Papers by Eduard Iricinschi
Religion in the Roman Empire (RRE), 2026
In considering Mani's Epistles, the Cologne Mani Codex, the Kephalaia of the Teacher, and the Cha... more In considering Mani's Epistles, the Cologne Mani Codex, the Kephalaia of the Teacher, and the Chapter of the Wisdom of My Lord Mani, this article proposes that third-and fourthcentury formative Manichaeism maps on to the development of a cosmic polity. Choreographed ritual activity around shared mythological narratives, articulated by personal revelations, connected humans (the Elect and the Hearers) and metahumans (unseen, otherworldly entities) in a larger, exemplary Manichaean community. Reconceptualisations of the enchanted universe construed as an immanentist cosmic polity (Sahlins 2022) and of emerging spiritual paths in conjunction with revelatory events (Taves 2016) substantiate the methodological novelty of this analysis.
Asdiwal.Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions, 2025
An extensive book review of Bruce Lincoln, Secrets, Lies, and Consequences. A Great Scholar’s Hi... more An extensive book review of Bruce Lincoln, Secrets, Lies, and Consequences. A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and His Protégé’s Unsolved Murder, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024.
Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, 2024
The goals of this special issue of Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies are (1) to attempt to set t... more The goals of this special issue of Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies are (1) to attempt to set the study of Manichaeism with respect to Judaism, Jews, and Jewish sources of late antiquity on firmer ground, given the great changes that scholarship on this topic has seen over the last fifty years; (2) to disentangle the normative perceptions of the continuity between the Nag Hammadi literature, ancient heresiological description of gnostic practices, and ancient Manichaean religion; (3) to further elucidate the historical relationships between Manichaeism and Christian and Gnostic evidence; and (4) to provide a platform for the fresh and exciting research on this topic that is emerging today. The present contribution, authored by the editors of this special issue, seeks to set the stage for the subsequent contributions by taking stock of how the scholarly conversation about Manichaeism’s relationship to Judaism developed, and what tensions may be observed therein. The introduction to the second, forthcoming issue of Gnosis devoted to Manichaeism and Judaism will focus on new trajectories for research opened up by the studies offered in these special issues.
Varia Manichaica. Analecta Manichaica III, 2024
https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503604268-1
Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 89/2 , 2023
Asdiwal: Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions, 18, 2023
Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, 89/2, 2023
Jason BeDuhn, Paul Dilley, Iain Gardner, eds., The Medinet Madi Library of Manichaean Codices at 90: Papers from the Symposium at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, 18–19 October 2019, Leiden: Brill, 2023, 187–218, 2023
In the next pages, I will advance that intricate forms of the art of memory, derived from educati... more In the next pages, I will advance that intricate forms of the art of memory, derived from educational aspects of Graeco-Roman rhetoric, rendered effective the process of religious purification by allowing the Manichaeans to meet Mani every year at the Bēma ceremony. The following will present a summary discussion of the art of memory in antiquity, paying attention to the economy of images in relation to the creation of mental storerooms for memory; it will propose a detailed analysis of images, places, and emotional scripts in the texts associated with the Bēma ceremony (The Bēma Psalms and The Sermon on the Great War); it will highlight the Peripatetic and Stoic roots of Manichaean characterizations of perception; and it will finish with a discussion of the role of the Light Mind in bringing the ceremony of the Bēma to its conclusion.
Asdiwal. Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions, 2021
The topic of this article, «Mircea Eliade, C. G. Jung, and the Eranos meetings», recently receive... more The topic of this article, «Mircea Eliade, C. G. Jung, and the Eranos meetings», recently received considerable attention and a good number of critical analyses. Steven M. Wasserstrom and Hans Thomas Hakl both provided excellent reconstructions, from different perspectives, of the Eranos circle, especially in the period this article deals with, the 1950s. Moshe Idel, Florin Turcanu, Dan Dana, and Natale Spineto contributed a great deal to cast a light on Eliade’s literary, personal, and academic outcome during the 1940s and 1950s. While the present text does not claim to have uncovered new historical data in the relationship between Eliade and Jung at Eranos, already magisterially probed by Turcanu, it pursues three new avenues of interpretation. It first mines Eliade’s 1950s diaries to analyze the role of personal dream interpretation as secondary data for Mircea Eliade’s history of religion. It turns next to Eliade’s correspondence with Jung to re-examine the historian of religions’ involvement with analytical psychology. It finally advances the proposal for a new trajectory of Eliade’s development of the set of perennial conceptual placeholders, such as «sacred/profane», «labyrinth/center», «axis mundi», «initiation», «trans-conscious», and «cosmic Christianity ». We dubbed them perennial conceptual placeholders in virtue of the epistemic and ontological work, of universalizing bent, Eliade had asked them to carry out in his scholarship. This article suggests that Eliade forged some of them in his cultural journalism, written in Romanian, and fully developed them during the 1950s Eranos meetings, as a form of personalized history of religion and cure for the souls.
