Parades and Processions

De rijke processiecultuur in Vlaanderen is een merkwaardig en opmerkelijk persistent fenomeen dat uiteenlopende betekenissen in zich draagt. Die vinden hun neerslag in divers en waardevol materieel en immaterieel erfgoed. De lokale traditiedragers en erfgoedgemeenschappen hebben nood aan ondersteuning en begeleiding. Initiatieven zoals die van het consortium 'Op handen gedragen' (Histories, PARCUM en KADOC-KU Leuven) spelen daarop in. Door het faciliteren van expertise-uitwisseling en de aanmaak van een centraal repertorium van processietradities wordt de zorg voor het betrokken erfgoed versterkt, een essentiële voorwaarde voor meer en vernieuwend onderzoek naar de historische en actuele praktijken. We bieden een stand van zaken en schetsen de contouren van een onderzoeksagenda. Processies in veelvoud Vlaanderen kan in historisch perspectief bogen op een bijzonder rijke en duurzame katholieke processiecultuur. Hoewel een volledig overzicht ont-breekt, mag gerust worden aangenomen dat tijdens de voorbije eeuwen nagenoeg elke lokale katholieke geloofsgemeenschap processies organi-seerde. Het bijzonder rijk maar ook kwetsbaar materieel en immaterieel erfgoed dat met het fenomeen is gelieerd, geniet een toenemende maat-schappelijke belangstelling. Dit is beslist toe te juichen. Maar kan een

This book presents a provocatively new interpretation of one of New Orleans' most enigmatic traditions, the Mardi Gras Indians. By interpreting the tradition in an Atlantic context, Dewulf traces the " black Indians " back to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and its war dance known as sangamento. He shows that good warriors in the Kongo kingdom were per definition also good dancers, masters of a technique of dodging, spinning and leaping that was crucial in local warfare. Enslaved Kongolese brought the rhythm, dancing moves and feathered headwear of sangamentos to the Americas in performances that came to be known as " Kongo dances. " By comparing Kongo dances on the African island of São Tomé with those in Latin America, the Caribbean and Louisiana, Dewulf demonstrates that the dances on New Orleans' Congo Square were part of a much broader Kongolese performance tradition. He links that to Afro-Catholic mutual-aid societies that honored their elected community leaders or " kings " with Kongo dances. While the public rituals of these brotherhoods originally thrived in the context of Catholic procession culture around Epiphany and Corpus Christi, they transitioned to carnival as a result of growing orthodoxy within the Church. Dewulf's groundbreaking research suggests a much greater impact of Kongolese traditions and of popular Catholicism on the development of African-American cultural heritage and identity. His conclusions force us to radically rethink the traditional narrative on the Mardi Gras Indians, the kings of Zulu and the origins of black participation in Mardi Gras celebrations.

http://www.ulpress.org/item_224/From-the-Kingdom-of-Kongo-to-Congo-Square.php

'Taking Place Architecture Religious Devotion in 17C Italy', in Renaissance and Baroque Architecture, ed. Alina Payne, 2017; part of The Companions to the History of Architecture, ed. Harry Mallgrave (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., www.companionstohistoryofarchitecture.com) author Helen  Hills uncorrected proofs.pdf

In Spanish early modernity, a theatre genre deeply embedded in Catholic material religion and cult of images rose to popularity and saw an aesthetic proliferation, while iconoclast tendencies in the northwest dominated a fundamental change in media and representation culture. During Corpus Christi celebrations, the so-called auto sacramentales-a form of liturgical drama descending from medieval mummery and morality plays-addressed the staging of the Eucharistic miracle. This essay explores how ritual and theatre, as forms of cultural performance, share a common nucleus that also applies to walking ceremonies with images. Likewise, sacramental drama in its liminality can only be explained with reference to its pragmatic religious context in Eucharistic ritual and processions. A juxtaposition of the poetics of transubstantiation in allegorical performance and the mediation of Eucharistic and image presence in Corpus processions aims to differentiate the varieties of presence in sacramental theatre.

