CRASIS Annual Meeting - "Sensing, Making, Relating: Ontologies of the Divine"

We were honoured to have received Prof. Esther Eidinow (University of Bristol) as keynote speaker and master. The overall theme of the 2023 Masterclass and Annual Meeting was:

Sensing, Making, Relating: Ontologies of the Divine

How did the ancients imagine their gods? What did a god look like? How did a god behave? Ontology is the ‘study of being’, and ‘an ontology’ is a theory of the nature of existence, which offers a description of knowledge in a particular domain: a set of concepts, their characteristics, and the relationships between them. Regarding the gods of ancient cultures, scholars have conjured a rich variety of such ontologies, prioritising a variety of different dimensions. From the origins of gods and their evolution to, more recently, psychological and sociological models, these have categorised divinities and their relations in different ways, for example, treating the gods as individuals or as interrelating powers. Alongside scholarly exploration of ontologies of the divine, a renewed interest in the ontology of belief in the divine has also developed. In the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars emphasised ritual, alongside what Henk Versnel has famously identified as the “modern notion [that] ‘belief’ did not and could not ‘exist’ in Greek (or any other traditional non-Christian) religion” (2011: 539). But the cycle of scholarship has turned again: renewed attention to the gods has accompanied a shift in focus, from one that concentrates on the external activities of cult to one that, at least, acknowledges the possible internal processes of the worshipper. The gods are now studied with a rich diversity of perspectives and methods, examining both concepts of divinity and how these may have been experienced. From network theory to naming practices, from sensory experience to interrogations of ‘belief’, the result is a burgeoning field of inquiry that raises plentiful new themes and questions, many of which will be central to the Annual Meeting. This master class asks participants to explore past, present and potential ontologies of the divine in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, and their development/maintenance, investigating by what processes or activities—physical or mental, material or metaphysical, individual or communal—the gods were imagined and experienced. The focus of study may be perceived ancient ontologies and/or modern approaches (to the extent those can be separated) in Greek and Roman cultures, early Judaism and Christianity.

Speakers Masterclass 2023

• Eleni Giamarellou Bourmpouli (St Andrews): Experiencing Power and Emotions in the Margins: The Erinyes in Aeschylus; Eumenides
• David Wilson (King’s College London): Making Gods Real through Choral Dance
• Laura Osigwe (Groningen): Docetism and Plato's ontology
• Rhiannon Paré (Princeton) : The Golden Girls: Materiality of the Divine in the Roman Empire
• Marte Zepernick (Vienna): Materialised Belief? Ancient Greek Votives and the Gods
• Pim Schievink (Groningen). Constructing the sacred on Kos: voices, practices and experiences in the Asklepieion of Kos during the Hellenistic period
• Krzysztof Pierzchalski (Jagiellonian University Krakow) Gods that can be seen. Dreams and epiphanies in ancient Mediterranean cultures

Speakers Annual Meeting 2023

• Keynote: Esther Eidinow (Bristol): Divine and Human Narratives, Time and Being
• Marianne Kleibrink (Groningen) : Pallas Athena and her korai: a reconstruction based on terracotta figurines and their archaeological contexts at Francavilla Marittima (Calabria)
• Saskia Peels (Groningen): Imagining Greek gods as ‘networks’
• Joe Barber (Oxford), The Mythological Past and Ritual Present in the Hittite Disappearing God Texts
• Joshua Scott (Augsburg): Divine Midwives? Heavenly Messengers at Jesus of Nazareth’s Birth
• Michiel van Veldhuizen (University of North Carolina Greensboro) Detecting Diving Agency: The Case of the Earthshaker
• Miriam Kamil (Hamilton College): Furiae, Erinys, Eumenides: A Taxonomy of Furies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses