The discussion of ritual killing and sacrifice of humans in Old Norse religion has a long tradition. In the more text oriented discipline of history of religions, the opinion has sometimes been very critical to the theories that human sacrifices were performed, while the discipline of archaeology has been more inclined to interpret some finds as the traces of sacrifice, although sometimes due to a too wide definition of the word ‘sacrifice’. Since the two disciplines use different sources, the research needs an analysis of the religious phenomenon with a consideration of the archaeological material, and with respect to how the two disciplines may contribute to the analysis. The written sources mention and describe human sacrifices, but the question of their authenticity is problematic. Some new archaeological surveys have revealed finds that has raised the question of human sacrifices during Late Iron Age in the northern countries anew. The new archaeological material may provide an altered interpretation of the written texts. But then we need to discuss the definition of ‘human sacrifice’ from the perspectives of both disciplines.

This thesis has two aims. One is a discussion of the history of the study of Old Norse religion and related aspects, centered on how general tendencies within the area of research have affected the interpretations of the god *Tīwaz/Tyr. Thereby, it treats a selection of influential trends of interpretation, and a selection of prominent scholars of the field. The second aim is an empirical and comparative analysis of the Old Norse source material and, to some degree, the continental Germanic, the Baltic, and the other Indo-European material. Tyr has been interpreted according to trends of research in the field; the mythological character has been used as a projection screen of the theories. Already from the beginning, Tyr was interpreted as a sky god; connected to this was the conception of an original high god. The interpretations of Tyr as a sun god, sky god, and/or law god are close related to this high god conception. These interpretations of the god Tyr has built their arguments upon the etymological connection to Indo-European words for ‘heaven, celestial’ and ‘god’, but they have not taken enough consideration of the Old Norse sources. Georges Dumézil interpreted Tyr, according to his système tripartite, as a law god. This understanding of the god has been widely adopted, but cannot be confirmed; the Old Norse material only speaks of Tyr as a war god. The comparative Indo-European etymological material indicates that his function as sky god is archaic, while the martial traits shared with the continental Germanic and Celtic counterparts prove that this characteristic must have evolved early. Tyr (or rather his predecessor *Tīwaz) lost his celestial traits and became an unmitigated war god, and as such we perceive him in the Old Norse religion. 

This thesis analyses the late-Vedic goddess Śrī and her non-personified precedent śrī ‘splendour, glory, excellence, fortune’. Śrī has not before been studied in the light of the Avestan royal splendour, xᵛarənah, and is often interpreted one-sidedly as a pre-Aryan goddess of prosperity. In contrast, this thesis locates the genealogy of Śrī’s characteristics in the Vedic goddess of dawn. The meaning of light in Vedic poetic and sacrificial terminology is highlighted, especially in the relation between royal patron and priest-poet. Śrī’s relation to terms like varcas and tejas, the “shining fame” of the hero, and epic descriptions of blazing warriors, are discussed. The nimbus in early Indian iconography is compared to descriptions of royal splendour in the texts. A subsistent theme in epics, myths and Vedic rituals is identified: the splendour won, lost and recovered by the king. This paradigm is showed to be dependent on the truthfulness, sacrificial status and asceticism of the king. A new understanding of central events in the royal consecration ritual, in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata are thereby offered. It is argued that a continuous and richly varied concept of royal splendour can be identified, from the Ṛgveda to the great epics, and that it is of considerable importance in the ancient Indian rulership ideology.

Key words:  Royal splendour, śrī, goddess Śrī, Avestan xᵛarənah, tejas, varcas, svayaṃvara, ascetic, legitimation of power, fire, sun, dawn, Indra, Viṣṇu, rājasūya, king and priest-poet, Vedic ritual, Vedas, Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, Indo-European.

The ”vrātya problem” has been discussed for more than a century. It is not clear who the vrātya is, as some Vedic passages describe him in a cryptic manner. That the vrātya continues to engage scholars is demonstrated by two recent publications, both with T. Pontillo as one of the editors: The Volatile World of Sovereignty: The Vrātya Problem and Kingship in South Asia (2015), and Vrātya Culture in Vedic Sources (2016). In this review article I look at the two volumes in context of previous reseach and discuss a handful of the contributions. I also refer to a number of vrātya-related articles published elsewhere.