The Festa della Chinea, which roughly translates as ‘Festival of the Wandering Nag’, was a historic festival held in Rome bi-annually until the late 18th century (1788), in which the viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples was required to pay his homage to the pope. This entailed, among other things, the offering of a white horse (‘nag’) that formed part of a procession through the streets of Rome. The destination of the procession was the Basilica of St Peters, where the horse was traditionally allowed to roam within the basilica before finally being guided to the cathedra of the pontiff for a formal blessing. The peculiarity of this festival has never really been properly explained. By the early 18th century it gave rise to the most elaborate ephemeral constructions in the city, culminating in a huge firework display in the Piazza Farnese, the location of the embassy of the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples and Sicily from the late 17th century. In this paper, I will examine the Festa della Chinea in the context of the tradition of festivals in Rome, tracing changes in the symbolic and ceremonial meanings of these extravagant events with specific focus on equine and water symbolism. As one of the oldest festivals in Rome, which was held annually over a period of about 600 years, the Festa della Chinea provides a rich source of material about how such events were celebrated and understood, both by the organisers and the spectators.

In December 2011, Philadelphia’s Liberty Lands Park began hosting an annual event called the Krampuslauf. The communities involved modeled this processional festival around a traditional European event featuring a masked, costumed holiday monster called the Krampus. The Krampuslauf, later renamed the Parade of Spirits, brings together several groups from Philadelphia and Central Pennsylvania. The neighborhood around the park, a community of contemporary neo-Pagans, and an active arts-and-crafts community in the area adopted the Philadelphia Parade of Spirits as a representative festival. Using ethnographical methods and analyzing the communities as folk groups practice a form of social drama through the parade form, I argue that the Krampus and other “Christmas monster” figures are being re-contextualized in an American capitalist environment as a way of critiquing the commercialism of the holiday season by those who wish to find personal meaning in seasonal ritual without conforming to mainstream Christmas practices. I simultaneously argue that the festival meets the social and symbolic needs of multiple communities at once, while also providing a unique reflexivity from the folk groups as they negotiate the expansion of the festival and the meaning of winter holidays in the United States.

The article gives a survey of what we might know about processional activity in the townscapes of medieval Norway. This includes both liturgical and regal processions, as well as episcopal and regal adventus. The text is based upon normative sources such as the liturgical ordinal Ordo Nidrosiense, but also upon the saga accounts of medieval rituals.

A distinctive Ram statue was used in Hyderabad, Telangana, in the annual shobha yatra (grace procession) between 2012 and 2018 for the occasion of Ram Navami, the festival of Ram's birthday. 1 This festival occurs each year in the larger program of Spring Navratri. Yatra translates from Hindi as "procession," and is used to refer to both religious and political variants, while shobha commonly translates as "grace." The two terms together highlight the religious aspects of the procession and its place in the ritual calendar. The first public shobha yatra in Hyderabad occurred in 2010. Previously, it was a more relaxed affair that was celebrated in private. This change occurred in response to the Milad-un-Nabi celebrations of the Hyderabadi Muslim community becoming public for the first time in 2010, just a few weeks before that year's Ram Navami. 2 The last yatra I have information about is 2018. Personal and academic factors made it impractical to continue to follow the Hyderabadi yatra after this date. However, the impact of pandemic restrictions on the yatra would be fascinating to discuss. A cursory search suggests

The pompa circensis, the parade which preceded the chariot races in the arena, was a political pageant and a religious ritual that produced a republican, imperial, and even Christian image of the city. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity.

