Tag: The Sacred


Teaching ‘The Sacred’ as An Art Historian

by Marguerite Mayhall*, Kean University. The carved relief lintel showing Lady Xok performing a bloodletting ritual for her husband Shield Jaguar’s accession to the throne of the Maya site of Yaxchilan is a startling image (top left image, Lintel 24). Xok, dressed in an elaborate huipil, or woven dress, kneels while she draws a barbed rope through her tongue and piles it in a bowl in front of her. Her husband, the king-to-be, stands over her, holding a torch and […]

Read More from Teaching ‘The Sacred’ as An Art Historian

The World is a Funny Place

As I remarked to someone on Facebook some years ago, all it takes is a slight tweak in some of our cherished texts in the study of religion to make plain how problematic the work actually is — i.e., how deeply embedded the argument is in a set of presumptions about the world that likely need to be examined instead of simply assumed. Case in point: consider replacing the words “sacred” and “profane” as follows in this famous passage: If […]

Read More from The World is a Funny Place

The Eternal Return All Over Again

I wrote a post recently in which I critiqued a new book by Brent Plate, saying it (along with other developments in the field, such as the turn toward so-called embodied or lived religion) was evidence that the work of Eliade was still representative of the field, no matter how much distance some may claim separates us today from when he first wrote many of his now famous studies in the history of religions (that is, back in the 1950s). […]

Read More from The Eternal Return All Over Again