School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemThe Sacred Life of Trees: What trees say about people in the prehistoric Aegean and Near East(Monash University, 2012)The realistic nature of the glyptic idiom of Minoan Crete, as expressed in images of tree cult, has resulted in the general assumption that such illustrations depict real places within the Cretan landscape. Variously termed ‘rural sanctuaries’, ‘sacred enclosures’ or ‘open-air shrines’, glyptic iconography is the main source of evidence for this category of cult site and its supposed characteristics, thought to range from the architecturally elaborate to the ephemeral.1 This paper argues that, as a result of the miniaturisation process involved in the creation of glyptic motifs, it is more likely that images of tree cult are not scenes, but signs, comparable with more minimalist Cypriot and Israelite examples. In order to support this contention, the paper will initially contextualise the images chronologically and spatially.
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ItemWalk like an Egyptian: Egypt as authority in Aleister Crowley's reception of The Book of the Law(Equinox Publishing, 2010-12-01)This article investigates the story of Aleister Crowley's reception of The Book of the Law in Cairo, Egypt, in 1904, focusing on the question of why it occurred in Egypt. The article contends that Crowley created this foundation narrative, which involved specifically incorporating an Egyptian antiquity from a museum, the 'Stele of Revealing,' in Egypt because he was working within a conceptual structure that privileged Egypt as a source of Hermetic authority. Crowley synthesized the romantic and scholarly constructions of Egypt, inherited from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as the uses that two prominent members of the order made of Egyptological collections within museums. The article concludes that these provided Crowley with both a conceptual structure within which to legitimise his reformation of Golden Dawn ritual and cosmology, and a model of how to do so.
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ItemResearching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions(Equinox Publishing, 2011-01-01)Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a response by practitioner Pagans to academic research on the history of Pagan religions.
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ItemHousehold and Family Religion in Antiquity(Equinox Publishing, 2014-01-01)Book review on John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 346 pp., $50.95 (paper).
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ItemDropping Ecstasy? Minoan Cult and the Tropes of Shamanism(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2015-04-03)Cult scenes illustrated in miniature on administrative stone seals and metal signet rings from Late Bronze Age Minoan Crete are commonly interpreted as “Epiphany Scenes” and have been called “shamanic”. “Universal shamanism” is a catch-all anthropological term coined to describe certain inferred ritual behaviors across widely dispersed cultures and through time. This study re-examines evidence for Minoan cultic practices in light of key tropes of “universal shamanism”, including consumption of psychoactive drugs, adoption of special body postures, trance, spirit possession, communication with supernatural beings, metamorphosis, and the journey to other-worlds. It is argued that while existing characterizations of Minoan cult as “shamanic” are based on partial, reductionist and primitivist assumptions informed by neo-evolutionary comparative ethnologies, shamanism provides a dynamic framework for expanding understandings of Minoan cult. It is of course understood that while this study is a careful, informed analysis of the evidence, it is but one interpretation among others.
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ItemVirtual Reality: Tree Cult and Epiphanic Ritual in Aegean Glyptic Iconography.(Astroms forlag - Astrom Editions, 2016)For the first half of the twentieth century and even up until quite recently Minoan religion has been interpreted through an evolutionist lens. Glyptic iconography depicting ritual activity inconjunction with trees and stones has been considered evidence for the evolutionary trajectoryof Minoan religion from an earlier “primitive” phase, characterised by aniconism, to a moresophisticated stage signied by anthropomorphism. In contrast, this article proposes thatMinoan religion was simultaneously physiomorphic, theriomorphic and anthropomorphic.Through examination of the Minoan imagery of epiphany set within natural landscapes, inconjunction with comparative ethnographic analysis of cult activity and religious symbolismfrom the Levant and Egypt, it is determined that Minoan religion was a “nature” religion thatwas experienced through the mediation of elite human performance.
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ItemFlorence and the Mummy(Megalithica, 2009)
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ItemSamuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers and Isis(Hidden Publishing, 2009)Ten years on from the groundbreaking Triumph of the Moon: A history of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Professor Ronald Hutton, a selection of worldwide scholars, some 'big names; some newer in the field, with nearly two centuries of hands-on pagan research experience between them, present a collection of researches inspired by, deriving from or just celebrating the immense impact of that seminal...
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ItemIsrael: Museums(Springer New York, 2014)With over 230 museums, the State of Israel has the most museums per capita in the world. These range in size and sophistication from small house museums to those representing state-of-the-art contemporary museum design, such as the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum. Israel’s diverse assortment of museums covers time periods spanning prehistory to the present day. Not all museums are concerned with archaeology and many focus on other topics as varied as military history, grain, computers, sport, clandestine immigration, founding figures, visual art, folklore, and transport.
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ItemNuminous tree and stone: re-animating the Minoan landscape.(Peeters, 2016)Iconographic scenes of inferred cultic activity, including the hugging or leaning upon of aniconic stones and the apparent appearance of epiphanic figures in proximity to trees, are suggestive of an animistic conception of the natural world. Architectonic evocations of the numinous sacred landscape, through iconographic representation, cultic paraphernalia, palatial architectural features, extant baetyls and peak sanctuaries, reflect strategies of elite status legitimisation through advertisement of relational associations with landscape. Scenes of epiphanic ritual depicted within apparently natural settings – amongst trees and stones free from architectural elaboration – are suggestive of elite interaction with perceived numinous elements within the landscape, while images of envisioned epiphany imply direct communication between human ritual actors and the animate landscape, achieved through interaction with tree or stone. Stepped cult structures such as shrines and openwork platforms, which may be sat upon by women or surmounted by trees, may have symbolised mountains and facilitated the replication of peak sanctuary ritual in an architecturally elaborated, possibly urban, setting. Interaction with baetyls may appropriate qualities of solidity and permanence, while also enhancing claims to status and authority through evoking ancestor veneration. Evidence of feasting in association with baetyls may suggest their function within programs of social cohesion and the naturalisation of hierarchy in which elites expressed status and generated ritual indebtedness through conspicuous generosity and display. These elements of the Minoan sacred landscape will here be analysed through the lens of animism. In contrast with the influential primitivist evolutionary epistemology expounded by the Victorian comparative ethnologists, animism drawn from cultural anthropology posits a relational epistemology, in which a reflexive relatedness exists between people and the natural environment, which is perceived as being sentient. Rather than providing inert backdrops to ritual performance, the landscape is here reconfigured as sentient and numinous, functioning as a politicised, active agent in the enactment of power.