An Epistemology of Revelation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to approach the epistemology of revelation through the approach of political anthropology. It departs from Max Weber’s distinction between ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary situations, which led to his idea of charismatic power. This article complements the Weberian perspective by introducing the anthropological term “liminality” for such situations, as well as the term “trickster” for figures who have a specific affinity for appearing in such situations, creating havoc instead of offering a solution. Ordinary knowledge does not apply to liminal void situations of incommensurability; incommensurable knowledge can be gained by magic and religion. Magic forces the transcendent and claims to produce effects, while religion is based on revealed knowledge, the validity of which is established by trust. Under particularly anguishing liminal conditions, the hardly tolerated practitioners of magic might gain positions of power. An important such example is offered by Persian Magi. Turning to the present, modern rationalism, with Bacon and Descartes, undermined both ordinary and revealed knowledge. The possible relevance of revealed knowledge in contemporary times is discussed through the related phenomena of apocalyptic expectations and Marian apparitions.

God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right. But God as truth, God as 2 + 2 = 4—that wasn’t so clearly all right. Was there any chance of their being the same? Were there bridges to join the two worlds?

Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay, pp. 7–8 (Huxley [1923] 1969)

1. Introduction

The title of this article might sound like an oxymoron, an absurd hybrid between philosophy and religion, yet it has been carefully chosen, though certainly with a degree of provocativeness—a necessary provocativeness, given our time and situation, that is perhaps closest indeed to the thinking of a great thinker of the absurd, Albert Camus, and his idea about rebelling. Camus, in a way, was the opposite of a rebel; as his entire way of thinking, as among others—but certainly not including everyone—for example, Eric Voegelin (2000, vol. 54, pp. 237–38), suggests so clearly, was opposed to the idea of revolting, and he rather diagnosed the revolt of modernity. However, as we live inside modernity, inside the modern revolt, he was forced to become a rebel—a rebel against the modern Gnostic revolt, not to say rebellion.

This article, similarly, is written as an act of revolt, in this case against the epistemology implied by the scientific–rationalistic rather than the political and cultural revolution; this article is not so much against scientific epistemology per se—though there is a valid point to make in this regard as well—but rather against the presumed exclusivity of the scientific epistemology. The central idea is that there is an epistemology of religion as well, an epistemology of revealed religion—but every genuine religion1 is and must be based on some kind of revelation in one way or another—and that that epistemology as epistemology is by no means secondary to scientific epistemology; rather, the contrary is true.

This theme, needless to say, is enormous, meaning a single article can hardly touch upon it in any depth (see Bateson 2005; Forrest 2021; Girard 1978; Szakolczai 2023; Wydra 2015).2 Furthermore, presumably, such an article should start with a ‘review of the literature’. However, the literature is so vast in this case that it cannot be approached—with the implication that this article perhaps should not have been attempted to be written. This issue, technical as it may seem to be, however, already touches upon the central theme, as the standard mode of proceeding implies that every article statement is only supposed to add to an already canonised knowledge, whether in an incremental or a critical way, and thus, it is not really possible to avoid the trap of a badly posed problem—a problem that came to be badly posed over quite some time, say, many centuries.

Thus, starting in the middle, instead of with an incremental addition or a presumed absolute beginning, this article will present an epistemology of revelation using some central concepts and perspectives of political anthropology—not political anthropology as a subdiscipline of anthropology, characterising the manner in which it is often pursued in contemporary universities, but rather political anthropology as it has been practised by the group of scholars behind the journal International Political Anthropology, as well as the Routledge book series Contemporary Liminality. The reason behind this is that this approach adopts a series of terms developed by maverick anthropologists,3 complementing the comparative historical–sociological or genealogical approach pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin, and Michel Foucault, while also allowing for a return to the classical political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, following, among others, Eric Voegelin, as well as the last Collège de France lectures of Foucault (2008, 2011, 2014), bypassing or reversing the modern rationalist revolution in philosophy, highlighted by Bacon, Descartes, and Kant. Some of the main figures of political anthropology, like René Girard, Gregory Bateson, or Michel Serres, themselves were preoccupied with an epistemology of the sacred.