At the end of the Republic, the Romans regarded Triumph as the most magnificent ceremony and the status of the triumphant general as the highest attainable. This rite, officially awarded by the Senate, permitted the general to make a processional entry into the city of Rome and glorify his prestigious victory in front of his fellowcitizens. However, the critical analysis of sources reveals that the data related to Triumphs are unreliable. The first Triumph of Romulus was reconstructed by Augustus for ideological reasons : to emphasize the paralell between himself and the founder of the Urbs. Moreover, during the third century BC, families made up fake Triumps which were then integrated into annal and epigraphs. Such inventions mostly concern the period 322 BC -291BC  -because it was at this point in time that Triumphs became highly political as the Romans adopted the Theology of victory current in the hellenistic world. Military victory was what the nobilitas, the emerging Roman aristocraty, valued most and its celebration, the Triumph, became the occasion for asserting the hereditary dimension of victory and power. In the third century BC, the desire for Triumph intensified, which led the Senate to impose stricter rules and conditions. The resulting conflicts between the senate and the generals explains the emergence of new ceremonies such as the Ovatio and the Triumph on Mount Alban. Triumphant generals had a variety of ways of commemorating their victories and reminding the Romans of them, especially at election time. But the most efficient way was the building of temples financed by spoils of war. The adoption of new cults enabled them to celebrate divine protection, under which they fell, but also to integrate the memory of their victories in both the history and architecture of Rome. Indeed, close historical examination often reveals an interesting ‘coincidence’ between the dates of the consecration of temples and those of the Triumphs.

Throughout history, the Seleucid military might demonstrated
many times its importance for the maintenance, expansion and defense of the Empire. Rarely the Seleucid army was defeated in a campaign and it happened in front of the almighty Rome. After the defeat at Thermopylae and Magnesia, and following the imminent withdrawal must conquer the Ptolemaic Empire, the new king Antiochus IV Epiphanes held a military parade as never been done before, its real purpose is unknown, but the Seleucids showed the world the power that still had the Empire. Through the stories of several classic sources, we can come closer to this event and what
it could entail.

The imperial cult, emerging at the end of a long evolutionary process including the worship of notable individuals, Hellenistic kings, Roman officials and the goddess Roma, and based upon the same model of benefactory exchange, constituted the natural reaction of Greek cities to the appearance of dominant Rome, the characteristically Greek way of incorporating the superior emperor into the familiar political and religious order. The traditional cult provided the requisite institutions: priests, temples, statues, sacrifices, festivals and games. In the Peloponnese, the onomastic and iconographic assimilations of emperors to traditional Greek gods, their shared worship, the reuses and reconsecrations of temples and the festivals of the Kaisareia and Sebasteia constituted the primary expressions of the imperial cult. The worship of members of the domus augusta as well as of prestigious local benefactors, its complex ritual, the grandeur of the sacred procession, the duties of the city officials and their control mechanism are laid out in elaborate detail in the lex sacra of the city of Gytheion. In the brief reply letter of Emperor Tiberius, the polite refusal of isotheai timai manifests the self-restricting tendencies of the Roman emperors in the handling of their own cult.

“Engines of Prophecy: Materializing Muhammad in the Modern Islamic World,” in The Name of the Image: The Role of Figural Representation in Islamic and Christian Cultures, ed. Axel Langer (Zurich: Rietberg Museum, 2022), 321-328 (also published in German).

The cult of Apollo Delphinios was the main state cult of Ionian Miletos, from the seventh century BC until Late Antiquity. His cult association, the so-called Molpoi, controlled access to citizenship. Their executive board formed the governing body of the prytaneis and supplied the aisymnetes-stephanephoros, the eponymous magistrate. At the beginning of every new year, the rituals of the city’s most important festival of Apollo Delphinios, including officers’ oaths, sacrifices, dining, competitions, and citizen initiations were performed. The sanctuary of Apollo, the Delphinion, incorporated the prytaneion of Miletos. It thus functioned not only as a religious, but also as a political centre of the polis, a role that is emphasized by its position in the agora. The ritualization of public space, signifying the firm bond between religion and politics, manifests itself in the New Year procession to the extra-urban sanctuary of Apollo in Didyma. This ‘bipolarity’ of the Milesian Apollo cult can also be detected in Miletos’ colonial enterprises, sanctioned by the oracle of Apollo Didymeus Milesios.

