Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Texts of Classical religion

[(Anonymous)]

Not a classics scholar but I have a decent grounding in it.

Politics and religion were deeply intertwined in that time period. Works dealing with "secular" topics would be seen as having religious overtones in their original context. As an example, if you want to really understand Jupiter, you have to understand the roman legal system.

Cicero is great. For the reasons above, anything by him is highly recommended.

Julian is quite nice but does come with a warning: The roman religious systems had become royally messed up by the time he came around, and was explicitly trying to reinterpret everything in a neoplatonic framework. As long as you know his biases and don't misunderstand his view of religion for the older substrate, his work can be quite illuminating.

Plutarch and Sallust are the other two writers I would add to the list.

Ovid is a major figure, and to my mind, also a major donkey. There is a lot of his writing extant, and it includes a great deal of material. But it is worth remembering that his work was seen as impious when he was alive. Anything from him should be taken with an entire spoonful of salt.

Re: Texts of Classical religion

[lunarapprentice]

Ovid was an urban, and urbane, skeptic. He did not believe in the myths, he was just relaying them. I hear some modern commentators feel Ovid was sympathetic to the people who believed them, but his contemporaries saw through him.

Re: Texts of Classical religion

[boccaderlupo]

RE: Ovid, I am of the opinion that the mere act of relaying the stories of the gods is looked askance at, though one can serve as a vessel for the gods without knowing it.

Much of the fear and concern of Ovid seems due to some perception that there is some "pure" tradition that he is muddying (disregarding the variegated and sometimes incongruous landscape of the original Hellenic "texts," as it were). His chief contribution, besides the retelling, is in my view the concept of metamorphoses: that although the gods themselves are immutable, the symbols and vehicles in which they manifest themselves change. In light of the fact that, with rare exceptions perhaps, there are no unbroken Romano-Hellenic traditions, this idea of change is important, especially as it permitted the syncretism of the Renaissance, which permitted the "survival" of the gods during periods of vehement monotheism. Indeed, the "reconstitution" of older traditions is, in this light, merely part of the dynamic.

One is as apt to find the gods expressing themselves in the divine poets as in the compendiums of mythographers as on the back of a cereal box as in the contemplation of an oak stirring in the breeze. The path is wherever you start.

Axé,
Fra' Lupo

Re: Texts of Classical religion

[isabelcooper]

My impression (only reading him in translation) is that he made a lot of the myths more Just-So Stories than the originals did, so any sense of the gods' character comes second to This Is Why We Have Birds, or similar.