Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales
Reading, Simulation, and Priming of Readers’ Oneiric Experiences
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21875922 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Olympia Panagiotidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-06 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Cognitive Historiography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2051-9672 • E-ISSN: 2051-9680 |
| Publisher | Equinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1558/jch.33225 |
| OpenAlex | W4312582905 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 49 |
Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales, composed in the 2nd century CE, is considered a unique literary work, in which the author claimed to have recorded the dreams he had received from Asclepius over a long period of time. Modern historians explore the value of the Sacred Tales both as a literary work and as a personal oneiric record of actual dreaming experiences. In this article, I take into account the modern insights offered by the embodied human cognition paradigm in order explore the possible long-term influence and repercussions of the Sacred Tales on the readers’ imagination and dreaming experiences. In particular, I suggest that Aristides’ oneiric descriptions would have been meta-represented in the readers’ minds upon reading the text, priming specific images, representations, mental, and emotional states as well as expectations about potential divine revelations during the ritual of incubation. Later, those readers who would find themselves in similar bodily, mental, and emotional conditions like the ones experienced and described by Aristides, could have implicitly used the primed representations for meta-representing a personal epiphany of Asclepius. Thereby, the Sacred Tales would have provided the raw material to feed the readers’ imaginative simulations and to elicit a personally meaningful divine revelation
Aesthetics · Art · Embodied cognition · Epiphany · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Revelation · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs · Philosophy · Psychology
Society, Medicine and Religion in the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides
Metarepresentations
Aelius Aristides
The Experientiality of Narrative
The Act of Reading
Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology
Enculturing brains through patterned practices
Dream Cultures, Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming
Consciousness during Dreams
Dreaming
Emotion and Cognition
I sogni e la loro interpretazione nell’età dell’impero
Personal Religion Among the Greeks
Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome, and the Gods
Situated simulation in the human conceptual system
Being There
The affective regulation of cognitive priming
Embodiment in Religious Knowledge
Brain, Body and Culture
Action between plot and discourse
Presence in the reading of literary narrative
At the Limits of Art
Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales
Dreams and Dreaming in the Roman Empire
Apuleius A Latin Sophist
The Embodied Mind
How Stories Make Us Feel
Crying, Moving, and Keeping It Whole
Self-awareness in dreaming
| Highly cited | No |
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