Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity

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This volume aims to sift through the polemics to make sense of the daunting mosaic of religious belief and practice in late antiquity. In the waning years of the Roman Empire, Jews, Christians, and Pagans alike used rituals to bridge the human and the divine. labelled negatively as magic or positively as theurgy . This led to numerous problems of interpretation, including marginalizing certain ritual practices as magic or occult while privileging others as genuine or orthodox. From rabbis who ascended to heavenly places to sorcerers seeking to harm enemies with spells, the text reveals how ritual practitioners held common assumptions about why their rituals worked and how to perform those rituals. It aims to shift the discussion out of the rhetoric of magic or mysticism and describe the mechanisms of ritual with semiotic terms, so moving us beyond the value-laden terminology of ancient polemicists and modern scholars so that we can better see how these rituals worked and how they affected the social identities of their followers.