- Title Pages
- Preface
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
-
Introduction the Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century
-
1 What is A Greek God? -
2 Canonizing the Pantheon: The Dodekatheon in Greek Religion and its Origins -
3 Gods in Greek Inscriptions: Some Methodological Questions -
4 Metamorphoses of Gods into Animals and Humans -
5 Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations -
6 Getting in Contact: Concepts of Human—Divine Encounter in Classical Greek Art -
7 New Statues for Old Gods -
8 Zeus at Olympia -
9 Zeus in Aeschylus: The Factor of Monetization -
10 Hephaistos Sweats or How to Construct an Ambivalent God -
11 Transforming Artemis: From the Goddess of the Outdoors to City Goddess -
12 Herakles Between Gods and Heroes -
13 Identities of Gods and Heroes: Athenian Garden Sanctuaries and Gendered Rites of Passage -
14 Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods -
15 Gods in early Greek Historiography -
16 Gods in Apulia -
17 Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine -
18 The Gods in the Greek Novel -
19 Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine -
20 Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells -
21 Homo Fictor Deorum Est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells -
22 The Gods in Later Orphism -
23 Christian Apologists and Greek Gods -
24 The Materiality of God's Image: The Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology -
25 The Greek Gods in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century German and British Scholarship - Epilogue
- Index
Homo Fictor Deorum Est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells
Homo Fictor Deorum Est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells
- Chapter:
- (p.406) 21 Homo Fictor Deorum Est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells
- Source:
- The Gods of Ancient Greece
- Author(s):
Jan N. Bremmer
Andrew Erskine
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
This chapter starts by examining the fact that for most of Greek history, gods’ visits to humans were hard to discern--one never could be sure when or if a god were present, even within divinatory settings, when one would most expect that to be the case. It then moves on to contrast this with the situation found in later antiquity, particularly as expressed by divinatory rituals described by magical and theurgic texts. In these cases, the practitioner not only knew exactly what the visiting god or angel or daemon would look and sound like, but often was able to request that it manifest itself in a specific form. The paper explores these points by focusing particularly on four different types of divinatory experiences described by these texts: direct encounters (sustaseis, autopsiai), photagogia (leading in of divine light), lecanomancy and lychnomancy (divining by flames and water) and dreams.
Keywords: Spells, Magic, Theurgic texts, Dreams, Divination, Encounters with the divine, Angel, Daemon, Lecanomancy, Lychnomancy
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Preface
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
-
Introduction the Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century
-
1 What is A Greek God? -
2 Canonizing the Pantheon: The Dodekatheon in Greek Religion and its Origins -
3 Gods in Greek Inscriptions: Some Methodological Questions -
4 Metamorphoses of Gods into Animals and Humans -
5 Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations -
6 Getting in Contact: Concepts of Human—Divine Encounter in Classical Greek Art -
7 New Statues for Old Gods -
8 Zeus at Olympia -
9 Zeus in Aeschylus: The Factor of Monetization -
10 Hephaistos Sweats or How to Construct an Ambivalent God -
11 Transforming Artemis: From the Goddess of the Outdoors to City Goddess -
12 Herakles Between Gods and Heroes -
13 Identities of Gods and Heroes: Athenian Garden Sanctuaries and Gendered Rites of Passage -
14 Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods -
15 Gods in early Greek Historiography -
16 Gods in Apulia -
17 Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine -
18 The Gods in the Greek Novel -
19 Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine -
20 Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells -
21 Homo Fictor Deorum Est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells -
22 The Gods in Later Orphism -
23 Christian Apologists and Greek Gods -
24 The Materiality of God's Image: The Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology -
25 The Greek Gods in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century German and British Scholarship - Epilogue
- Index
