Symbolic Representations of the Pendulum Movement (in Polish and East Slavic Folklore and Traditional Culture)

This article is devoted to the symbolic representation of the pendulum movement, such as rocking, swaying and swinging. The research covered Polish and East Slavic  folklore, ethnographic and linguistic material. The analysis aims to reach the conceptual basis of pendulum motion developed from the physical experience of movement and related events such as magical practices and rituals. To interpret the material, pre-linguistic conceptual schemas and narrative study, it uses tools to reconstruct the procedures of rites de passage. Examining the contexts and associations accompanying the magical activities of pendulum motion led to the disclosure of archaic beliefs that go back to the myth of creation. The broad spectrum of issues related to the performative power of rocking, swaying and swinging allowed us to present an embodied conceptualisation of the primary movement experience as the universal model of cosmic rhythms.

The Presence of Messianism and Millenarianism in Brazilian Folk Religiosity in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous unorthodox Christian religious communities sprang up in many parts of the vast Brazilian interior. Their worldview basis was the belief that the present life takes place in times of cosmic and social crisis. Waiting for the day of the Last Judgement was associated with attempts to establish a just social order, consistent with Christian norms and values. These communities were led by charismatic leaders, perceived by their participants as incarnations of saints. In this article, we ask about the circumstances and reasons for this religious and social revival, and we consider them in the perspective of the meeting of European culture with the cultures of the New World, understood as the process of creating a new, common symbolic universe.

* Artykuł przygotowany przy finansowym wsparciu Narodowego Centrum Nauki – grant nr 2017/27/B/HS1/00234. 

Zoroastrian Women in Temples: Places of Worship in the Perspective of the Zoroastrians Diaspora in the USA

In this article, I approach the issue of temple visits by Zoroastrian women living in the USA. I analysed the field material in terms of the motivations and circumstances of these visits. The analysis showed that the women visit both Zarathushtrian places of worship in the immediate area, as well as those located further away, including in their old homelands, although they valorise them differently and motivate the need for such visits differently. Some perform religious practices at temples of other religions.

This article is an attempt to present the problem of abandoning the Muslim religion in favor of Christianity. The article is based on materials collected and stored in the archives of Russia (Saint Petersburg), Lithuania (Vilnius), and Belarus (Grodno). These mostly contain either surviving records of baptisms sent to the consistory or police reports. The cases of conversion among nineteenth-century Muslims in the territory of the Russian Empire cited in the article have served as the basis for this phenomenon’s typology in the Muslim Tatar community. Moreover, they have provided the basis for analyzing whether it is possible to fit them into pre-existing conversion models in social sciences. The examples quoted in the text show the kinds of life problems that prompted Muslim Tatars to abandon the religion of their ancestors, e.g., terminal illness, the issue of marriage, or the likelihood of rejection by one’s group. It should be mentioned that there had already been conversions among Muslim Tatars in the early period of their settlement. However, this trend has never taken on a mass character, as evidenced by the relatively good condition of the Muslim community living in the former territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Ritual Places of Contemporary Pagans in Kraków

In the following article I describe ritual places used by four Kraków Neopagan groups (Native Polish Church, Group Mir, Free Rodnovers of Kraków, and Reformed Druids of Gaia Poland). The most important locations include the surroundings of Krakus Mound (along with the Liban quarry below and the ‘sacred circle’ on the opposite site of the quarry) and Grove by the Wilga river. The used sites and their context are analysed, as well as the reasons why a particular place was chosen. I focus on the perspective of my interviewees, using Kim Knott’s spatial analysis and the combination of the three approaches by Belden C. Lane. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with members of the studied groups, I distinguish three categories of reasons (physical; connected to culture and tradition; metaphysical), which show the multidimensional character of the decisions made and many perspectives in which ritual places are perceived.

This text is dedicated to uncovering conditions for interpretation in the philosophy of Eric Voegelin. According to Voegelin, human existence is a matter of interpretation and its essence is constituted in tension towards the so-called divine ground of reality, i.e. nonobjective transcendence. I argue that the condition for any understanding of the human being, as well as the reorientation of human existence, is the divine presence dwelling in language, in history and in the subject itself. However, it is not a presence of some kind of object, content, or being –rather, it is a unpresentable ‘flow’or ‘flux’of presence, a flow that instils a primordial mobility in reality and orients man in his being.

* The article was written as part of the research project 2019/33/N/HS1/01868 “Filozofia religii Erica Voegelina – pomiędzy fenomenologiąa hermeneutyką”, financed by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki in Poland.