Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. This ritual process redefined the topographical urban map, shifted the urban worldview and concepts of embodied charismatic power. Diabolization is comprised of two parts: first, a rhetorical/discursive amplification of the demonic, the intensification of the demonic threat, drawing it closer and closing the distance that demonization creates second, a ritual strategy aimed toward defeating or managing the demonic. Ecclesiastical leadership in cities employed demonological discourse and exorcistic practice-that is, diabolization-to a maintain congregations and Christianize the city. Finally, I present the centrality of diabolization in my thesis. I discuss the wider, historiographical background (Gibbon’s narrative of fall and decline replaced by late antiquity’s dynamic of continuity and transformation), which shaped my alternative view of the relationship between a perceived historical progression and imagined enchanted environment (Robert Orsi's abundant history, animistic history)-a relationship animated through ritual practice.

To that end, I present the thesis, my methodology (intertwining material analyses-i.e., archaeology-and literary analyses), and theoretical approaches (anthropology, ritual theory). By combining critical theoretical methods with research into literary and material evidence, Daughters of Hecate interrogates a false association that has persisted from antiquity, to early modern witch hunts, to the present day.This chapter presents the book’s framework as: (1) a new form of cultural history (animistic history of demons in the city or ecclesiastical authority) and (2) historiographical critique (why have demonologies of late antique cities been neglected in scholarship?). In fact, the essays in this volume uncover complexities and counter-discourses that challenge, rather than reaffirm, many gendered stereotypes taken for granted and reified by most modern scholarship. Daughters of Hecate provides a nuanced exploration of the topic while avoiding reductive approaches. The authors probe the foundations of, processes, and motivations behind gendered stereotypes, beginning with Western culture's earliest associations of women and magic in the Bible and Homer's Odyssey. The book illuminates the gendering of ancient magic by approaching the topic from three distinct disciplinary perspectives: literary stereotyping, the social application of magic discourse, and material culture.

Daughters of Hecate unites for the first time research on the problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman culture.

City of Demons by Dayna S. Kalleres