Chapter 5 outlines the way in which Plath’s poetry engages with the language and performance of ritual magic. It introduces the concept of ritual magic that employs ritualistic, incantatory language, such as chants, spells, and ritualistic acts. The chapter focuses on two poems, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Burning the Letters’, that engage with the idea of poetic spellcasting and argues that the poems seek inspiration from the ritual of exorcism or banishing spirits. The close reading relies on the drafts of the poems, highlighting Plath’s attribution of magical powers to poetic language that she often erased from the final versions of her poems. The chapter asks how Plath’s poems interrogate what constitutes ritual magic, engaging with the blurred boundaries between mundane and magical rituals and utilising the powers of poetic language.

Given the image controversies of the sixteenth century, Catholic theologians tended to reiterate careful formulations of the distinction between the image and its prototype, insisting that prayers to a Marian statue should be directed at the heavenly Mary above. Borromeo’s actions, however, show a different story in practice. He not only promoted miraculous images, but also helped to multiply them. Chapter 5 addresses Borromeo’s role in the post-Tridentine proliferation of printed and painted copies of miraculous images, works that by definition celebrated the intercessory powers of a particular physical image. Borromeo and other Catholic elites circulated copies of miracle-working images on a new scale. Artists, praised as skilled copyists, participated in this system of privilege. Printmakers, too, benefited financially from the production of miraculous image copies, further proliferated through the burgeoning print publishing industry. Borromeo advocated for traditional image rituals, which used a statue, painting, or even a print as a material locus of prayer, but he did so in a changed world that propagated miraculous image replicas for political, financial, and Counter-Reformatory purposes.

According to Dazai Shundai, ritual and music are essential elements of the government of the sages. They complement each other, with ritual drawing strict distinctions of status and establishing ethical standards for different types of human relationships, while music functions as a gentle force for bringing people together in harmony. Compared with other methods of governing, the superiority of ritual and music lies in their ability to enter people on a deep level and transform their customs, creating long-lasting stability without the need to rely solely on explicit laws. In order for ritual and music to work properly, though, they must be established by rulers who look back to the traditions of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan learned such ritual and music from China and used these to govern, but in recent times, vulgar ritual and music have arisen from among the common people, with detrimental effects for Japanese society. To remedy this situation, vulgar ritual and music need to be suppressed and replaced with proper ritual and music.

Folk dance remains a diffuse and contested concept and yet its performances and meanings retain contemporary saliency to many people across the world. This chapter reflects on definitional issues, the relationship of folk dance to ritual and folk dance’s embodied ideology in Europe and beyond. Given that nineteenth-century thinking haunts the later literature and manifestations of folk dance, I re-visit Felix Hoerburger’s concepts of ‘first existence’ and ‘second existence’ folk dance, together with their critique and key modifications by Andriy Nahachewsky and Anthony Shay. I consider contemporary ritual folk dancing that draws upon evolutionist theory for inspiration and discuss examples of folk dance as cultural heritage that bear performative testimony to perceived unbroken connections between land, people, gender, race and nation. I conclude by urging both persistent critical interrogation of folk dance as ideology in a global frame and further investigation of the choreographic and artistic relevance of folk dance to its widespread practitioners and audiences.

The project’s focus is on the calendar of republican Rome and the Julian reform, and its chief concern is its cultic and juristic significance. Cult rested most directly on rites, but it also involved law, which identified who might legitimately perform certain acts and where and when they might do so, and ideas about how the world worked, which might be implicit and poorly defined. The calendar’s days, months, and year were the crucial units, and all were tied in complicated ways both to the heavens and the activities of Rome’s priests and magistrates. In the ancient world, polities often sought to establish a homology with the heavens, ruled by the gods, and here calendars were crucial instruments. Studies of the Roman calendar often obscure these relationships, and studies of cult often devalue the importance of law.

The chapter discusses the development of sacramental doctrine during a period of lively debate on the subject around the year 1200, with a focus on the relevance of the Fourth Lateran Council as a continuation of the eleventh-century ecclesiastical reform movement, and with stress on the unique relevance of Paris as the key centre of intellectual production.

Herodotus’ Historiesare filled with instances of personal engagement with the supernatural. If we consider that phenomenon in the specific terms of ‘personal religion’, new patterns and questions emerge. This chapter demonstrates not only that personal religion in Herodotus tends to resolve itself in the political, but that this reinforces the point that there was no strict boundary between personal and polis religion. Most of the people whose experiences Herodotus relates remain ‘public figures’, and Herodotus’ historical narrative, by its nature, devotes significant attention to political affairs. Many episodes from the Histories involve atypical individuals. But their experiences with the divine nevertheless fit into common categories, and the concerns which lead these individuals to approach the divine are mostly nothing out of the ordinary. Herodotus’ stories reveal elements of personal religious practice which might otherwise be difficult to find in surviving sources. By considering both personal and civic aspects of Greek religious thought and practice in Herodotus’ work, we see the continuous presence of the gods in the lived experience of individuals.

The notion that curse tablets were used to cause harm whereas amulets were used to provide protection is a misleading oversimplification. Curse tablets have often been removed from the category of religion and consigned to the illusive one of magic. However, the existence of those tablets designated as prayers for justice illustrates that the desires which drove curse tablet creation were varied. To ascertain to what extent the use of curse tablets and amulets fitted in with polis religion, different aspects of them are examined, such as the ritualistic nature of their creation, their use of formulaic inscriptions and evidence for their use, or lack of use, of reciprocity. Examples of amulets and curse tablets are presented from the fourth century BCE through to the second century CE and from a large geographical scope. Examples from across the Greek world illustrate a paradoxical unity and sense of religious community amongst those who engaged in these practices. The incredibly personal nature of the inscriptions on curse tablets and the wearing of amulets provides an insight into Greek religious practice at an individual level.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

The instructions on ritual of Innocent I to a minor bishop under his immediate authority help explain why Charlemagne looked to Rome for liturgy.

The final chapter examines how a new kind of shamanism developed in the riverbank settlements and attracted peoples across the colonial and Indigenous spaces. Although shamanism was a feature of Amerindian societies, the Portuguese also had a tradition of healing and folk curing. Riverine shamans from Indigenous communities were highly active in the eighteenth century, and modified Indigenous practices and Catholic symbols to meet the needs of their clients from all backgrounds seeking their ‘merciful’ work. Shamanic curing and healing connected the three spaces as shamans moved between each one and provided clients with relief from their suffering.

This second chapter on Julian’s Against the Galileans traces the second movement of Julian’s strategy of narrative subsumption: charting the apostasies that cascaded from, first, the Hellenic and, then, the Hebrew traditions, culminating in the Christian sect. Having pointed out the basic compatibility between Hebrew and Hellenic doctrine, Julian emphasizes next the most significant difference between the two: the glaring inferiority of the Hebrew to the Hellenic tradition. This basic framework makes sense of Julian’s claim that Christians are double apostates: Christians started out as Hellenes, and their first mistake was of degree rather than kind: they opted for the lesser Hebrew tradition, rather than the Hellenic one. They latched onto a deviation within the Hebrew tradition, however, which became the grounds for their second apostasy, now away from the Hebrews, to create a new sect.

Kimberly Hope Belcher surveys an impressive number of authors and theories who have engaged with the broad human phenomenon of ritual. For it is evident that both classical ritual studies and more recent approaches have enormous potential for engaging in a dialogue with scholars of Christian liturgy and liturgies.