This chapter examines how Sophoclean tragedy approaches and conceptualises the relationship between divine and mortal. It demonstrates that Sophocles builds on the early Greek theological, philosophical and literary tradition outlined in Chapter 1, but steers his own, distinctive course. It argues that Sophocles’ tragedies deploy ideas and beliefs about humans and gods in three, closely interconnected ways: in the explicitly theological and philosophical discourse uttered by characters and choruses; in the trajectories and experiences of individual characters on the stage; and in the broader, religious and ethical patterns that underlie these trajectories, which are occasionally and partially revealed to audiences. As part of its attempt to foreground the close interrelation of dramatic structure, form and content, the chapter devotes considerable space to a new interpretation of dramatic irony. This general discussion relies on readings of four Sophoclean plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, as well as on brief comparative analyses of some Aeschylean and Euripidean examples.

Romanticism Bewitched concludes with a discussion of Joanna Baillie’s Gothic tragedy, Witchcraft, written as a response to what she believed to be a missed opportunity by Scott in his novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, to explore the psychological and social dimensions of the rise of witchcraft. The first section outlines the similarities between Scott’s novel and Macbeth. Both Scott’s novel and Shakespeare’s tragedy take place in Scotland in a politically precarious moment with squabbling factions and dwindling confidence in the central authority of the government. In the second section, Baillie argues that the decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the female supernatural by Scott and others perpetuates damaging stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real problem – a social structure founded on inequity. Baillie’s tragedy explores the outbreak of accusations of witchcraft as the consequence of a diseased patriarchy and the abdication of the responsibilities of fathers, literally within the family unit and figuratively as the representatives of the authority of church and state.

This chapter investigates the ways in which Percy and Mary Shelley engaged with the idea of witchcraft. In The Witch of Atlas Percy Shelley playfully poses the question: what if God (or Christ) was a witch with a sense of humor? Like her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other Romantic-era women, Mary Shelley was suspicious of representations of female magic. All her novels chronicle how women who have or pretend to possess power, supernatural or otherwise, are inevitably sidelined or written out of the narrative by the men they love and the collusion of the social and historical contexts in which they find themselves. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of her novel, Valperga, arguing that the introduction of the figure of the witch enables Shelley to finish the novel that she struggled with and to find a way to avenge the wrongs done to the other two female characters.

Scott’s sympathy for the figure of the witch is put to the test in Guy Mannering with the introduction of Meg Merrilies, the Roma prophetess and witch. Merrilies’s status as a local sibyl and matriarchal leader within the Romany community is deliberately contrasted with Guy Mannering’s academic magic as an educated English astrologer, and, later, his social standing as a colonel and beloved father/patriarch. In addition, Merrilies’s powers as a storyteller or story-shaper are also in tension with Scott’s authorial control. It is not surprising, therefore, that the climactic resolution in Guy Mannering hinges on the death of Merrilies. Yet Scott’s effort to suppress and contain the disruptive presence of Merrilies by disposing of her is not entirely successful. This chapter concludes with a brief overview of the afterlife of Meg Merrilies in theatrical productions, Keats’s famous poem, and her influence on the aged Sarah Siddons.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

Chapter 1 argues that apocalyptic images and texts from the late Romantic period onwards respond to John Milton’s poetic treatment of temporality and grief in Paradise Lost, focusing on Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man. Shelley’s work, a project of revivification and memorialisation, challenges more conventional public narratives by embracing fragmentation and combining personal loss and universal catastrophe. In doing so, the novel draws on Milton’s epic, especially Adam’s prophetic vision after the fall. Shelley’s writings, including her letters, journals and Frankenstein, are read alongside John Martin’s apocalypse paintings and mezzotint illustrations of Paradise Lost. The chapter begins by positioning Shelley’s novel as a shared intertext for Martin’s The Last Man and Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley, both housed in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. It argues that Martin’s Paradise Lost illustrations more closely parallel Shelley’s literary response to Milton: both recreate Milton’s prophetic temporality and express apocalyptic grief through reference to darkness and light.

