Bruce Lincoln

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• Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at University of Chicago

At Yašt 19.34, Yima, the primordial king of Zoroastrian myth is described as having become a-šāta- after uttering the first lie, as a result of which he also lost his royal charisma (xvarənah) and the world lost the ideal state in which there was neither hot, cold, dryness, disease, old age, envy, or death. Previous translations have rendered the t...

While cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts and haunting has burgeoned in recent decades, much of this scholarship presumes the figure of the ghost as a less than literal apparition. We propose that writers such as Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, who make use of the ghostly as a trope, are in fact describing a phenomenon we term secondary hauntin...

Absent from the Older Avesta, vermin and poison first appear in a few verses of the Younger Avesta, whose authors misinterpreted Yasna 34.5c (where they mistook adjectival xrafstra- for a substantive) and Yasna 49.11c (whose "evil foods" [akaiš] they took to be poison [viša-]). The Pahlavi texts take the argument further, developing a narrative in...

Far from being authorless texts, eternal truths, and the authentic voice of the Volk (as Romantic theories have it), myths are narratives that disguise both their authorship and their tendentious nature. The two variants of “the” Scythian origin myth preserved in Herodotus 4.5–6 and 4.8–10 provide a convenient example of how close reading permits o...

Abstract The author responds to the reviews of Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars (Chicago, 2012) that appear in this issue by Horst Junginger, Stefan Arvidsson, Lars Albinus, and Daniel Ullucci, each of which focuses on different aspects of his work, which he suggests emerged in a rough chronological sequence. Three of these—a concern for the p...

For almost thirty years, two works have dominated serious discussions of sacrifice: Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans (1972)¹ and La cuisine du sacrifice (1979), edited by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant.2 That these two volumes are regularly cited together is surely no accident, as they form a well-structured pair in which killing is contrasted...

The point of departure for this article is a description of punitive practices reported to have been employed in Achaemenian Persia around 400 BCE. On closer examination, what appears to be an example of sadistic torture proves to be a judiciary ordeal constructed in such a way as to convert the accused's body (and bodily processes) into conclusive...

In 1948, John Gillin published the first sustained account of a ritual healing ceremony for soul loss as performed in the highlands of Guatemala. Reprinted in Lessa and Vogt's Reader in Comparative Religion (1958, 1965), this article played a foundational role for later work in ethnomedicine and the anthropology of religion. Gillin's analysis cente...

Th is is a point-by-point response from Bruce Lincoln to Tim Fitzgerald's article "Bruce Lincoln's 'Theses on Method': Antitheses" in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Volume 18 (2006): 392-423. Lincoln's original article, "Theses on Method" appeared in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Volume 8 (1996): 225-27.

Most discussions of George W. Bush's religious faith draw heavily on his campaign autobiography, A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House (1999), which puts religion at the beginning, middle, and end of the story. The book describes a gradual transformation that included such steps as Bible study, repudiation of drink, and a recommitment to...

My goal in this paper is to revisit a classic text that raises the most contemporary of issues: Marco Polo's stereotyped, highly influential, and highly prejudicial description of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” a text of virtually mythic status and power. Having invoked the category of “myth,” however, in a context where it is not commonly applied,...

In the wake of September 11, 2001, much has been written about religious groups commonly called ‘terrorist’, building on an older literature whose equally tendentious buzzwords were ‘cult’ and ‘fundamentalism’. In general, the conclusions advanced within such works tilt sometimes in the direction of alarm, and sometimes in that of reassurance. The...

It is tempting to regard the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln’s acclaimed Holy Terrors makes clear, were profoundly and intensely religious. Thus what we need after the events of 9/11, Lincoln argues, is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. Holy Terrors begin...

The conjunction "of" that joins the two nouns in the disciplinary ethnonym "History of Religions" is not neutral filler. Religion is that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal. History is that discourse which speaks of things temporal and...

Cet article considere les origines de la vie du monde et les roles respectifs de l'homme et de la femme dans la reproduction. Dans une premiere partie, l'A. etudie ce double theme dans l'antiquite grecque et iranienne, en notant les ressemblances entre le point de vue de Democrite (V-VIe s. avt J.-C.) et celui du Bundahisn (mazdeisme et tradition o...

Comment les pratiques rituelles qui se representent comme atemporelles sont-elles affectees par un processus temporel ? Quand, ou, pourquoi et comment le changement se produit-il dans le rituel ? L'A. aborde ces questions en utilisant un apercu de Catherine Bell sur ce sujet. Apres avoir identifie la genealogie de cet apercu, il modifie quelque peu...

In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others. He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological aut...

The author suggests that Dumézil&s most important contribution was his insistence on the ideological character of myth, while other aspects of his writings are more problematic. In particular, he questions whether Dumézil&s affinity for Charles Maurras and the Action Francaise led him to constitute diverse data as an idealized »system of three func...

The following article was written in 1984, when I had the pleasure of hosting Cristiano Grottanelli as a James J. Hill Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota. Since both of us were quite dissatisfied with the academic study of religion at that time, we took the opportunity to reflect on the history of our field, hoping to i...

Heroic accounts of progress and the march of civilization, when narrating the beloved Greek Miracle, regularly grant a prominent place to the transformation in speech and thought that led from the mythos of Homer and Hesiod to the logos of Heraclitus and Plato, a transformation they associate with the move from symbolic to rational discourse, anthr...

Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Constructing Authority Chapter 2: Oratory and Ridicule: Thersites and the Homeric Assembly Chapter 3: Rumors and Prophecies: Lucius Aurelius Cotta and the Roman Senate, 15 March 44 B.C. Chapter 4: Law, Curses, and Derision: Egil Skallagrimsson and the Gula Thing Chapter 5: Against Authority: Corrosive Discourses Chapter 6...

Une nouvelle approche des termes de mythos et logos possede une importance considerable pour la maniere dont nous comprenons l'histoire du discours, de la pensee et de la connaissance/pouvoir. L'A. pense que lorsque les aristocrates grecs n'ont pu etablir plus longtemps leur domination par la force ou le discours de la force c'est a dire le mythe,...

Chez les Sioux Lakota la Danse du Soleil est une fete qui a lieu pendant quatre jours a la fin du mois de juillet et au debut du mois d'aout : elle demeure encore aujourd'hui un des moments les plus importants du calendrier festif sioux. L'A. en decrit le deroulement, enumere les differents participants et leurs roles respectifs. En revanche, bien...

One of the world's leading specialists in Indo-European religion and society, Bruce Lincoln expresses in these essays his severe doubts about the existence of a much-hypothesized prototypical Indo-European religion. Written over fifteen years, the essays—six of them previously unpublished—fall into three parts. Part I deals with matters "Indo-E...