Healing rituals

Magical Ceremonies during the Ritual Year of the Greek Farmer.  In Minniyakhmetova, Tatiana and Kamila Velkoborská (eds.): The Ritual Year 10: Magic in Rituals and Rituals in Magic. The Yearbook of the SIEF (Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore) Working Group on The Ritual Year. Innsbruck/Tartu: ELM Scholarly Press 2015: 41-60.

Abstract:
In the wake of the British scholar, James G. Frazer’s claim that Greek religion reflects peasants’ concepts connected with fertility magic, the very term has been criticized by most humanists during the entire twentieth century, while it has been present in scholarly literature written by anthropologists. Through a comparison between modern and ancient Greek festivals and rituals taking place across the ritual year, the article illustrates the importance of fertility magic to ensure the food both for the modern and ancient farmers, since sympathetic magic is a persistent characteristic of ancient as well as contemporary festivals. While performing various fertility rituals, the farmer assists nature to pass the worst of the winter. The point is that the magic works, and an important magical means of communication is indeed the festival and all the factors that it consists of.

This article is an attempt to understand ‘locality’, where the issues of subversion, subordination and marginalization as well as the problematic notions of liminality and empowerment are more vibrant and real. We shall demonstrate that while the low castes and untouchables were engaged in economic conflict, at various levels, with the high-caste landowners, which resulted in occasional uprisings too, the popular belief system was used by the marginalized as an instrument of assertion of their power against social coercion. It is argued that the social and ritual protest aimed at diluting or subverting the local caste hierarchy in a stratified society is an efficacious threat to the power of the high castes; that the hope of social revision becomes an
alternative to economic subordination. More important, the symbols of empowerment are not the ones controlled by the high castes, but those which are located in the specialized rituals of the marginalized dalits. This article is about these symbols, which are liminal in nature, and how they empower, if only for a brief while, the economically exploited and socially marginalized dalit practitioners.

What is illness and in what way does Christian understanding of it differ from that handed down from pre-Christian Antiquity? Wolfgang Häfele analyzes The Miracles of Saints Cyrus and John, written by the subsequent patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronios, between 610 and 614 AD. This text is commonly yet unjustly thought to harbour a certain hostility towards doctors and medicine. While Sophronios does sharply criticise the conduct of the contemporary medical (and by then Christian) elite, he also appreciates what contemporary medicine is capable of and uses the latter's approaches to describe diseases. However, a second major aspect of illness becomes apparent in the text, particularly when it comes to diseases of the soul: illness and its treatment as metaphor. The book contains six chapters, a preface, bibliography, and register.

Drawing on original fieldwork, this book develops a fresh methodological approach to the study of indigenous understandings of disease as possession, and looks at healing rituals in different South Asian cultural contexts. Contributors discuss the meaning of “disease”, “possession” and “healing” in relation to South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism, and how South Asians deal with the divine in order to negotiate health and wellbeing.
The book goes on to look at goddesses, gods and spirits as a cause and remedy of a variety of diseases, a study that has proved significant to the ethics and politics of responding to health issues. It contributes to a consolidation and promotion of indigenous ways as a method of understanding physical and mental imbalances through diverse conceptions of the divine. Chapters offer a fascinating overview of healing rituals in South Asia and provide a full- length, sustained discussion of the interface between religion, ritual and folklore. The book presents a fresh insight into studies of Asian Religion and the History of Medicine.

A master thesis discussing the notions of body and disease, as they are presented in the Mesopotamian healing prescriptions collected in the genre of medical compendia referred to as the "therapeutic texts" by the assyriologists. An attempt to reach at least some level of the bodily experience of a dead culture. The thesis focuses on prescriptions for fevers, with regard to general context.