O Brasil na nova cartografia global da religião

Este artigo analisa as mudanças sociais, econômicas, culturais e religiosas que fizeram do Brasil um polo importante de produção do sagrado numa emergente cartografia global. Esta cartografia é policêntrica e entrecortada por uma miríade de redes transnacionais e multi-direcionais que facilitam o rápido movimento de pessoas, ideias, imagens, capitais e mercadorias. Entre os vetores que vamos examinar estão: imigrantes brasileiros que na tentativa de dar sentido ao processo deslocamento e de manter ligações transnacionais com o Brasil levam suas crenças, práticas, identidades religiosas para o estrangeiro, missionários e outros "entrepreneurs" religiosos, o turismo espiritual de estrangeiros que vão ao Brasil em busca de cura ou desenvolvimento espiritual, e as indústrias culturais, a mídia e a Internet que disseminam globalmente imagens do Brasil como uma terra exótica onde o sagrado faz parte intrínseca de sua cultura e natureza

Religion and the historical imagination : esoteric tradition as poetic invention

In this contribution, it is argued that the concept of "imagination" should be restored to the status of a crucial key term in the study of religion. More specifically, attention is focused here on the importance of the historical imagination as an object of research (as distinct from its importance as a factor in research) and its relation to strict historicity. The dynamics of the historical imagination can be analyzed in terms of a double polarity: factuality versus non-factuality and poeticity versus non-poeticity. Historical narratives with a high degree of poeticity tend to be remembered and have an impact on readers even if they are factually inaccurate, while narratives with a low degree of poeticity tend to be disregarded or forgotten even if they are factually accurate. Against this background, four infl uential historical "grand narratives" are analyzed: (1) the Renaissance and predominantly Catholic story of "ancient wisdom" through the ages; (2) its negative counterpart inspired by Protestant polemics, referred to as the story of "pagan error" through the ages; (3) the Enlightenment story of progress through rational "Enlightenment"; and (4) its counterpart more congenial to Romantic sentiments, the story of a progressive "education of Humanity." Such imaginative narratives have a strong impact because they are able to engage the emotions, and hence we need to analyze how specifi c narratives afford specifi c economies of emotionality. Because religious grand narratives are the refl ection of highly eclectic types of historiography, they need to be countered by an anti-eclectic historiography that does not sacrifi ce factuality to poeticity. And yet, it is at least as important for historians to accept the task of telling new "true stories" about religion too: narratives that engage the imagination of their readers without sacrifi cing nuance, complexity, and factual accuracy

How Hermetic was Renaissance Hermetism?

Based upon key publications by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1938) and especially Frances A. Yates (1964), it has been widely assumed that an important "Hermetic Tradition" emerged during the Renaissance and that Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (first ed. 1471) was at its origin. This article argues that these assumptions need to be revised. Close study of Ficino’s original translation (on the basis of Maurizio Campanelli’s recent reconstruction and critical edition, published in 2011) makes it questionable whether Ficino understood much of the Hermetic message at all; and the famous (unauthorized) first edition of the Pimander (1471) turns out to be corrupt in many crucial respects, leading to a long series of defective editions that obscured the actual contents of the Corpus Hermeticum for Renaissance readers. Hence we seem to be dealing with a Renaissance discourse about Hermes, but hardly with a Hermetic "tradition" in any meaningful sense of the word