PAGANISM PERSISTING

Robin Douglas and Francis Young. Paganism Persisting. A History of European Paganism Since Antiquity. University of Exeter Press, 2024.

The first question of course, is 'what is Paganism?' The word 'pagan' arose amongst Christians in the fourth century to describe their unconverted neighbours. It was derived from the Latin paganus, which has a number of possible translations, including 'civilian' and 'villager'. It is not clear why this term was used, but it is clear that it was meant to have negative overtones. 

🔽

DEVILS AND DEMONS

Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman. Demons, the Devil, and Fallen Angels. Visible Ink Press, 2018.

"The devil goes by many names, and his tribe is legion. Throughout human history, we have been obsessed with the dark opposites of God and angels, light and mercy. Whether it is our religious and sacred texts, folklore, and myths of old; legends, fairy tales, and novels; or the movies and television shows of today, the dark entities enthrall us, terrify us, and remind us of the the duality of good and evil."

🔻

SWIMMING AGAINST THE CURRENTS

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

One of the most original and fearless thinkers around, Jeffrey J. Kripal is that rarest of creatures: an academic (Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought) at a respected institution (Rice University) who is willing to admit his acceptance of paranormal and Fortean phenomena of the highest degree of strangeness. 

🔽

NEW AGE GNOSTIC

April D. DeConick. The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutioniseed Religion from Antiquity to Today. Columbia University Press, 2016.

For those expecting to read what the author promises in the title, there will be great disappointment, since the theme of the history of countercultural spirituality is barely mentioned until the last chapter when the author states that "this brief chapter is not the place to map the complex movement of Gnostic spirituality from antiquity to the present"!
🔻

BELIEVING IN NOT-BELIEVING - THE NEW ATHEISTS

Nathan Johnstone. The New Atheism, Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion. Palgrave Macmillan 2018.

The New Atheists is a term coined to described the group of militant atheists that emerged after the shock of 9/11. Comprising the biologist Richard Dawkins, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, the philosophers Daniel C. Dennett and A.C. Grayling, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the astronomer Victor Stenger, and others.
🔻

HOLY GHOST

Robert Conner, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story, Tellectual Press, 2018

I plucked this one from our editor’s grasp as soon as he’d pulled it from his goodie bag of new books to review and before any fellow Magonians could get a look-in, having become something of a fan of Robert Conner’s writing after reviewing two of his previous works, Magic in Christianity and The Secret Gospel of Mark. I knew I was in for a treat, and I wasn’t disappointed.

🔻

LAW AND LEGEND

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer. The Talmud: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2018.

Until fairly recently, most non-Jews had either never heard of the Talmud, or else were under the impression that it gave instructions upon how to sacrifice Christian children. It is actually a massive compendium of early Jewish thought. The core of it, termed the Mishnah, is a systematic law code.
🔻

CHRISTIANIZING EGYPT

David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity, Princeton University Press, 2018.

Most accounts of the spread of Christianity in its early centuries tell the story through the actions of emperors and bishops and the structuring of the Church into an institution with authority and a clearly-defined message. In contrast, in what he calls a ‘remodelling’ of the subject, David Frankfurter, professor of religion at Boston University, takes a ‘bottom up’ approach.
🔻

HOLY DEATH

Tracey Rollin. Santa Muerte. The History, Rituals and Magic of Our Lady of Holy Death. Weiser Books,  2017.

How-to-do-it books on magic, almost unobtainable a generation ago, are a growth industry. Those in English, at least, are rooted in the practices of the Golden Dawn and Wicca, even when some quite different slant is ostensibly given to them, such as ‘Practical Egyptian Magic’.

🔻

AND WAS JERUSALEM BUILDED HERE IN ASHTON-UNDER-LYNE?

Jane Shaw and Philip Lockley (editors). The History of a Modern Millennial Movement: The Southcottians. I.B.Tauris, 2017. 

This collection of eleven papers traces the development of the various sects and groups claiming descent from Joanna Southcott (1750-1814 ), who proclaimed herself as the “Woman clothed with the Sun” out of Revelations and who believed she was about to give birth to a new Messiah, the Shiloh. Instead she died and her followers divided over the years into various groups.

