histories, practices, that constitute but a section of the broader field of Early Christian Studies. One can speak in this regard, then, of a "conjoined super-discipline." For the sake of brevity and convenience we take New Testament and Early Christian Studies as a discipline. Thesis 2: In light of the foregoing, while New Testament Studies is normally conceived as the set of literary objects (the artefactual remains of social interactions), phenomena, and practices that form the foundation for the development and emergence of early Christian traditions, the conjunction of New Testament and Early Christian Studies as understood above, actually inverts
Journal for Semitics 29/1, 2020
In this essay the ambiguous afterlife of the character Judith and the eponymous book as cultural ... more In this essay the ambiguous afterlife of the character Judith and the eponymous book as cultural artefact is explored. The very rich and extensive impact on cultural and social imaginaries by the narrative and character of Judith provides an entry point to consider the social, cultural, and ideological work performed by the text. By drawing on a neglected trajectory in the interpretation of Judith, that of its imperialising force, in which Judith functions de facto like other Greek and Roman female deities who acts as city protectresses, and later as the Virgin, it is clear that Judith functions as cypher for imperial symbolisms. By employing New Historicism and its attendant theoretical assumptions, the figure of Judith becomes the occasion for an experiment in theory and method, on the borderline between cultural discourses and theories of religion. The text is read as a site for the operation of discourse and ideology, and as agency-medium in the imagining of history. When the text is 'read' in light of the reception history of both text and image, the text reading denotes the problematic conceptual relationship between theology, religion, and culture. All in all, bringing to bear on the text questions like these, this paper explores the borderlines between culture and religion, particularly when done in connection with a text which itself straddles the border between canonical and extracanonical. Judith, the narrative and figure, serve here as test case for widening the questions that should be brought to bear on ancient 'religious' literature.
The Greco-Roman Religions Section posts an open call for papers on the focus area, "Studying Gree... more The Greco-Roman Religions Section posts an open call for papers on the focus area, "Studying Greek and Roman 'Religions' in Context." Papers are invited that investigate, and/or theorize the contribution from material evidence, artefactual remains, and material contexts for our understanding of Greek and Roman religions and cultic traditions in the context of the Roman Empire. We particularly welcome papers that highlight how these manifest at the margins of the Roman world. Papers will typically investigate religions and/or cults as social and cultural formations (including the history of interpretation of these), especially focusing on contextual practices as they relate to wider encompassing social, cultural and religious discourses. We encourage a "thick" description and analysis of specific cults (inter alia, in terms of spatial orientation, architecture, cult economics, polis-connections, organization, practice, ritual paraphernalia, myth) as comparanda in a comparative exploration of the continuities and discontinuities between and across cultic institutions. We also envisage papers that move beyond description to frame interpretations of cultic and religious formations by discourse theories and theory of religion. Greco-Roman Religions Section call for papers Theme: "Thinking the Death and Demise of Greek and Roman Religions" The study of the lives, deaths, and afterlives of Greek and Roman religions is shaped by two main, and contradictory, focal points. First, the study of Greek and Roman religions and cults are conventionally framed by assumptions of continuity and duration, especially when "snapshots" of concrete iterations and manifestations are projected on to and across the diachronic stretch of a putative religious tradition, such that it creates an image of durability and immutability. In the process, such studies concentrate on continuations and neglect the disruptions, transformations, and eventual demise of cultural phenomena. Second, the trope of "the unstoppable triumphal march of Christianity" through the Mediterranean world and the Near East of the Roman Empire and the world of Late Antiquity is well-established in both religious tradition (in the self-mythmaking of the authors inventing that tradition, as well as in theology as the reflection on that tradition) and in scholarship on that invented history. Thus, in this conventional construction of the religious history of the Roman Empire, i.e., the triumphal supersession of Greek and Roman religions by Christianity, the dense variety of Greek and Roman religions had ceased to exist sometime around the fourth to fifth centuries CE, during the so-called Constantinian Revolution. This session seeks to rethink both these contradictory assumptions, viz., the image of long-enduring stability and identity of ancient religions, as well as their supersession by Christianity in Late Antiquity. Papers are invited that theorize interruptions in the cults of the Greek and Roman world: ranging from the cessation, or transmutation, of traditional translocal cults, to the disappearance of newer invented cults like that of Mithras and Glycon, the fading of "New Prophecy" and "Gnosticism," etc. (in short: conceptualizing the fate of the old mainstream "orthodox" religions, as well as the New Religious Movements of the Roman Empire). Recent work on the demise of religious traditions, both contemporary and in the past, pose new
This is a notification of the panel sessions and paper titles for the three sessions of the Graec... more This is a notification of the panel sessions and paper titles for the three sessions of the Graeco-Roman Religions program unit of the Society of Biblical Literature for the Annual Meeting in San Diego, November 2019.