2. Liminality

The article must start in the middle, as a more detailed presentation of the general approach would not leave space for the specific argument that will be proposed, which can be formulated without requiring a particularly extensive background presentation. The argument will start from the term liminality, introduced into anthropology by Arnold van Gennep ([1909] 1981) and Victor Turner (1967) (see also Turner (1969)), through the study of rites of passage (see also Thomassen 2014), a term that can characterise and be used to understand any situation of transition, transformation, or crisis, a term that also, as Victor Turner came to argue in some of his last writings (Turner 1985), helps to clarify Dilthey’s ideas about experience, by which he tried to escape Kantianism on a solid ‘empirical’ footing.4 A liminal moment, or period, is a ‘situation’, in the most general sense of the word (somewhat recalling the way Jaspers ([1931] 2009) used ‘situation’ in his famous 1931 book); when, suddenly, the taken for granted order of things becomes suspended, previous expectations are no longer met, people become uncertain and disoriented, as if trapped in the ‘in between’—neither here, nor there, no longer in the past, not yet in the future—which, somehow, much be solved. The situation also recalls what Weber called the out of the ordinary (ausseralltäglich), and for which he came up with the idea of charisma, as charismatic power or charismatic leadership—and Jaspers was perhaps the most direct disciple of Max Weber.5

The argument of this article will not start, however, from the standard idea of liminality; rather, it will start from the way Agnes Horvath, one of the founding editors of International Political Anthropology, developed it towards the liminal void and, especially, liminal incommensurability (Horvath 2021, 2024). The first term is important, as while liminality is often used to capture creativity, the exciting exploration of new ways, this interpretation ignores the basic fact that any liminal situation has a death-like character, encompassing the loss of the old ways and certainties, so to celebrate, unconditionally, liminality is unacceptable. Not accidentally van Gennep, in contrast to Turner, and quite rightly, considered as the most characteristic rite of passage rituals related to death and not initiation into adulthood. A liminal situation is fundamentally problematic, requiring the full attention and capacities of those entering it, implying a tragic, in contrast to a comic, mood—perhaps a good way to illustrate Nietzsche’s insights about the tragic sense of the Greeks. The Greeks certainly had a good understanding of liminality—Hermes embodies many central aspects of liminality, while key terms of Greek philosophy like apeiron or metaxy, the first having been introduced in the first and only fragment of Anaximander before being taken up by the Pythagoreans, while both were central for Plato (see Symposium and Philebus), are literal equivalents of liminality.6

‘Liminal incommensurability’ takes this point a step further by arguing that, in a liminal situation, standard modes and forms of tradition and rationality, just as formal logic, are not applicable, as elements emerge under such conditions, fragments of the previous, harmonious entity, which are not commensurable, so they cannot be easily put together and reconciled. The argument can be illustrated by some basic ideas of Greek mathematics, in particular the discovery of ‘irrational numbers’. Everybody knows what an irrational number is, from elementary school mathematics, but hardly anybody pays close attention to the meaning, and seriousness, of the adjective ‘irrational’ there. The meaning seems simple, identical to its modern definition: it is a number that cannot be written as a ratio, or fraction (we moderns so easily identify these two terms, though they are literally worlds apart!), of two natural (again, note the adjective!) or integer numbers. However, it is important to note here that the Greeks talk about logos in this context in the sense of ‘ratio’ and not division or fragmentation, being quite aware of the significance of the difference—so much so that Hippasus, the Pythagorean philosopher who discovered irrational numbers, purportedly died by suicide. It is irrelevant whether this story is true or not; rather, what matters is the existence of such an anecdote, indicating a sensibility that we moderns have lost.

There are many types and modalities of incommensurability—the significance of ‘liminal incommensurability’ is that it valorises the fact that, in a liminal situation, there is a particularly high probability for the emergence of incommensurable situations or characters. This article will focus on modalities of incommensurable knowledge.

