The Lingsar Temple and its annual festival, Pujwali, serve as a unifying event for the local Sasak Muslims and Hindus of Balinese origin. Constructed above abundant water springs in Lingsar, West Lombok, Indonesia, the temple complex holds significant religious importance due to the sacred properties attributed to its waters. This article explores recent developments in the multireligious festival. My fieldwork spans from 2017 to 2023, a period marked by significant changes. Analysing these changes provides insights into the entanglements of multicultural religious encounters during Pujawali and the ambivalence of majority–minority relations. The festival has navigated challenges such as earthquakes, the COVID-19 pandemic, shifts in power dynamics, evolving gender relations, the empowerment of the local Muslim community, and intrareligious crises within Hindu leadership. This article introduces an intrareligious perspective on the festival centred around sustaining interreligious unity and culminating in collaborative efforts between the two religious communities.

This paper aims to edit and analyse an unpublished Arabic tombstone from the Ibn ʿAbbās public cemetery in Ṭāʾif. It also explores a related historical theme, i.e., the continuity of the descendants of an Arab poet down to the twelfth century. This tombstone contains the name of a deceased individual, linked to Yazīd b. Miqsam al-Thaqafī, an influential poet from Ṭāʾif in the eighth century AD (second century AH). This connection necessitates an examination of the poet Yazīd b. Miqsam al-Thaqafī's family to establish connections between the deceased and Yazīd, as well as the relationship between Yazīd and the Umayyad caliphs.

Contrary to traditional perceptions, in the late Middle Ages numerous contacts developed between countries north of the Alps, especially the Holy Roman Empire, and the Mediterranean. Economic and political historians have already confirmed the true extent of exchanges; and art historians have added valuable insights as to the many links of communication. To deepen our understanding of this phenomenon, the present paper addresses the evidence of literary history. Fictional or factual narratives do not necessarily provide hard facts but shed relevant light on a broad concept about the foreign worlds (mentality) whereto especially knights and pilgrims were traveling. We can identify numerous poets who talked explicitly about their visits to the Mediterranean or who have their protagonists travel widely both all over Europe and the neighboring countries. With this evidence in hand, we can proceed to reevaluate late medieval culture as having been much more international if not even global than previously assumed. As much as the Alps appeared to be a significant geographical barrier, the Mediterranean hinterlands were certainly an intimate part of this significant contact zone where East and West met.

Nigârî was a significant painter of miniatures in the sixteenth century, known primarily for his portraits of Sultan Selim II and Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha (Barbarossa), which brought influences from Western-style portraiture to the Ottoman tradition of miniature painting. Since he was a sociable and cheerful person, he was popular in many assemblies, and even became Prince Selim’s (Later Sultan Selim II) boon companion. In addition, Nigârî was a long-serving captain in the Ottoman navy, fighting in many sea battles and proving his usefulness as a soldier. Moreover, Nigârî was a poet, and, while some of his shorter poetry can be seen written beneath his paintings, his major literary work is the heroic poem in praise of Grand Admiral Sinan Pasha, Ghazavat-i Sinan Pasha (Holy Wars of Sinan Pasha). In this book, Nigârî tells of the naval battles that occurred under Admiral Sinan Pasha which he witnessed personally. Among them were the expeditions to Messina and Malta, the conquest of Tripoli, and the defeat of the Crusader fleet under the command of Andrea Doria. A great deal of detail about these expeditions and battles is included in the work that is not found elsewhere. There are many subjects mentioned by the poet, including the places they stopped at on their voyage, the people they travelled with, the number of navy ships, and the admiral’s consultations with the sailors. Furthermore, it includes elements of military and state traditions as well as social life. Therefore, Nigârî’s work holds significant value for literature as well as maritime, social, and cultural history, and carries the potential to serve as a valuable supplementary source in these fields. This paper is organised into two sections, the first of which is an overview of Nigârî’s life and major works. The second section discusses Nigârî’s Ghazavat-i Sinan Pasha, notable for its portrayal of naval battles firsthand and its insight into the broader sociocultural intersections of military history.

