Description

About “God and the World” everybody speaks in societies without theology – or one is silent on the ultimate mysteries. These contradictory findings of the ethnology of religion, the author connects with his insights into archeology, prehistory and early history, the study of religion and folklore, to create an overall picture of the non-dogmatic faith. This belief can be subdivided into elementary patterns which by rite are able to give good answers to the performing uncontrollable powers. On the one hand, the reconstructed archaic cosmopolitanism appears in its core themes dominated by nature or integrated into it, on the other hand, it releases creativity that would hold together a cosmos out of joint again and again. In this conflict between conservating tradition and experimental vision tribal societies, early empires and religious peoples have proven themselves for millennia before the well-known scripture religions spawned an entirely new type of belief and sense of history.

Its persuasiveness and triumphant advance justify to talk of paganism as dying, but to listen to that “dying paganism” still can also have a favourable effect on modern people.

The author, born in 1945, was a professor at the Department of Ethnology at the Leipzig University until 2010. His numerous publications refer to cultural theory, professional history, ethnography and tsiganology. He is a member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and the Frobenius-Gesellschaft Frankfurt/Main.

2013, 496 pages, hardcover, illustrations, 17 x 24 cm;
ISBN: 978-3-938533-38-3