3. The Two Main Forms of Incommensurable Knowledge

There are many things in the world, or more simply in nature, that are incommensurable to us, either because they are too small, too big, or too powerful. Incommensurable things, just as liminal situations, are preoccupying, as we cannot have ‘normal’ knowledge of them. Thus, we humans, through many thousands of years, developed a certain knowledge about plants and animals, as well as various stones and other objects, though they have features, such as their coming into life or their curative effects, that are incommensurable for us. There are various phenomena, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storms, and other weather changes, as well as particularly rare events like eclipses, that are incommensurable to our everyday existence and knowledge. For dealing with such out-of-the-ordinary phenomena, out-of-the-ordinary forms of knowledge had to be developed—the most important examples being what is termed as magic and as religion. Modern, enlightened science dismisses such knowledge as sheer prejudice, but this is an extremely dogmatic position—first of all, because it has no evidence to support such claims. Furthermore, as anthropologists and also historians know this, ‘aboriginal’ beliefs and practices constitute a very delicate matter, as most ‘simple’ or ‘primitive people’, far from being credulous, have extreme suspicion about convoluted explanations, so they are not so easy to convince.

The difference between magic and religion, as the classic works of Weber and Mauss (1950) argue and show, is fundamental in principle yet quite often blurred in actual reality, with the resulting confusion being due to the trickster interference, to be discussed below. Magic is illicit and secret, being hardly tolerated, especially by recognised authorities; religion is open, public, and fundamental for the identity of any community. The main difference concerns the modality and character of the relation to transcendent powers. Magic works through the forcing of obscure forces of the beyond, having particular preference for the souls of the dead, and the spirits that are associated with such sinister modes of communication, while in the case of religion, initiative is always assigned to the godhead. This article, concerned with the epistemology of revelation, will argue that, consequently, all forms of genuine religion are based on some kind of revelation, ‘revelation’ meaning the communication of some kind of knowledge by supreme powers, whether that revelation was explicit, direct—including inner, mystic experiences as a sudden illumination or enlightenment—and preserved in written sources or more distant and implicit, only being preserved in traditions that have become vague and mythicised.

Obviously, one does not have ‘evidence’ concerning such revelation, in the rationalistic–scientistic sense; however, there is no evidence for many things in human history, and yet we need to make some sense of how we arrived at the current stage we find ourselves at. The standard, Weber–Maussian distinction between magic and religion implies that, in the case of religious traditions and practices, initiative had to come from the outside—and so, at least originally, all such traditions were ‘genuine’. Such an idea implies that certain supreme powers either ‘revealed themselves’ or transmitted, or revealed, some kind of special knowledge to humans.

This theme is enormous, tremendous even, and here, it will only be illustrated, at first, through two examples. The first is Homer. The existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey caused permanent headache for interpreters of world literature, as the fact that the very first piece of written literature at the same time offers still unsurpassable heights goes against modern evolutionist thinking—as if these poems sprung out of the head of Homer, like Pallas Athena out of the head of Zeus. The final, written version is traced to the beginning of eighth century BC, but the socio-political conditions rather evoke the world of Mycenaean civilisation, while the stories contained, especially in their modality, go back much further. One aspect of the epic poems, not to be encountered anywhere else in classical Greek culture, is the marked ease by which certain deities appear among humans—and the relative ease, certainly immediate awareness, by which they are recognised. This could only be explained, in a text that is considered, again, one of the unsurpassable classics of world literature, by the texts reaching back to a period when such revelations were experienced with a degree of frequency.

The second case, a particularly good example for the necessity of complementing scientific–rationalistic epistemology with an epistemology of revelation, concerns knowledge about edible, poisonous, and curative plants and mushrooms. Modernists tend to explain such knowledge through the trial and error ‘method’ of Russell and Popper, but such an idea is unacceptable. In prehistoric communities, every child, every human being was a rare and precious ‘asset’ to be cared for; treating them by giving them various plants to eat so that their eventual effect could be perceived is a preposterous idea. It is equally unacceptable to argue that such knowledge can be acquired after the event, because it is difficult, even in a contemporary context, to reconstruct sometime later, and especially in the frightening, liminal situation of someone falling ill, what the sick person consumed and when. Yet, and again according to archaeological evidence, even Neanderthals had a quite precise knowledge about the effects of various herbs (Patou-Mathis 2018): how could they possibly acquire such knowledge if not by some or other kind of natural or supernatural ‘revelation’?

