Mahmut Kelpetin, İslâm Öncesi Güney ve Kuzey Arabistan, Kuramer Yay., İstanbul 2016
In our work, Pre-Islamic South and North Arabia wrinting by Mahmut Kelpetin is presented.
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In our work, Pre-Islamic South and North Arabia wrinting by Mahmut Kelpetin is presented.
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Near Csákvár, in the so-called Báraczháza cave there are relics of an antique Diana cult. A number of inscriptions can be found before and within the cave system, part of them known from the 18th c., part of them unpublished. The two main passages of the cave seem to have been the sanctuary. In the left passage the Diana idol carved into the stone remained, its iconography is nearly unique, and fits to a provincial cult based on pre-Roman, Celtic or Pannon background. At the end of the right passage there is a strange short inscription with a phallic symbol scratched into the wall, which may refer to the divine pair of the local Diana goddess, called most likely Silvanus. The statue and some inscriptions were made, and consequently the sanctuary was certainly used in the Severan Era, and probably remained in use until the later 4th c., when the spreading Christianity must have finished the cult, although the possible Christograms in the walls of the cave cannot be taken doubtless as signs for that; the cave contains some early New Age inscriptions too.
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Anlässlich des 150. Geburtstages von Albert von Le Coq wird in diesem Aufsatz seine Arbeit an den manichäisch-türkischen Texten aus den Turfanfunden gewürdigt. Mit seinen Editionen hat er entscheidend dazu beigetragen, dass auch dieser Teil des zentralasiatischen Erbes in die manichäische Religionsgeschichte einbezogen wurde.
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The paper analyses the social history and the cultural aspects of collective visions from the traditional Moldavian Csángó culture. It shows the mechanism of how in times of economic and social crisis the social fears are reflected in visions. The author argues that the collective visions played an important role in the articulation of crisis in a transforming Moldavian Csángó society. He mentions the conditions and circumstances of their appearance, their ontological qualities (sacred–demonic), the attitude of the church to them, the features of the visions compared with the Orthodox religious culture. For the exceptionally religious Csángó community, for whom the religious experience has a very deep emotional meaning, the other world has medieval importance. They accept the reality of the other-world without transcendental experience. The visions announce visual certainty about this important religious structure.
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In this paper, I shall be following Jagić’s study on the legends about the grabancijaš dijak, which was published in German in 1877. The paper in question discussed the legends about the grabancijaš dijak, a shabby itinerant cleric, wanderer and light-hearted adventurer, a travelling student (fahrender Schüler), a former student of the 13th School, part-priest, part-wizard. Besides folklore notations, the personage appears in Croatian literature of the 18th century and is usually linked with the Zagreb Seminary. The echoes of the study in the works of Oskar Asbóth and Moses Gaster are also looked into; prompted by Jagić’s work they published in the same journal – the Archiv für slavische Philologie – the results of their own research into the grabancijaš in Hungarian and Romanian tradition. The morphological designations and functional connections between similar mythic personages in Croatian oral-literary tradition – such as the dragon, basilisk, serpent, krsnik, táltos, mogut, and warlock – are analysed in considerable detail. The grabancijaš is also observed as a mythic personage who deviated most from functionally similar personages, and was fully adapted to Christianisation. This is also shown in the relatively numerous Croatian written notations from Zagreb and the Zagreb area.
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The article discusses wolf holidays among Southern Slavs in the Balkans. They are celebrated for a period of 3–11 days, most often around St. Mrata’s day, in Serbia also around St. Sava and more seldom around Archangel Michael’s day. During the holidays many prohibitions are observed and many acts performed and the chief purpose of all of them is to protect the livestock (and people) from wolves. People symbolically shut the jaws of wolves, do not work with the livestock or animal products, do not knit or spin, do not go into the woods, do not mention wolves or use other names for them, etc. The last day of these holidays is believed to be especially dangerous as this is the day when the “lame wolf” is supposed to move. The paper demonstrates that these taboos, folk beliefs and practice can only be understood on the basis of folk beliefs related to the Master of wolves and more specifically legends about the Master of wolves who gives out food to wolves on his name day.
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Based on written and oral evidence, the present study focuses on Romanian Herodias’ various hypostases: biblical queen, queen of the fairies, sovereign of the căluşari. The canonic, apocryphal and magical writings referring to Herodias are considered as some of the most significant testimonies about this character. Such texts present the image of Herodias as biblical queen who provoked the decapitation of John the Baptist, as it was promoted in 17th–18th-century Romanian literature; they also represent an important document for deciding whether a certain apocryphal tradition influenced Romanian folk beliefs related to the malevolent fairies. The study of the oral evidence investigates how Romanian folk beliefs assimilated the story of St John’s decapitation and transformed it into traditional legends and inquires whether these new compositions had an effect on Herodias’ traditional roles, those of queen of the fairies and patroness of the căluşari. Finally, the research attempts to describe how Herodias’ beneficial functions are put into the shade by a powerful Christian opponent.
