#annette yoshiko reed

[chthonicdivinebard]

Nevertheless, in the Greek translations of the Book of the Watchers, the association of these skills with women’s magic does appear to have been enhanced. The image of the Watchers’ wives learning pharmakeia, for instance, echoes the trope of the dangerous women in Athenian drama. The appeal to teachings of rizotomia and botanê in Codex Panopolitanus, moreover, resonates with domains of expertise associated with dangerous women in Greek literature—although even in the Greek evidence, as Lucia Nixon notes, one finds “Demeter’s positive connection with plant lore” alongside “the more common, negative associations of women and ‘root-cutting’ represented by Medea and Circe.”

Gendering Heavenly Secrets? Women, Angels, and the Problem of Misogyny and “Magic” by Annette Yoshiko Reed in Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World edited by Kimberly B Stratton and Dayna S Kalleres

[talmidimblogging]

Book Note | Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism

Annette Yoshiko Reed, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. DOI: 10.1017/9781139030847. x+353 pp. They said about Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, that he took up scripture and Mishnah, halakha and aggada, minutiae of Torah and scribal minutiae, arguments a fortiori and synkrisis pros ison, astronomy and geometry, parables of launderers…Book Note |…

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

The belief that demons have sex with humans runs deep in Christian and Jewish traditions

Incubus, a male demon, was said to prey on sleeping women in mythological tales. Walker, Charles: The encyclopedia of secret knowledge

Cavan W. Concannon: Associate Professor of Religion, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

https://theconversation.com/the-belief-that-demons-have-sex-with-humans-runs-deep-in-christian-and-jewish-traditions-143589

August 12, 2020

Houston physician and pastor Stella Immanuel – described as “spectacular” by Donald Trump for her promotion of unsubstantiated claims about anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for COVID-19 – has some other, very unconventional views.

As well as believing that scientists are working on a vaccine to make people less religious and that the U.S. government is run by reptilian creatures, Immanuel, the leader of a Christian ministry called Fire Power Ministries, also believes sex with demons causes miscarriages, impotence, cysts and endometriosis, among other maladies.

It has opened her up to much ridicule. But, as a scholar of early Christianity, I am aware that the belief that demons – or fallen angels – regularly have sex with humans runs deep in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Demon sex

The earliest account of demon sex in Jewish and Christian traditions comes from the Book of Genesis, which details the origins of the world and the early history of humanity. Genesis says that, prior to the flood of Noah, fallen angels mated with women to produce a race of giants.

The brief mention of angels breeding with human women contains few details. It was left to later writers to fill in the gaps.

In the third century B.C., the “Book of the Watchers,” an apocalyptic vision written in the name of a mysterious character named Enoch mentioned in Genesis, expanded on this intriguing tale. In this version, the angels, or the “Watchers,” not only have sex with women and birth giants, but also teach humans magic, the arts of luxury and knowledge of astrology. This knowledge is commonly associated in the ancient world with the advancement of human civilization.

The “Book of the Watchers” suggests that fallen angels are the source of human civilization. As scholar Annette Yoshiko Reed has shown, the “Book of the Watchers” had a long life within Jewish and early Christian communities until the middle ages. Its descriptions of fallen angels were widely influential.

The story is quoted in the canonical epistle of Jude. Jude cites the “Book of the Watchers” in an attack on perceived opponents who he associates with demonic knowledge.

Christians in the second century A.D., such as the influential theologian Tertullian of Carthage, treated the text as scripture, though it is only considered scripture now by some Orthodox Christian communities.

Tertullian retells the story of the Watchers and their demonic arts as a way to discourage female Christians from wearing jewelry, makeup, or expensive clothes. Dressing in anything other than simple clothes, for Tertullian, means that one is under the influence of demons.

Christians like Tertullian came to see demons behind almost all aspects of ancient culture and religion.

Many Christians justified abstaining from the everyday aspects of ancient Roman life, from consuming meat to wearing makeup and jewelry, by arguing that such practices were demonic.

Christian fascination with demons having sex with humans developed significantly in the medieval world. Historian Eleanor Janega, has recently shown that it was in the medieval period that beliefs about nocturnal demon sex – those echoed by Immanuel today – became common.

For example, the legendary magician Merlin, from the tales of King Arthur, was said to have been sired by an incubus, a male demon.

Demonic deliverance

For as long as Christians have worried about demons, they have also thought about how to protect themselves from them.