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Papers by Gerhardus A . van den Heever
Writing the history of the end of Greek and Roman cults is perennially complicated by the fact that it is done from the perspective of the ‘winners’ – early Christian historians like Eusebius, or contemporary historians of religion who repeat the emic viewpoints of early Christian writers’ triumphalist successionist histories. Along with that is the problem of defining religion: can one actually speak of Graeco-Roman religion, when before the emergence in the Mediterranean world of large-scale translocal religious formations, all cults only manifested in local cultic organisations? Even where the same deities were offered cult as in other locales, local iconographies, myths, ritual practices anchored such cults in their local community contexts.
To address problems like these, one needs to change perspective and consider both the making of religion and the broader phenomenon of religious changes from the viewpoint of how religions are ‘manufactured.’ When viewed from the perspective of religion ‘building blocks,’ it is actually possible to see how religions and cults mutate, become transformed, get absorbed into larger formations, and generally, how cults and religions continue to have afterlives. In the context of the topic of Christianisation of the Roman Empire, one can actually say that Christianity is the way in which Greek and Roman religions continued to exist.
Keywords:
Discourse theory – redescriptive theory of religion – Christianisation – history of religion – Greek and Roman cults – critical historiography – cultural change
Exorcising “Devilsdorp”: Demonization and Satanic Possession in South Africa
The recent South African four-part true crime documentary television series, Devilsdorp (lit. “town of the devil”), narrated and analysed a series of eleven gruesome murders perpetrated between 2012 and 2016 in and around Krugersdorp on the West Rand by a group called Electus per Deus (Chosen by God). The murders were alternatively labelled the “Appointment Murders” and the “Satanic Murders.” The latter because the main leader of the murder gang claimed she is a reformed satanist and collected money for foster care children rescued from Satan-worshipping families. Various commentators claimed that the group resembled and operated as a satanic cult and the members were possessed by evil spirits. This essay will not address the question of whether the members of the gang really were possessed by the devil or some evil spirit, so much as the discourse of why is it assumed to be so plausible to interpret inexplicable evil events as satanic, or even satanically possession events? This essay is about the discourse of satanic or evil spirit possession, using a discourse analysis approach. In this sense, the study of “discourse” is a way into investigating all the concrete operational sites of a given historical society’s sense of self – its self-understandings, its self-representations, and its self-reinscriptions, and the way in which these manifest in social and political institutions, public texts and literary traditions.
One of the commentators in the film, Col. Kobus Jonker, who resolutely interpreted the murders and the group as satanic, as evidence of the presence of the satanic in South African society, became famous in the early 1980s as the founder of the anti-cult unit of the (then) South African Police. As an influential public figure at a time of tremendous social stresses and anxieties (the states of emergency with their emergency police powers at the end of the apartheid era), he promoted a discourse of the presence of Satan and satanic possession that gripped large parts of white South African society. As a result, signs of the presence of Satan were “discovered” everywhere, one of the – at the time – most prominent “places” was the so-called backward masking, where satanic messages were supposedly coded into rock music and could only be decoded by playing the music backwards, but when listened to normally, would cause subliminal influencing and possession. The big “Satan scare” is largely over since the change to democratic government, existing only in some small pockets in society, religious and social/political. From time to time in contexts of social anxiety and stresses, possession discourses emerge in very contained local conditions, often leading to isolated individuals (mostly elderly women living alone) identified as witches and killed on that suspicion. The argument pursued in this essay is one that proceeds from the perspective that it is important to note the context in which possession discourses emerge, and the social, cultural, and ideological work performed by (and through) such discourses. The preliminary conclusion of the essay is that possession discourses translate other deeply submerged tensions and trajectories in society, manifesting in embodiments of discourse (a habitus of exposure to harmful supernatural agents) that govern social behaviour.
The essay was published as: Gerhard van den Heever, "Once Again: Modelling Early Christian Social Formations and Christ-Cult Groups among Graeco-Roman Cults," Journal of Early Christian History.