The arrival ceremony (adventus) provides important insights into the social imaginary of late antique Rome. On the one hand, the adventus visibly highlighted the power of those arriving. On the other hand, the city presented a version of itself in the form of the welcoming committee. How, for whom, and by whom these arrivals were staged reveals the changing ways that Rome was imagined. Though the ceremony remained deeply traditional for a very long time – emperors greeted by the senate and Roman people – over centuries, the ritual was slowly adapted to suit a Christianizing city. Bishops not only joined the welcoming committee, but they themselves were welcomed back into Rome in grand style.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> update 29.07.2020:

Ok, I now have a searchable pdf of the book. However, it is still 160 mb large.

I therefore could not install it here for download.

Please contact me via my email address (alexander.herda@web.de), and I will send you the file via "wetransfer".

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>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> update 10.07.2020:

a searchable pdf of my book for free download is placed here soon. actually in one week it is done! (It goes without saying that this is on my own cost...)

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I am planning to place here a free pdf (on my own cost) asap, as the book was sold out by the publisher, without offering me to buy some of the leftovers of the first - and last - edition for the ridiculous price of 19.95 Euro for which they sold it at a loss (not really, because they had already been compensated fully by the editing institution).

reviews:
R. Parker, Classical Review 58, 2008, 178–180;

O. Hülden, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 17.03.2008, URL: hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2008-1-208;

E. Lupu, in: sehepunkte 8, 2008, Nr. 9 (15.09.2008), URL: www.sehepunkte.de/2008/09/13326.html;

M. Gonzales, AJA Online Book Review 112. 3, July 2008, URL: www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/book_reviews/112.3/06_Gonzales.pdf;

M. Horster, Klio 91, 2009, 528–529

A. Chaniotis, The Molpoi Inscription: Ritual Prescription or Riddle?, Kernos 23, 2010, 275-279, URL:
http://kernos.revues.org/1594

For answering some of the reviewers critiques, especially those of Parker and Chaniotis, see my articles of 2011 (How to Organise a State Cult) and 2016 (Megara and Miletos).

Archaeologists and historians have long taken the honor guards, vehicles, and horses along the sloping path as clearly denoting the tomb occupant’s identity and status. Through the comparison of the same sloping path murals of three princesses, the paper assesses whether the tombs were controlled by ritual regulations or other factors. In other words, whether there is a relationship between the “procession” on the sloping path mural and the status/gender of the deceased. The paper proposes that tomb art does not in fact represent the identity of the deceased while living but rather represents the new identity of the dead. It furthers speculates on the relationship between the mural  gures as honor guards and the clay  gurines which are brought into the tomb during the time of the funeral as the real procession. Making use of textual descriptions of princess processions from Tang texts, close description of mural iconography, funerary rituals and processions, the paper concludes that the mural programs were primarily in uenced by locale, time, and political factors, and not ritual regulation or gender. In conclusion, the murals are compared to epitaphs, as both created a new identity and status for the deceased.

"Mechanismen der Vergegenwärtigung: Die Materialisierung Muhammads in der modernen islamischen Welt," in _Im Namen des Bildes: Die figürliche Darstellung in islamischen und christlichen Kulturen_, ed. Axel Langer (Zürich: Museum Rietberg, 2022), 322-339.

The devotion of the people, church and the royal family, to Saint Elizabeth, the Queen of Portugal was intense throughout the centuries, due to the many miracles obtained through her intercession, but it increased after her beatification in 1516. King João III, who transferred the University from Lisbon to Coimbra in 1537, felt a great devotion for Elizabeth. The somewhat miraculous birth of the future King Sebastião in 1554 was understood as a blessing of God through the intercession of the Holy Queen. After King João’s death, the abbess of the monastery of Saint Clare at Coimbra, with the support of the Queen Mother Catherine of Austria founded the “Confraternity of Saint Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal” in 1560, with the purpose of organizing at least two solemn processions every year, among other acts of worship. The members of this Confraternity were not only laypeople of Coimbra, but also regular and secular religious men and women, and teachers and students of the University. After her canonization in 1625 and the construction of a new monastery for the religious community of Saint Claire in Coimbra, to shelter the tomb of the Holy Queen, the cult increased considerably.
The A. discusses the role of the Confraternity in the preservation and development of the cult and history of the Holy Queen and the cultural heritage around the monastery, in the city of Coimbra and all over the country and over the centuries, until the great celebrations of the 600th anniversary of her death, in 1936.