Ritual is often seen as a safe and certain of success. That the question of risk and failure is important for our understanding of ritual has, however, been argued by an increasing number of scholars. This article analyses two Vedic śrauta rituals - the horse-sacrifice and the royal consecration - from this perspective. According to brahmanic theory, sacrifice implies a dangerous break-up of cosmic structure; once started, a ritual must be successfully brought to an end, or the performer will come out lesser than before. Royal ritual also involves political dangers: being a claim to overlordship, rivals might oppose and defeat the sacrificer. Śrauta ritual appears not as a microcosm devoid of danger and unknown outcome. Rather, risk increases a ritual’s value and is an essential part of Vedic royal ritual, wherefore the most awesome sacrifice has the highest risk factor. Danger and conflict in śrauta ritual reflect the aristocratic-agonistic culture in which it evolved.

The article explores, from an Indo-Iranian comparative perspective, the concept of 'royal splendour' and its role in myth, ritual and political discourse, in ancient Indian and Iranian texts. It argues that there are similarities both on the level of details (terminology, imagery, motifs) and on a broader level (ruler ideology), some of which likely go back to Proto-Indo-Iranian culture. The article relates the Avestan xvarenahto the Vedic sri- and varcas-, as well as their Avestan counterparts sri- and varecah-. It looks at how the Vedic/Avestan epithet apam. napat-/apam napat- is connected to the motif of aquatic and royal splendour. The Avestan concept of royal splendour, it is argued, also shares key characteristics with the late Vedic and early epic goddess Sri. As the fickle and mobile consort of successive kings, whom she approaches or abandons depending on their virtues, the epic Sri is reminiscent of xvarenah-.

Den som säger sig tillhöra en viss religion kan i praktiken vara mer eller mindre troende, eller inte troende alls. Det kan handla om att man firar vissa högtider men utan att särskilt bry sig om deras religiösa innebörd, eller att man ibland deltar i gudstjänster och ber någon gång i månaden, eller ett liv iständig hågkomst av Guds närvaro. Spektrat av religiositet för en person kan vara allt från att religionen endast har kulturell betydelse till att man lever sitt liv helt enligt dess påbud, såväl som att man anser att religion är en privatsak till att man arbetar för att samhället skall formas enligt religionen.

Vad gäller islam i Sverige har de muslimska samfundens organisation och aktiviteter beskrivits i ganska stor detalj. Däremot finns inte mycket kunskap om de värderingar de står för. Och vad gäller värderingar och övertygelser hos muslimer i allmänhet finns nästan ingenting skrivet. Denna uppsatstar fasta på den kunskapsbristen.

Genom en enkätbaserad attitydundersökning av explorativ karaktär med muslimska SFI-elever somrespondenter har följande frågor undersökts:

- Är fundamentalism ett utbrett fenomen inom denna grupp?

- I hur stor utsträckning anser man att shari’a bör gälla för muslimer i Sverige och vad är attityden tilldemokrati?

- Hur ser relationen mellan religion och moral ut och hur uppfattas det svenska samhället i dettasammanhang?

Undersökningens resultat är överlag i samstämmighet med tidigare undersökningar med liknande teman. Respondenterna har en överväldigande positiv attityd till demokrati och en stor del anser också att yttrandefrihet är bra. Samtidigt tycks många mena att islam är undantaget yttrandefriheten ochatt islamiska regler är viktigare än svensk lag. Stödet för shari’a är också påtagligt. En stor majoritet menar att gudstro är nödvändig för att vara en moralisk person och anser samtidigt att Sverige är ett moraliskt land.

På grund av urvalsmetoden och den stora andel som avstått från att delta i undersökningen kan resultatet inte generaliseras utanför gruppen av respondenter.

The conditions for the creation, distribution and reception of myths have changed drastically during the late modern era. Do myths exist at all in the contemporary, Western societies? If so, where are they and what do we then mean by “myth”? The article is a sketchy overview of different areas where myths might be found, and the author simultaneous tries to discuss relevant definitions of myth. From the conceptualization of myth in the Enlightenment and Romantic era the article moves on to discuss the reception of mythology in New Age spirituality, the invention of Nationalist mythologies and the issue of myths in the products of the Culture industry and commerce. The main focus is on the debatable issue wither or not the liberal, “post-politic” discourse of contemporary Westerns democracies – a discourse often presented as drained of any fantastic rhetoric and only concerned with practical, instrumental decisions – could be said to contain myths.

