Women, Pilgrimage, and Rituals of Healing in Modern and Ancient Greece

Download or read book Women, Pilgrimage, and Rituals of Healing in Modern and Ancient Greece written by Evy Johanne Håland and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-21 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates religious rituals and gender in modern and ancient Greece, with a specific focus on women’s role in connection with healing. How can we come to understand such mainstays of ancient culture as its healing rituals, when the male recorders did not, and could not, know or say much about what occurred, since the rituals were carried out by women? The book proposes that one way of tackling this dilemma is to attend similar healing rituals in modern Greece, carried out by women, and compare the information with ancient sources, thus providing new ways of interpreting the ancient material we possess. Carrying out fieldwork—being present during, often, enduring rituals within cultures, despite other changes—teaches one whole new ways of looking at written and pictorial records of such events. By bringing ancient and modern worlds into mutual illumination, this text also has relevance beyond the Greek context both in time and space.