286-I Negotiating the Crisis: The Role of Sanctuaries as Places of Resilient Religious Experiences 09:00 - 10:40 Friday, 3rd September, 2021 Ada Campione, Laura Carnevale, Angela Laghezza

Sanctuaries are “special” sacred places. Despite the difficulty of a strict definition, there is a scholarly agreement about a core identity feature: in any religious system, they are places safeguarding a memory, which can be related, f.i., to extraordinary events, bodily relics, or objects of worship. People usually flow to a sanctuary in times of changes or crises, either from a personal or from a collective perspective. In other words, they attend these places when critical factors (diseases, famines, conflicts, epidemics) threaten their vital relationships with themselves and with the others, irrupting in their everyday lives and interrupting them. Pilgrims reach sanctuaries to seek for healing, solutions, protection from the superhuman agent. Thanks to the performance of both peculiar rites and devotional practices, they start to cope with their crisis: in other words, they learn to negotiate it and to be resilient. The use, transfer, and relocation of sacred objects often support such crisis management. Dynamics of collective identity involving the lived experience of the devotees contribute to achieving this goal: they include the resolution of distresses, the finding of new social cohesion, the endurance of changes without having to adapt permanently, the experience of relationships not only with human and superhuman agents. The mobility of people and objects leads to encounters of mindsets and ideas (one of the main reasons for the lively and dynamic, rather than static, nature of the sanctuaries): a feature associated with their unstructured and spontaneous origin. Thus, sanctuaries prove to be social and relational hubs where bottom-up religious expressions vividly emerge, although institutionalized religious actors usually control them. The memories connected with sanctuaries are shaped and recounted using oral or written narratives to explain their origins, the exceptional or significant events that "took place" there, the presence of sacred objects, attributing new meanings to individual and collective experiences. The Panel aims at investigating the roles, functions, and patterns of superhuman and human agents in resolving and negotiating crises within the space of the sanctuaries. We welcome papers focusing on: experiences of negotiating the crisis in a sanctuary; the role of institutionalized religious agents (mediation, communication, facilitation); written sources and material evidence showing the dynamics of interaction within the sacred place; the function of rituals, devotional practices, relics, objects in shaping the devotees’ resilient experiences.

591 On the Borderline: (Un)disciplined Bodies and Ascetic Performance between Suffering and Resilience. The Life of Daniel the as a Case Study

Chiara Cremonesi Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy

Abstract

Stylitism, as an ascetic bios entailing stasis on the top of a pillar or on several pillars of increasing height – from which the ascetic does not descend, if not under exceptional conditions – was an established practice in Late Antique Syria and also in the heart of the empire, in the Byzantium banlieue, where none other than the Emperor had ordered the erection of the most impressive of columns for the benefit of Daniel the Stylite (409 – 493). In hagiographical texts, where the code of the marvellous is largely employed, the holiness of the great is expressed by means of the anomaly of a bios “on the borderline”, not only defined by a harsh regimen of fasting and waking but also characterized by challenging pain to the extreme. Bearing suffering, overcoming it, and, at times, reaching indifference to it become thebasanos of the exceptional status that allows ascetic to take upon themselves the suffering of others, supporting the resilience of individuals and communities, seeking for healing, solutions and protection. Here, we focus especially on The Life of Daniel the Stylite: indeed, the Life provides exceptional glimpses into the role of (un)disciplined ascetic bodies and performance between suffering and resilience, between power and deviance; into the role of religious device as coping with the crises.

738 Resilient Religious Experiences and Negotiation of the Crisis in a Byzantine sanctuary: The Michaelion of Anaplous

Laura Carnevale Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

Abstract

In this paper I will analyze some resilient religious experiences in Anaplous, a Michaelic sacred place near , included by Hesychius of Miletus (6th century) among the sanctuaries attributed to Constantine, and identified with a Michaelion mentioned by Sozomenus (5th century). Specifically, I will focus on Sozomenos’ description of the healing process of two sick people, a Christian and a Pagan, who both experience in the Michaelion a divine vision and perform peculiar rites, among which the incubatio. In the perspective of negotiating the crisis, I will also take into account the role played by the Daniel the Stylite who, according to his Life (13-21), initially dwelt in an isolated pagan temple in Constantinople not far from the Michaelion: this led to problems of co-existence and critical relationship among religious powers, which ended up with the hermit’s choice to leave that (disputed) space and climb his column. 307 The Temple of Jerusalem as a “Trigger Point” for Visionary Experiences: Resilience and/or Individuality in the Book of Watchers (1 Enoch, 6-36) and the Apocalypse of John

Luca Arcari Università Federico II, Naples, Italy

Abstract

A key concept in recent neurohistory is that of the “neurochemical mechanism” of the human brain, by which the human species has learned “how to assess our status and our standing in the group largely through chemical clues [—from pheromones and hormones to an addiction to gossip]” (Smail 2008, p. 176). In human evolution, particularly interesting examples of this are provided by that mechanism which Daniel L. Smail has called psychotropic, i.e. human cultural practices that alter or affect brain-body chemistry (listening to pleasing music; seeing a performance; playing a part in a public cultic ceremony). Religious practices of the Temple of Jerusalem of the Hellenistic-Roman period provide a clear example from the history of religions of the employment of psychotropic practices. Based on the literary evidence, we can emphasize that festivals and practices of the Temple of Jerusalem were specifically constructed to alter the body chemistry of Jewish people. For example, forms of public reading or meditation of authoritative scriptures and traditions (see Neh 8:1-8) have favoured a shared sense of belonging as well as many inner mutations and chemical clues, including experiences which were reinterpreted as a direct contact with the other world (for example, see History of the Captivity in Babylon 8b). Also in early Christian groups, public reunions and shared rituals in particular spaces seemed to favour experiences of first-person contact with the other world, and in so doing early Christian texts have re-proposed and resumed similar narratives and/or experiences deriving from a temple imagery (see Ap 1:10-11; Ascension of Isaiah, 6:10-15). This paper aims at emphasizing connections between psychotropic “inputs,” which are connected to the imagery and/or the reality of the Temple of Jerusalem, and visionary “outputs” (i.e., first-person descriptions of the otherworld) as they emerge from the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch, 6-36) and the Revelation of John. Such a dynamic stands out as a clear instrument of resilience and/or individual adaptation: the use, transfer, and relocation of an imagery, which is connected with and/or is constructed on the basis of a specific cultic space, often supports experiences of individual reinvention of that hegemonic cultic space (the Book of Watchers) and/or mechanisms of resolution strategy for the fall and the loss of that same cultic space (the Revelation of John).