Download or read book The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus s Mysticism written by Zeke Mazur and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus’s Mysticism, Zeke Mazur offers a radical reconceptualization of Plotinus with reference to Gnostic thought and praxis, chiefly as evidenced by Coptic works among the Nag Hammadi Codices whose Greek Vorlagen were read in Plotinus’s school.

Download or read book The Platonizing Sethian Gnostic Background of Plotinus Mysticism written by Alexander J. Mazur and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential point of this dissertation is to demonstrate that a crucial element of Plotinus' thought--his conception of mystical union with the One--cannot be understood solely within the conventional history of philosophy, or as the product of a unique, sui generis psychological propensity, but rather must be reconceptualized in the broader context of contemporaneous Gnostic thought and praxis. The conclusion is that Plotinus tacitly patterned his mystical ascent to the One on a type of visionary ascent ritual that is first attested in Gnostic sources. These sources include the Platonizing Sethian tractates Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1) and Allogenes (NHC XI,3) of which we have Coptic translations from Nag Hammadi and whose Greek Vorlagen were known to have been read in Plotinus' school.

Download or read book Apocalypse of the Alien God written by Dylan M. Burns and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-02-19 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second century, Platonist and Judeo-Christian thought were sufficiently friendly that a Greek philosopher could declare, "What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?" Four hundred years later, a Christian emperor had ended the public teaching of subversive Platonic thought. When and how did this philosophical rupture occur? Dylan M. Burns argues that the fundamental break occurred in Rome, ca. 263, in the circle of the great mystic Plotinus, author of the Enneads. Groups of controversial Christian metaphysicians called Gnostics ("knowers") frequented his seminars, disputed his views, and then disappeared from the history of philosophy—until the 1945 discovery, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of codices containing Gnostic literature, including versions of the books circulated by Plotinus's Christian opponents. Blending state-of-the-art Greek metaphysics and ecstatic Jewish mysticism, these texts describe techniques for entering celestial realms, participating in the angelic liturgy, confronting the transcendent God, and even becoming a divine being oneself. They also describe the revelation of an alien God to his elect, a race of "foreigners" under the protection of the patriarch Seth, whose interventions will ultimately culminate in the end of the world. Apocalypse of the Alien God proposes a radical interpretation of these long-lost apocalypses, placing them firmly in the context of Judeo-Christian authorship rather than ascribing them to a pagan offshoot of Gnosticism. According to Burns, this Sethian literature emerged along the fault lines between Judaism and Christianity, drew on traditions known to scholars from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Enochic texts, and ultimately catalyzed the rivalry of Platonism with Christianity. Plunging the reader into the culture wars and classrooms of the high Empire, Apocalypse of the Alien God offers the most concrete social and historical description available of any group of Gnostic Christians as it explores the intersections of ancient Judaism, Christianity, Hellenism, myth, and philosophy.

Download or read book Brill s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity written by Harold Tarrant and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 679 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which ancient readers responded to Plato, as philosopher, as author, and more generally as a central figure in the intellectual heritage of Classical Greece, from his death in the fourth century BCE until the Platonist and Aristotelian commentators in the sixth century CE. The volume is divided into three sections: ‘Early Developments in Reception’ (four chapters); ‘Early Imperial Reception’ (nine chapters); and ‘Early Christianity and Late Antique Platonism’ (eighteen chapters). Sectional introductions cover matters of importance that could not easily be covered in dedicated chapters. The book demonstrates the great variety of approaches to and interpretations of Plato among even his most dedicated ancient readers, offering some salutary lessons for his modern readers too.

Download or read book Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition written by John Douglas Turner and published by Presses Université Laval. This book was released on 2001 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Practicing Gnosis written by April DeConick and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual, magic, liturgy, and theurgy were central features of Gnosticism, and yet Gnostic practices remain understudied. This anthology is meant to fill in this gap and address more fully what the ancient Gnostics were doing. While previously we have studied the Gnostics as intellectuals in pursuit of metaphysical knowledge, the essays in this book attempt to understand the Gnostics as ecstatics striving after religious experience, as prophets seeking revelation, as mystics questing after the ultimate God, as healers attempting to care for the sick and diseased. These essays demonstrate that the Gnostics were not necessarily trendy intellectuals seeking epistomological certainities. They were after religious experiences that relied on practices. The book is organized comparatively in a history-of-religions approach with sections devoted to Initiatory, Recurrent, Therapeutic, Ecstatic, and Philosophic Practices. This book celebrates the brilliant career of Birger A. Pearson.

Download or read book Gnosticism Platonism and the Late Ancient World written by Kevin Corrigan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Festschrift honors the life and work of John D. Turner (Charles J. Mach University Professor of Classics and History at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln) on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Professor Turner’s work has been of profound importance for the study of the interaction between Greek philosophy and Gnosticism in late antiquity. This volume contains essays by international scholars on a broad range of topics that deal with Sethian, Valentinian and other early Christian thought, as well as with Platonism and Neoplatonism, and offer a variety of perspectives spanning intellectual history, Greek and Coptic philology, and the study of religions.

Download or read book Histories of the Hidden God written by April D DeConick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Western religious traditions, God is conventionally conceived as a humanlike creator, lawgiver, and king, a being both accessible and actively present in history. Yet there is a concurrent and strong tradition of a God who actively hides. The two traditions have led to a tension between a God who is simultaneously accessible to humanity and yet inaccessible, a God who is both immanent and transcendent, present and absent. Western Gnostic, esoteric, and mystical thinking capitalizes on the hidden and hiding God. He becomes the hallmark of the mystics, Gnostics, sages, and artists who attempt to make accessible to humans the God who is secreted away. 'Histories of the Hidden God' explores this tradition from antiquity to today. The essays focus on three essential themes: the concealment of the hidden God; the human quest for the hidden God, and revelations of the hidden God.

