Questions like these have been asked of diviners around the world throughout history – and still are today. From astrology and tarot to reading entrails, divination comes in a wide variety of forms.

Yet they all address the same human needs. They promise to tame uncertainty, help us make decisions or simply satisfy our desire to understand.

Anthropologists and historians like us study divination because it sheds light on the fears and anxieties of particular cultures, many of which are universal. Our new exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Oracles, Omens & Answers, explores these issues by showcasing divination techniques from around the world.

Here are five examples of divination techniques different cultures have developed to cope with life’s uncertainties.

1. Spider divination

In Cameroon, Mambila spider divination (ŋgam dù) addresses difficult questions to spiders or land crabs that live in holes in the ground.

Asking the spiders a question involves covering their hole with a broken pot and placing a stick, a stone and cards made from leaves around it. The diviner then asks a question in a yes or no format while tapping the enclosure to encourage the spider or crab to emerge. The stick and stone represent yes or no, while the leaf cards, which are specially incised with certain meanings, offer further clarification.

The movements of the spider or crab rearrange these objects, so that if a leaf card is moved to the stone or the stick, the answer emerges.

The answer is not always clear, however. If neither the stick nor the stone are selected (or both are chosen), interpretive work is required. The diviner and client must resolve the ambiguity, or decide that in this case the spider wasn’t saying anything at all.

2. Palmistry

Reading people’s palms (palmistry) is well known as a fairground amusement, but serious forms of this divination technique exist in many cultures. The practice of reading the hands to gather insights into a person’s character and future was used in many ancient cultures across Asia and Europe.

In some traditions, the shape and depth of the lines on the palm are richest in meaning. In others, the size of the hands and fingers are also considered. In some Indian traditions, special marks and symbols appearing on the palm also provide insights.

Palmistry experienced a huge resurgence in 19th-century England and America, just as the science of fingerprints was being developed. If you could identify someone from their fingerprints, it seemed plausible to read their personality from their hands.

One person who had their palm read at this time was Oscar Wilde. His reader, Edward Heron-Allen, published a sketch of Wilde’s hands, explaining that his palms indicated “extraordinary brain power” and a “great power of expression”.

3. Bibliomancy

If you want a quick answer to a difficult question, you could try bibliomancy. Historically, this DIY divining technique was performed with whatever important books were on hand.

Throughout Europe, the works of Homer or Virgil were used. In Iran, it was often the Divan of Hafiz, a collection of Persian poetry. In Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions, holy texts have often been used, though not without controversy.

There are a few ways to do it. In south-east Asia, you might push a sharp object through the pages of the book to see where its tip reaches.

Alternatively, you could open a page at random and see where your gaze falls. Although it might need some careful interpretation, the passage is thought to hold an answer to your dilemma.

4. Astrology

Astrology exists in almost every culture around the world. As far back as ancient Babylon, astrologers have interpreted the heavens to discover hidden truths and predict the future.

To cast horoscopes – essentially maps of the planets and stars as seen from a particular place and time on earth – astrologers need access to accurate astronomical observations. For this reason, pre-modern astrology was closely connected to astronomy.

Astrologers might cast horoscopes for a person’s birth, for the moment at which a client asks a query, or even a date in the future to determine whether it was good timing for a particular event.

The planets and zodiac signs each carry meanings, which are augmented by their relations to each other on a horoscope. Astrologers’ readings of these charts have long helped people seeking guidance, providing answers to pressing questions and aiding decision making.

In many historical cultures, astrologers also held prominent positions in royal courts and governments, making forecasts about the health and prosperity of their realm and the likelihood of impending disasters.

5. Calendrical divination

Calendars have long been used to divine the future and establish the best times to perform certain activities. In many countries, almanacs still advise auspicious and inauspicious days for tasks ranging from getting a haircut to starting a new business deal.

In Indonesia, Hindu almanacs called pawukon explain how different weeks are ruled by different local deities. The characteristics of the deities mean that some weeks are better than others for activities like marriage ceremonies.

In pre-conquest Mesoamerica (which roughly covered modern day central Mexico south to the north-western border of Costa Rica) your nature, fate and even your name were determined by the day on which you were born. Calendar priests in Mexico could forecast the success of a marriage by using a sacred, 260-day divination calendar. Interpreting the signs, the priest could tell whether a partnership would be happy, challenging or doomed – as well as how many children would result.

Oracles, Omens & Answers is at Oxford’s Bodleian Library at Oxford until April 27 2025.

David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford and Michelle Aroney, Research Fellow in Early Modern History, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Here are some more striking figures (all converted into Australian dollars). The average price of a ransom: $560,000. The payout to families if one of their loved ones dies in an act of terrorism (in Australia) $75,000. The average price of saving a life through strategic philanthropy: $6,000. And the price of buying a cadaver: $7,600.

Kleeman’s book investigates the many ways decision-makers find themselves putting a price on the priceless.

In her quest to discover how our modern world fixes a price to human life in a wide variety of contexts, she also investigates the costs and consequences of life insurance, the sale of body parts, and the inside details of government policy-making, compensation for murder and more.

As an ethicist, I enjoyed wrestling with the many surprising questions Kleeman’s fascinating book opens, even when I disagreed with some of her answers.

Who decides?

Of course, the amusing variations between the numbers Kleeman uncovers aren’t wholly unexpected: the prices affixed to human life in these contexts provide answers to very different questions. The hitman, for example, isn’t pricing that $30,000 based on how much they think a human life is worth. (Being the type of person who genuinely asks that question of themselves probably precludes that career path.) Instead, they are pricing the personal risks to them of committing the crime.

As this suggests, Kleeman’s book is not just concerned with how and why a human life is priced, but on who decides that price. Kleeman’s question encourages her to look in strange places and talk to interesting people, opening the readers’ eyes to decisions and calculations often hidden – sometimes deliberately so – from public view.

It spills over with fascinating characters: contract killers, police detectives, military jet pilots, philanthropists, life insurance investigators and government policy-makers. This is one of the book’s most delightful features. Her conversations with these varied characters are always engaging – because pricing life requires wading through deep ethical waters.

Ironically, Kleeman began work on the book in 2019. Back then, she – like so many of us – could comfortably avoid thinking about putting a price on human life and health. But that was pre-COVID. By early 2021, the question of what we are willing to pay to save lives was pressed onto us and our political leaders, in urgent and public ways.

‘Quality adjusted life years’

Confronting questions about what we will pay to save a life makes Kleeman’s subject especially vivid and urgent. Here, she meets strange ideas and stranger people: QALYs and effective altruists.

“QALYs” refers to Quality Adjusted Life Years – roughly, a year of human life lived in good health.

If pricing a life is to be done in any meaningful way, the QALY (or something like it) is a vital step in that direction. It lets decision-makers have a measure of consistency in allocating scarce resources.

For example, she discovers that the United Kingdom’s National Health Service will cover drugs that run to £30,000 (A$60,000) per QALY. More expensive treatments don’t present enough value per dollar invested. With a limited amount of funds to spend, it makes a kind of sense to spend them in the way that will do the most good possible, even if it involves making hard decisions.

It’s not just governments that try to carefully quantify the impacts of their dollars on human wellbeing.