To cite this article: Gerhard van den Heever (2020) Once Again: Modelling Early Christian Social Formations and Christ-Cult Groups among Graeco-Roman Cults, Journal of Early Christian History, 10:3, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/2222582X.2021.1950998
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2222582X.2021.1950998
Writing the history of the end of Greek and Roman cults is perennially complicated by the fact that it is done from the perspective of the ‘winners’ – early Christian historians like Eusebius, or contemporary historians of religion who repeat the emic viewpoints of early Christian writers’ triumphalist successionist histories. Along with that is the problem of defining religion: can one actually speak of Graeco-Roman religion, when before the emergence in the Mediterranean world of large-scale translocal religious formations, all cults only manifested in local cultic organisations? Even where the same deities were offered cult as in other locales, local iconographies, myths, ritual practices anchored such cults in their local community contexts.
To address problems like these, one needs to change perspective and consider both the making of religion and the broader phenomenon of religious changes from the viewpoint of how religions are ‘manufactured.’ When viewed from the perspective of religion ‘building blocks,’ it is actually possible to see how religions and cults mutate, become transformed, get absorbed into larger formations, and generally, how cults and religions continue to have afterlives. In the context of the topic of Christianisation of the Roman Empire, one can actually say that Christianity is the way in which Greek and Roman religions continued to exist.
Keywords:
Discourse theory – redescriptive theory of religion – Christianisation – history of religion – Greek and Roman cults – critical historiography – cultural change
Exorcising “Devilsdorp”: Demonization and Satanic Possession in South Africa
The recent South African four-part true crime documentary television series, Devilsdorp (lit. “town of the devil”), narrated and analysed a series of eleven gruesome murders perpetrated between 2012 and 2016 in and around Krugersdorp on the West Rand by a group called Electus per Deus (Chosen by God). The murders were alternatively labelled the “Appointment Murders” and the “Satanic Murders.” The latter because the main leader of the murder gang claimed she is a reformed satanist and collected money for foster care children rescued from Satan-worshipping families. Various commentators claimed that the group resembled and operated as a satanic cult and the members were possessed by evil spirits. This essay will not address the question of whether the members of the gang really were possessed by the devil or some evil spirit, so much as the discourse of why is it assumed to be so plausible to interpret inexplicable evil events as satanic, or even satanically possession events? This essay is about the discourse of satanic or evil spirit possession, using a discourse analysis approach. In this sense, the study of “discourse” is a way into investigating all the concrete operational sites of a given historical society’s sense of self – its self-understandings, its self-representations, and its self-reinscriptions, and the way in which these manifest in social and political institutions, public texts and literary traditions.
One of the commentators in the film, Col. Kobus Jonker, who resolutely interpreted the murders and the group as satanic, as evidence of the presence of the satanic in South African society, became famous in the early 1980s as the founder of the anti-cult unit of the (then) South African Police. As an influential public figure at a time of tremendous social stresses and anxieties (the states of emergency with their emergency police powers at the end of the apartheid era), he promoted a discourse of the presence of Satan and satanic possession that gripped large parts of white South African society. As a result, signs of the presence of Satan were “discovered” everywhere, one of the – at the time – most prominent “places” was the so-called backward masking, where satanic messages were supposedly coded into rock music and could only be decoded by playing the music backwards, but when listened to normally, would cause subliminal influencing and possession. The big “Satan scare” is largely over since the change to democratic government, existing only in some small pockets in society, religious and social/political. From time to time in contexts of social anxiety and stresses, possession discourses emerge in very contained local conditions, often leading to isolated individuals (mostly elderly women living alone) identified as witches and killed on that suspicion. The argument pursued in this essay is one that proceeds from the perspective that it is important to note the context in which possession discourses emerge, and the social, cultural, and ideological work performed by (and through) such discourses. The preliminary conclusion of the essay is that possession discourses translate other deeply submerged tensions and trajectories in society, manifesting in embodiments of discourse (a habitus of exposure to harmful supernatural agents) that govern social behaviour.
The essay was published as: Gerhard van den Heever, "Once Again: Modelling Early Christian Social Formations and Christ-Cult Groups among Graeco-Roman Cults," Journal of Early Christian History.
To cite this article: Gerhard van den Heever (2020) Once Again: Modelling Early Christian Social Formations and Christ-Cult Groups among Graeco-Roman Cults, Journal of Early Christian History, 10:3, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/2222582X.2021.1950998
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2222582X.2021.1950998