Late antique religion between animism and cosmotheism

Guest Lecture with Johan Brun Mendes Cederfeldt, PhD-candidate, Department for the Study of Religion, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University.

Discussions about religion and nature have in recent years assumed a still more central role in the study of religion. In these discussions, the late antique period (roughly the period between Marcus Aurelius and Muhammed) has a particularly important and contested status. Since Hans Jonas’ work Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist, a widespread narrative has portrayed the late antique religious traditions as pervaded by an anticosmic rejection of the natural world. Still, it is in these very traditions that we see the development of ideas about natural correspondences and sympathies, of the natural world as a forest of symbols and hidden meaning – ideas that would be foundational for the conceptions of nature in the subsequent traditions of Western Esotericism.

This presentation will be a guided tour through the complex and varied landscape of late antique religion and its relationship to nature. We will visit the enigmatic theurgical rituality of pagan Neoplatonism, the cosmos mysticism of hermetic spirituality and the construction of sacred landscapes connected to the emerging Christian cult of the saints. Across these phenomena we find a tension between disenchantment and reenchantment, monism and dualism, as well as delocalisation and relocalisation of the sacred in nature.

All are welcome (free of charge).