Wilderness in Mythology and Religion

Approaching Religious Spatialities, Cosmologies, and Ideas of Wild Nature

Laura Feldt

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781614512240
• eBook ISBN:
  9781614511724
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: World History

Wilderness is one of the most abiding creations in the history of religions. It has a long and seminal history and is of contemporary relevance in wildlife preservation and climate discourses. Yet it has not previously been subject to scrutiny or theorising from a cross-cultural study of religions perspective. What are the specific relations between the world's religions and imagined and real wilderness areas? The wilderness is often understood as a domain void of humans, opposed to civilization, but the analyses in this book complicate and question the dualism of previous theoretical grids and offer new perspectives on the interesting multiplicity of the wilderness and religion nexus. This book thus addresses the need for cross-cultural anthropological and history of religions analyses by offering in-depth case studies of the use and functions of wilderness spaces in a diverse range of contexts including, but not limited to, ancient Greece, early Christian asceticism, Old Norse religion, the shamanism-Buddhism encounter in Mongolia, contemporary paganism, and wilderness spirituality in the US. It advances research on religious spatialities, cosmologies, and ideas of wild nature and brings new understanding of the role of religion in human interaction with 'the world'.

Table of contents

• 1. Wilderness in Mythology and Religion
• 2. Greek Demons of the Wilderness: the case of the Centaurs
• 3. Wilderness and Hebrew Bible Religion – fertility, apostasy and religious transformation in the Pentateuch
• 4. “The mountain, a desert place”: Spatial categories and mythical landscapes in the Secret Book of John
• 5. “The truth is out there”: Primordial lore and ignorance in the wilderness of Athanasius’ Vita Antonii
• 6. Wilderness as a Necessary Feature in Hindu Religion
• 7. Notes on Qur’ānic Wilderness – and its absence
• 8. Wilderness, Liminality, and the Other in Old Norse Myth and Cosmology
• 9. Making a Garden out of the Wilderness: landscape, dwelling and personhood in the encounter between European settlers and the Mi’kmaq in “New France”
• 10. William Robertson Smith on the Wilderness
• 11. The Taiga Within. Topography and personhood in Northern Mongolia
• 12. Ritual is Etiquette in the Larger than Human World: the two wildernesses of contemporary Eco-Paganism
• 13. Wilderness, Spirituality and Biodiversity in North America – tracing an environmental history from Occidental roots to Ear h Day
• Contributor biographies
• Index