Charisma, Magic, and Spirituality as Socially Engaged Processes: Lucian’s (circa 120-200) “Alexander the False Prophet” and People’s Accounts of the Supernatural

Robert Prus

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.13.4.01

Authors

Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.13.4.01

Keywords:

Magic, Charisma, Religion, Spirituality, Supernatural, Pragmatism, Symbolic Interactionism, Lucian of Samosata, Prophecy, Belief, Doubt, Community

Abstract

Focusing on Alexander the False Prophet and The Lover of Lies, two texts from the Greek poet-philosopher Lucian of Samosata (circa 120-200) of the Classical Roman era, this paper considers (a) charisma, magic, and spirituality as aspects of an interconnected, collectively achieved, developmental process associated with the emergence of a religious cult. Somewhat relatedly, this paper also acknowledges (b) people’s broader, longstanding fascinations with matters that seem incredulous.

Depicting a more sustained realm of prophetic activity and an account of people’s intrigues with the supernatural, Lucian’s texts offer some especially valuable transhistorical and transcultural reference points for the broader sociological study of human knowing and acting. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of these matters for the study of people’s involvements in religion and spirituality as humanly-engaged realms of endeavor and interchange.

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Author Biography

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus is a sociologist (Professor Emeritus) at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. A symbolic interactionist, ethnographer, and social theorist, Robert Prus has been examining the conceptual and methodological connections of American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological offshoot, symbolic interactionism, with Classical Greek, Latin, and interim scholarship. Attending to pragmatist viewpoints and ethnographically-oriented accounts of human group life, encountered in the developmental flows of Western social thought, he has been working with ethnohistorical materials in the interrelated areas of religion, education and scholarship, rhetoric, poetics, philosophy, history, love and friendship, politics and governing practices, and deviance and morality. As with the present statement focusing on Lucian’s work on charisma, magic, and the supernatural, Robert Prus has been indicating, in more direct conceptual terms, the exceptional scholarly advantages of developing more sustained transsituational (transcontextual, transhistorical, and transdisciplinary) analytic comparisons of human lived experiences from the classical Greek era to the present time through the more extensive use of ethnohistorical and contemporary ethnographic materials.

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