Asdiwal. Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions, 2021
The editors advanced a preliminary definition of «spiritual scholarship» as the tendency, mostly ... more The editors advanced a preliminary definition of «spiritual scholarship» as the tendency, mostly discernible with the scholars of religion who gathered at Ascona, of attributing psychological meanings to religious phenomena and of regarding the scholarly interpretation of myths, symbols, and religious images as means of self-improvement. The « spiritual scholarship » produced at Eranos both provided a body of data that became fundamental to various trends in the twentieth-century history of religions and associated it with a personalized and redemptive hermeneutical approach. Indeed, most scholarship in the history of religions produced between the 1950s and 1980s displays strong influences from Mircea Eliade, D.T. Suzuki, Henry Corbin, Gershom Scholem, Joseph Campbell, Karl Kerényi, Gilbert Durand, and Carl Gustav Jung. Some of the above scholars designated and selected the «data» of what was supposed to constitute the "history of religion." At the same time, they provided the hermeneutic lenses through which one could interpret the content of this discipline.
Ioan Petru Culianu, Argonauta della Quarta Dimensione (ed. H.C. Cicortaș, R. Moretti, A. Scarabelli; Rivista Antarès, 18/2021: 50–55; Milan: Bietti) , 2021
Prefazione di Mircea Eliade, tradotta in italiano, al romanzo fantascientifico di IPC Hesperus, c... more Prefazione di Mircea Eliade, tradotta in italiano, al romanzo fantascientifico di IPC Hesperus, con correzioni manoscritte. Il romanzo venne più volte annunciato da Jaca Book dopo l'uscita de La collezione di smeraldi , del 1989 (archivio Culianu-Petrescu). Frontespizio dell'opera di Athanasius Kircher Mundus subterraneus, quo universae denique naturae divitiae (1665).
Uomo e cosmo nella storia. Paradigmi, miti, simboli: Atti del Convegno Internazionale Palermo, 18–20 settembre 2019 (eds. Ignazio Buttitta and Antonino La Barbera; Palermo: Fundazione Ignazio Buttitta, Acta diurna, 14, 2021), 323–336, 2021
ASDIWAL. Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions, 2020
The article redescribes Irenaeus of Lyon’s depiction of Marcus the Magician and his followers (Ag... more The article redescribes Irenaeus of Lyon’s depiction of Marcus the Magician and his followers (Against the Heresies I,13-15) and, following the methodology elaborated by Jonathan Z. Smith and Burton L. Mack, it advances a rectification of the category of «heresiology» in the work of this second-century Christian writer. This application of the Smith/Mack four-step theoretical recalibration of comparison entails, in a first stage, a description of the Marcosians according to the primary sources. It continues with a comparison with similar ancient religious elements, derived from the collection of Greek magical papyri, and from the religious history of Montanism. The paper proposes, in a third stage, a redescription of the ancient religious group of the Marcosians as a highly mobile religious group, active across the Mediterranean world, open to complete inclusion of women in ritual activities and prophecy, with an ambitious agenda of social mobility. Finally, the paper advances a categorial rectification: it considers the category of «heresiology» as being influenced by Irenaeus’s discourse of creating a «heresiological double» with the purpose of delegitimization and deauthorization, and it suggests regarding it as an aggregating term. In Irenaeus’s particular case, « heresiology » aggregates «magic» and «gender» as two constitutive terms in the depiction of the Marcosians.
