Chapter 3 examines the blood libel invented by Hyppolitus Guarinoni in 1619, Tyrol, Austria. The fictional murder of the boy, Andreas of Rinn, would have taken place in July of 1462. The accepted explanation for this unusual blood libel is a response to Protestant incursions into the Tyrol area, where Rinn is located. The chapter provides a systemic account of the blood libel, which includes complex responses to drought, plague, famine, along with the continuing influence of pagan magic. These elements created an internal dissonance within the Catholic system that Guarinoni was trying to fortify.

This essay examines the oracular responses of the oracle of Dodona portrayed in fifth-century BCE Attic tragedies. This analysis explores the wording of the oracular answers, characterized by extreme conciseness and clarity, and the topic of the queries, on household security, family matters, and final journeys. The evidence from the lead tablets at Dodona corroborates this focus, showing that while the oracle addressed various concerns, a significant number of private queries dealt with family, health, marriage, and travel. Additionally, the responses from Dodona were brief and straightforward, in contrast to the cryptic nature of Apollo’s oracles at Delphi.

The introduction argues on the basis of historical and social-cognitive research that it is likely that Paul and other early Christ-followers were influenced on some level by ethnic stereotypes. It outlines the following chapters, in which this hypothesis will be tested, and discusses why and how reception history will be integrated into these analyses.

Chapter 6 outlines three embodied systems – schema, image, and global – in order to explain the nature of systemic dissonance in the human body, along with the signal generated by this dissonance. The chapter discusses a number of religious cases of embodied dissonance, including spirit possession in India, body modification in the United States, the Hindu Kavadi practitioner in Southeast Asia, and the complicated bodily phenomena that characterize the life of the twelfth-century mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux. Systemic theory allows us to understand some embodied religious practices as complex responses to an internal body-self dissonance rather than the effect of a single cause.

Symeon’s Hymn on Divine Love offer one abbot’s answer to the question, “What do monks want?” Or rather, “What did what one abbot want his monks to want?” In his poems, Symeon enacts longing and desire. His expression of passionate love of God borrows vocabulary and tropes found also in the ancient Greek novel. Far from sublimating queer desire, Symeon seeks to activate and engage it. Unfulfilled queer longing thus becomes the essence of monastic love, as Symeon cultivates eros within the confines of expected celibacy.

Chapter 7 examines the function of humor, clowns, and fools within religious systems. The systems under discussion are from India, biblical Israel, Nepal, Europe, and even corporate England. The chapter argues that clowns and fools act as signal generators reflecting the dissonance within the systems and challenging the internal boundaries on which systems depend to maintain order. This humorous disruption enhances the dynamic quality of the systems, permitting its viability over time.

For a long time, Greek sanctuaries were studied from a positivist perspective, that is, in terms of their spatial evolution and the typologies of their architecture and artefacts. At the sanctuary of Dodona, this perspective has also been applied to a great variety of structures and objects. The present paper offers new ways of looking at one of the most intriguing classes of objects found at the sanctuary, the lamellae on which were written the questions for and answers from the oracle. Consistent with the growing interest in the materiality of writing, we discuss the physical properties of the lamellae and the contexts in which they were used with respect to their adoption at the sanctuary during the Archaic period. We argue that the ease with which lead tablets can be inscribed, folded, and transported made this material more suitable for the context of the sanctuary than ostraca, another inexpensive medium often used for writing in ancient Greece.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main argument of the book. It emphasizes the specificity and particularity of systems. It also repeats the insight that religion and systems theory belong in the humanities because the response to systemic dissonance requires the conscious attention of participants in the system. However, the responses are not predetermined by the nature of the dissonance and can take a variety of forms. Finally, the basis for comparing religion, is not the similarities among phenomena but the role of the systemic mitigation within specific systems.

Niketas Stethaos (c. 1005–c. 1065) was a monastic leader who was keen to manage the erotic energies of his novices. He encouraged monks at the Stoudios Monastery to exchange one salty fluid for another, to abandon semen for tears. Ejaculation offers fleeting and shameful pleasure, but tears of compunction acquire an emotional intensity that becomes orgasmic, gushing, and perpetual. Bodily repentance becomes an erotic act of its own.

Sound and hearing play a crucial role in the conceptualisation and perception of divine entities, cultic places, and ritual processes. Sound phenomena can evoke religious experiences, structure ritual communication and stimulate desired emotional responses, whilst exposure to certain resonance frequencies can affect the human body, thereby influencing one’s perceptions and states of consciousness. This essay analyses the Dodonean soundscape, exploring the potential affect of the various sonic experiences in relation to the process of consultation. In addition to the diverse sensory input from the natural environment, which in the case of Dodona is crucial, as it can be surmised from the traditional accounts of the oracular oak, special consideration is given to the chalkeion of Dodona, a remarkable sonic installation that offered one of the most unusual auditory experiences to the pilgrims. Based on the symbolic and sound properties of the chalkeion, it is possible to suggest that the soundscape at Dodona invited a form of ecstasy or meditation, with the potential to alter the focus of attention and consciousness, thus allowing for new forms of knowledge to become available.