We are delighted to speak with Anthony Kaldellis about ‘Byzantium’, fabled empire full of Greek-speaking Romans which never fell until the fifteenth century, and which plays an outsize role in the history of western esotericism. Come for the historiographical debates about the term ‘Byzantine’, stay for the ‘Byzantine’ court astrology.
We begin our read-through, exploring the philosophic and religious cultures at Athens and Alexandria from the days of Hypatia down to the height of Proclus' career. Come for the prosopography of many extraordinary religious and philosophical characters of late antiquity, stay for Isidore's theurgic bird-imitations.
We discuss Justinian's great church, Hagia Sophia, the gem of Constantinople and of Orthodox Christianity. We then look at a number of theories out there which read Hagia Sophia as encoding esoteric messages beneath her Orthodox exterior, and use this case-study as a springboard for discussing the thorny problems involved in interpreting architecture, especially esoteric architecture.
We discuss the life, times, and reign of Justinian, ‘probably the most consequential Roman emperor, at least since Constantine, and maybe since Augustus.’ He transformed the empire; nothing would be the same after his reign. Said reign also saw the closure of the Athenian academy and a number of crucial crises within Christianity, all of which are essential for the history of western esotericism.
We discuss Augustine the anti-esotericist, who denies that Christianity has any esoteric dimensions. He employs the esoteric to do so. Can you trust a guy who does that?
We wander through a bunch of important (but mushy) ideas helpful for understanding late antiquity and late-antique religion: monotheism, henotheism, polytheism, and dualism. Featuring the triumphant return of Rupert and Steve, and they brought some friends.
We dive into the history of late-antique Rome from the perspective of Jews, Christians, ‘pagans’, ‘heretics’, and others vis à vis the Roman state, and give some partial explanations for how the ‘impossible’ happened, and the Empire became the Christian Empire.
At the end of the the third century, the podcast dives back into the realm where politics meets religion. In Part I, we discuss the geopolitical balance of the Roman and Sassanian states, the position of the Jews in late antiquity, and the basics of the future of Jewry, a new form of Jewish life and religion known as Rabbinic Judaism.
We ask Jason BeDuhn some responsible and irresponsible questions about Mani and Manichæism, in which it emerges that the Religion of Light was a much more positive, even world-affirming faith than is commonly thought.
The surviving oeuvre of Clement of Alexandria hides some complicated textual issues. In this episode, not for the fainthearted, we discuss the various lost works, fragments, and alleged forgeries.
We introduce the life and thought of Orthodox Christianity's favourite in-house Gnostic, the great Clement of Alexandria. Come for the philosophical, esoteric Christianity, stay for the progressive postmortem deification.
We take a deep breath before diving into detailed discussions of early esoteric Christianities to consider a few key terms and their historical development. What was orthodoxy? What was heresy? Who were the heresiologists, and what were they doing?
We put a number of impossible-to-answer questions about ancient demiurgic traditions in proto-Christianity to Professor Williams, and receive some fascinating answers.
Professor Michael Williams leads us on a tour of ‘Gnosticism’, both as a term (used and misused by ancient heresiologists, Reformation-era polemicists, modern scholars, and even modern ‘Gnostics’) and as a group of late-ancient religious texts which are very, very interesting, but which should probably not be called ‘Gnostic’.
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