Thus, in this article, the ‘epistemology of revelation’ will not be limited to the main revealed religions, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam, but will be extended at least to the early history of all established religions. The reason for such a temporal qualification will become apparent later.

4. Revelation in History: Some Evidence

Moving closer to the present, archaeological evidence offers us some kind of direct evidence concerning revelations, or epiphanies, in certain images found in the Tassili Mountains in the Sahara, and especially in Minoan Crete, where some of the stunning scenes depicted in seals and seal impressions were identified as scenes of epiphany (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1951; Kerényi 1976; Matz 1958, 1973; Sourvinou-Inwood 1989).

The two main revelations of which concrete evidence survived can be connected to the figures of Abraham and Zoroaster. Without going into the question of their historical dating or comparing their content, their historical conditions of emergence can be assigned to the crisis of the Bronze Age, even the Bronze Age as an age of crisis, or a period of particularly acute liminality. Concerning Ancient Judaism, this is a quite well-known point, argued in detail by Voegelin (1956), about the leaving of the city of Ur. Concerning Zoroaster, and it is a central point in the innovative, path-breaking work of Mary Boyce (1984a, 1984b).7

Such historical anchoring of these two pioneering historical revelations as liminal situations is crucial to the argument of this paper for two reasons. First, it shows that transcendent forces, as revealed by such events (the issue of their truthfulness will be considered soon), are not concerned with a minute, daily interference in human affairs; rather, they represent the offering of some corrections to, or ways out of, intolerable situations into which the dynamics of human history, for some reason, became entrapped (such reasons will also be discussed soon, focusing on the figure of the trickster, another key term of political anthropology, closely connected to liminality and also with imitation). This reading is further supported by the events of the Axial Age,8 where an unprecedented period of spiritual fermentation can be closely correlated with events of the rise of ecumenic (or globalising) empires, followed by the rise of Christianity, which, for a long time, in a way, represented a calming down of the violence that had been escalating for centuries, if not millennia.

This point will be centrally revisited, concerning its application to modernity, in the last part of this paper.

The second point concerns the crucial epistemological issue—the possible assessment of the truth of revelations—and can be split into two senses: the truthfulness (trustworthiness) of the person who claimed to have received such revelations and the truth content of what they said. These two senses, in this case, are closely and inseparably connected—thus making the question of truthfulness, or truth telling, the fundamental issue in the epistemology of revelation, in contrast to scientific epistemology.

The point is very simple. In the case of scientific evidence, there are various, established ways to ascertain the truth of the claims. In the case of historical events for which direct evidence is available or things that supposedly happened, there are again various procedures, mostly taken over from law, which can again confirm or refute the accounts. However, amidst allegations about supernatural or transcendent revelations, such features are unavailable: forcing transcendent powers to repeat what they transmitted is associated with magic, so the path of religion and truth is immediately abandoned.

This means that the truth of such claims can only be established indirectly, by the truthfulness of the concrete human person making such claims, as established by their previous conduct and/or the lasting and convincing changes shown by their conduct after the events. It is evidently impossible for us to decide now the truthfulness of past events, as well as long-dead persons, but people then must have had reason to be convinced; we have no other option but to trust the good senses of human beings who lived a long, long time before us.

The problem, actually, is not with them but with us, moderns, due to the two main modalities of modern dogmatism that prevent us from understanding the dynamics of world history. The first is evolutionism, the idea that human history is a continuous march of progress and enlightenment. Such a vision has been refuted by archaeology. It is not possible to review the evidence here; only one particularly relevant example can be mentioned: the case of the ‘Neolithic revolution’. While, for a long time, archaeologists thought, guided by evolutionism, that the driving force of the ‘Neolithic revolution’ was the discovery of agriculture, which first led to settlement, and then the rise of religion, in the form of fertility cults—a view which has been codified by V. Gordon Childe, a Stalinist—in the past decades, based on a series of discoveries, it has been conclusively demonstrated that settlement preceded the rise of agriculture by many millennia (see Bar-Yosef and Valla 1991; Zeder 2011) and that settlement had no rational, evolutionary explanation. Conversely, it was due to religious–ritualistic factors. The second is modern rationalism, especially in the form of ‘Cartesian doubt’, which will be discussed in some more detail shortly.

