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  • New Antiquities: Transformation of Ancient Religion in the New Age and Beyond ed. by Dylan Michael Burns and Almut-Barbara Renger
  • Allison P. Coudert
New Antiquities: Transformation of Ancient Religion in the New Age and Beyond. Edited by Dylan Michael Burns and Almut-Barbara Renger. Equinox, 2019. 320 pages. $100.00 cloth; ebook available.

This collection of essays provides further examples of the way traditions claiming to be ancient have been, and continue to be, invented, a contention first made by Hobsbawn and Ranger in The Invention of Tradition (1983) and reiterated by Lewis and Hammer in The Invention of Sacred Tradition (2007). The essays selected for this volume focus on modern revivals of Goddess worship and the reappropriation of certain strands of ancient Near-Eastern and Gnostic thought.

In her opening essay, Almut-Barbara Renger investigates the use of Taoist texts that present westerners with holistic forms of healing and self-improvement. She takes the case of facial acupuncture outlined in "The Tao of Venus" and demonstrates that this practice and the text have nothing to do with ancient Taoism or Goddess worship, but everything to do with the successful marketing of "wellness" products that promise "eternal peace" and even salvation. Renger traces these marketing strategies, as well as the Goddess images used to support them, to Blavatsky and Jung's appropriation of ancient spiritual traditions as ways to transform and improve the self. [End Page 107]

Essays by Caroline Jane Tully and Meret Fehlmann further investigate contemporary Goddess worship. Although they deal with different groups, both authors demonstrate that images of the Goddess as the embodiment of fertility and nature are based on outdated scholarship. The idea that ancient Greece and Crete were peaceful matriarchal societies until overthrown by patriarchal invaders is contradicted by more recent evidence revealing that both societies practiced human sacrifice. This, however, has not changed Goddess worship.

Kathryn Rountree then describes what she calls "native faith groups," who wish to recover the ancient religion of specific ethnic groups or geographical areas in response to globalization, crises of ethnic identity, and anxieties about cultural erosion. Among the groups she describes are those dedicated to the revival of Hellenic and Maltese Paganism. Like Rountree, Dylan M. Burns and Nemanja Radulovic consider the revival of the dualistic heresy of the Bogomils in The Universal White Brotherhood in Bulgaria and the Balkan Bogomil Center in Croatia as similar attempts by ethnic groups to claim an ancient, pre-Christian identity.

Two essays address the reappropriations of ancient Near Eastern religions from Israel-Palestine, Egypt, and Syria. In the first, Ethan Doyle White examines the revival of the cult of Antinous, Hadrian's young lover who died mysteriously in 130 CE, to ask how modern cults claim historical continuity with ancient ones that existed under completely different historical conditions. The answer White offers is that everyone approaches history through the lens of their own culture, a fact that makes appropriation possible. In the second, Anne Kreps examines the United States-based Essene Church of Christ. Like other new religious movements discussed in this volume, this group predicates its beliefs on outdated work of scholars who considered the Essenes early Christians. This ignores newer research demonstrating that the Essenes were a Jewish sect and fit into the Jewish culture of the time.

Most of the remaining essays investigate modern Gnostic movements. Both Olav Hammer and Matthew Dillon reveal the close connection between academic scholarship and new religions by analyzing the effect the modern deconstruction of Gnosticism has had on Gnostic churches and individuals. Hammer describes how the Ecclesia Gnostic and Stephan Hoeller's refashioning of Valentinian Gnosticism tried to deal with this problem by essentially avoiding it. Dillon's focus is on the defensive reaction of the Apostolic Johannite Church in the wake of the defection of one of its members, Jeremy Puma. An essay by Franz Winger deals with the gnostic text Pistis Sophia and its appropriation and reinterpretation by the Latin American writer and spiritual leader Victor Manuel Gómez Rodriquez (1917–1977), a popular guru known among Hollywood celebrities as Samael Aun Weor. Jay Johnston explores modern magic and the use of images from late antique...

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