In a recent article in the journal Kernos (2018, 31: 39–58), Julia Kindt compared ancient Greek epiphanic and oracular narratives and rightly argued that although both epiphany and divination explore analogous issues of limited human cognition at the face of the divine, recent studies of divine epiphany (Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion, Cambridge University Press 2011, and Georgia Petridou, Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture, Oxford University Press 2015) tend to keep discussions of these religious phenomena separate. This chapter is an attempt to readdress this seeming imbalance by focusing more explicitly on complex self-conscious narratives pertaining to incubation (enkoimesis, kataklisis) in Imperial Pergamum, a religious practice that could be thought as offering an interesting intersection of divine epiphany and what Kindt calls ‘inspired divination’. More specifically, this paper focuses on the dynamics and problematics of diagnostic and therapeutic divination, as delineated in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Discourses (Hieroi Logoi, Or. 47–52 Keil), Galen’s De curandi ratione per venae sectionem (4.23 = 11.314–315 K.), and contemporary epigraphic evidence from the temples of Asclepius in Pergamum and Epidaurus.

Tantalizing similarities between Euripides’ Bacchae and the historical ritual of the oreibasia— – a mountainside dance performed for Dionysus – have fascinated and polarized scholars for over a century. The wild women of myth are depicted as ecstatic devotees of the Dionysian cult, or as raging, murderous avatars of the god’s vengeance. But in the tightly regulated civic cult, ritual practitioners were respectable women who honoured Dionysus by imitating his mythological entourage.<break/>The question of whether ritual participants could have experienced ecstasy and epiphanic visions has stimulated a long-running debate encompassing hysteria, belief, and the interplay between cult and myth. Lacking first-hand accounts, historians have struggled with reconciling the ecstatic ‘madwomen’ of myth with the prestige of the civic cult performance, but the apparent gap between ritual performers and mythical exemplars may not be so wide. Inspired by Jan Bremmer’s 1984 paper on the physiological effects of the oreibasia, I revisit the ancient evidence with a cognitive interpretative framework, looking at ritual experience in the embodied mind. Incorporating theories of agency detection and predictive processing, I explore how an interdisciplinary approach can integrate artistic and historical narratives, and better understand the lived experience and religious identity of historical maenads.

The chapter opens by making the case for a capacious understanding of the psychology of the religious imagination. Psychological capacities and propensities, it is suggested, are enabling as much as they are constraining, and religious actors creatively employ these capacities and propensities as much as they are unknowingly subject to them. The particular phenomenon for which this notion of the religious imagination is then explored in the bulk of the chapter is the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy; the relevant imaginative capacity is the human propensity for make-believe. The chapter argues that both externally, as a form of make-believe, and internally through details of the dialogue between god and characters, deus ex machina scenes pull systematically in two directions: the religious experience they enable is one in which there is room simultaneously for both belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, commitment and distance. A subsidiary strand of the argument aims to contribute to current debates about the notion of ‘belief’ in scholarship on Greek religion. The chapter emphasizes that ‘belief’ is usefully understood as sometimes including an attitudinal dimension. This attitudinal dimension comes to the fore in the deus scenes.

In this chapter, I consider the outlines of a pedagogy for leisure, offering examples that aim to show, more than tell, what a leisure-informed pedagogy looks like. While there is no surefire recipe or formula for leisure, certain parameters can help us cultivate leisure. The three guidelines outlined in the previous chapter – apprenticeship, study, and epiphany – are present in all three examples noted below, but each illustrates one particular guideline more prominently than the others.

Without a Messiah expected, and if one’s current pain or trial is meaningless, why not commit suicide? In the Modernist canon, suicide is typically putting an end to one’s misery because there’s no reason not to do so, or because one is in any event a machine caused to do so by necessary causes and effects. Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus is an essay on how to live without hope or suicide; his novel The Plague starts with an averted suicide and ends with limited hope – or a hope for limits. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins and ends with the central duo’s wish, both times deferred, to hang themselves. Modernist responses to the question of meaning, and the attendant problem of suicide, include: persisting in hope or waiting despite the minimal probability of hope’s fulfillment (Franz Kafka, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Beckett); the epiphanies of the everyday, getting what it seemed you hoped for even without exactly having hoped for it (Virginia Woolf); affirmation of the repetitions, recurrences, and accidents of natural and human life, overcoming their sameness through an act of will (Camus).

The relics of the Magi who had visited the infant Jesus were enshrined at the cathedral at Cologne in the twelfth century, where they became an important focus of pilgrimage. The cult was widespread and diverse in form, and was especially focused on the season of Epiphany; devotional practices included formal liturgical rites, representative drama, and the invocation of the Magi in medical remedies. This chapter considers the relationship between such categories as devotional and liturgical in relation to examples of the cult in Insular sources. In particular, the presence of a votive Mass for Travellers of the Three Kings of Cologne, as found in a fifteenth-century manuscript belonging to priest Henry Wells, presents an opportunity to consider individuals for whom the cult held particular significance.

This chapter examines the significance of wonder in ancient conceptions of music, choral song and dance. The essential role of wonder in ancient religious thought as an effect which often accompanies epiphanic encounters between gods and humans and which naturally arises within the ritual space created by song performance is explored. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is examined as a case study in which the rich relationship between music, semata (signs) and thauma in the Greek imagination is particularly evident. This chapter also discusses the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the Odyssey and the story of Arion in Herodotus’ Histories.

The second chapter, closely aligned with the first chapter, continues the earlier discussion of cult and divine movement to further reflect on the visual depiction of divine arrival and absence in different media. A first section reviews key texts for reflecting on the visuality of Apollo's arrival from Hyperborea. The second section turns to relevant physical images of Apollo as the travelling god. The third section expands the discussion to assess what has often been read as stone epiphanies of Apollo's return on the metopes of late Archaic and Classical temples. The fourth section continues the reflection on stone epiphanies through focus on the single most prominent visual depiction of Apollo's return, and one of the most significant divine representations of the Greek world: the late-sixth century BCE East pediment of the Alcmaeonid temple at Delphi. The fifth section looks at Plutarch's reading of the pediments of the fourth-century BCE temple in De E apud Delphos (387f–389c), and his cosmographical reconfiguration of the theology of Delphic divine alternance between Apollo and Dionysus. The sixth section focuses on Pausanias' reading of the Galatian shields set up on the north and west metopes of the same fourth-century temple.

Some critics polarize Joyce and Yeats by invoking the Irish Literary Revival. This practice, which can seem unduly based on sectarian divisions, the politics of post-1916 Ireland, and the retrospective formulation of ‘Modernism’, fails to address adequately Yeats’s and Joyce’s common origins in the Aesthetic and Symbolist ethos of the 1890s, their common dedication to ‘the religion of art’. Yeats’s profound influence on Joyce attaches Joyce to the Revival, as does the struggle between different brands of cultural nationalism as represented by Joyce in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Walter Pater was fundamentally important to the aesthetics of both Yeats and Joyce; the Paterian ‘epiphany’ as a symbolic structure bridges their poetry and prose; and Charles Stewart Parnell, who can assume qualities of Pater’s ‘artist-hero’, complements Pater in his importance to both: to their dialectics between art and history. The chapter ends with a discussion of some startling thematic overlaps c. 1914 between Yeats’s Responsibilities and Joyce’s Portrait.

With one important exception, dreams in the Homeric poems follow a traditional formula of visitation or epiphany and provide the dreamer with a clear message from a supernatural power. The one exception, Penelope’s dream in Odyssey 19, is better read as a coded message than as a dream in light of its context and its divergence from the standard dream formula.