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The interpretation of the expression ’ruricolae, Gradive, tui’ from the Argonautica 5, 142 of Valerius Flaccus is controversial: behind the original of Apollonios most probably there was a fountain referring to the cleaning of iron ore, which was known by the Greek author. The information given by Apollonios Rhodios about Chalybes, which were taken by him literally, were interpreted by Valerius Flaccus in a romanized, metaphoric sense, of Roman ideas regarding the iron age.
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The paper presents the pastoral activity of Jesuits in Nieśwież (Niasvizh) on the basis of manuscript sources preserved in the Roman Archive of the Society of Jesus. After considering the situation of the Jesuit fathers in this residential city of the Radziwiłł family, the author analyses some of the typical aspects of post-tridentine Catholicism, such as the cult of saints and relics and the activity of pious confraternities.
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At first glance, the Catholic identity of a Cardinal should not be a complicated topic, particularly if we are dealing with a person who became one of the most famous symbols of Catholic resistance against communism during the Cold War Era. In the 1950s Cardinal József Mindszenty was regarded as one of the most prominent martyrs of the Catholic Church. This reputation emerged again in the early 1970s all over the world, particularly in North and South America, but also in Western Europe, Austria, and Germany. He was arrested, put on trial in 1949, imprisoned, allegedly tortured, was freed during the revolution of 1956, and spent the next 15 years of his life as an exile in the U. S. Embassy in Budapest. He died only four years later, in 1975, in his last exile in Vienna. But József Mindszenty, born József Pehm in 1892, stood also for a very specific understanding of Hungarian Catholicism: a particularly conservative, anti-liberal, legitimist, pre-Vatican II, reactionary, traditionalist and nationalist Catholicism. In my paper, I look at the case of Cardinal Mindszenty in order to explore the most important aspects and changes of Hungarian Catholic identity during the 20th century. I want to show that, contrary to the common view, most questions regarding Mindszenty and Hungarian Catholicism are still open and require further research.
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Liberal academics and enthusiastic lay audiences hailed the public debuts of the Calvinist theologian and acclaimed orator László Ravasz as the leading representative of a new generation of modernist clergymen in the early 1910s. Much to the regret of his liberal critics, in the wake of the collapse of historic Hungary following World War I his message stemmed from a modern cult and culture of defeat and was in no way a continuation of the old school liberals of the belle époque of the Dual Monarchy. In his memoires, which were written during the 1960s, Ravasz described his erstwhile political views as “fetishes,” but defended his theological motives. This raises questions concerning a central problem of modern religious experience: how can one map the constantly evolving frontiers between rampant secularization and the no less permanent and certainly insatiable nostalgia for the sacred order of things in modern societies? By redefining what is religious, the currents of Protestant and Catholic thought in interwar Hungary presented in the following article established intellectual contexts on both sides that make not only the historical description of Christian identity but also the very notion of modernity a function of multi-layered readings. At the same time, the Catholic and Protestant rapprochement may be interpreted as a symptom of the decline of religious explanations of the world and history, because they testify to the fact that the dialectics of historical interpretation are no longer defined by the particular approaches of Catholic or Protestant theology or the differences between the two, but rather by the state of competition between universalist utopias and religious world explanations forced into the conservative camp, which necessarily bleaches the emphatic elements of Christian teachings as well.
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Singing mendicant beggars (kaliki perechozie), who, for the most part, were blind or crippled and could be found everywhere in Russia before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, were only later, i.e. secondary, carriers of Russian religious songs (duchovnye stichi). The primary composers and performers of Eastern-Slavic religious folk songs were mediators between the Orthodox Christian Church and the people. Mendicant pilgrim beggars in Old Russia regarded themselves as those among the few selected by God. They practised their vocation of begging alms with approval from Jesus Christ. They “were baptized into Christ and clothed themselves with Christ”. From this, it follows that treating beggars to a meal or giving them alms was the same as treating Christ and giving the alms to him. The holy beggars of Old Russia were pilgrims: mendicant icons of Christ. With their life, they were meant to encourage others to purify their own icon-like quality received from God, and thus become similar to Christ.
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The present article is an attempt to reconstruct the story of the man-eating Kalmasapada and the Bodhisattva Sutasoma in Old Turkic. It forms a part of the vast collection of avadanas called Dasakarmapathavadanamala which has hitherto only been partly published. The investigation of newly identified and placed fragments allows for an appraisal of the uniqueness of this narrative within this particular story cycle.
