Sacred marriage in the study of religion
A perspective from India on a concept that grew out of the ancient near east
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4866036 |
|---|---|
| Authors | William Harman (DePauw University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1989 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 353-376 |
| Publication date | 1989-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0048-721X • E-ISSN: 1096-1151 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1016/0048-721x(89)90051-1 |
| OpenAlex | W1978242415 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 27 |
Current scholarly understandings of ‘sacred marriage’ are seriously impaired by work that focuses on ancient cultures, primarily in the Near East, but also in Greece. Even when ‘diffusionism’, ‘patternism’, and an apparent preoccupation with rituals presumed sexual are all factored out, modern scholars offer little new because they appeal to rituals never witnessed and to fragmentary texts which we can only hope had some connection to ritual. Focusing on an extant ritual tradition in India with a 200-year-old festival and an explicitly associated text from the 13th century ce, Harman suggests that here, at least, sacred marriage is an elaborate, ritual statement of kinship responsibilities and obligations reestablished each year among deities and between deities and selected human beings
Ancient history · Appeal · Art · Extant taxon · Kinship · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Law · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Religion and Society Interactions
Autour de la Déesse hindoue
Asceticism and eroticism in the mythology of Śiva.
Myths and Rituals
The Ancient Gods
The Ritual Theory of Myth
The Golden Bough
Classical Hindu Mythology
Siva, Mīnākşsi, Visnu— Reflections on a Popular Myth in Madurai
Kinship Metaphors in the Hindu Pantheon
The Meaninglessness of Ritual
The family of Śiva in a South Indian grove
The Ritual Theory of Myth
Reflections on a Puranic Passage
The Poverty of Functionalism
Toward the Image of Tammuz
The Divine Couple's Relationship in a South Indian Temple
The Sacred Marriage of a Hindu Goddess
Census of India 1961
A Dictionary of Comparative Religion
Harijan religion
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |