Opportunistic Corruption

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Notes

"The case studies discussed below make clear that the character of any particular re-appropriation of ancient Mediterranean deities is governed by specific cultural “flash points,” such as politics, ethnicity, and gender, and that the particular positions and actions different groups of Pagans take are utterly diverse. We see, for example, that the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece are deployed in very different religio-political discourses by the followers of modern Greek ethnic “Hellenism” on one hand, and by participants in the global, feminism-inspired, Goddess spirituality movement on the other. In the case of the former, ethnic politics are at work; in the latter, gender politics drive modern meanings and usages of “goddess.” Meanwhile, Iberian and Italian expressions of modern Paganism show that Pagan appropriations of the past develop in deeply local contexts inflected by unique cultural and historical conditions, irrespective of what they draw from global resources. The importance of the local context is also abundantly evident in Malta, where the binary interfaces of national-global, Pagan-Christian, and ancient-modern have been collapsed in a creatively re-configured cosmology."

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