medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> Your points are well taken. But all the practices associated with Mary are
> also associated with other saints as well.
Marjorie,
Certainly. But in sheer numbers, Marian shrines beat out those of all other saints --
and in the vast majority of cases, without the aid of relics.
And as for "These are all social
> needs which religion has accommodated long before Christianity arrived on
> the scene." That is precisely what so fascinated Jung and others interested
> in the anthropology/psychology of religion. Me too.
I would myself distinguish between social needs and any sort of Jungian
"archetypes". That is not, in any case, what I was getting at. I remain highly
sceptical of the idea that "symbols" somehow spring from the subconscious. We all,
however, get hungry, suffer from various illnesses and eventually die. These are
ubiquitous to the human condition and create common human needs, regardless of
culture.
When I see Indians of
> the American southwest (no PC corrections please, that's what they call
> themselves when they aren't using their Indian names) using something very
> like incense and wearing shawls that look EXEACTLY like sacerdotal stoles, I
> wonder too. And, if I may further stick my neck out, priests of Assyria
> carved on reliefs wear headgear designed to make them resemble fish. They
> look like they're wearing mitres.
As with the Jungian stuff, I am wary of such seeming formal similarities.
Anthropology has developed the concept of "parallel evolution" exactly to explain
resemblances that are not directly related to one another. And this brings up the
probably unanswerable question of when ritual began. All of these peoples used
fire, as well, the earliest evidence for which I believe was found in northern China;
half a million years later, it had spread to Europe. Where there's fire, there's
smoke. When people started using smelly smoke, I don't know.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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