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The Salpinx in Greek Cult
No full textThe salpinx is not often treated by scholars of ancient Greek music, because it was mainly a military instrument. The instrument was usually not used for musical purposes, only for giving signals. In Greece the salpinx is known from the 8th century onwards. The Greek salpinx was an aerophone, usually made of bronze, and consisted of an 80 to 120 cm long, straight, tube with cylindrical bore, and with a conical or more often bell-shaped final, kodon, which could be made of bone. The bone had to be fired in order to get the right acoustic qualities, according to Aristotle. Salpinx is usually translated as "trumpet", but the type of sound generator it may have had has been discussed
Christian rock concerts as a meeting between religion and popular culture
No full textDifferent forms of artistic expression play a vital role in religious practices of the most diverse traditions. One very important such expression is music. This paper deals with a contemporary form of religious music, Christian rock. Rock or popular music has been used within Christianity as a means for evangelization and worship since the end of the 1960s. The genre of "contemporary Christian music", or Christian rock, stands by definition with one foot in established institutional (in practicality often evangelical) Christianity, and the other in the commercial rock musicindustry. The subject of this paper is to study how this intermediate position is manifested and negotiated in Christian rock concerts. Such a performance of Christian rock music is here assumed to be both a rock concert and a religious service. The paper will examine how this duality is expressed in practices at Christian rock concerts
Sjiele sacrifices, Odin treasures and Saami graves?
No full textThis paper presents archaeological findings described as Saami metal deposits. These well-known "Finds from Lapp Places of Sacrifice", objects from the Viking Age and Early Middle Ages, were mostly found in northern Sweden. The author also presents a research project dealing with prehistoric and medieval Saami graves from the south Saami area
Spiritual and religious aspects of torture and scalping among the Indian cultures in Eastern North America, from ancient to colonial times
No full textOnly a few decades ago a common perception prevailed that the historical Native Americans were very prone to violence and warfare. Scalping and torture were seen as a specific custom attached into their ideology and sociocultural ethos. However in the 1960s a completely reversed picture started to emerge, following the course of other worldwide movements, such as ethnic rights, pan-Indianism, ecological conscience, revisionist historiography and so on. Immediately the Native American people came to be seen as the victims of the European colonialism and the Whites were the bad guys who massacred innocent women and children, either at Sand Creek or in Vietnam. Books were written in which the historians pointed out that the practice of scalping was actually not present in the Americas before the whites came. This theory drew sustenance from some early colonial accounts, especially from the Dutch and New England colonies, where it was documented that a special bounty was offered for Indian scalps. According to this idea, the practice of scalping among the Indians escalated only after this. On the other hand, the blame fell on the Iroquois tribesmen, whose cruel fighting spread terror throughout the seventeenth century, when they expanded an empire in the north eastern wilderness. This accords with those theorists who wanted to maintain a more balanced view of the diffusion of scalping and torture, agreeing that these traits were indeed present in Pre-Columbian America, but limited only to the Iroquoians of the east. Colonial American history has been rewritten every now and then. In the 1980s, and in the field of archaeology especially, a completely new set of insights have arisen. There has been a secondary burial of the myth of Noble Savage and a return of the old Wild Indian idea, but this time stripped of its cartoon stereotypical attachments. The Indians are now seen as being like any other human beings, with their usual mixture of vices and virtues. Understanding this, one may approach such a topic as scalping and torture without more bias than when reading of any practice of atrocities in human history
Die Samen in der UdSSR
No full textThe article offers a chronological overview of Sami people living in the area of the USSR, focusing on demography and population growth, from the earliest records dating to the ninth century until the 1980-ies
Non-Buddhist Buddhism and non-Christian Christianity in Japan
No full textThe New Religions in Japan, is in disguise a real renascence of Buddhism. That, for one thing, it forces Buddhism into accommodating and streamlining for the new age at a much more rapid pace than would otherwise have been possible, and that, for another, the New Religions themselves in reality represent Buddhism with its fantastic ability to change. It may to some extent be said that Buddhism is a religious idea in constant movement more than a religion as such—and some observers might be tempted to say that Buddhism, as represented by the New Religions, has moved so far that it has been cut off from its roots and no more is master of its development. The Buddhist will probably answer that this is exactly the main pride of Buddhism, that it always accommodates, that it thrives on syncretism and religious cocktails, that it is always in evergreen renascence, modern to all times
In God’s name: practising unconditional love to death
No full textIn this article the author considers some of the ways in which those with religious authority might exercise their power by persuading believers to perform actions that they (the believers) would not have dreamed of performing had not justifications been presented to them in the name of religion. There are, of course, reasons other than religion – love and money, to take but two obvious examples – that lead people to do things that they would not otherwise have done, but religion would seem to add that extra something (for good or evil) that can inspire people to believe and act with an added fervour, an extra commitment, and an extra disregard for other considerations. If we really believe that it is God who wants us to do something then we are more likely to do it (or at least feel more guilty if we do not do it) than if George or Tony or even our guru asks us to do it – unless we believe that our guru is God, or is the only one with a direct hotline to Him (or Her). We may even be prepared (in both the active and the passive senses of the word) to kill ourselves and others for what we have come to believe is ‘the cause’, as happened in a situation described in this article