The first biography of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark, written around A.D. 70, presents Jesus as a charismatic preacher who both heals people and casts out demons. In one of the first scenes of the gospel, Jesus casts an unclean spirit out of a man in the synagogue at Capernaum.

In one of his letters to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul argued that women could protect themselves from being raped by demons by wearing veils over their heads.

Christians also turned to ancient traditions of magic and magical objects, such as amulets, to help ward off spiritual dangers.

Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism

In the wake of the Enlightenment, European Christians became deeply embroiled in debates about miracles, including those related to the existence and casting out of demons.

For many, the emergence of modern science called such beliefs into question. In the late 19th century, Christians who sought to retain belief in demons and miracles found refuge in two separate but interconnected developments.

A large swath of American evangelicals turned to a new theory called “dispensationalism” to help them understand how to read the Bible. Dispensationalist theologians argued that the Bible was a book coded by God with a blueprint for human history, past, present and future.

In this theory, human history was divided into different periods of time, “dispensations,” in which God acted in particular ways. Miracles were assigned to earlier dispensations and would only return as signs of the end of the world.

For dispensationalists, the Bible prophesied that end of the world was near. They argued that end would occur through the work of demonic forces operating through human institutions. As a result, dispensationalists are often quite distrustful and prone to conspiratorial thinking. For example, many believe that the United Nations is part of a plot to create a one world government ruled by the coming Antichrist.

Such distrust helps explain why Christians like Immanuel might believe that reptilian creatures work in the U.S. government or that doctors are working to create a vaccine that makes people less religious.

Meanwhile the end of the 19th century also saw the emergence of the Pentecostal movement, the fastest growing segment of global Christianity. Pentecostalism featured a renewed interest in the work of the Holy Spirit and its manifestation in new signs and wonders, from miraculous healings to ecstatic speech.

As scholar André Gagné has written, Immanuel has deep ties to a prominent Pentecostal network in Nigeria – Mountain of Fire Ministries or MFM founded in 1989 in Lagos by Daniel Kolawole Olukoya, a geneticist turned popular preacher. Olukoya’s church has developed into a transnational network, with offshoots in the U.S. and Europe.

Like many Pentecostals in the Global South, the Mountain of Fire Ministries believe spiritual forces can be the cause of many different afflictions, including divorce and poverty.

Deliverance Christianity

For Christians like Immanuel, spirits pose a threat to humans, both spiritually and physically.

In her recent book “Saving Sex,” religion scholar Amy DeRogatis shows how beliefs about “spiritual warfare” grew increasingly common among Christians in the middle of the last century.

These Christians claimed to have the knowledge and skills required to “deliver” humans from the bonds of demonic possession, which can include demons lodged in the DNA. For these Christians, spiritual warfare was a battle against a dangerous set of demonic foes that attacked the body as much as the soul.

Belief that demons have sex with humans is, then, not an aberration in the history of Christianity.

It might be tempting to see Immanuel’s support for conspiracy theories as separate from her claims that demons cause gynecological ailments.

However, because demons have also been associated with influencing culture and politics, it is not surprising that those who believe in them might distrust the government, schools and other things nonbelievers might take to be common sense.

________________________________________

On July 27, the president and his son Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted a viral video featuring Dr. Stella Immanuel, in which the Houston pediatrician rejected the effectiveness of wearing face masks for preventing the spread of COVID-19 and promoted hydroxychloroquine to treat the disease.

God, Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han achieved unity inside the womb…. Hak Ja Han was lifted up to God’s wife position.

Sun Myung Moon – Restoration through Incest

Cheongpyeong: Evil spirits stop Korean and Japanese women from having children.

Shamanic Trees and Magical Thinking at the Cheongpyeong Training Center

Shampoo to get rid of evil spirits

“The Angels and Absolute Good Spirits have left Cheongpyeong” says Hyo-nam Kim / DaeMo Nim

Soon-ae Hong (the mother of Hak Ja Han) spent two years in Chuncheon Prison after Ansu beating an 18-year old boy to death.

Moon’s Other Gospel and Immorality

Ritual Sex in the Unification Church – Kirsti L. Nevalainen

The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) was formerly known as the Unification Church (UC). In May 2020 the name of the organization was again changed – this time to ‘Heavenly Parent’s Holy Community.’

[surejaya]

Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire

Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire by Natalie B. Dohrmann, Annette Yoshiko Reed

In histories of ancient Jews and Judaism, the Roman Empire looms large. For all the attention to the Jewish Revolt and other conflicts, however, there has been less concern for situating Jews within Roman imperial contexts; just as Jews are frequently dismissed as atypical by scholars of Roman history, so Rome remains invisible in many studies of rabbinic and other Jewish sources written under Roman rule.

Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire brings Jewish perspectives to bear on long-standing debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity. Focusing on the third to sixth centuries, it draws together specialists in Jewish and Christian history, law, literature, poetry, and art. Perspectives from rabbinic and patristic sources are juxtaposed with evidence from piyyutim, documentary papyri, and synagogue and church mosaics. Through these case studies, contributors highlight paradoxes, subtleties, and ironies of Romanness and imperial power.

Contributors: William Adler, Beth A. Berkowitz, Ra'anan Boustan, Hannah M. Cotton, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Paula Fredriksen, Oded Irshai, Hayim Lapin, Joshua Levinson, Ophir Münz-Manor, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Hagith Sivan, Michael D. Swartz, Rina Talgam.

Download : Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire More Book at: Zaqist Book

[redpananda]

Questioning Categories and Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins – By Simon J. Joseph - The Marginalia Review of Books

"Annette Yoshiko Reed has also interrogated the concept of Enochic Judaism in so far as it assumes that the Book of Enoch reflects a distinctive movement legitimately described as a Judaism rather than “a movement, group, community, school of thought, or literary tradition within Judaism.” Reed questions whether we can reconstruct a distinctive form of Judaism based primarily on a particular approach to the problem of evil and urges caution about conflating the literary components of the Enochic books (plural) into an illusory coherence and unity" Questioning Categories and Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins – By Simon J. Joseph - The Marginalia Review of Books November 2, 2017 at 10:30AM via Instapaper http://ift.tt/1ML5IeB

[shemihazah]

[upennrels]

Annette Yoshiko Reed, “From Didactic List to Long-Duration Literature: The Enochic Astronomical Book and Aramaic Jewish Scribalism in the Early Hellenistic Age”

History of Material Texts Workshop / 8 September 2014 5:15pm, Class of 1978 Pavilion, Kislak Center Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT: Long marginalized due to its focus on scientific issues wholly unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible, the Enochic Astronomical Book (1 Enoch 72-82) was revealed to be one of the oldest known Jewish writings outside of the Bible when Aramaic fragments were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q208-4Q211). The Aramaic fragments revealed the surprising antiquity of the work (ca. third century BCE) but also pointed to the surprising depth and degree of ancient Jewish engagement with Mesopotamian science and scholasticism. The fragments were not fully published until 2000, and since then, there has been a renaissance of research on the astronomy and calendrical science behind this work. This presentation builds upon this research but asks a different question: Why did Jews choose to write about Babylonian calendrical astronomy in the early Hellenistic age, and why did they do so in Aramaic, rather than Hebrew or Greek? The manuscript evidence frustrates the reconstruction of an Ur-text or stable textual identity for the Astronomical Book, but it may help us to answer the question of why it took form precisely when and how it did. When one sets aside the search for a single “original,” it is possible to use the Aramaic, Greek, and Ethiopic witnesses to reconstruct a dynamic process of textual formation whereby didactic lists used for scribal teaching came to be compiled into newly literary and narrativized forms. If so, the Astronomical Book provides critical yet overlooked evidence for the history of Jewish literary production, and it also points to intriguing Jewish parallels to the “archival turn” in much of the Greek literature of the same period.

[chthonicdivinebard]

For now, it suffices to note that it does seem to assume some prior association between women and “magic.” The statement that “they bewitched [ethelksan] the Watchers before the Flood,” for instance, resonates so poignantly with the notion that the Sirens began their lives as the Watchers’ wives that one wonders whether it is merely coincidence. The language here used to describe their role in tempting the Watchers, moreover, is readily understood in terms of the exegesis of a version of 1 Enoch 8:1 similar to that preserved in Syncellus: the statement that “by adornment [dia tês kosmêseôs] they lead astray first their minds [planôsin prôton tas dianoias]” (T Reub 5.3) answers the question of how these women “led astray the holy ones [eplanêsan tous hagious]” with reference to the inclusion of “ornamentation for women [kosmia tais gunaiksi]” among the teachings of Azael, as made by men for themselves and their daughters (1 Enoch 8:1, Syn).

