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Dinosaur fossils with magical inscriptions, ancient “voodoo” dolls in tiny boxes, human skulls with stones forced between the jaws – traces left behind by creatures from other worlds. The module offers case studies on ancient and medieval transcendental beings: entities which required very specific techniques and settings to make contact with humans. The focus will be directed at texts, images, and objects as mediums of practical interactions with these creatures, in the hopes of getting to know more about the people who created them. In our discussions, we will rely on methods provided by various disciplines, such as archaeology, papyrology, classical philology, anthropology, and history. The course goes beyond a tabloid-style history of curiosities and shows how premodern people reasoned about these entities, what functions they had in those societies, how people communicated with them, used them, and tried to control them.
The module follows a roughly chronological order. Starting from ancient Mesopotamian dummies deployed for black magic, we will move on to the appearance of giants and ghosts in Greek antiquity as creatures from beyond the boundaries of time and wakefulness. During the second set of three classes, we will discuss how monotheisms incorporated pagan entities such as the wandering womb, Egyptian demons and desert ghouls. The stories of these “adopted” beings will shed light on the intellectual and religious ferments surrounding the advent of Christianity and Islam in various regions. The final two sessions of our module are devoted to two distinct kinds of unusual corpses, which nevertheless may be seen as mirror images of each other: the bodily remains of saints and vampires.
Module leader: Mézes Ádám Gergely