Here, first, a key case will be discussed, wherein there is a degree of contextual historical evidence about the truthfulness of a revelation: the conversion of Saul into Paul and, eventually, St Paul the apostle on the road to Damascus. Starting with the obvious, there is no scientific way to assess the truthfulness of the events that happened with Paul—perhaps apart from it happening at noon, a particularly ‘liminal’ and thus sacred turning point of the day. However, we not only have the testimony of Paul but also the testimony of the historical Christian communities who became convinced about the truth of what he experienced by his subsequent conduct. Saul the Pharisee was a most ferocious persecutor of the Christians, but after his conversion experience, he gained a leading position in Christian communities, even becoming an apostle. All this had to be for a good reason, and questioning, by aprioristic reasoning, the truthfulness of his own account is unreasonable.

Such a return to truthfulness, in contrast to rationalistic procedures confirming truth-claims, is central to two of the most important contemporary philosophers who made it their lifework to overcome the limitations of Cartesian rationalism: Michel Foucault (2011, who followed Nietzsche, especially the fifth book of Gaia Scienza) and Michel Henry (2002), who was a main figure in the theological turn of French phenomenology.

However, before turning to the problem of modern rationalism, and the contemporary situation concerning revelation, let us review the historical trajectory of the two main forms of incommensurable knowledge and their changing relationships with commensurable knowledge.

5. The Rise to Dominance of Incommensurable Knowledge

Every human culture and community developed, and lived by, a certain combination of knowledge about what is commensurable—what every single member of the community could come to experience and understand—and what is incommensurable—that which is beyond the reach of normal human understanding and that which only certain, at once respected and feared individuals, usually members of a special ‘occupational’ caste or class (priests, wizards, sorcerers, shamans, etc.), could master, or claim to master. Knowledge about the latter always matters in liminal situations, when the ordinary business of life is temporarily suspended: birth and death, illness or injury, extreme natural events or disasters.

The modalities of adjustment between the commensurable and the incommensurable are practically infinite, but this does not concern this article. This article is only concerned with a single type of situation: when, for one reason or another, knowledge about the incommensurable gains dominance over normal, commensurable human knowledge.

The relative importance of, or the ascendancy between, commensurable and incommensurable knowledge is impossible to decide in principle and in advance. This is because such knowledge is, itself, incommensurable: Everyday knowledge is concrete, tied to a specific place and time. Every human being, unless affected by some specific condition, has a definite knowledge about their own world, which includes knowledge about who has more knowledge, as well as and how they have more knowledge, in the sense of being more trustworthy and reliable, than others. This knowledge, however, is applicable only in a very limited sense to extraordinary situations.

This is the reason why not only out-of-the-ordinary situations are particularly dangerous, in an evident, self-explanatory sense. Danger and risk, and the related matters of fear and anxiety, are almost defining features of the out of the ordinary, but even knowledge about the out of the ordinary is dangerous, in the sense that ‘ordinary people’ cannot have it, cannot judge it, and, therefore, are naturally suspicious of anyone who claims to have such knowledge, while on the other hand, one can easily become enchanted, lured in, or misled by those who claim to possess such knowledge. One might argue that it is easy to verify the proof of such knowledge, in terms of its success of solving the out of the ordinary; this is close to the way Weber interpreted charisma. However, charisma can be faked, and persons pretending to offer a solution might alter the state of affairs to such an extent that nobody could judge anymore the character of the solution offered and imposed.

It is here that a second key anthropological term enters the scene: the trickster.

6. The Trickster

While the term has certain precedents, especially in the figure of the ‘confidence trickster’, so important for, for example, the novels of Dickens, it was assigned little importance until anthropologists discovered the figure all over the world, in the legends, myths, and folktales of practically every human culture, and even there and then, it took a long while for it to gain general acceptance (Radin 1972; Hyde 1999; Horvath 2013; for the use of the term in mythology, see Dumézil 1986; Kerényi [1943] 1986, [1963] 1991). Based on previous work, especially work related to the journal International Political Anthropology, it is asserted here that trickster is not only a useful term even outside anthropology; rather, together with liminality, its pair term, it is among the most important terms of social-theoretical analysis, being indispensable for understanding the course of history.