Gendering Heavenly Secrets? Women, Angels, and the Problem of Misogyny and “Magic” by Annette Yoshiko Reed in Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World edited by Kimberly B Stratton and Dayna S Kalleres

[chthonicdivinebard]

In doing so, it [Testament of Reuben] may reflect some of the same Hellenistic Jewish concerns that shaped the initial Greek translation of the Book of the Watchers around the first century BCE; it may even draw from a version of the text that includes Syncellus’s longer reading of 1 Enoch 8:1 as well as Codex Panopolitanus’ association of the Watchers’ wives with Sirens. By the time of its integration in its present form into the second-century CE Christian Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs, however, such concerns seem surprisingly rare.

Gendering Heavenly Secrets? Women, Angels, and the Problem of Misogyny and “Magic” by Annette Yoshiko Reed in Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World edited by Kimberly B Stratton and Dayna S Kalleres

[chthonicdivinebard]

In addition, the Greek of Codex Panopolitanus at 1 Enoch 19:2 asserts that the Watchers’ wives will become Sirens, whereas the Ethiopic translation states that they will be peaceful. A statement unique to the version of 1 Enoch 9:8 preserved by the ninth-century chronographer Syncellus, moreover, associates the Watchers’ wives with knowledge of “hate-charms” [misêtra].

Gendering Heavenly Secrets? Women, Angels, and the Problem of Misogyny and “Magic” by Annette Yoshiko Reed in Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World edited by Kimberly B Stratton and Dayna S Kalleres

[chthonicdivinebard]

Such concerns make sense, notably, in the context of the ancient discourse about the origins of civilization in both Jewish and Hellenistic cultures—including but not limited to Genesis and the traditions surrounding Prometheus. Yet a modern gendering of knowledge has often been imposed, as if universal, due perhaps to two common habits. First is the practice of reading references to women as always and everywhere meant to communicate something about gender, with the tacit implication that an author would have only included reference to men if he had wished to communicate human totality or universality, whereby the invisibility of masculinity is affirmed and the assumption of the male as model of the human re-inscribed. Second is the tendency to interpret the association of any form of knowledge or practice with women as a sign that this knowledge is being devalued or judged as negative, after which one applies the circular logic that its lesser valuation speaks to the correspondingly negative view of women. In both cases, common modern reading practices can result in a homogenization of ancient misogyny that forecloses further inquiry into what is distinctive in specific times and sources.

Gendering Heavenly Secrets? Women, Angels, and the Problem of Misogyny and “Magic” by Annette Yoshiko Reed in Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World edited by Kimberly B Stratton and Dayna S Kalleres

[chthonicdivinebard]

[William] Loader, for instance, judges its [metalworking] inclusion [in the Book of the Watchers] “problematic and rather extreme,” in contrast to other categories that he apparently feels are more of a natural fit as “forbidden knowledge.” Such judgments, however, may speak mostly to the gap between modern categories of knowledge and their ancient counterparts. After all, the connection of divination, pharmacology, and metallurgy is well attested in the literature of the ancient Mediterranean world. These technai are treated as one complex of powerful yet ambivalent arts in Prometheus Bound (484–500 BCE), for instance, and the fourth-century BCE historian Ephorus of Cyme similarly credits the Idaean Dactyls—whom he describes as “sorcerers [goêtas], who practiced charms [epôdas] and initiatory rites and mysteries [mustêria]”—with teaching humankind about the “use of fire and what the metals copper and iron are, as well as the means of working them” (Diodorus 5.64.4–5).40 As Fritz Graf has shown, metallurgy’s association with ambivalent power in the Book of the Watchers reflects its participation in “the eastern Mediterranean literary Koine.”

Gendering Heavenly Secrets? Women, Angels, and the Problem of Misogyny and “Magic” by Annette Yoshiko Reed in Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World edited by Kimberly B Stratton and Dayna S Kalleres

[talmidimblogging]

Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages @gigantologist @AnnetteYReed — Remnant of Giants Exciting news for fans of Enoch and the giants. A volume from John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed is planned for 1 March 2018 which will provide the first part of a comprehensive compendium of literature from antiquity to the Middle Ages which referenced Enoch: John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., Enoch […] via Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages — Remnant of Giants

[talmidimblogging]

Reed, "Retelling Biblical Retellings" | PaleoJudaica.com

Reed, “Retelling Biblical Retellings” | PaleoJudaica.com

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED: “Retelling Biblical Retellings: Epiphanius, the Pseudo-Clementines, and the Reception History of Jubilees” (Academia.edu). This is an offprint of Professor Reed’s article in Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation from Second Temple Literature through Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity. Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium of the Orion Center

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