Download or read book Gnosis written by Daniel Merkur and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the use of powerful gnostic visionary techniques from Hellenistic Gnosticism and Jewish merkabah mysticism, through Muhammad, the Ismaeilis, and theosophical Sufism to medieval neoplatonism, and renaissance alchemy.

Download or read book Gnostic Religion in Antiquity written by R. van den Broek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of Gnostic religion in Late Antiquity within its historical and religious context, using Greek, Latin and Coptic sources.

Download or read book Valentinianism New Studies written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valentinianism: New Studies offers fresh contributions by leading experts on the history of the Valentinian “Gnostic” church, on contested aspects of Valentinian doctrine, and on the use and interpretation of the New Testament by the Valentinians.

Download or read book Polish K Pop Fandom written by Julia Trzcińska and published by Stowarzyszenie Badaczy Popkultury i Edukacji Popkulturowej Trickster. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was written for people who would like to learn more about Polish K-Pop fandom, but it can also be of help for those who are looking for some basic information about fan studies or K-Pop in general. Korean music has only recently started to gain popularity in Poland (as well as in other European countries). Some may affiliate K-Pop with Psy’s Gangnam Style, a track which was virtually inescapable in the summer of 2012, but around that time the European K-Pop fandom was already well-developed, as evidenced by the Korean group Big Bang winning MTV European Music Award in 2011, or the flashmob fans organized in front of the Louvre museum that forced one of the biggest Korean entertainment companies to organize one more concert of their artists in the same year. Nevertheless, K-Pop’s international popularity peak is often being connected to BTS’ success, when they were awarded the Top Social Artist Award and successfully performed during the Billboard Music Awards in 2017. It would be difficult to say how many K-Pop fans there are in Poland now and how the number changed over the years, but it is still undoubtedly growing.

Download or read book Plotinus the Master and the Apotheosis of Imperial Platonism written by William H. F. Altman and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-01-29 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With both the Roman Empire and contemporary scholarship as backdrop, this book contrasts the Imperial Platonism of Plotinus with Plato's own by distinguishing one as a master enlightening disciples, and the other as an Athenian teacher who taught students to discover the truth for themselves in the Academy.

Download or read book The Gospel of Thomas and Plato written by Ivan Miroshnikov and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Gospel of Thomas and Plato, Ivan Miroshnikov offers the first systematic discussion of the Platonist impact on the Gospel of Thomas, arguing that Platonism is indispensable to making sense of those sayings that have long remained exegetical cruces.

Download or read book Goddesses and the Divine Feminine written by Rosemary Ruether and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-11-20 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The scholarship in this book is superior, revealing a depth of insight and a scope of knowledge possible only from a scholar who has lived with the concerns of feminist theology for decades. Ruether is a gifted storyteller, and lucidly translates complex ideas and debates. This work is of the highest importance, and Ruether asks the right questions at the right time. The text is groundbreaking."—Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Saint Mary's College of California "Ruether has provided a valuable introduction to an important feminist topic: what can we know about sacred female imagery in Western culture? She guides us through contemporary feminist scholarship, providing engaging narrative, and venturing her own interpretations. Ruether calls for feminists to move beyond divisions created by our different interpretations of prehistory and work together towards our common project of a more peaceful, just, and ecological world."—Carol Hepokoski, Meadville Lombard Theological School

Download or read book The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran written by Patricia Crone and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patricia Crone's book is about the Iranian response to the Muslim penetration of the Iranian countryside, the revolts subsequently triggered there and the religious communities that these revolts revealed. The book also describes a complex of religious ideas that, however varied in space and unstable over time, has demonstrated a remarkable persistence in Iran across a period of two millennia. The central thesis is that this complex of ideas has been endemic to the mountain population of Iran and occasionally become epidemic with major consequences for the country, most strikingly in the revolts examined here and in the rise of the Safavids who imposed Shi'ism on Iran. This learned and engaging book by one of the most influential scholars of early Islamic history casts entirely new light on the nature of religion in pre-Islamic Iran and on the persistence of Iranian religious beliefs both outside and inside Islam after the Arab conquest.

Download or read book Christen und Sethianer Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion um den religionsgeschichtlichen und den kirchengeschichtlichen Begriff der Gnosis written by Herbert Schmid and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Christen und Sethianer. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion um den religionsgeschichtlichen und den kirchengeschichtlichen Begriff der Gnosis versucht Herbert Schmid zu zeigen, dass es vermutlich keine Vorform der Gnosis an den Rändern des antiken Judentums gegeben hat. Sowohl Schenkes Sethianismus, als auch der Valentinianismus und andere frühe Ausprägungen der Gnosis sind vermutlich als frühe Versuche christlicher Theologie zu begreifen. In diesem Zusammenhang erweist sich der Begriff Gnosis als eine durchaus brauchbare Kategorie, um antike Religionsgeschichte zu beschreiben. In Christen und Sethianer. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion um den religionsgeschichtlichen und den kirchengeschichtlichen Begriff der Gnosis, Herbert Schmid argues that there are no hints for a more primitive and independent form of Gnosticism which developed on the fringes of ancient Judaism. Not only the Valentinian school, but also Hans-Martin Schenkes Sethianism and other early manifestations of Gnosis are probably best understood as early attempts to phrase Christian theology. In this context, the term Gnosticism is a useful category to describe ancient religious history.