Inspired by the writings of utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, effective altruism is a philosophy that focuses on doing the most good possible with the available resources.

It made headlines last year, when (now disgraced) crypto king and loud-and-proud effective atruist Sam Bankman-Fried claimed he needed “infinite dollars” because he planned to address existential risks facing humanity.

The philosophy has been particularly influential with Silicon Valley philanthropists like Bankman-Fried, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, a major funder of the charity Open Philanthropy. Kleeman interviews the latter “OpenPhil” team, who explain how they try to direct the charity’s billions of dollars towards the most cost-effective ways of saving human lives.

Organisations like OpenPhil and GiveWell estimate it takes around A$6,000 to save a life.

A reluctant journey?

At the start of her journey, Kleeman was profoundly disquieted about pricing human life. She raises this concern consistently.

She notes that the effective altruists she interviews in San Francisco, for example, ignore the homeless people living on nearby streets. Instead, they maximise the life impact of their philanthropy by dispassionately directing their charity to far-off Africans.

By the book’s end, though, Kleeman finds herself more open to some of the ways a price is put on human life. Is this moral progress? Or – she wonders – has she simply become used to talking and thinking in these ways?

Kleeman writes best when she is struggling with these difficult questions. When she is cocksure, sneering at the cost of weapons systems as she claims the money could be better spent addressing climate change, her sweeping ethical statements seemed – to this ethicist at least – glib and unserious.

But when she wrestles squarely with the seeming need for pricing life, and the simultaneous horror of doing so, she brings the reader along on her challenging but illuminating journey.

Putting a price on life

To get to a price on life, two conceptual steps need to be made.

The first step is to judge that – in some ways at least – human lives are commensurable. That is, we can add up the value (the goodness, or happiness, or worthwhileness) of one life and numerically compare it to another.

This is controversial – but many would argue it can, or even must, be done. This is what QALYs aim to do. The ethical theory of utilitarianism, which tells us to maximise the sum total of happiness in the world, also urges us to do it.

Indeed, we all do something like this in our everyday lives. Whenever we decide to make the world a better place by helping other people, we are implicitly judging that the good we do for them will outweigh the possible risks or costs we impose on them.

The second step in pricing a life is fully converting those “commensurable” numbers, which represent the value of people’s lives, into monetary terms. This seems self-evidently morally awful. Humanity can’t be reduced to a fungible resource that allows it to be weighed alongside – and traded with – other market goods.

To me, what Kleeman’s book demonstrates – despite its title – is that almost no one actually does this. For almost all the people she interviews, the question is not: “what is the overall objective worth of a person, expressed in dollars?”

Instead, the questions they confront are more like: how much do I as an individual owe this person? How much should we as a community support this person? Given the extent of resources available, how do we save as many lives as possible? How much will my family need to be supported if I die?

None of those questions are morally objectionable. Sometimes they might need to be answered in dollar terms.

Sometimes, the money is symbolic

Kleeman suggests people will be morally outraged at the difference in numbers between, say, the payouts given to the families of victims of the 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack. In this horrifying tragedy, terrorists used a van to mount the London Bridge kerb and mow down pedestrians (including many tourists), before leaving the vehicle to murder other civilians, using knives they had strapped to their wrists.

In the aftermath, the families of victims struck by the vehicle were able to sue the deep pockets of the rental company’s insurer. The families of those stabbed on the street had only the highly variable payouts their native countries give to victims of terrorism.

But is this really a moral affront? There is no infinite slush fund to compensate for the bad things that happen to people. We can’t judge policy as if there were. This inevitably means the extent of compensation available to victims will depend on how they were harmed, who is legally responsible, and – yes – how deep their pockets are.

Even the variability between nations in payouts for victims of terrorism is understandable. Most of these payments are not designed to compensate for life lost. How could they be? Instead, they aim to show community concern and offer some basic support. These are factors that might reasonably lead to different outcomes.

Do dollars deny humanity?

Kleeman’s abiding question remains. What is gained, and what is lost, from answering difficult moral questions in quantified monetary terms?

Kleeman has strong views on the costs of doing so. Too easily, decision-makers can forget the human being represented by the numbers they work with. This can empower them to make hard, dispassionate judgements they likely would never make – could never make – to a person in front of them. Dollar amounts can be traded off easily, in ways human beings should never be.

Kleeman worries this dispassionate application of dollar sums to human problems requires a denial of humanity.

There are reasonable worries here, but Kleeman seems unduly cynical about moral perspectives that don’t match her own. (To the point where she wonders if San Francisco’s tech philanthropists actually prefer giving to Africans rather than homeless locals, because the former seem less blameworthy for their condition.)

But my own research shows we have good reason to think there is actually an astounding variety of reliable and fulfilling ways of being moral. Rather than deplore the diverse psychological motives that can drive people to philanthropic giving, we should simply celebrate the fact of their doing so.

Justice in numbers?

But enough on the costs. The really intriguing question is: are there moral goods to these numbers?

Kleeman seems unwilling to grant that the numbers might improve efficiency and effectiveness in morally important ways.

The effective altruists might seem to be perversely applying a mathematical and engineering perspective to matters of conscience. However, it is hard to deny they are literally saving more lives than they would using other approaches. On any ethical reckoning, it must matter that those abstract numbers eventually culminate in real human beings, who are living today because of these calculations.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there is also a sense of justice in these bare numbers.

As Kleeman’s thinking evolves, she occasionally gestures towards this possibility. There is a reason the statue of “Lady Justice” used to embody justice is often presented as blindfolded. It illustrates there are things that should not be taken into account in fair decision-making. Sometimes, personal, humanising details are morally inappropriate.

A good place to start

Kleeman recounts the heartwarming story of a child who was marginally ineligible for a lifesaving medical treatment to be funded by the UK health system. By going public with his story, his mother humanised her child and pushed the National Health Service to extend coverage for the treatment to her child, and more widely.

Yet equally, we all must know in our hearts that a similar story could be told – perhaps should be told – for all dying children, including the ones whose parents are unable to mount campaigns on their behalf.

At some point, the sterility of numbers seems not just expedient, but right. It reminds us that in important ways, we are all of equal moral worth, no matter whose stories seize national attention.

Ultimately, for those wondering how much numbers should be part of the solution to the moral problems we confront, Kleeman’s book presents a great place to start looking for answers.

Hugh Breakey, Deputy Director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Moana is a seagoing adventure portraying the courage of its Pacific characters. I see many aspects of Māori communities represented in the film: our elders, our voyaging history, our language and culture, our ability to adapt, our sense of spirituality and our hope.

I see the characters in my own whānau (extended family). My nephew is similar to the character of Māui, the demigod voiced by Dwayne Johnson. He’s a likeable “big-boned” fulla with a quick wit – an overly confident rascal who draws others to him with a playfulness that gets him into (and out of) trouble.

At the same time, movies like Moana – in which non-Indigenous creators try to tell Indigenous stories – raise sensitive questions about authenticity, cultural appropriation and veiled forms of continuing colonisation.

Disney’s bottom line is to develop characters and storylines that suit a global market and will ultimately be financially viable. Perhaps this is why it missed so many key characteristics of Māui as he is known to the Polynesian people.

