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Elizabeth A. Clark writes, “A major but often unacknowledged problem with historical knowing is that the past is not an object of sense perception that can be experienced empirically in the present.” In other words, historians’ knowledge of the past is hampered by our inability to directly experience it; we can only partially reconstruct it from fragmentary and even contradictory evidence. But modern historians are not the only ones who had to contend with the problem of incomplete evidence. Ancient Christian writers did too. In this lecture, Dr. Shaily Patel–assistant professor of early Christianity in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech– offers a brief survey of one of early Christianity’s most-reviled arch-heretics, Simon Magus, in order to demonstrate the various strategies ancient authors used to supply missing information and develop their own orthodoxies in the process.

What are rituals? Why do so many people engage in them? How do rituals shape culture, religion, and society? These are some of the foundational questions of anthropology and religious studies, discussed by generations of scholars. Many theories of ritual focus on their social and political functions, explaining how rituals serve to make communities such as kinship groups or nation-states. Some classical theories have also addressed the question of how rituals help humans establish and mediate relationships with powerful nonhuman actors such as animals, climate phenomena, rivers, and spirits. These last theories take on new significance today, in this time of polycrisis often referred to as the Anthropocene. What happens to ritual traditions when confronted with displacement, the loss of livelihoods and companion species, and the destruction or pollution of places deemed sacred or ensouled? How do we preserve more-than-human relations in a time when so many relations are severed? Do rituals still matter, and if so, how? These are some of the questions that I explore in my research.

This lecture discusses some of the ways in which humans relate to the natural environment through ritual action. I will use examples drawn from my fieldwork in Vietnam and Japan, conducted as part of the ERC-funded project Whales of Power (2019-2025), which studied human-animal relations in Asian popular religion. I will also introduce my new ERC project, Maritime Goddesses: Transnational Connections, Blue Environments, and Ritual Care in East- and Southeast Asia (2026-2031), which aims to develop a new theory of ritual action in the Anthropocene.

Bio:

Aike P. Rots is Professor of East Asian Religions at the University of Oslo. He has published widely on religion, heritage, and environmental issues in Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He is the author of Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests (Bloomsbury 2017) and co-author of the forthcoming Animating Action: Changing the World with Anime, Rituals, and Robots (with Yulia Frumer and Jolyon Thomas, University of Hawai‘i Press 2026). He is also the co-editor of several special issues and books, including Sacred Heritage in Japan (Routledge 2020) and Water Powers: Sacred Aquatic Animals of the Asia-Pacific (University of Hawai‘i Press 2026). He is currently writing a monograph on whale rituals in Vietnam and Japan, while preparing his new ERC-funded project on goddess worship in East and Southeast Asia.


Co-Sponsered with Asian Studies