Where do the gods live? Divine ecology: to live on, in or below the Earth

Drit­ter Vor­trag von Corinne Bon­net im Rah­men der Mon­day-Lec­tures, die gemein­sam von Max-Weber-Kol­leg, Sem­i­nar für Reli­gion­swis­senschaft sowie dem The­ol­o­gis­chen Forschungskol­leg t³ The­olo­gie — Tra­di­tion — Trans­for­ma­tion ver­anstal­tet wer­den.

The link between the gods and the Earth has been the sub­ject of out­dat­ed the­o­ries in the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy of reli­gions about an alleged Moth­er Erath or Great Mediter­ranean God­dess. Like­wise, the bipar­ti­tion between “Olympian” gods and “chthon­ian” gods was the sub­ject of a pro­found revi­sion. How­ev­er, the earth is a fun­da­men­tal space for human life, and even for the sur­vival of the social com­mu­ni­ties. Its sur­face, its thick­ness and every­thing that is found in the depths, under the earth, con­sti­tute spaces inhab­it­ed by a whole series of divine pow­ers, with which it is strate­gic to inter­act. This sem­i­nar will there­fore pro­vide the oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore the “earth­ly” dimen­sion of the space of the gods, between Ge and the gods who receive the remains of deceased men, the innu­mer­able pow­ers which link or attach to the earth or to the nether­world in the defix­iones, or Posei­don and the Semit­ic El qn ʾrṣ, the gods who hold or shake the earth. The earth is also con­nect­ed with oaths and dif­fer­ent sym­bol­ic rit­u­als. And last but not least, the earth is expe­ri­enced and nar­rat­ed as an ances­tral, even autochtho­nous space, where ances­tral gods live “for­ev­er” and con­vey the col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of a longue durée human and divine his­to­ry.