In Moana, there is a mystique around Māui’s demigod status; he sits in the space between the gods and humanity. Like the Māui of Polynesia, he can shapeshift, wields a magic hook and is courageous.

Yet this Hollywood Māui would have no chance against the Māui of Polynesia, who is not a god to be worshipped, but a spirit – a set of characteristics identified through the actions of a person. Māui’s spirit lives today and can be activated by his descendants to do extraordinary things.

A Māori view of Māui

Māui’s biggest muscles were in his head and stomach (where Māori believe the core being of a person is located). However, there is no record of him having an appearance that made him stand out in the community.

When Māui decided to rejoin his birth family as a young man, he lined up with his brothers, and his mother was unable to see a difference between the siblings’ physical builds. This is in contrast with his unusually large build in Moana.

He also wasn’t the playful, reckless larrikin depicted in Moana. He saw the world through clear eyes and calculated his way forward, courageously approaching challenges as opportunities to demonstrate his mastery.

He was innovative, intelligent, confident and resourceful – and most of what he did would benefit the whole community. That said, he could also be devious, cruel and jealous as he pushed to achieve his goals.

One of his names is “Māui-pōtiki”, or “Māui the youngest sibling”, which signals the characteristics of someone who challenged the status quo – a free thinker and a clever trickster.

Supernatural power leads to supernatural deeds

Māui faced a series of challenges. Some were forced on him, such as surviving his infancy. At birth he was presumed dead (or near death) and was abandoned to the sea. His grandfather rescued and raised him, teaching him skills, knowledge and karakia – the spiritual means to bend the laws of the universe in his favour.

He faced many challenges in his world, and his responses conveyed important social and life lessons. For instance, the days were too short and people were unable to complete their work before nightfall. So Māui’s answer was to slow the Sun’s journey across the sky. He convinced his sceptical brothers to help him and they went to the pit where the Sun rose each day.

Armed with plaited ropes, infused with spiritual power to hold the Sun, as well as the sacred jawbone of his ancestor (which he also used as a hook), they stationed themselves around the pit and waited.

As the Sun rose into the morning sky, the brothers pulled their ropes to form a tight net, trapping the Sun. Māui quickly climbed onto the Sun and began to beat him (the Sun is personified and thought to be masculine in Māori belief) with his ancestor’s jawbone.

Dazed and battered, the Sun asked Māui the reason for the attack, who then gave him an ultimatum: “Slow your movement across the sky (or I’ll be back)!” The Sun, from fear and injury, slowed down, providing a useful length of daylight for the people.

While violence may not be a justifiable approach to change, there’s still much to learn from this incident. When you need to get something done, you should have a plan, build a team, make use of the resources available to you, be courageous and go for it.

Stories spread across the seas

Māui is credited with many other exploits. He hauled islands up across the Pacific. He spoke with the gods and creatures of the Earth. He even brought fire to the world from the goddess Mahuika and came close to conquering death.

Each story contains layers of knowledge, explaining important aspects of the world and human behaviour. This information was so significant that these stories have been passed down through generations for hundreds of years – spread with our voyaging ancestors across the Pacific, the largest continent in the world.

As such, Māui pops up in stories all across Polynesia, reaching into Melanesia and Micronesia. While the tales about the character, attitude, aptitude and mana (the spiritual lifeforce) are similar, variations exist across Polynesia.

Moana aims to entertain and speak to us and our children. Perhaps the sequel will now reawaken Māui-based discussions on marae (Māori communal spaces) and other Pacific forums. Or perhaps the spirit of Māui will see this “harmless rascal” persona as a launch pad to galvanise his descendants into addressing the ills that face them today.

Kia ara ake anō te kawa a Māui – let the spirit of Māui arise. And enjoy the movie.

Mike Ross, Head of School, Te Kawa a Māui, School of Māori Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Throughout our workshop, my colleagues in the Cree Nation of Iiyiyiu Aschii shared their excitement about a “great journey” their youth were undertaking: the Journey of Nishiyuu. A group was traveling 1,000 miles on foot in the dead of winter – all the way from their homes in Whapmagoostui First Nation, on the shores of Hudson Bay, to Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the capital of Canada.

For Indigenous activists, walking the land can take on powerful spiritual and political significance. It has been, and continues to be, an important way Indigenous nations pursue healing, environmental stewardship and diplomacy across Turtle Island, the name many Indigenous groups use to refer to North America.

I am a Canadian scholar whose ancestry stems from Western Europe. I now teach in San Diego, on Kumeyaay territory. My scholarship focuses on Indigenous spiritualities and social movements. Over the past several years, I have worked with Whapmagoostui First Nation – a remote, fly-in community in northern Québec – on research about the Journey of Nishiyuu.

Healing journey

The Journey of Nishiyuu – which translates to"human beings" or “new people” – took place from January-March 2013. More broadly, that season was known as the winter of Idle No More, a movement in support of First Nations’ rights in Canada.

Led by Indigenous women, Idle No More arose when the Canadian government passed C-45, legislation that they feared would reduce environmental protections and weaken consultation with Indigenous communities. The winter of 2012-13 was also when Theresa Spence, the chief of Attawapiskat First Nation, held a hunger strike near Parliament Hill – an effort to hold the government accountable for its treaty obligations and to address the inadequate living conditions in northern reservations.

The Nishiyuu walkers announced that they were walking the land to demonstrate that the Iiyiyiuch are still “keepers” of their “language, culture, and tradition,” and honoring their ancestors. Many individual walkers also spoke about the experience as a healing journey.

“For the youth here there is no better place to be than out on the land,” said David Kawapit, the young walker who initiated the journey, when I interviewed him in Whapmagoostui.

The walkers started off their journey in snowshoes, traveling along traditional trap lines and trading routes. As they moved farther south, the trail turned to highways, and walkers exchanged moccasins and snowshoes for boots and running shoes. Throughout the journey, walkers were hosted by other Iiyiyiu, as well as other Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, where they shared stories, food and prophecies with one another.

When the group set off in January, it consisted of only six young walkers from Whapmagoostui and their elder guide, the late Isaac Kawapit. By the time they reached Parliament Hill, however, the movement had grown to approximately 270 people of many ages and cultural backgrounds.

This was not just a walk for the Cree Nation. The journey was also intended to strengthen inter-Indigenous relations across Canada during Idle No More. The Nishiyuu walkers embarked on their journey to emphasize the important role land plays in shaping their sense of well-being, their culture and their communities’ political autonomy.

Walking land and lakes

The Journey of Nishiyuu is one of many Indigenous-led social justice movements that engage in walking the land. In 1978, for example, the American Indian Movement led a 3,000-mile walk from Alcatraz Island in San Francisco all the way to Washington, D.C.

Activists who participated in this “Longest Walk” did so to hold the U.S. government accountable to its treaty obligations. The United States signed approximately 374 treaties with Indigenous nations from 1778 until 1871, but Native American groups argue the government has often eroded rights these treaties were meant to protect.

The Longest Walk helped prevent the passage of 11 bills in Congress that would have restricted Native communities’ jurisdiction and social services and diminished their land and water rights, among other consequences.

In 2008, Indigenous activists embarked on a second Longest Walk and once more made the long journey from Alcatraz to Washington. This time, the walkers called attention to the need to respect sacred sites, protect the environment and create better futures for young people.

