Pre-Print: Esoteric Knowledge in Ancient Sciences
The Max Planck Institute has made available a pre-print for what looks to be an absolutely amazing volume: Markham J. Geller and Klaus Geus, edd. Esoteric Knowledge in Antiquity (TOPOI […]
The Max Planck Institute has made available a pre-print for what looks to be an absolutely amazing volume: Markham J. Geller and Klaus Geus, edd. Esoteric Knowledge in Antiquity (TOPOI […]
A large collection of what appear to be lovely papers on ancient Alexandria, and its relationship to ancient Judaism and Christianity, is due to be published in January of 2021. […]
The website for the 2021 conference, in Pisa, Italy, of the European Association for the Study of Religion (EASR) has been launched. It is full of important information regarding the […]
Lovers of the Pythagoreans — the actual followers of the historical Pythagoras, or those following those followers — will be excited to see that Carl Huffman, who has done us […]
The end of summer has brought us not one but two new titles dealing with providence, fate, and free will in Roman philosophical and religious literature of the first centuries […]
Followers of this website (and contemporary media on ancient Christianity in general) may be familiar with the fiasco of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife that transpired ca. 2012-2016. (See here.) […]
I’m excited to see that Nicola Spanu‘s new book on the great Neoplatonist Proclus ‘the Successor’ and theurgy will be published in August 2020, by Routledge. Surely one that will […]
I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time – a new reader of Valentinian sources, with Greek and Coptic facing new English translations, by Geoffrey S. Smith of […]
Iain Gardner, one of the world’s foremost experts on Manichaeism, has recently published with Cambridge a biography of the prophet of light himself, Mani. Here is the description from the […]
A new book on demons and angels in Neoplatonism has just been reviewed in BMCR by Cesare Sinatti – you can read the review here. The book is: Luc Brisson, […]
‘The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt is a five-year research project (2018-2023) based at the Chair of Egyptology of the Julius Maximilian University […]
Courtesy of BMCR: Nicholas Banner, Philosophic Silence and the ‘One’ in Plotinus. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. ix, 299. ISBN 9781107154629. £75.00. Reviewed by John Dillon, Trinity […]
Michael Zellmann-Rohrer (Oxford University) has just published a review at BMCR of a Christopher Faraone, The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times. Empire and after (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania […]
Attilio Mastrocinque’s work is nothing if not distinctive. His From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism is one of those books that comes at the old problems from a very different perspective. […]
An up-to-date study of the ancient Hermetica in their Egyptian context with attention to Egyptian, Greek, and Gnostic sources alike – a sort of sequel to Mahé’s Hermès en Haute-Égypte – […]
Conference: Charms, Charmers, and Charming When: May 22 – 24, 2019 Where: University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy) Deadline for abstracts: December 1, 2018 From the organizers: The Department of Lingue, Letterature […]
Since the ’90s, the standard English translation of the Corpus Hermeticum has been Copenhaver’s Hermetica. It remains a very useful tool, but one way in which it is inferior to […]
Brent Nongbri’s work will be familiar to many followers of this website, principally his terrific book Before Religion, a wonderful critique of the usage of the category ‘religion’ in the […]
Via PaleoJudaica (in turn reblogging AWOL): The Digital Syriac Corpus has been around for some time, and is starting to have a significant corpus of digitized Syriac texts available for […]
ESSWE7: Western Esotericism and Consciousness, Visions, Voices, Altered States Where: University of Amsterdam When: July 2-4, 2019 Deadline: October 1st, 2018 Website From the organizers: The history of Western esotericism […]
Courtesy of April DeConick: the newest issue of Gnosis: Journal for Gnostic Studies is guest-curated by Christian Bull, and features a collection of new papers on Hermetism. (It doesn’t get […]
There are loads of new volumes including papers on the Nag Hammadi texts these days. The study of Gnosticism really has transformed over the last twenty years, in wonderful and […]
I am very happy to draw attention to the forthcoming publication of Nicholas Banner’s Philosophic Silence and the ‘One’ in Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). I was lucky enough […]
From the website at Brill: Apocalyptic Thinking in Early Judaism. Engaging with John Collins’ ‘The Apocalyptic Imagination.’ Edited by Cecilia Wassen and Sidnie White Crawford. Supplements to the Journal for the Study […]
NSEA members and readers of this blog will want to know about the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP). Created by Earl Fontainelle, a researcher of esotericism, the podcast […]
The (First) Apocalypse of James is an early Christian Gnostic apocalypse extant in two different Coptic versions, Nag Hammadi Codex V and the Tchacos Codex. These Coptic works are generally […]
This new volume of papers looks terrific, and includes a number of studies about Gnosticism as well as ancient wisdom traditions more generally. The volume is a Festschrift for Prof. […]
From Bernardo Ballesteros Petrella <bernardo.ballesteros@classics.ox.ac.uk>:============================= University of Oxford The Early Text Cultures research group at the University of Oxfordinvites contributions to its online seminar series for Trinity Term2021 (April 25th […]
A new collection on the great Emperor Julian (still called ‘the Apostate’ in the title, in a remarkable acceptance of Christian value-judgements) is out from Brill. A look at the […]
The Encyclopædia Iranica is an invaluable resource for anything Iran- or Persia-related. For followers of this site, that includes Manichaeism, Zoroaster and Zoroastrianism, and of course Persian and Syriac literature, […]
This book looks very interesting; not esoteric per se, but an interesting study of Roman beliefs about the dead, the divinity of the dead, their power to act upon the […]
from Lucio Del Corso (Università di Cassino) Dear Colleagues, we are pleased to invite you to the webinar “Astra in Chartis. Astronomical and Astrological Papyri from Graeco-Roman Arsinoites”, organized in the frame […]
Be sure and check this out tomorrow! It features our very own Dylan Burns and a number of other leading lights in our field discussing interesting stuff. Wednesday 13 January, […]
An online course for Classical Armenian, organised by the Armenian School of Languages and Cultures – ASPIRANTUM from February 9 until April 9, 2021. For details, see here:https://aspirantum.com/courses/classical-armenian-grabar-online-school?fbclid=IwAR0wEZO67j4_nhcYAq43cjLaeJO9cIj45ZRkAHdFOfpTjfloW6BtBadre28