Abstract
City of Demons widens our view of the late antique urban environment by insisting upon a simple but far-reaching interpretive innovation: people believed in and continuously ritually interacted with, against, and through demons. Cities were topographical, complex spaces, teeming with invisible, material powers that people interacted with to gain power, to compete, to survive. The city had unpredictable dangers, but also potencies. Ritual protections, defenses, and curses were common practices. This book projects John Chrysostom’s Antioch, Cyril’s Jerusalem, and Ambrose’s Milan against this backdrop. Sacramental rituals transform into powerful weapons in the baptized Christian’s ritual war to Christianize the city. I have adapted the term diabolization from the anthropologist Birgit Meyer, who studied exorcism and demon possession in Pentecostal churches in Ghana. Diabolization describes a ritual and discursive process whereby unseen forces of the city were identified as dangerous, predatory; Meyer places sacramental rituals within the frame of spiritual warfare, describing an anti-demonic, ritual practice from a sociological perspective. I argue that each urban church leader wrapped demons around specific, local, socio-religious or politico-religious conflicts. In analyzing a case study for each leader and location, I demonstrate the potential for diabolizing rhetoric and rituals to escalate quickly into violence. In moving toward new forms of animistic/enchanted history, this book identifies and critiques the modern, Western perspective problematizing our interpretation of late antique ritual. Ultimately, then, I argue for developing a ritual model that recognizes how belief in and experience of a pre-Cartesian, enchanted environment factored into concepts of ritual power and agency.
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