[...]... The Ethiopians imagine their gods as black with snub noses The Thracians imagine their gods as blue-eyed and red-haired The Egyptians imagine their gods as light-complexioned with black hair If oxens and horses and lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art just as men do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen But the divine is one and. .. Making offerings to the divine was a potent, ubiquitous fact of ancient Greek religious life: The central ritual of Greek religion, from the pouring of libations onwards, is the offering to the god.”2 This particular altar is the organizing axis of the register of a great three-handled kalpishydria, a water-carrying vessel The vase is ascribed to the Berlin Painter, one of the great masters of ancient... Zurvan’s Thousand-Year Sacrifice, 189 ¯ 7 “Myself to Myself ”: The Norse Odin and Divine Autosacrifice, 213 xii contents III The Peoples of the Book: Monotheism and Divine Ritual Introduction: The Special Interpretive Challenge of Divine Ritual in Monotheism, 239 8 The Observant God of the Talmud, 249 9 “God and His Angels Pray for the Prophet”: A Qur›¯ nic Paradigm, 283 a Conclusion Religion of the Gods ,... untroubled by the paradox that gods are traditionally the focus of ritual orientation and the recipients of ritual action, not themselves the instigators of ritual for where then are focus and recipient? The logic goes that the gods are projected constellations of human nature, “big people”; hence they do everything that people do, including worship, no matter how theologically self-contradictory such an idea... perhaps the most extreme example of projection Xenophanes might have imagined Yet the idea clearly existed contemporaneously in the ancient Greek religious imagination, namely, in the form of hundreds of vases, the majority of them painted in dark red and bright black between the years of 510 and 440 B.C.E.—not only by the marginal vase-painters of Attica but also by its masters The iconography of the. .. interpretation of these vases, nor any other cases of what I will call “divine reflexivity.” This is for the simple reason that these models only “work” when God or the gods are the object, and not the active subject or agent of ritual When ritual has a divine, rather than a human subject, these categories appear to be unusable In the special but not rare image of an enthroned Zeus clearly pouring a wine offering... through, on behalf of, and because of themselves Their religious actions, even those such as sacrifice that on a mortal level would certainly require a recipient, are not directed to a being higher than themselves Religion itself is a part of the gods essence and domain; when they practice human-type religious actions, they do so as gods The causes and effects of the cultic mechanism in their case is,... thought In many other religions of the world, some dead, some alive, some historically related to or interactive with ancient Greece, and some utterly remote from it in time and space, other “high gods were also portrayed as themselves engaged in worship Therefore, we may have to rethink the category of ritual worship itself In the self-understanding of religious traditions that portray the gods as religious... human activity of religious action is being projected onto the deity The fountainhead of this idea might be located in the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, who, in his most important works The Essence of Christianity and The Essence of Religion, rebelled against the theistic thought of his teacher Hegel In contrast to Hegel’s notion of divine self-realization, Feuerbach’s theory viewed religion instead... as the “humanization” of the gods; sacrifice to a higher, absent deity; and atonement for the overthrow of a previous divine generation prove inadequate I propose that a new phenomenology should be imagined, one that combines theology and cult and, I believe, solves the paradoxical deployment of normal sacrificial categories I argue that the gods were seen in ancient Greece as the source of cult, rather . 213 III. The Peoples of the Book: Monotheism and Divine Ritual Introduction: The Special Interpretive Challenge of Divine Ritual in Monotheism, 239 8. The Observant God of the Talmud, 249 9. “God and. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h1" alt="" Religion of the Gods This page intentionally left blank Religion of the Gods Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity kimberley christine patton 1 2009 3 Oxford University Press,. Oxford; and in this country, John Herrmann at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Joan Mertens at the New York Met- ropolitan Museum of Art. Without the work of Prof. Erika Simon at the University of Würzburg,