Other walks have brought together Indigenous activists from Canada and the U.S., such as the Mother Earth Water Walkers. The late Josephine Mandamin, an Anishinaabe Grandmother and member of Wikwemikong First Nation, initiated the first Water Walk on Easter morning in 2003. She walked the entire perimeter of Lake Superior, on the U.S.-Canada border – an act of prayer and an effort to live out her obligations to care for and heal the waters.

Mandamin was joined by other “water walkers” who have kept her traditions and teachings alive. They have continued to walk around numerous bodies of water, including Lake Ontario in 2006, Lake Erie in 2007 and the Menominee River in 2016. Their walks embody an Anishinaabe perspective that water is a sacred medicine, and also aim to educate the public on the importance of Indigenous peoples’ access to water and jurisdiction over their ancestral waterways.

Affirming freedom

When Indigenous activists walk the land, they are restoring their firsthand knowledge of place and reknitting their relationships with plants, animals and other human beings. They are also revitalizing traditional forms of governance and diplomacy through visits with other Indigenous nations along the way – and sometimes inviting non-Indigenous people to walk with them. These invitations offer non-Indigenous walkers opportunities for reconciling their own relationships to land and to the Indigenous peoples whose territories they inhabit.

Part of such walks’ significance stems from history. For centuries, the United States and Canada attempted to control Indigenous peoples’ freedom of movement – often with support from religious institutions. In the U.S., the reservation system segregated Indigenous nations and allocated them to small portions of land. In Canada, the pass system mandated that Indigenous people present a travel document to an appointed Indian agent in order to leave and return from their reservations.

Boarding schools in the United States and residential schooling in Canada separated children from their lands, families and communities. Federal relocation programs encouraged or forced Indigenous people to move to cities and urban centers in an attempt to assimilate them.

While these social movements commemorate history, and try to heal from it, they are also a reminder that the past is present.

By walking the land, Indigenous people assert their sovereignty and carry out their sacred obligations to care for their lands and waters – which I believe can inspire a more just and beautiful future.

Meaghan Weatherdon, Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, University of San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scott’s film will undoubtedly capture the thrills of this spectacle. But as someone who studies the Roman world, I think it’s worth remembering that its cultural legacy goes beyond the cinematic pleasures of the big screen.

You might be surprised to learn that there are threads that tie together gladiators, Christian martyrs and the sense of persecution that exists among many U.S. evangelicals today.

Fan clubs and heartthrobs

Gladiatorial fights likely began as part of the funeral rites of wealthy Roman families. Over time, the fights became mass public events, regulated by the state and elites.

They included three sets of events: wild beast fights, the executions of criminals, and gladiatorial fights. The gladiators were the main event, with their forthcoming battles hyped on the walls of Roman cities. These advertisements often mentioned the names of the famous fighters, the number of gladiators fighting, and whether there would be fights to the death. Not all gladiators fought to the death: The gladiator Hilarus, for example, won 12 times but fought in 14 fights.

Gladiators were, by law, required to be slaves.

Their enslavers invested time and money in their training and upkeep. Roman games were put on at the expense of local elites, or even the emperor. Well-trained gladiators meant better shows for the sponsors and bigger profits for their owners. A gladiator who died in his first fight was not good for business. Meanwhile, a successful gladiator – meaning one who had made his enslaver a lot of money – could hope to be freed or be given an opportunity to buy his freedom.

Those who won could also expect to become beloved celebrities, which somewhat offset the dishonor of being enslaved. In Pompeii, multiple inscriptions mention the Thracian gladiator Celadus, calling him a heartthrob. Gladiatorial fan clubs were common. One group was likely responsible for a riot that broke out during a set of games in Pompeii in 59 C.E. There’s even evidence of gladiatorial cosplay. One Roman senator was said to have fought duels with a woman in a leopard costume at Ostia.

Meanwhile, the tombstones of gladiators in Roman-controlled Greece celebrated their prowess using language drawn from ancient athletics, which were sports that were only available to freeborn citizens. These gladiators gave themselves stage names evoking mythological heroes or their courage and bravery.

These stage names were not just for entertainment; they were attempts to immortalize their respectability. By casting themselves as athletes and not enslaved fighters, they presented themselves as participants in a noble, athletic tradition.

Christians embrace ancient athletics

Early Christians used descriptions of sports and athletics because they could be easily understood by Roman society.

Ancient athletic competitions shaped how people thought about beauty, the body, self-control, education and competition. For victorious gladiators, the outcast and the slave could paradoxically embody the ideals of Roman virtue.

In the Christian New Testament, the apostle Paul famously describes himself as a runner and a boxer and even as a gladiator. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews speaks of running a race before a heavenly crowd of witnesses.

By embracing this imagery, early Christians positioned themselves as outsiders who nonetheless championed Roman ideals and culture.

Gladiator as martyr

Some early Christians followed Paul’s example and wrote themselves into the culture of ancient sports, particularly in a genre of Christian writing focused on martyrdom.

It is commonly thought that the earliest Christians were regularly and systematically persecuted by the Roman government. But the widespread persecution of ancient Christians under the Roman Empire is a myth that modern historians have debunked. Local persecutions did happen from time to time: There were a few short periods where the imperial government targeted Christians. However, for the most part, the Romans paid little attention to Christians.

So why were Christians so focused on telling stories of martyrs?

Ancient Christians wrote violent stories about martyrs because they functioned as morality plays that taught virtue and vice.

One example is the account of the “Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne,” written sometime at the end of the second century C.E. In the story, those condemned to death in the arena are described as “noble athletes” and “noble competitors.” The author characterizes Christians – who are dying not as athletes or gladiators, but as common criminals – as those who possess the elite virtues of great athletes. The reversal of expectations gives the story its force.

You can see this in the character of Blandina, an enslaved woman who is described in the account as a noble athlete and as one who has put on Christ, the “mighty and powerful athlete.” The author instructs the audience to see her as a hero, not as a slave or a criminal: through her, “Christ showed that the things that appear worthless, obscure, and despicable among men are considered worthy of great glory with God.”

In another martyr narrative, a woman named Perpetua has a dream in which she transforms into a gladiator before her martyrdom. These early Christian martyr accounts envision games in which enslaved people display noble courage and virtue; those condemned to torture, beatings and violent deaths are unfazed. Instead, they’re self-possessed athletes who strive for imperishable crowns.

Forever persecuted

The draw of stories in which Christians are “thrown to the lions” has remained powerful. Most ancient martyr accounts were written after Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire. But Christians continued to write stories about martyrs even after they became the majority of the population.

In the U.S. today, evangelical, charismatic and conservative Christians continue to tap into the martyrdom mythology. Even as they’ve become a powerful force in national politics, many influential wings of conservative U.S. Christians have come to characterize themselves as a persecuted minority. And they keep writing martyr stories.

High school football coach Joe Kennedy became an evangelical hero for fighting for the right to pray on the field at public high school football games. Kennedy had been fired for leading postgame prayers on the field, in violation of school policy. His supporters viewed him as a champion of religious freedom who was being unfairly persecuted for his beliefs. Kennedy ultimately fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor.

Other conservative Christians have also returned to the arena. This time, they’re the gladiatorial fighters and not the murdered martyrs.