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Ethnological and religious studies point to differentiation in the status of men and women, which eventually results from cultural conditions, and not from biological differences. Many researchers indicate asymmetry connected with the gender, which also refers to the religious sphere. The nonliterate peoples consider life to be the fundamental value and that is the reason why their cultural and religious traditions put emphasis on woman’s biological functions and see procreation as her main vocation and task. A woman performs the role of a native doctor and healer among many African peoples, since the basic medical care takes place within the family. In Africa older women after menopause perform priestly duties to a smaller degree. Researchers of the African peoples emphasize that spirit possession takes place more frequently in the case of women than men, which they consider a reaction to the inferior status of women in the social, political and religious life. Both men and women are diviners among many African peoples. Among some peoples of Eastern and Southern Africa women control the Earth fertility and they are renowned rainmakers. Women belong to secret societies in some African peoples. Both men and women can be sorcerers and witches, although among many African peoples it is more often older women who are accused of witchcraft, which is explained by social and economic inequality and the desire for power.
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The Jewish pilgrimages in Hungary belong in the context of expansion of the 18th century Chassidic movement of the Ashkenazic Jews of Poland. The differing forms are connected to the charismatic figures of the communities, to the so-called righteous men. Pilgrims visited them at the time of individual crises or at major feasts. The news of their travels attracted thousands of pilgrims. This pilgrimage could be repeated for their funeral and on the anniversaries of their death. Places of pilgrimage with very large areas of attraction arose. Societies and Talmudic schools were often associated with these persons, which became the germs for the organization of virtual communities forming again after the Holocaust. Today these graves are important mnemotechnical places for the Chassidic virtual communities, and the pilgrimages are mnemotechnical occasions and compensatory rites. They can provide new knowledge for history of mentality studies of the religious practice of rural Jewry, and for research on sacral communication, the organisation of virtual communities and on pilgrimages.
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The special relationship between religious and national identity is being scrutinised in the present paper. The fieldwork lasted from March 2004 to April 2005 and took place in the city of Szeged in Hungary. A Krishna devotee new religious community called the Hungarian Bráhmana Mission was targeted as this group has a unique combination of the two types of identities. It is postulated that the close relationship between religious and national identities even in new religious groups can be interpreted as a typical phenomenon in post-communist Central European countries, which is justified by the research. The Geertzian, interpretive, hermeneutical method is used during the fieldwork.
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This article is a transcript and French translation of the chapters 6 to 8 of Book 1 of the Latin manuscript by the Jesuit F. X. Eder on the missions or reductions in the Amerindian nations of the Moxos and Baures. It is the continuation of the two first articles entitled Lima, Peru, and their inhabitants in the 18th century and Jesuit missions in the now Bolivian Amazon basin in the 18th century.
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This paper concerns a local Bengali deity named Dharmaraj, whose worship in eastern India was quite extensive in medieval times. Today, however, ritual performances in his honor are confined to three contiguous districts of West Bengal. This decline in worship is partly due to the co-optation of a predominantly lower-caste deity by Brahmins. The degree to which “Sanskritization” has altered the practices associated with the deity shall be explored in both historical and ethnographic contexts based on medieval Bengali literature and anthropological fieldwork. The aim is to understand how the deity can be manipulated ideologically over time to serve the interests of different caste groups. I wish to sketch the dynamics of how Dharmaraj is currently constructed, interpreted, and understood in one small village – Goalpara – located in Birbhum District, the center of the deity’s worship. To do this, I will present data pertaining to annual puja, or ritual performance, for the deity. Ritual data will be supplemented with exegesis provided to me by a cross section of individuals belonging to various castes within the village. I intend to conclude by suggesting that the deity serves a mediational role in the village by resolving conflicts resulting from caste hierarchy. Moreover, his annual puja, although not levelling social status, displays a strong sense of Turnerian communitas, which allows for a temporary form of egalitarianism in which members of all castes gain access to the deity.
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The main religious lay-leader of the Hungarian Calvinists living in Carpathian Ukraine was the peasant-prophetess, Mrs. Mariska Borku (1910–1978). Her higly important work, the so-called “Third Testament” is a manuscript, written under the influence of the Holy Spirit. It was considered by Mrs. Mariska Borku and her followers as a holy text, a part of the Bible. These almost 800 biblical “quasi loci” were spread in hand-written copies and were read aloud at religious meetings in the Hungarian villages of Carpathian Ukraine, even 10–15 years after her death. Beside the biblical paraphrases, religious songs and prayers, one fourth of the text consists of her visions. The prophetess never explained these visions and the Holy Spirit’s “verbs” to her followers – only announced them. Recently the largest religious community of her followers, mostly women over fifty, exists in the village of Dercen. Its lay-leader, Miss Ida Balla, can explain the Words of the “Third Testament”, and the visions of Mrs. Borku on the occasion of their private religious service Sunday afternoons. My study offers a short survey of the historical and political situation of the area between 1920 and 1995, in which the emphasised folk religion played a very important role in the survival of national identity and in strengthening the faith of the Hungarian inhabitants living in a very often tragic minority status. I illustrate my presentation with original visionary texts of the “Third Testament”, and their actual-political exegesis given by the recent lay-leader of Mrs. Mariska Borku’s followers.
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