Róbert Péter (ed.), British Freemasonry, 1717-1813, 5. vol. Representations (New York: Routledge, 2016).

volume 1: Institutions (C. Révauger)
volume 2: Rituals I – English, Irish and Scottish Craft Rituals (J. A.  M. Snoek)
volume 3: Rituals II – Harodim Material and Higher Degrees (J. A. M. Snoek)
volume 4: Debates (R. Péter)
volume 5: Representations (R. Péter)

For a limited access to volume 5 see
https://books.google.hu/books?id=n7dCDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT2&dq=British+Freemasonry,+1717-1813+Representations&hl=hu&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiE-ejJmYDQAhXM6xoKHTiQDNYQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=British%20Freemasonry%2C%201717-1813%20Representations&f=false

More information about the edition is available at:
https://www.routledge.com/British-Freemasonry-1717-1813/Peter- Revauger-Snoek/p/book/9781848933774

The attached copyright material was provided by the Routledge division of Taylor and Francis on 20 October, 2016.

Processions for the redemption of Christian captives held for ransom in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa were of great importance for the outward expression of Christian faith during the early modern period. The city of Valencia, as a major maritime centre in the Mediterranean, mounted many of these highly symbolic processions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two main religious orders were dedicated to freeing captives: the Mercedarians and the Trinitarians. This article considers the soundscape of this type of procession in Valencia at that time, and, in particular, analyzes the major role of confraternities based in the churches of the two orders in the realization of processions. Extant documentation of these two religious houses affords insight into the urban ceremonies occasioned by the redemption processions and offers detailed descriptions of the soundscape they created with the singing of psalms, motets, and the Te Deum laudamus. It also provides an interesting account of the dispute between Trinitarians and Mercedarians over control of ceremonial space in the urban complex—both physical and sonic—occasioned by the processions they organized.