The popular internet meme of Marine Todd taps into this particular fantasy: The fictional Marine gets so fed up with his atheist university professor that he punches him in front of the class. Meanwhile, the gallows and crosses that accompanied the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol juxtaposed fantasies of violence with Christian fears of persecution. While less ominous, the recent film “The Carpenter” puts Jesus ringside, telling the story of how Jesus takes on an apprentice and teaches him how to fight, MMA-style, in ancient Nazareth.

In depictions like these, Christians are no longer dying in the arena. It’s where they fight back.

Cavan W. Concannon, Professor of Religion and Classics, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Road to Hell: The Apocalypse in Classical and Contemporary Forms”

What prompted the idea for the course?

When Meghan R. Henning, a scholar of early Christianity, completed her 2014 book on how the concept of hell evolved in the early Christian church, she wanted to develop a course that examined how these visions of hell found their way into contemporary media. Soon after, she met Joseph Valenzano III, a communication scholar who studies religious rhetoric in film and television. The course “Road to Hell” was born in 2015 as a collaboration between the two. I’ve been teaching the course since 2020, which aligns with my research focus on intersections of film and television production with geography and American culture.

What does the course explore?

The course begins with the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. It ends with the evangelical “hell houses” of the 21st-century United States that attempt to scare visitors into salvation with horrific visions of secular sinners being dragged into hell. It’s a chronology that spans about 3,500 years.

Along the way, the course explores other versions of the afterlife, such as the ancient Jewish concept of Sheol, Greek and Roman visions of Hades, Norse mythology’s Ragnarok, and the evolution of Christian concepts of hell and the end-times from the Gospels and the Book of Revelation through Dante’s Inferno, and how all these visions align with scholarly definitions of an apocalypse. In each of these lessons, students compare these traditions against contemporary film and television that evoke the iconography and thematic content of those apocalypses.

Why is this course relevant now?

Even outside of the Christian tradition, hell is a concept that is never far from people’s minds, and since at least the 1970s, the end-times have been a part of mainstream American discourse. Most people have an idea of what hell or the end-times look like, but few understand where these ideas come from, or how much those ideas are mediated by popular culture.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

The images we see in books, TV shows and movies are a part of a rhetorical tradition that goes back thousands of years. Understanding where those images come from and how they are used in contemporary media helps people understand the relationship between ancient times and the present day.

What materials does the course feature?

“Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature,” by Meghan R. Henning.

“Enraptured by Rapture: Production Context, Biblical Interpretation, and Evangelical Eschatology in The Rapture, Left Behind, and This is the End,” an October 2024 article in the Journal of Religion & Film by Robert G. Joseph, Laura M. Tringali and Meghan R. Henning.

“Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema,” edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Regina M. Hansen.

What will the course prepare students to do?

By the semester’s end, students complete their own analyses of their chosen ancient apocalypse and contemporary media with a final presentation. Like all good humanities courses, Road to Hell encourages its students to reach into the past in order to better understand how reality is constructed in the present.

Robert Gordon Joseph, Senior Lecturer of Communication, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the popular mind, the two groups are synonymous. In the story of the quintessential American holiday, they have become inseparable protagonists in the story of the origins.

But as a scholar of both English and American history, I know there are significant differences between the two groups. Nowhere is this more telling than in their respective religious beliefs and treatment of Native Americans.

Where did the Pilgrims come from?

Pilgrims arose from the English Puritan movement that originated in the 1570s. Puritans wanted the English Protestant Reformation to go further. They wished to rid the Church of England of “popish” – that is, Catholic – elements like bishops and kneeling at services.

Each Puritan congregation made its own covenant with God and answered only to the Almighty. Puritans looked for evidence of a “godly life,” meaning evidence of their own prosperous and virtuous lives that would assure them of eternal salvation. They saw worldly success as a sign, though not necessarily a guarantee, of eventual entrance into heaven.

After 1605, some Puritans became what scholar Nathaniel Philbrick calls “Puritans with a vengeance.” They embraced “extreme separatism,” removing themselves from England and its corrupt church.

These Puritans would soon become “Pilgrims” – literally meaning that they would be prepared to travel to distant lands to worship as they pleased.

In 1608, a group of 100 Pilgrims sailed to Leiden, Holland and became a separate church living and worshipping by themselves.

They were not satisfied in Leiden. Believing Holland also to be sinful and ungodly, they decided in 1620 to venture to the New World in a leaky vessel called the Mayflower. Fewer than 40 Pilgrims joined 65 nonbelievers, whom the Pilgrims dubbed “strangers,” in making the arduous journey to what would be called Plymouth Colony.

Hardship, survival and Thanksgiving in America

Most Americans know that more than half of the Mayflower’s passengers died the first harsh winter of 1620-21. The fragile colony survived only with the assistance of Native Americans – most famously Squanto. To commemorate, not celebrate, their survival, Pilgrims joined Native Americans in a grand meal during the autumn of 1621.

But for the Pilgrims, what we today know as Thanksgiving was not a feast; rather, it was a spiritual devotion. Thanksgiving was a solemn and not a celebratory occasion. It was not a holiday.

Still, Plymouth was dominated by the 65 strangers, who were largely disinterested in what Pilgrims saw as urgent questions of their own eternal salvation.

There were few Protestant clerics among the Pilgrims, and in few short years, they found themselves to be what historian Mark Peterson calls “spiritual orphans.” Lay Pilgrims like William Brewster conducted services, but they were unable to administer Puritan sacraments.

Pilgrims and Native Americans in the 1620s

At the same time, Pilgrims did not actively seek the conversion of Native Americans. According to scholars like Philbrick, English author Rebecca Fraser and Peterson, the Pilgrims appreciated and respected the intellect and common humanity of Native Americans.

An early example of Pilgrim respect for the humanity of Native Americans came from the pen of Edward Winslow. Winslow was one of the chief Pilgrim founders of Plymouth. In 1622, just two years after the Pilgrims’ arrival, he published in the mother country the first book about life in New England, “Mourt’s Relation.”

While opining that Native Americans “are a people without any religion or knowledge of God,” he nevertheless praised them for being “very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe witted, just.”

Winslow added that “we have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving. … we often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them.”

In Winslow’s second published book, “Good Newes from New England (1624),” he recounted at length nursing the Wampanoag leader Massasoit as he lay dying, even to the point of spoon-feeding him chicken broth.Fraser calls this episode “very tender.”

The Puritan exodus from England

The thousands of non-Pilgrim Puritans who remained behind and struggled in England would not share Winslow’s views. They were more concerned with what they saw as their own divine mission in America.

After 1628, dominant Puritan ministers clashed openly with the English Church and, more ominously, with King Charles I and Bishop of London – later Archbishop of Canterbury – William Laud.

So, hundreds and then thousands of Puritans made the momentous decision to leave England behind and follow the tiny band of Pilgrims to America. These Puritans never considered themselves separatists, though. Following what they were confident would be the ultimate triumph of the Puritans who remained in the mother country, they would return to help govern England.

The American Puritans of the 1630s and beyond were more ardent, and nervous about salvation, than the Pilgrims of the 1620s. Puritans tightly regulated both church and society and demanded proof of godly status, meaning evidence of a prosperous and virtuous life leading to eternal salvation. They were also acutely aware of that divine-sent mission to the New World.

