Mythology/Religion

The Poetics of Distress, the Rape of the Heavenly Maiden, and the Most Ancient Sleeping Beauty: Oralistic, Linguistic, and Comparative Perspectives on the (Pre-)Historical Development of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Often compared with West Asian and Egyptian texts, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (hereafter Hymn) and the other variants of the myth of Demeter and Persephone-Kore have a number of onomastic, phraseological, and thematic parallels in texts composed in other Indo-European languages. By means of an oralistic, linguistic, and comparative approach, my research aims to, firstly, reconstruct the common background of the Hymn and its Indo-European counterparts on the strength… Read more

Epics and Ritual: Reconsidering Homeric Performance in Ancient Greece

Citation with persistent identifier: Brouillet, Manon. “Epics and Ritual: Reconsidering Homeric Performance in Ancient Greece.” CHS Research Bulletin 7 (2019). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:BrouilletM.Epics_and_Ritual.2019 Abstract My project on Homeric epics and ritual seeks to explore the link between the massive importance of Homeric epics in Greek polytheism, as stated by Herodotus himself, and their performance during religious… Read more

Calling the Gods: How Cult Practices Moved across Space and Time in the Ancient Mediterranean

Persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:BachvarovaM.Calling_the_Gods.2018 “The tongue is a bridge!” So exclaims the practitioner, probably an Old Woman, to the Sun-goddess of the Earth in the 15th century BCE Hittite Ritual against an Ominous Bee as she attempts to lure the goddess to the sacrificial offerings (CTH 447.A = KBo 11.10 iii… Read more