Wisdom on the Move explores the complexity and flexibility of wisdom traditions in Late Antiquity and beyond. This book studies how sayings, maxims and expressions of spiritual insight travelled across linguistic and cultural borders, between different religions and milieus, and how this multicultural process reshaped these sayings and anecdotes. Wisdom on the Move takes the reader on a journey through late antique religious traditions, from manuscript fragments and folios via the monastic cradle of Egypt, across linguistic and cultural barriers, through Jewish and Biblical wisdom, monastic sayings, and Muslim interpretations. Particular attention is paid to the monastic Apophthegmata Patrum, arguably the most important genre of wisdom literature in the early Christian world.

Scholars agree that the imagination is central to esoteric practice. While the esoteric vis imaginativa is usually attributed to the influx of Neoplatonism in the Italian Renaissance, this article argues that many of its key properties were already in place in medieval scholasticism. Two aspects of the history of the imagination are discussed. First, it is argued that esoteric practice is rooted in a broader kataphatic trend within Christian spirituality that explodes in the popular devotion literature of the later Middle Ages. By looking at the role of Bonaventure’s “cognitive theology” in the popularization of gospel meditations and kataphatic devotional prayer, it is argued that there is a direct link between the scholastic reconsideration of theimaginative faculty and the development of esoteric practices inspired by Christian devotional literature. Secondly, it is argued that the Aristotelian inner sense tradition of the scholastics left a lasting impression on later esoteric conceptualizations of the imaginative faculty. Examples suggesting evidence for both these two claims are discussed. The article proposes to view esoteric practices as an integral part of a broader kataphatic stream in European religious history, separated out by a set of disjunctive strategies rooted in the policing of “orthopraxy” by ecclesiastical authorities.

The imagination is central to esoteric practices, but so far scholars have shown little interest in exploring cognitive theories of how the imagination works. The only exception is Tanya Luhrmann's interpretive drift theory and related research on mental imagery cultivation, which has been used to explain the subjective persuasiveness of modern ritual magic. This article draws on recent work in the neuroscience of perception in order to develop a general theory of kataphatic (that is, imagery based) practice that goes beyond the interpretive drift theory. Mental imagery is intimately linked with perception. Drawing on "predictive coding" theory, the article argues that kataphatic practices exploit the probabilistic, expectation-based way that the brain processes sensory information and creates models (perceptions) of the world. This view throws light on a wide range of features of kataphatic practices, from their contemplative and cognitive aspects, to their social organization and demographic make-up, to their pageantry and material culture. By connecting readily observable features of kataphatic practice to specific neurocognitive mechanisms related to perceptual learning and cognitive processing of mental imagery, the predictive coding paradigm also creates opportunities for combining historical research with experimental approaches in the study of religion. I illustrate how this framework may enrich the study of Western esotericism in particular by applying it to the paradigmatic case of " astral travel" as it has developed from the Golden Dawn tradition of ritual magic, especially in the work of Aleister Crowley.

This is an open peer commentary to the target article, "(Re)defining Esotericism", by Steven Engler and Mark Q. Gardiner, published in Aries 24.2 (2024).

Four years ago, we announced the intention to introduce a new article format in Aries: The target article with open peer commentaries.1 The format has much to offer our field. Target articles are an excellent way to highlight topical issues, while open commentaries and author responses can facilitate dynamic discussions that include a broader range of voices. As the study of esotericism is expanding in terms of disciplinary approaches, geographic and cultural locations, subject matter, and sheer demographics, it is more crucial than ever that this journal provides ways for open, transparent, and inclusive scholarly debate.

This chapter considers a cross-historical selection of cases from the ritual magical traditions and discusses explanations of how such practices may produce subjectively convincing experiences of otherworldly beings on the one hand, and methodological questions of how we might best study them on the other. The chapter argues that our best model is found in the framework of predictive processing, through which magical ritual should be seen as an expectation management technology that manipulates material-environmental, sensory-motor, and ideational/conceptual processes in ways that set the practitioner up for certain kinds of perception-like experiences. The picture emerging is that magical ritual produces (hetero)phenomenologically similar experience narratives through a variety of different techniques, which include elements such as sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic substances, (auto)hypnosis, hypnagogic states, and visualization, but are always grounded in a material-semiotic dimension through which things, gestures, and sensations are imbued with meanings that point towards an otherworldly reality.