🔽

THE LOTUS POSITION

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. The Lotus Sutra: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2016

When Lopez, who for twenty years has taught a course at the University of Michigan called ‘Introduction to Buddhism’, was asked to write about The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Princeton’s continuing excellent ‘Lives of Great Religious Books’ series, he consented if they would let him follow it with an account of a ‘more authentically Buddhist’ text.
🔽

CALVIN AND THE CRITICS

Bruce Gordon. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton University Press, 2016.

The late Bernard Levin, in his book Enthusiasms, devoted a chapter to the pleasures of reading. As a counterpoint, he included a selection of works which, he considered, no-one could derive any pleasure from reading. At the head of his list was Calvin’s Institutes.
🔻

BURNING BRIGHT

Joscelyn Godwin. Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State. Excelsior Editions, University of New York Press. 2015.

In the early 19th century, western and central New York State became known as the burned-over district. The evangelist Charles Finney coined the phrase, saying that so many fires of religious revivalism had swept across the district in such a short time, there was no fuel (unconverted people) left to burn (convert). 

🔻🔻🔻

BETWEEN DEMONS AND SAINTS

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints. Pennsylvania University Press, 2015.

Ermine, who died in 1396, was a widow who had caught hard religion, which entailed mortification of the flesh and that sort of thing. Over the last ten months of her life she experienced a series of mainly, but not exclusively, night visions. Strange people entered her bedroom and tempted her. A naked couple came into her room and had sex in front of her.
🔻

MARK, MY WORDS

Robert Conner, The Secret Gospel of Mark: Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and Four Decades of Academic Burlesque, Mandrake of Oxford

Robert Conner seems to be specialising in books about controversies stirred up by New Testament scholar Morton Smith. Earlier this year I reviewed his Magic in Christianity, which largely examined Smith’s idea that Jesus was, essentially, a sorcerer. In this book he turns to Smith’s other claim to fame/notoriety, his discovery of the one-time existence of a ‘secret’ version of Mark’s Gospel.

🔻

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN

Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician, Hampton Roads Press, 2014 (first published 1978)

---

Robert Conner, Magic in Christianity: From Jesus to the Gnostics, Mandrake, 2014

These two new releases complement each other neatly, one being a reprint of a ground-breaking study and the other a survey of the work that built on it. As Bart D. Ehrman notes in his foreword to the new edition of the late Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician, its appearance in 1978 marked a watershed in New Testament scholarship, as it introduced a new, and to many unwelcome, factor into the already problematic quest for the ‘historical Jesus’.
🔻

RED-HANDED

Joshua T. Searle. The Scarlet Woman and the Red Hand: Evangelical Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Northern Ireland Troubles. Lutterworth Press, 2014.

Most British people of my generation can remember the long Northern Ireland Troubles, the euphemistic term for the de-facto civil war that raged in that province from 1968-1998 and is not entirely dead. They also remember that religion fused with ethnicity played a major role in that conflict. 

🔽

THE BHAGAVAD GITA

Richard H. Davis. The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton University Press, 2015.

The Bhagavad Gita began as an aside in the Mahabharata, a massive eighteen-volume epic on the wars between two branches of the same family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Before the battle royal commences, Arjuna, one of the Pandava leaders, expresses his concern about it to his charioteer, Krishna, who happily chances to be an incarnation of ‘the Supreme Personality of Godhead’. 

🔽

BELIEF AND BELIEVING IN ET

David A. Weintraub. Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? Springer, 2014

Although the title suggests that this book is solely concerned with religious attitudes to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, it also gives a detailed survey of the methods used by astronomers to attempt to discover extrasolar planets and to identify any that might be capable of supporting life.
Paragraphs appear that are up to two pages long so you might want to read it in small doses rather than on the beach and an oxygen supply may come in handy too.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BIOGRAPHIES

Bernard McGinn. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2014.

---

David Gordon White. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2014.

The excellent ‘Lives of Great Religious Books’ series is continuing: McGinn begins by observing that few people have ever read the whole of the Summa theologiae, which runs to a million and a half words. Personally, I have only read the sections on demonology. Even Bertrand Russell’s compendious History of Western Philosophy deals mainly with the shorter Summa Contra Gentiles. 🔻