Unearthly powers : religious and political change in world history / Alan Strathern (University of Oxford). [print]

The two forms of religion: being and nothingness -- Religion as the fabric of the state -- The two forms of sacred kingship: divinisation and righteousness -- The economy of ritual efficacy and the empirical reception of Christianity -- The conversion of kings under the conditions of immanentism: Constantine to Cakobau -- Dreams of state: conversion as the making of kings and subjects.

Why was religion so important for rulers in the pre-modern world? And how did the world come to be dominated by just a handful of religious traditions, especially Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism? Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical literature from all regions and periods of world history, Alan Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about transformations in the fundamental nature of religion and its interaction with political authority. His analysis distinguishes between two quite different forms of religiosity - immanentism, which focused on worldly assistance, and transcendentalism, which centred on salvation from the human condition - and shows how their interaction shaped the course of history. Taking examples drawn from Ancient Rome to the Incas or nineteenth-century Tahiti, a host of phenomena, including sacred kingship, millenarianism, state-church struggles, reformations, iconoclasm, and, above all, conversion are revealed in a new light.

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