Puritans believed they must seek out and convert Native Americans so as to “raise them to godliness.” Tens of thousands of Puritans therefore poured into Massachusetts Bay Colony in what became known as the “Great Migration.” By 1645, they already surrounded and would in time absorb the remnants of Plymouth Colony.

Puritans and Native Americans in the 1630s and beyond

Dominated by hundreds of Puritan clergy, Massachusetts Bay Colony was all about emigration, expansion and evangelization during this period.

As early as 1651, Puritan evangelists like Thomas Mayhew had converted 199 Native Americans labeled by the Puritans as “praying Indians.”

For those Native Americans who converted to Christianity and prayed with the Puritans, there existed an uneasy harmony with Europeans. For those who resisted what the Puritans saw as “God’s mission,” there was harsh treatment – and often death.

But even for those who succumbed to the Puritans’ evangelization, their culture and destiny changed dramatically and unalterably.

War with Native Americans

A devastating outcome of Puritan cultural dominance and prejudice was King Philip’s War in 1675-76. Massachusetts Bay Colony feared that Wampanoag chief Metacom – labeled by Puritans “King Philip” – planned to attack English settlements throughout New England in retaliation for the murder of “praying Indian” John Sassamon.

That suspicion mushroomed into a 14-month, all-out war between colonists and Native Americans over land, religion and control of the region’s economy. The conflict would prove to be one of the bloodiest per capita in all of American history.

By September 1676, thousands of Native Americans had been killed, with hundreds of others sold into servitude and slavery. King Philip’s War set an ominous precedent for Anglo-Native American relations throughout most of North America for centuries to come.

The Pilgrims’ true legacy

So, Puritans and Pilgrims came out of the same religious culture of 1570s England. They diverged in the early 1600s, but wound up 70 years later being one and the same in the New World.

In between, Pilgrim separatists sailed to Plymouth, survived a terrible first winter and convened a robust harvest-time meal with Native Americans. Traditionally, the Thanksgiving holiday calls to mind those first settlers’ courage and tenacity.

However, the humanity that Pilgrims like Edward Winslow showed toward the Native Americans they encountered was lamentably and tragically not shared by the Puritan colonists who followed them. Therefore, the ultimate legacy of Thanksgiving is and will remain mixed.

Michael Carrafiello, Professor of History, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We are scholars of Buddhism who specialize in social media research. In August of 2019, we searched on Apple’s App Store and Google Play and found over 500 apps associated with Buddhism. The majority of the apps centered on the practice of mindfulness.

Do these apps truly promote Buddhist ideals or are they a product of a lucrative consumer industry?

Health benefits

As it is practiced in the U.S. today, mindfulness meditation focuses on being intensely aware, without any sort of judgment, of what one is sensing and feeling in the given moment. Mindfulness practice has been shown to counter the tendency in many of us to spend too much time planning and problem solving, which can be stressful.

Mindfulness practices, as pursued by the Buddhist apps, involve guided meditation, breathing exercises and other forms of relaxation. Clinical tests show that mindfulness relieves stress, anxiety, pain, depression, insomnia and hypertension. However, there have been few studies of mindfulness apps.

The current popular understanding of mindfulness is derived from the Buddhist concept of sati, which describes being aware of one’s body, feelings and other mental states.

In early Buddhist texts mindfulness meant not only paying attention but also remembering what the Buddha taught, so that one could discern between skillful and unskillful thoughts, feelings and actions. This would ultimately lead to liberation from the cycle of birth and death.

For example, the Buddhist text “Satipatthana Sutta” describes not only being mindful of breath and body, but also comparing one’s body to a corpse in a cemetery to appreciate the arising and ceasing of the body.

“One is mindful that the body exists, just to the extent necessary for knowledge and awareness. And one remains detached, grasping at nothing in the world,” the sutra reads.

Here mindfulness enables one to appreciate impermanence, not become attached to material things and strive to attain greater awareness so that one can ultimately become enlightened.

Early Buddhist mindfulness practitioners were those who criticized mainstream societal values and cultural norms such as bodily beauty, family ties and material wealth.

Mindfulness apps, on the other hand, encourage people to cope with and accommodate to society. They overlook the surrounding causes and conditions of suffering and stress, which may be political, social or economic.

Lucrative industry

Mindfulness apps are part of a massive and lucrative industry valued at roughly US$130 million.

Two apps, Calm and Headspace, claim nearly 70% of the overall market share. These apps cater to a wide audience, which includes religious consumers as well as the growing number of Americans who consider themselves spiritual but not religious.

Americans spend over five hours each day glued to their mobile devices. Nearly 80% of Americans check their smartphones within fifteen minutes of waking up. The apps provide a way to do meditation while on the go.

The fact that Buddhist apps exist is not surprising, as Buddhism has always been skillful at using new media technologies to spread its message. The oldest known printed book, for example, is a Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra, a Sanskrit Buddhist text that dates to the ninth century.

Are these apps merely repackaging of ancient Buddhism in new digital wrappers?

Is this Buddhist?

There is no doubt that Buddhist apps are a reflection of real social distress. But, in our assessment, mindfulness, when stripped of all its religious elements, may distort understandings of Buddhism.

A core aspect of Buddhism is the concept of no-self: the belief that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul or other essence. In promoting an individualistic approach to religion, then, Buddhist apps may well rub against the very grain of Buddhist practice.

Indeed, our findings show that Buddhist meditation apps are not a cure that relieves suffering in the world, but more like an opiate that hides the real symptoms of the precarious and stressful state in which many people find themselves today.

In that case, Buddhist apps, rather than curing the anxiety created by our smartphones, just make us more addicted to them and, in the end, even more stressed.

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Gregory Grieve, Head and Professor, Religious Studies Department, University of North Carolina – Greensboro and Beverley McGuire, Professor of East Asian Religions, University of North Carolina Wilmington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This makes no sense! Job did nothing wrong. Three friends visit Job and mourn with him. But an epic debate erupts when they claim that, if Job is the target of God’s wrath, it must have been deserved.

Job, on the other hand, says God has deprived him of justice and demands an explanation from the Almighty. He and his friends argue through poetry – a “rap battle” with beautiful imagery, eloquent wordplay and sarcastic insults.

The Book of Job is frequently touted as a literary masterpiece for the way it challenges foundational beliefs. Many stories have been written about characters like Job, thrust into a topsy-turvy world where nothing works the way it should. Suddenly, they must rethink their understanding about how the universe operates.

As a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, I see the closest parallels in another classic book – but perhaps not one you’d expect.

Down the rabbit hole

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” published in 1865, is a hallmark of children’s literature because of the way it encourages curiosity. Like the Book of Job, the novel upends literary conventions and mocks elders, teachers and religious leaders – really, anyone who tries to tell you that life will be OK if you stop asking questions and follow the rules.

It opens with a little girl named Alice, who is bored one afternoon until she sees a rabbit check its pocket watch and declare that it’s running late. She follows it down a rabbit hole and into Wonderland, a dreamlike place where cats vanish into thin air, babies turn into pigs and caterpillars smoke hookah.