This is because the trickster is the par excellence figure of liminality, just as much as, or even much more than, the charismatic hero. The trickster is the eternal outcast and outsider, not being part of any community or culture because they are unable to participate, unable to give, unable to trust, unable to have genuine emotions, having no authenticity, being a mere mime. The trickster is therefore universally loathed and even despised but also feared, being not only unreliable but unpredictable. In liminal conditions, however, the terms might change in a nick of time; the trickster can gain the initiative, even the ascendancy, and suddenly, the despised outsider might gain great, even unlimited, absolute power. The term ‘unlimited’ must be understood in its full sense, as the trickster being a figure of liminality also means that it is a figure of the limit and thus of limitlessness—as, if somebody stands on the limit, or is the limit, then we cannot see the limits, any limit, and thus, the figure becomes associated with limitlessness or the unlimited. In a way, this is the greatest danger in and for human life; limitlessness, ignorance of or failure to respect the limits identified, is, in many cultures, even etymologically, associated with evil (see English but also Greek (‘hubris’), or even the Latin combination of evil and illness, ‘malum’).

The trickster, as this particularly telling, apt name indicates, is a figure of knowledge, but of a particular kind: a knowledge that is merely a trick, that might work well in some cases, that especially seems to work, seems to offer a solution, but rather only mimes it, imitating or pretending genuine knowledge, and usually only makes things worse. The central issue is that the trickster is not familiar with ordinary, commensurable knowledge, as it does not participate in the life of any community, ethnic or religious; it can only fake knowledge, whether ordinary or out of the ordinary. However, through such faking, in out-of-the-ordinary situations, it might succeed to evoke obscure powers. Here, through history, two basic trickster modalities can be identified. The first is magic, or an obscure manipulation of supernatural forces, especially the souls of the dead, in order to bring about the desired result. Magic, clearly, involves all kind of tricks, including, among others, particularly shrewd and ruthless play with secrecy and publicness, but it also must work in some kind of way, as, otherwise, after a time, people would pull the tricks. Here, the English term ‘perform’, which also has a most interesting etymology and semantic history, is particularly illuminating, as ‘performance’, on the one hand, is closely associated with something that is not real, merely staged, like a theatrical performance, while, on the other hand, ‘performance’ is also a term for successful achievement: someone who performed well in an examination is not someone who only managed to deceive the examiners, but someone who really demonstrated knowledge and capability.

All this also shows that the trickster has close links not only with liminality but also with a third key term of political anthropology, imitation. Being a figure of liminality, the trickster is also a figure of imitation: not being able to participate in social reality, having no authentic emotions, not being able to give and to trust, the trickster can only copy others, behave as if it were real, faking and pretending.

The problem of the trickster, in world history, however, is not limited to the use of magic. It extends to a much more portentous issue: the manner in which incommensurable knowledge can gain ascendancy, occasionally a total one, over commensurable knowledge.

7. Incommensurable Totalitarianism

There are two main ways in which, through trickster interference, incommensurable knowledge can gain overwhelming, total ascendency over the commensurable.

One is magic. As magic is hardly tolerated, mostly secret—certainly not public—partly trick, illusion, and deceit and partly an illicit communication with obscure powers of the beyond, it is, by definition, associated with tricksters of one kind or another. Its powers are much feared, but for this reason, it is also respected in a way, though its practitioners can never become part of the acknowledged, genuinely respected leaders in any community. However, it might transpire that, using particularly intense liminal crisis moments, magicians can extend their power and gain an all but dominating influence. This evidently has been happening in many parts of the world, especially so in Southern America, Africa, and the broad areas of Oceania. Such tribes in the past were associated with a primitive, ignorant state of mankind, but this is a mistake, as humans, as far as their commensurable knowledge is concerned, were never ignorant, back at least to Neanderthal times, according to archaeological evidence (Patou-Mathis 2018). What looked like ‘barbarism’ was not original but acquired, due to sustained trickster manipulation and the comprehensive contamination of everyday life by the mentality of magic. The devastating effects of such manipulation on the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ of a people is well illustrated by the following claim of Evans-Pritchard: ‘[I]f time and opportunity permitted many Azande would wish to consult one or other of the oracles about every step in their lives’ (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, p. 123).9

