Mythology/Religion
Is the scepter of Agamemnon a cult object?
For the last post I have chosen a subject – the question of the scepter of Agamemnon as a cult object – that arose during the conversation I had at the CHS symposium on November 30. Statues representing gods and other cult recipients are usually classified as “cult objects,” an… Read more
Odysseus and the Cult of Apollo at Delos
The Hellenistic keraton at Delos. Photo by Steven Lowenstam. For my final post, I would like to explore how the audiences for whom early Greek epics were composed and performed might have responded to representations of the cult of Apollo on Delos in epic poetry. This site,… Read more
Ritual Practice and Material Support: Objects in Ritual Theories
Citation with persistent identifier: Patera, Ioanna. “Ritual Practice and Material Support: Objects in Ritual Theories.” CHS Research Bulletin 1, no. 1 (2012). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:PateraI.Ritual_Practice_and_Material_Support.2012 https://vimeo.com/57934924 Confined to the religious sphere [ritual] has some minimal utility. But used in the wide manner of ethologists (the rituals of copulation), archaeologists (with their… Read more
Abstract: Ritual Practice and Material Support: Objects in Ritual Theories
“Ritual” has long attracted classicists. While building on anthropological theories, however, the field of classics has not yet fully explored or integrated recent developments into its hermeneutics. While anthropologists have written and thought a great deal about “ritual” and the adequacy of the term for describing repetitive actions in religious… Read more