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 period between 1500 and 1700 is sometimes associated with a dip in Arthur’s popularity. In fact, this was a time of Arthurian reinvention, rather than decline: if Arthur did not appear quite as frequently, his appearances nevertheless reached a new peak in terms of their creativity and variety. Increased scepticism surrounding Arthur had a freeing effect, allowing him to be invoked in new and different contexts, from satire to archery shows, and pre-existing Arthurian narratives and geographies were revised. Perhaps unexpectedly, Arthur’s diversification seems to have peaked during the years when Arthur’s narrative was the most potentially dangerous, such as England’s Interregnum and the early Restoration years. At the same time, popular medieval Arthuriana continued to be consumed in manuscript and print; and many local Arthurian traditions were first recorded and brought to wider knowledge during these years.

While Arthur functioned as a point of reference and a hero to be emulated in early medieval Welsh texts, the rise in interest in utilising King Arthur and the values he stood for in visibly political ways becomes evident in the period following the twelfth century. Appropriations of the symbolism from Arthurian stories ranged from objects, performances, ceremonies, events (such as Arthurian-themed tournaments and pageants) and displays. This chapter interrogates the social and political uses of these varied instances of Arthurianism, linking them, where possible, to their Arthurian literary sources. It aims to show, selectively, the breadth of inspiration drawn from Arthurian legends across Europe for daily life, particularly among those who had urgent and real benefits to reap from association with the legendary king.

Deals with divine actions: are events in the world caused by divine interventions or by laws of nature? If both, which dominates? While some Jewish thinkers maintain that God is the only cause of anything, and that belief in other causes is a form of paganism or idolatry, others surprisingly endorse some form of naturalism (the idea that events in the world are brought about by natural causes). In the chapter I explore, through Jewish texts reasons that have been used to ground a theistic naturalist position.

Finally, the analysis turns to forces of resistance and rebellion. World history may be suspected of occluding the life of ordinary people and forces that could resist the ruling imperial elites and cultures so far discussed. This is a misunderstanding. World history has revealed a broad range of forms of resistance. These insights yield crucial tools for the Roman historian. The Greco-Roman literary record is teeming with references to rebellious activities, but most are very brief. By using the perspective of world history, these brief references may be brought to life and tell us about rebellions fuelled by millenarian prophecies, banditry and other forms of resistance. A world history perspective will also confirm the impression that peasant risings rarely succeeded in turning over the agrarian order. If we want to look for ‘revolution’, it more often came from frontier regions of the empire and usually arrived in the form of a new conquering force overturning the old imperial rulers. This was how the Roman world was brought to heal, both by its so-called Germanic federates and by the rise of the Arabs and foundation of their new empire on the basis of both Rome and Persia.

The extent to which religious motivations helped inspire the American Revolution has generated debate among historians. Some perceive the Revolution to be the convergence of the English radical traditions of religious dissent and political protest. In this view, a strong millennialist, anti-Catholic strain in Protestant evangelicalism saw the war of independence as an apocalyptic confrontation with the Antichrist. Other historians regard religion as a secondary factor in the independence movement. Yet consideration of connections between religion and Revolution cannot be limited to spiritual influences on the independence movement. Many enslaved African Americans embraced Protestant Christianity to criticize slavery and claim a right to freedom. Native American revival movements from the Great Lakes to the Deep South fueled resistance to colonial and Revolutionary land grabs. Loyalists asserted the same right to individual conscience as the Revolutionaries. Accordingly, the narrative of religion must include the sacred motives of many more participants, including those opposed to the struggle for independence.

This chapter turns from the question of the Gospels’ literary form to that of their literary formation. According to David Strauss, no preceding understanding of the Gospels shared closer proximity to the emerging “mythical point of view” than “ancient allegorical interpretation” – an astonishing claim left unexamined since his Life of Jesus was first published. Strauss’s comparison of the mythical and allegorical views cuts closer to the heart of Origen’s sense of the figurative nature of the Gospels than any other account of early criticism of the Gospels. Nevertheless, I challenge Strauss’s final charge of unrestrained interpretive “arbitrariness” resulting from Origen’s view. I show instead that Origen locates the formation of the Gospel narratives in the Evangelists freely “making use” of the traditions they had received for their own purposes, freedom reflected in the distinctive (even discordant) characteristics of their narratives, which differ according to how the authors sought, “each in his own way,” to “teach what they had perceived in their own mind by way of figures.” Thus, for Origen, the Evangelists themselves were “figurative readers” of the life of Jesus.