The idea that esotericism is a form of “rejected knowledge” is back in vogue. This idea was also central to the so-called sociology of the occult of the 1970s, a research program that esotericism scholars have largely dismissed. Through a reassessment of this literature I argue that much of the criticism leveled at it missed the mark, and that mining it for theoretical resources can help us refine the field’s own undertheorized rejected knowledge narrative. In particular, the sociology of the occult offers useful tools for theorizing the historicity, substance, social significance, and social organization of esotericism as rejected knowledge.

The election of the 45th president of the United States set in motion a hidden war in the world of the occult. From the meme-filled underworld of alt-right-dominated imageboards to a widely publicized “binding spell” against Trump and his supporters, the social and ideological divides ripping the American social fabric apart are mirrored by witches, magicians, and other esotericists fighting each other with magical means. This article identifies key currents and developments and attempts to make sense of the wider phenomenon of why and how the occult becomes a political resource. The focus is on the alt-right’s emerging online esoteric religion, the increasingly enchanted notion of “meme magic,” and the open confrontation between different magical paradigms that has ensued since Trump’s election in 2016. It brings attention to the competing views of magical efficacy that have emerged as material and political stakes increase, and theorizes the religionizing tendency of segments of the alt-right online as a partly spontaneous and partially deliberate attempt to create “collective effervescence” and galvanize a movement around a charismatic authority. Special focus is given to the ways in which the politicized magic of both the left and the right produce “affect networks” that motivate political behaviors through the mobilization of (mostly aversive) emotions.

Western esotericism is intimately linked with conspiracy theories. On the one hand, conspiracy theories often focus on alleged “secret societies” such as the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, or the Freemasons, sometimes thought to possess superhuman powers. On the other, contemporary esoteric currents often spin their own conspiratorial narratives involving reductionist science, materialistic medicine, and corrupt repressive politicians, acting in concert to keep the true esoteric knowledge of divine origins and human potential from a population starved of spiritual truth. How might we explain these relationships? This article proposes a model that combines historical, sociological, and psychological factors, arguing that the relationship is intrinsic. Historically, “esotericism” is a product of mnemohistorical processes where “hidden lineages” from ancient times to the present play a crucial role, both for adherents identifying with such secret traditions and opponents attributing unwanted developments to secret cabals; socially, esotericism is organized along the lines of the loosely structured and culturally deviant “cultic milieu”; psychologically and cognitively, the cultic milieu produces selection pressures that favour certain personality traits and cognitive styles associated with increased conspiracism as well as paranormal beliefs and attributions, and produce forms of “motivated reasoning” that make conspiracy theories about “the establishment” – and competing esoteric groups – appealing.

While the handbook as a whole establishes the study of conspiracy theory as an interdisciplinary subfield in the study of religion and transcends the usual geographic limits in studies of conspiracy beliefs, this afterword identifies key topics that should be developed further in future research. Mediatization, transnational flows, and glocalized uses of conspiracy theories are topics that continue current research trends, but there is also need for considering the role of specific religious organizations. The dynamic relationship between organized religion and state power, when conspiracism is disseminated from above, is another area that tends to be overlooked in current research. Some geographical and cultural areas are left all but untouched, with conspiracy thinking in non-literate societies a particularly glaring lacuna. A broadening of methodological approaches is also warranted. Gender, sexuality, and the body are central loci for both organized religion and conspiracy theories, but notably absent from existing research. Finally, the role that religion might play not only in the creation, spread and adoption of conspiracy beliefs, but also in in resistance against them deserves further attention.

Det Egyptiska sekelskiftet var minst lika omvälvande som det Franska, och Aghili lyckas även i Egypten gravitera mot händelsernas centrum. Trots att Aghili befinner sig i Kairo under vad som kommit att kallas den islamiska renässansen, och att han själv kan sägas vara engagerad i en av tidens reformrörelser, gapar forskningen om denna tid i hans liv av stora hål. Religionshistorikern Frédéric Brusi kontextualiserar i sitt bidrag Aghilis religiopolitiska verksamhet i Egypten, men pekar också på en rad oklarheter i Aghilis biografi, oklarheter som öppnar mot nya forskningsfält.

"Islam behöver en reformation" är ett påstående man ofta får höra i debatten. Det påståendet bygger på tre premisser: att islam är en monolit som varit oförändrad genom seklerna: att kristendomens utveckling är normativ för andra religioner; samt att reformation är liktydigt med framsteg och modernitet Frédéric Brusi problematiserar i denna artikel dessa premisser.