Everyday logic no longer applies. Like Job, Alice must question her assumptions if she is to make sense of what is happening around her. Other fantasy worlds require swords, but Alice battles the fantastical creatures of Wonderland with words. As with Job, her ordinary day has gone upside-down, and she finds herself in a debate about reality.

Method to the madness?

Each of these books pushes back against easy answers and heavy-handed morals, which were expected in both ancient wisdom literature and Victorian children’s stories.

Proverbs in Job’s day taught that wickedness leads to punishment. Bestsellers in Carroll’s day included the “Fatal Effects of Disobedience to Parents,” a story about a little girl who burned herself to the ground after her parents told her not to play with fire.

The characters who debate Job and Alice are desperate to find these kinds of lessons in the midst of chaos.

Job’s friends claim that “upright” people never suffer and always enjoy divine protection – unaware that God has already acknowledged Job is “upright.” They look silly as they search in vain for a sin that explains Job’s suffering and scoff when he suggests there is none.

Alice, meanwhile, squares up against characters such as the Duchess, who offers ridiculous suggestions about the moral of Alice’s story. The Duchess scoffs when Alice suggests that there is none.

Wordplay, not swordplay

Job and Alice, on the other hand, make fun of society’s rules – as when they sing parodies of religious songs.

Psalm 8, a hymn of praise in the Bible, waxes eloquent about how beautiful it is that the almighty God spends time caring about insignificant humans. Job recites his own version, which complains that it is petty for an infinite creator to spend so much time testing humans.

Carroll grew up singing songs like “Against Idleness and Mischief,” composed by minister Isaac Watts to teach children that they should work hard like an innocent, busy bee. When Alice tries to remember this song, it comes out in Wonderland logic, where a sinister crocodile eats little fish.

Both parodies sarcastically question the underlying assumptions of the original poem. Is it always good to have God’s attention? Is hard work always good?

This shows how both books play with style, including intentional misspellings, rare and even made-up words, and elements borrowed from other languages. They coined enduring phrases such as Job’s “by the skin of my teeth” and “the root of the matter,” or Wonderland’s “down the rabbit hole.”

These techniques add an otherworldly texture to the language of Uz and Wonderland, far from the books’ original readership in Israel and England. The diction opens countless possibilities for puns and wordplay and forces readers to question basic assumptions about language.

Order in the court

Ultimately, these stories make readers consider a fundamental desire: justice. The adventures of Alice and Job both culminate in epic trials, dominated by stormy authority figures. But if the protagonists can’t even rely on words’ meanings, how can they rely on the law?

When Alice meets Wonderland’s ruler, the Queen of Hearts, she is “frowning like a thunderstorm,” and Alice is “too much frightened to say a word.”

But she is displeased with the queen’s arbitrary distribution of justice and summons the courage to challenge her during a trial for the Knave of Hearts, who stands accused of stealing the sovereign’s tarts.

Throughout the trial, Alice becomes more and more bold. While everyone else cowers in fear, she is willing to question court conventions when they are manipulated by those in power.

Voicing her protest seems to awaken her from Wonderland and back to the “real” world. The book ends with a note about how she will never lose “the simple and loving heart of her childhood” – that is, she won’t forget that kids can have fun for fun’s sake.

Back in the land of Uz, Job wishes that a court judge would compel God to explain why he is being punished. Certain he did nothing wrong, he says he would wear the accusations like a crown and refute every charge.

God, aware of Job’s innocence the entire time, was never trying to punish him. The deity finally appears in the middle of a whirlwind, and Job puts his hand over his own mouth. It is difficult to argue with the Almighty.

Job had accused his friends of merely flattering God when they insisted his “punishment” was the result of divine wisdom. In the end, God blesses Job for speaking honestly – using a Hebrew word, “nekhonah,” that appears only one other time in the Bible, where it stands in contrast to flattery.

It turns out that God is pleased by those who are honest when a moral agenda doesn’t fit reality – people who, like Job and Alice, speak truth to power.

Ryan M. Armstrong, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Oklahoma State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Their gathering is meant to mark a different occasion – the Indigenous People’s Thanksgiving Sunrise Ceremony, an annual celebration that spotlights 500 years of Native resistance to colonialism in what was dubbed the “New World.” Held on the traditional lands of the Ohlone people, the gathering is a call for remembrance and for future action for Indigenous people and their allies.

As a scholar of Indigenous literary and cultural studies, I introduce my students to the long and enduring history of Indigenous peoples’ pushback against settler violence. The origins of this sunrise event are a particularly compelling example that stem from a pivotal moment of Indigenous activism: the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island, a 19-month-long takeover that began in 1969.

Reclaiming of Alcatraz Island

On Nov. 20, 1969, led by Indigenous organizers Richard Oakes (Mohawk) and LaNada War Jack (Shoshone Bannock), roughly 100 activists who called themselves “Indians of All Tribes,” or IAT, traveled by charter boat across San Francisco Bay to reclaim the island for Native peoples. Multiple groups had done smaller demonstrations on Alcatraz in previous years, but this group planned to stay, and it maintained its presence there until June 1971.

Before this occupation, Alcatraz Island had served as a military prison and then a federal penitentiary. U.S. Prison Alcatraz was decommissioned in 1963 because of the high cost of its upkeep, and it was essentially left abandoned. In November 1969, after a fire destroyed the American Indian Center in San Francisco, local Indigenous activists were looking for a new place where urban Natives could gather and access resources, such as legal assistance and educational opportunities, and Alcatraz Island fit the bill.

Citing a federal law that stated that “unused or retired federal lands will be returned to Native American tribes,” Oakes’ group settled in to live on “The Rock.” They elected a council and established a school, a medical center and other necessary infrastructure. They even had a pirate radio show called “Radio Free Alcatraz,” hosted by Santee Dakota poet John Trudell.

The IAT did offer – albeit satirically – to purchase the island back, proposing in the 1969 proclamation “twenty-four dollars (US$24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago,” referring to the purchase of Manhattan Island by the Dutch in 1626.

On behalf of IAT, Oakes sent the following message to the regional office San Francisco office of the Department of the Interior shortly after they arrived:

“The choice now lies with the leaders of the American government – to use violence upon us as before to remove us from our Great Spirit’s land, or to institute a real change in its dealing with the American Indian … We and all other oppressed peoples would welcome spectacle of proof before the world of your title by genocide. Nevertheless, we seek peace.”

After 19 months, the occupation ultimately succumbed to internal and external pressures. Oakes left the island after a family tragedy, and many members of the original group returned to school, leaving a gap in leadership. Moreover, the government cut off water and electricity to the island, and a mysterious fire destroyed several buildings, with the Indigenous occupiers and government officials pointing the blame at one another.

By June 1971, President Richard Nixon was ready to intervene and ordered federal agents to remove the few remaining occupiers. The occupation was over, but it helped spark an Indigenous political revitalization that continues today. It also pushed Nixon to put an official end to the “termination era,” a legislative effort geared toward ending the federal government’s responsibility to Native nations, as articulated in treaties and formal agreements.

Solidarity at sunrise

In 1975, “Unthanksgiving Day” was established to both mark the occupation and advocate for Indigenous self-determination. For many participants, Unthanksgiving Day was also a reiteration of the original declaration released by IAT, which called on the U.S. to acknowledge the impacts of 500 years of genocide against Indigenous people.

