The Materiality of Divine Agency

Description

Two topics of current critical interest, agency and materiality, are here explored in the context of their intersection with the divine. Specific case studies, emphasizing the ancient Near East but including treatments also of the European Middle Ages and ancient Greece, elucidate the nature and implications of this intersection: What is the relationship between the divine and the particular matter or physical form in which it is materially represented or mentally visualized? How do sacral or divine "things" act, and what is the source and nature of their agency? How might we productively define and think about anthropomorphism in relation to the divine? What is the relationship between the mental and the material image, and between the categories of object and image, image and likeness, and likeness and representation? Drawing on a broad range of written and pictorial sources, this volume is a novel contribution to the contemporary discourse on the functioning and communicative potential of the material and materialized divine as it is developing in the fields of anthropology, art history, and the history and cognitive science of religion. Acknowledgments Preface Contents Abbreviations List of Illustrations Contributors Part I: The Material Divine: Anthropomorphism, Animation, and Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing the Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective The Animation and Agency of Holy Food: Bread and Wine as Material Divine in the European Middle Ages Part II: Divine Materials, Materiality, and Materialization in Mesopotamia “What Goes In Is What Comes Out” – But What Was Already There? Divine Materials and Materiality in Ancient Mesopotamia Imperial Allegories: Divine Agency and Monstrous Bodies in Mesopotamia’s Body Description Texts Divine (Re-)Presentation: Authoritative Images and a Pictorial Stream of Tradition in Mesopotamia Part III: A Feast for the Senses: Visual and Auditory Engagement with the Divine and Divine Agents in the Ancient Near East Seeing and Socializing with Dagan at Emar’s zukru Festival The Voice of Mighty Copper in a Mesopotamian Exorcistic Ritual Index