In May 1991, having received threats that terrified him, rising academic star Ioan Culianu entrusted a colleague with a mysterious set of papers. A week later, Culianu was murdered. What was in those mysterious papers? And what connection might they have to Culianu's death? The papers eventually passed into the hands of Bruce Lincoln, and their story is at the heart of this book.
One of the world's leading specialists in Indo-Europeanreligion and society, Bruce Lincoln expresses in these essayshis severe doubts about the existence of a much-hypothesizedprototypical Indo-European religion.Written over fifteen years, the essays—six of thempreviously unpublished—fall into three parts. Part I dealswith matters "Indo-European" in a relatively unproblematizedway, exploring a set of haunting images that recur indescriptions of the Otherworld from many cultures. WhileLincoln later rejects this methodology, these chapters remainthe best available source of data for the topics theyaddress.In Part II, Lincoln takes the data for each essay from asingle culture area and shifts from the topic of dying tothat of killing. Of particular interest are the chaptersconnecting sacrifice to physiology, a master discourse ofantiquity that brought the cosmos, the human body, and humansociety into an ideologically charged correlation.Part III presents Lincoln's most controversial caseagainst a hypothetical Indo-European protoculture.Reconsidering the work of the prominent Indo-EuropeanistGeorges Dumézil, Lincoln argues that Dumézil's writingswere informed and inflected by covert political concernscharacteristic of French fascism. This collection is aninvaluable resource for students of myth, ritual, ancientsocieties, anthropology, and the history of religions.Bruce Lincoln is professor of humanities and religiousstudies at the University of Minnesota.
Dans ce livre qui reprend ses leçons prononcées au Collège de France, Bruce Lincoln propose d'analyser les rapports entre empire, religion et politique, à partir de l'exemple de la Perse achéménide. Il nous invite à un passionnant parcours qui va des historiens grecs aux inscriptions monumentales de Darius via la Bible et les traités de mythologie zoroastriens. La confrontation de ces sources révèle l'importance cruciale dans l'imaginaire impérial achéménide de l'institution du paradis, jardin clos au sein duquel sont réunis toutes sortes de plantes et d'animaux, mais qui est surtout une image microcosmique de la perfection originelle créée par le grand dieu Ahura Mazd(...). Lincoln montre ainsi que loin de n'être qu'un lieu de plaisance et d'insouciance, le paradis perse fonctionne comme le modèle idéologique de l'empire, dont la finalité est de rassembler sous sa domination la totalité des espèces vivantes, végétales et animales, l'humanité comprise. Réunissant des sources insuffisamment lues de concert, Bruce Lincoln montre de manière magistrale ce que doit être une histoire des religions critique et comparative.