Invitation to a conference "The Cult of the Ruler in Antiquity and the Middle Ages" - updated (original) (raw)
The cult of the ruler, its ideology and practice and the related official art are among the most interesting and challenging issues of historical knowledge. In different cultural circles and societies the manifestations of the ruling cult have a diverse character, and their study from a modern perspective helps us to get a deeper and truer knowledge of the past.
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In this paper I discuss the dossier of cults for Arsinoe II Philadelphos to investigate how the worship of a sovereign could concretely become a constitutive part of the religious life of the communities composing a kingdom. I argue that in order to let the worship of a sovereign survive the political context in which it was first conceived, a certain degree of freedom and of individual initiative must have been encouraged among potential worshippers, so that the cults could become part of a durable shared religious and political identity connecting the individual with the collective sphere. The Appendix provides an up-to-date geographical catalogue of inscribed altars, stones and vessels pertaining to the cut of Arsinoe Philadelphos from Egypt, Cyprus and the Aegean world.
A methodology for the study of religions and cults of the Late Antiquity. a new perspective.doc
The study of the religions and cults of the Late Antiquity was based mostly by the Theological Schools on the characteristics of Gods, the theological teachings, the rituals or the ethnic tradition. Those elements werent always helpful in order to understand the development and the institution of the several religious traditions in the provinces and the social groups of the Roman Empire. We can find a lot of studies about the cult of Isis, Mithras, the Christianity and Judaism that are completely isolated by the social and religious context and as a result of this the researchers conclusions are generalities. Im going to present a different methodology for depicting the religious development of Roman Empire by categorizing the cults of this era according to a) the expansion of the religious community, b) the methods of promotion and establishment in several areas of the Roman Empire, and c) how a cult or a religious tradition is depended on a topos (religious place); especially, the topic/utopic depiction of the world (ecumene) can give us a lot of answers about the formation and mobility of these new cults. Those theoretical characteristics can help us form a new taxonomy for the cults of this particular era based not only on the factor of mobility but also on how people adapt and act after they have settled down on a new place.
Divine Leadership and The Ruler Cult in Roman and Contemporary Times
Imperial Leadership in the Roman World: Traditions and Transformations, 2020
Seeing how the idea of the ‘ruler cult’ and the necessary ‘myth-making’ to establish it exists to this day, as seen with the regime of a 21st century dictator like Kim Jong-il, it would be most interesting to see what parallels exist between cases of divine leadership and what we might learn about our contemporary cult rulers when looking at the dynamics of the two-millennia-old cult of the deified Emperor Augustus. As such, I have formulated a central question that focuses on the reign of Divus Augustus, and in doing so provides opportunity to extrapolate from it new insights in similar but contemporary figures of leadership. A clear case of 'to understand motives in the present, one must look at actions in the past.'
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