These days, the event is conducted by the International Indian Treaty Council and is largely referred to as the Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering.

Participants meet on Pier 33 in San Francisco before dawn and board boats to Alcatraz Island, bringing Native peoples and allies together in the place that symbolizes a key moment in the long history of Indigenous resistance.

At dawn, in the courtyard of what was once a federal penitentiary, sunrise ceremonies are conducted to “give thanks for our lives, for the beatings of our heart,” said Andrea Carmen, a member of Yaqui Nation and executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council, at the 2018 gathering.

Songs and dances from various tribal nations are performed in prayer and as acts of collective solidarity. At the same gathering, Lakota Harden, who is a Minnecoujou/ Yankton Lakota and HoChunk community leader and organizer, emphasized that “those voices and the medicine in those songs are centuries old and our ancestors come and they appreciate being acknowledged when the sun comes up.” Through the sharing of song and dance, they enact culturally resonant resistance against the erasure of Native peoples from these lands.

The Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering also gives people the chance to bring greater community awareness to current struggles facing Indigenous people across the globe. These include the intensifying impacts of climate change, the widespread violence against Native women, children and two-spirit individuals, and ongoing threats to the integrity of their ancestral homelands.

Resistance beyond The Rock

Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering lands near the end of Native American Heritage Month, which is dedicated to celebrating the vast and diverse Indigenous nations and tribes that exist in the United States. Professor Jamie Folsom, who is Choctaw, describes this month as a chance to “present who we are today … (and) to present our issues in our own voices and to tell our own stories.”

The people who will meet on Pier 33 on the fourth Thursday of November continue this story of Indigenous political action on the Rock and, by extension, in North America. The more than 50-year history of this gathering is a testament to the endurance of the original message from Oakes and Indians of All Tribes. It is also part of a larger network of resistance movements being led by Native peoples, particularly young people.

As Harden says, the next generation is asking for change. “They’re standing up and saying we’ve had enough. And our future generations will make sure that things change.”

Shannon Toll, Associate Professor of Indigenous Literatures, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The criticisms are based on the argument that Mary and Joseph, and their son Jesus, a Jewish man born in Bethlehem, were, in fact, Palestinian. Some critics of the Netflix casting are concerned about the inappropriateness of Israeli actors playing historical people they believe are Palestinians, while contemporary Palestinians are being killed by Israeli bombs.

Film-maker D.J. Caruso has explained the casting of Israeli actors as a deliberate choice: “It was important to us that Mary, along with most of our primary cast, be selected from Israel to ensure authenticity.”

So, were Jesus and his parents Palestinian?

Bethlehem is now a city located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Palestinian Territories, about ten kilometres south of Jerusalem. So the short answer is: yes, Jesus was a Palestinian, according to modern geopolitics at least.

But one could also argue that he was not, because, as a Jewish man, he was born at a time when Palestine did not exist as a political entity.

Paula Fredriksen, a historian of ancient Christianity, made this point in March. In the Washington Post, she called claims Jesus was Palestinian “an act of cultural and political appropriation”.

A Jewish man from Bethlehem

According to the New Testament, Jesus was born somewhere around 4-6 BCE during the reign of Herod the Great, in Bethlehem. Bethlehem’s location was in an area then known by the Romans as Judea – the land of Judah, then occupied by the Jewish people (the Judeans).

The Roman historian Tacitus was the first to mention the existence of Jesus as a Judean, outside of the New Testament, in his Annales (115-120 CE).

Tacitus told his readers the Emperor Nero had blamed the fire that destroyed Rome in 64 CE on the Christians. They were named, he wrote, after (Jesus) “Christus”, who was executed by Pontius Pilate when he was governor of “Judea, the first source of the evil”.

According to the Old Testament, the 12 tribes of Israel conquered Canaan (later to become known as Palestine, then Judea, then Palestine, and then Israel) around 1200 BCE. The tribe of Judah settled in the region to the south of Jerusalem.

This made Jesus a Judean (in Hebrew, a Yehudi), from which the English word “Jew” is derived. As a Judean, Jesus was part of the Jewish religious tradition, which was focused on the temple in Jerusalem, known as the second temple.

‘Palestine’ has a long history

The name “Palestine” for that region also had a long history, though. It first appeared in the fifth century BCE, in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus.

He wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palaistinê”, between Egypt and Phoenicia, an ancient region that corresponds to modern Lebanon, with adjoining parts of modern Syria and Israel. So, the land (or part of it) was called “Palestine” by the Greeks before it was called “Judea” by the Romans.

The key moment in the creation of Palestine was shortly after a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Judea from 132-135 CE, known as the Bar Kokhba revolt. The Jews were killed, displaced or enslaved. They wouldn’t return to Palestine in numbers until after World War II, when the Jewish state of Israel was created.

The Emperor Hadrian changed the name of the Roman province from “Judea” to “Palestinian Syria” in c.138 CE. This name change removed the Jewish character of the region, implying it was more Syrian and Greek than Jewish.

We might say that, from this moment on, Jesus was a Palestinian.

His ethnic identity as a Jew and his religious affiliation to the religion of the Jews remained the same, but his geographical identity had changed. The Judean had become a Palestinian.

Back then, this mattered little. After all, Palestine was just another name for Judea.

Politicising ‘Palestine’ and ‘Israel’

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the boundaries of Palestine were vague and uncertain. “Palestine” did not refer to any specific political identity, so no precise geographical determination was needed.

The crusaders preferred “the Holy Land”, or “the Kingdom of Jerusalem”. The borders of Palestine remained fluid after it became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1516, until the end of the first world war ended Ottoman sovereignty in the region.

Jerusalem was captured by British and Allied forces in December 1917. By October 1918, the remaining area was occupied by the British, which would administer Palestine until a mandated end date of 1948. In May 1948, after an estimated 750,000 people who lived on 77.8% of the land in then-Palestine were displaced, the modern state of Israel was declared.

The geographical identity of Palestine now reemerged as crucial. Palestine would now become a limited and determined geographical space, defined against the creation of the new state of Israel.

This new state built upon its original Judean, or Jewish identity. But with its new name, it created a new understanding of itself. A new kind of Jew, an “Israeli”, had arrived in the place formerly known as Judea.

The new Jewish “Israelis” established themselves against the previous inhabitants, the “Palestinians”. They limited the Palestinians to a space in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, on what the Israelis still considered the Promised Land given to them by God, according to the Bible.

For their part, the Arabs of Palestine began to use the term “Palestinian” to assert the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people and their right to an independent state.

A common humanity

When Judaea and Palestine covered more or less the same geographical space, Jesus could be both a Judaean and a Palestinian. Back then, it didn’t matter.

But in a modern Middle East divided along binary lines (between Jew and Arab, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Muslims or Christians), it seems he can no longer be both.

Heaven only knows what Jesus would make of all this. But realising Jesus is a Palestinian and a Jew should make us question the truth and value of such binary distinctions.

After all, Jews, Muslims and Christians believe we all come from one original pair of humans: Adam and Eve.

That story leads us towards a recognition of common humanity – beyond the arbitrary and impermanent divisions of people and places thrown up by the changes and chances of history.

Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.