The anxieties over bodies and the afterlife gave religion its meaning for many communities and were inexorably connected to everyday life. Peter Berger wrote that death, “ presents society with a formidable problem not only because of its obvious threat to the continuity of human relationships, but because it threatens the basic assumptions of order on which society rests.” The care of bodies after death, including ritualized positions, cleaning and dressing of bodies dates back more than 100,000 years! B urial may have been a way for humans to ease anxieties after death, including the fear that improper ritual will lead to consequences for the deceased person in the afterlife. But do you ever wonder what kinds of traditions existed before the ones we commonly see today? What did the ancients do? Why did they do it? Well, wonder no more! Here are the most fascinating ancient burial rituals that we unearthed! The Most Fascinating Ancient Burial Rituals In the Archaic period the Greeks did not yet conceptualize the difference between a divinity and its statue.The ways that contemporary societies bury their dead are diverse and countless, ranging in method and meaning all over the world. As our global community grows increasingly technologically advanced and environmentally conscious, even our burials are shifting with new and sustainable burial practices. Therefore, stories that stressed the agency of statues separate from their divinities must have seemed less strange at that time than when the statues had become independent, so to speak, from their gods or goddesses. The latter started to happen in the transitional period to the Classical era when the well-known triad of divinities heroes mortals came into being, and philosophers began to criticize the worship of statues. All these changes together led to a development in which the agency of statues increasingly became noteworthy. After the 5th century BC we keep hearing about the agency of statues but we can also notice a growing critique of the worship of statues by different philosophical schools. In both Greece and Rome divine statues manifested themselves in particular during moments of crisis or of a decisive political character.
In the Greek East the belief in the agency of statues lasted until the 3rd century AD, as Archaic statues represented a kind of cultural capital for the Greeks under Roman rule. Yet, in the end the continuing philosophical critique, which had been radicalized by the Christians, made the agency of statues intellectually unacceptable.
This article investigates an important aspect of traditional religiosity, the veneration of statues, as a contribution to our understanding of the relationship between opinions (often philosophical) found in non-Christian texts and the actual religious practices of communities. These presented arguments for the religious use of statues on the basis that statues offered a symbolic presentation of divinity, served as an acceptable concession to limited human intellect, and represented something of the intelligible nature of the divine in material form. It appears that cult statues remained important until at least the fifth century, among intellectuals as well as among the general populace. As long as shrines existed, they continued to act as contact portals. With the destruction of shrines, the pagan community turned to other, humbler forms of worship. Rising in importance during this time is the intermediary role of the holy man and the recourse to hieratic magic.
Theurgic methods of invoking and compelling divine immanence relied on this long tradition of statue worship. It is here argued that the ardent commitment to cult and statues among prominent pagans was a response to the new situation after Constantine and the result of the close connection between philosophy and ritual in late Platonists through the theurgic dimension of late Neoplatonism. Which appeared in 1967 under the editorship of A. Since the publication of that work, an enormous amount of fundamental philological and historical scholarship pertaining to the philosophical works of late antiquity has appeared. New critical editions, commentaries and translations of important philosophical texts have made this vast complex of material more accessible to historians, who in turn have made considerable advances in the understanding of the last phase of ancient philosophy. Although this more than forty years of labour seems justification enough for a new survey of the period, it should not be supposed that all or even most of the assessments made in the earlier work have been summarily invalidated.
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