Cet article propose une « redescription » du tableau peint par Irénée de Lyon (Contre les hérésies I,13-15) de Marc le Magicien et ses disciples. Adoptant les principes méthodologiques élaborés par Jonathan Z. Smith et Burton L. Mack, nous proposons ainsi une rectification de la catégorie d’«hérésiologie» dans l’œuvre de cet auteur chrétien du deuxième siècle. Ces principes de recalibrage théorique implique quatre étapes: 1) une description, ici des Marcosiens d’après les sources primaires ; 2) une comparaison avec des éléments religieux antiques similaires, ici tirés du corpus des papyrus magiques grecs et de l’histoire religieuse du montanisme; 3) une redescription du groupe religieux antique des Marcosiens en tant que groupe religieux hautement mobile, actif à travers l’ensemble du monde méditerranéen, ouvert à une inclusion totale des femmes dans ses activités rituelles et prophétiques, et doté d’un ambitieux projet de mobilité sociale; 4) enfin, une rectification catégorielle, en considérant comment la catégorie d’«hérésiologie», influencée par le discours d’Irénée et l’idée d’un «double hérésiologique», dépourvu à la fois de légitimité et d’autorité, est en fait un un terme agrégeant. L’«hérésiologie d’Irénée en particulier agrège la «magie» et le «genre» comme le deux termes constitutifs de sa description des marcosiens.
Entangled Religions, 2020
The article first presents the theoretical, historical, and methodological presuppositions that g... more The article first presents the theoretical, historical, and methodological presuppositions that guided the organization of the first “Formative Exchanges in Late Antique Eurasia” workshop at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg (KHK), Ruhr-Universität Bochum, in 2017. In the second part, the article summarizes the papers presented at this meeting and identifies the emerging questions and results shared by the participants.
“ ‘Cind eruditia explodeaza in joc’: Deceniul linistit al olandezului Ioan Culianu,” in Ioan Petru Culianu, Iter in silvis II: Gnoza si magie, Iasi: Polirom, 2013, 7–34
“Ioan Petru Culianu si Ugo Bianchi: trickster-ul, fiinta suprema si studiul dualismelor religioase,” in Ioan Petru Culianu, Iter in silvis I: Eseuri despre gnoza si alte studii, Iasi: Polirom, 2012, 7–16
“Gnoza de la Messina: Hans Jonas, Ugo Bianchi si educatia dualista a lui Ioan Petru Culianu,” in Ioan Petru Culianu, Gnosticism si gindire moderna: Hans Jonas, Iasi: Polirom, 2006, 191–235
“In cautarea unei stiinte universale a religiei: Mircea Eliade, Ioan Petru Culianu si Enciclopedia religiei” in Ioan Petru Culianu, Cult, magie, erezii: Articole din enciclopedii ale religiilor, Iasi: Polirom, 2003, 199–262
“Ascensiunea celesta a sufletului. Interpretari, metode si controverse la Ioan Petru Culianu,” in Ioan Petru Culianu, Experiente ale extazului, Iasi: Polirom, 2004 (2nd ed., 2016), 297–318
“Where the Author Dwells: Searching for a Definition of Religion in the Introductions to Culianu’s Books”, in Sorin Antohi (ed.), Religion, Fiction, and History: Essays in Memory of Ioan Petru Culianu, vol. II, Bucharest: Nemira, 2001, 501–41
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Papers by Eduard Iricinschi
Cet article propose une « redescription » du tableau peint par Irénée de Lyon (Contre les hérésies I,13-15) de Marc le Magicien et ses disciples. Adoptant les principes méthodologiques élaborés par Jonathan Z. Smith et Burton L. Mack, nous proposons ainsi une rectification de la catégorie d’«hérésiologie» dans l’œuvre de cet auteur chrétien du deuxième siècle. Ces principes de recalibrage théorique implique quatre étapes: 1) une description, ici des Marcosiens d’après les sources primaires ; 2) une comparaison avec des éléments religieux antiques similaires, ici tirés du corpus des papyrus magiques grecs et de l’histoire religieuse du montanisme; 3) une redescription du groupe religieux antique des Marcosiens en tant que groupe religieux hautement mobile, actif à travers l’ensemble du monde méditerranéen, ouvert à une inclusion totale des femmes dans ses activités rituelles et prophétiques, et doté d’un ambitieux projet de mobilité sociale; 4) enfin, une rectification catégorielle, en considérant comment la catégorie d’«hérésiologie», influencée par le discours d’Irénée et l’idée d’un «double hérésiologique», dépourvu à la fois de légitimité et d’autorité, est en fait un un terme agrégeant. L’«hérésiologie d’Irénée en particulier agrège la «magie» et le «genre» comme le deux termes constitutifs de sa description des marcosiens.