When Johan Maurits of Nassau, Governor-General of Dutch Brazil (1630-54), sent out expeditions against the maroons of Palmares, he was informed by his intelligence officers that the inhabitants followed the “Portuguese religion,” that they had erected a church in the capital, that there were chapels with images of saints and the Virgin Mary and that Zumbi, the king of Palmares, did not allow the presence of “fetishists.” Portuguese sources confirm that Palmares had a priest who baptized children and married couples and that its inhabitants followed Catholic rite, although according to Governor Francisco de Brito, they did so “in a stupid fashion.” Many more examples of the existence of Afro-Catholic elements in maroon communities in Latin America can be found. They question the widespread assumption that Catholicism had been forced upon all African slaves and that, even among those who seemingly embraced the colonizer’s faith, it functioned merely as a veneer underneath which their truly African, indigenous beliefs remained hidden. As the case of Palmares indicates, slaves did not necessarily wish to liberate themselves from all “Catholic ballast” once they ran away but sometimes remained strongly attached to it. 
This conclusion corresponds to the assumption by the Brazilian historian Marina de Mello e Souza that upon arrival in the Americas, many slaves did not perceive Catholic elements as something foreign since “Catholicism represented a link to their native Africa.” Souza is but one of several scholars who in recent years contributed to a shift in the study of black performance culture in the New World. The new paradigm essentially consists in the acknowledgment that our understanding of black performance culture can be bettered if we take into consideration that many Africans had already adopted certain European—predominantly Portuguese—cultural and religious elements before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.
In the context of this shift, there has been an increased interest in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods (irmandades/hermandades) and confraternities (confrarias/cofradías). While it was long assumed that these so-called “black brotherhoods” were associated with slave culture on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America only, it can now be confirmed that Afro-Catholic fraternities also flourished in parts of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. As Linda Heywood has argued, “many Kongos and not a few Angolans had been Christians before their enslavement in Brazil. Thus they would have been familiar with the brotherhoods in Luanda, Soyo, and Kongo, and the central role they played in the creole society of Kongo, Angola and São Tomé.” Nicole von Germeten’s research on black brotherhoods in Mexico also concluded that “some Central Africans probably took part in social and religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods before crossing the Atlantic.” 
Ira Berlin also observed that black brotherhoods played a crucial role in the intercontinental networks that developed in the context of the transatlantic slavery. However, like most scholars, Berlin perceives brotherhoods as an essentially Iberian phenomenon that was crucial to the development of black identity the Iberian World, differing from North America, where “numerous informal connections between black people” developed, but not brotherhoods. Although Berlin confirms that slaves “created an intercontinental web of cofradias … so that, by the seventeenth century, the network of black religious brotherhoods stretched from Lisbon to São Tomé, Angola, and Brazil,” he believes that those slaves who ended up in Dutch, French or English colonies refrained from developing brotherhoods since there were no “comparable institutional linkages” that allowed them to do so. Berlin’s assumption thus presupposes that brotherhoods could only be established with institutional support and excludes the possibility that slaves themselves may have taken the initiative to create such organizations.
This article questions this conclusion and explores the possibility that slave organizations modeled upon Iberian brotherhoods have existed in North America. In doing so, it follows a reasoning by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs and James Sidbury, editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013), according to whom “approved institutional structures authorized by the Catholic Church were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build fraternal structures.”  A first section provides an overview of the characteristics of Afro-Iberian slave brotherhoods. The following section presents a comparative analysis between king celebrations in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods and those at African-American Election Day and Pinkster festivals in New England and New York. The article ends with a reflection on the origins of Afro-Iberian cultural and religious elements among slave communities outside of the Iberian realm in the American diaspora.

This paper proposes the notion of ReligioCity as an analytical category to account for religious urbanism and urban influences on religion(s). This theoretical notion allows us to explore the ways religion and urban space are transformed together by current socio-political processes, but also to examine the ways the city's landscape encompasses new expressions of religious materiality in the urban environment. Taking Acre, a small multireligious and multi-ethnic city in the north of Israel the paper explores religious processions, parades, and festivities as public rituals which encompass ways of being in the city and of taking temporary control of specific city spaces while engaging with urban infrastructures. In what ways these spatial religious manifestations are dictated by urban infrastructures and at the same time influence the city and how they serve as forms of being in the city for participants? The argument is that these religious manifestations and spatializations are ways of placing religion as an identity marker, with the possibility of sustaining, projecting or even reinventing a sense of self and community in the changing landscape of cities.

Thefocusofprocession,intheancientAndesandelsewhere,isgenerallyonmovement.AhandfulofMocheceramicvessels, however, suggest that stasis was also an important part of processional activity. This article presents visual evidence from Moche ceramic vessels and Moche architecturalremainsto suggest that Moche artisans intentionally included referencesto pauses in ritual activity. These pauses are given tangible form on representations where two-dimensional processional movement intersects with three-dimensional architectural structures. Appearing as recessed or depressed spaces, they are located squarely in the boundary between processional movement and architectural destination.
While thesefeatures, inbothart andarchitecture,havebeenlargelyoverlooked,theirinclusioninMocheartindicatesthey had a decided function in Moche ritual activity. Their appearance in art and architecture alerts us to, as well as concretizes, anaspectof procession which isdifficult to recognize in the archaeological record: thresholds oftransition, or liminal space. These features illuminate for us not onlya space but also a moment. By giving concrete form to this feature, Moche artisans communicated the importance of liminal or transitional moments in Moche procession.

This essay about Nicole Eisenman's large-scale sculpture Procession (2019-2020) was published as part of the first in-depth exploration of Eisenman’s sculptural practice. The monograph was published in conjunction with the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize exhibitions—Nicole Eisenman: Sturm und Drang, presented at the Contemporary Austin, and Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee, presented at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York.