This paper focuses on how first-generation Bahá’ís view dreams and visions as confirming their choice to become Bahá’í. It presents life story interviews, highlighting the significance of their dream narratives in religious conversion. The study emphasizes that these dreams integrate their prior religious identity, mainly through the appearance of messengers of God serving as supernatural agents, which conforms to Bahá’í beliefs in progressive revelation. It advocates for anthropological attention to Bahá’í dream accounts, presenting dreams as premonitions or encouragements for conversion and acknowledging leaving a previous faith. The paper calls for investigating dreams’ bridging function, viewed by converts as a nonhuman and non-institutional force aiding conversion. It aims to explore agency in dreams concerning religious conversion by analyzing dream accounts from first-generation Bahá’ís’ life stories, illustrating how dreams influence and transform individual beliefs.

Both in Iran and India, Zoroastrian communities have traditionally possessed a strong and rigid ethno-religious identity. In recent decades, however, debates regarding the opening of the communities to converts have become increasingly significant. At the same time, a growing interest in religious conversion to Zoroastrianism can be observed among Kurds, Tajiks, Iranians, and other populations. This article analyses the autobiographical account of two Muslim-born Iranian converts to Neo-Zoroastrianism and discusses how such conversions can be adequately framed. It criticises previous works on Neo-Zoroastrians for framing its religious practice as “unauthentic.” As Zoroastrian religiosities transform, especially among urban Tehran Zoroastrians, one can observe a certain convergence of reformed ethic Zoroastrian and Neo-Zoroastrian religious discourses. Taking this trend into account, Iranian Neo-Zoroastrianism can be framed as a movement for religious revival and reform as well as a vehicle of resistance against the state-promoted Shi’ite Islam of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This article discusses the so-called “Venus of St. Matthias,” a former Roman statue of the goddess Venus that has, throughout its history, been embedded in diverse contexts of use. It has been venerated, criticized, rejected, and (almost) destroyed until it found its way into a museum where it is kept to this day. Outlining some of the central stages of this history, the paper intends to illustrate and discuss some of the various types of anti-iconism as outlined in the introduction to this special issue. The object serves as a promising case to elaborate on the possible relations of religion and images and is a good example to explain the heterogenous constellations of iconic and anti-iconic attitudes towards specific objects. The Venus of St. Matthias has been entangled with both iconic and anti-iconic discourse, thus producing a narrative that is inextricably linked with its material substance.

This introduction to the Special Issue “Religion, Media, Materiality” succinctly outlines the central themes of media and authority, serving as tertia comparationis within the volume, and evokes their significance in addressing media changes from a transdisciplinary perspective. It surveys three theoretical frameworks and general perspectives on the interplay between religion, media, and authority, as put forth by Stewart Hoover, Birgit Meyer, and David Morgan. The discussion emphasises how the case studies examined by Sarit Shalev-Eyni, Ines Weinrich, Hanna Staehle, Giulia Evolvi, and Tim Karis actively engage with these frameworks. In doing so, they contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the intricate connections between media, authority, and religion, offering a detailed exploration of these overarching concepts.

The Baltic region has always been situated on the crossroads of the three main branches of Christianity: Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism. As such, it has provided ample material for studying religious contact. This special issue brings together four contributions analysing such cases in this region during the early modern period. It shows the value of the Baltic region as a multi-ethnic melting pot of different Christian denominations, held together primarily by the change-resistant land-owning class of Baltic Germans.

Among modern practitioners of magic, the “psychologization of magic” has become a common strategy to adapt practices such as rituals of invocation to naturalistic thought. In this article, I discuss what was probably the most elaborate attempt to bridge the gap between the magic of the past and magic suited for the present that took place within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888–1903). Approaching the Order’s teachings through the lens of contemporaneous literary discourse, the Irish poet and magician William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) attempted to consolidate supernaturalist and naturalist understandings of magic throughout the 1890s. In 1892, he made the concept of the “immortal moods” a key to both his poetry and his magical practice. Evoked through symbols in a ritual or a poem, these moods would descend “like a faint sigh into people’s minds” and move them to action, causing “all great changes in the world.” Yeats explored this concept in theoretical writings, poetic experiments, and his ritual practice, finding his own imagination entangled with past imaginations. Serving a brief term as the Golden Dawn’s Imperator and Instructor in Mystical Philosophy in 1901, he condensed the insights gained from this work in the doctrines of the “great mind and great memory.” Presenting a study of Yeats’ psychology of the universal mind, this article shows how his amalgamation of literary and folkloristic theorizing paved the way to connect magical and poetic practice to the emerging psychological discourse.