Chapter 1 opens with a description of the different peoples of the Americas in 1492 and the earliest contacts with Europeans, and outlines the process of Spanish penetration and settlement. It then explores indigenous reactions to Europeans at first contact, and analyzes the roots of the apotheosis of Europeans in Spanish America, arguing that it is misleading to distinguish too sharply between religious and rational considerations, and indicating that native peoples did not bow before the strangers as gods. The chapter then shifts the focus to the intellectual framework employed by Europeans to situate native peoples within a European worldview (European Mythology of the Indies I). Europeans interpreted indigenous peoples according to their own mythological concepts, such as the myth of the Earthly Paradise, the myth of the Reconquest of Jerusalem, the myth of the Marvelous East, and the myths of the Classical Tradition. The chapter ends with a summary of Spanish expansion into the Pacific.

This chapter tracks the hierocratic version through revisions of the manna and rock-water episodes (Exodus 16–17) and the scouts episode (Numbers 13–14), but its primary focus is a new version that begins at the sea (Exodus 14). This version is tracked through another revision of the scouts episode and readings of the episodes involving bitter water (Exodus 15), divine fire, quail, objection to Moses’s foreign wife (Numbers 11–12), and snakes (Numbers 21). The bitter water episode bypasses Aaron as mediator of torah and introduces the wilderness as a period of testing. The divine fire episode decentralizes the sanctuary and provides a way to mitigate threat of divine wrath as Moses intercedes with God. The quail episode initially protects Aaron’s control of meat consumption but is revised to reimagine the structure of Israel’s political leadership. Miriam’s complaint initially construes ritual impurity as a punishment for sin and transforms social isolation into banishment, but a revision sidelines Aaron and reestablishes Moses as a trustworthy mediator. Finally, God, the divine healer, prescribes the manufacture of a snake icon, which does not instill fear-driven obedience but prompts viewers to studiously reflect on uses and abuses of sovereignty.

Chapter 5 covers the tradition of the apotheosis in North America, principally the North East. It outlines the earliest encounters between Europeans and Native Americans and considers how the former were interpreted as shamans, as powerful spirits called manitou, or as the returning dead. The Europeans’ magnificent vessels conveyed an impression of extraordinary power, but not divinity. The chapter considers what a “first encounter” might mean where coastal natives had already had (sometimes decades of) experience of Europeans by the early seventeenth century. It then considers the extent to which European voyagers, such as Francis Drake, Thomas Harriot, and Walter Raleigh, engaged in self-apotheosis. The final section analyzes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century first encounters in the North American North West, the emergence of prophetic narratives and the significance of oral traditions.

Chapter seven opens with an account of the arrival of Captain James Cook’s expedition at Hawai’i, his association with the native ancestor god, Lono, and his death at the hands of the islanders. It then examines in depth the evidence for Cook’s identification with Lono, and the meaning of the Polynesian concept of mana. The rest of the chapter considers the merits of the two opposing views on how Hawaiians perceived Cook, the “Cook-as-Lono” interpretation, and the “Cook-as-Lono-as-myth” interpretation. It suggests that the “Cook-as-Lono” interpretation may be closer to the realities of Hawaiian ethnography, as long as we bear in mind that Lono, as an akua or “ancestor god” bore little resemblance to the western notion of “God;” and that the binary nature of the discussion (two clashing perspectives) may be a hindrance to appreciating a third interpretation which takes account of both sides. For Hawaiians, there was no inconsistency in seeing Cook as, all at once, a (Hawaiian) god, an ancestor spirit, a sacred high chief, and a man; both human and more-than-human (or human-plus) at the same time.