The other is religion—or rather its abuse, the move away from the path of genuine religion. Under stressful liminal conditions, the outcast outsiders can insinuate themselves as saviours, pretending or expropriating traditional knowledge, and thus, through imitation and faking, they manage to blur the lines between magic and religion. The most important example of such confusion is rituals of sacrifice, where gift giving-based activities are turned into violent and destructive rituals. Here, the most evident examples are those cultures that come to be dominated by priestly castes and their violent rituals of human sacrifice, as exemplified by pre-Columbian cultures, like the Aztecs or the Mayans, or those in the Ancient Near East, especially in Phoenicia.

These two modalities, the domination of magic and the abuse of religion, usually culminate in an escalation of warfare, rendering it endemic. In the first case, this can lead to a culture of persistent headhunting wars between small neighbouring tribes, as in Papua New Guinea or alongside the Amazon; in the second case, the result is systematic warfare, culminating in efforts to conquer the entire world, for which the best example is offered in the Near East, with the age of the Ecumenic Empires (Voegelin 1974).

8. The Magi

A ‘priestly’ caste offering an astonishingly clear, paradigmatic example for the three points discussed before is the Persian Magi. Magi were recognised as effective magicians—our very word ‘magic’, through Greek mediation, is derived from them. Furthermore, Magi were not hardly tolerated sorcerers, but recognised, official religious leaders of the Persian Empire, up to the rise of Islam, as exemplified by the priests of Zoroastrianism, the first recorded revealed religion, together with Ancient Judaism. However, and most importantly, they were not the original Zoroastrian priests; rather, at some obscure historical moment, in between the rise of the Median and Persian empires, they managed to oust the traditional Zoroastrian priests and take over their place. This takeover is associated with the formation of the Persian Empire and its becoming the first Ecumenic Empire. According to the available historical evidence, especially Herodotus, Magi were the main advisors of the emperors in these conquests – even source of inspiration behind such striving, so can be characterised as archetypal colonisers and war-mongers.

This is of particular importance as it was in the context of the Ecumenic Age, with the overwhelming preoccupation about wars, conquest, and empire building, that the main contemporary revealed religions originate as efforts to deal with or overcome such seemingly irresistible escalation of violence and ‘bad life’, providing a prelude to our ‘age of globalisation’.

9. Modern Scientistic Rationalism

Modern rationalistic philosophy, inspired by science, which itself is a form of incommensurable knowledge,10 launched a mortal attack on both everyday commensurable knowledge and the incommensurable knowledge gained through direct revelation. Concerning the former, the main figure was Bacon, with his list of idols. Here, the attack was frontal: Bacon denounced everyday knowledge, including language itself, as erroneous, little more than marketplace gossip, hardly sparing the classics of philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, though not daring to attack the Church directly.

Descartes made a further step, though having ancient precedents, e.g., in Sextus Empiricus, and with his famous identification of thinking and doubting based rationality on doubt, undermining, though only indirectly, the truth-trust link, central for the epistemology of revelation.11

It is difficult to adjudicate whether they were aware of the enormity of their deeds and, even more so, whether they had explicit destructive purposes. Descartes, in particular, claimed full good faith and gained ecclesiastic support, through Mersenne. However, Father Mersenne had good private reasons to support Descartes, as his own mathematical interests were close to breeching the limits of magic, and in general, the entire early history of science and rationalistic philosophy requires a serious re-evaluation, beyond the traditional storyline about the vested interests of the Church and the heroic struggles of the pioneers of science and rationalism (see Yates 1964, 1975, 1992; Horvath 2021, 2024). This article can only allude to two points: the first is the insight of Nietzsche, taken up most explicitly by Foucault, that the will to true knowledge characteristic of modern science was itself a secularised version of the Christian will to truth and knowledge, at any price; the second is that the three types of true knowledge, the commensurability of everyday knowledge, and the incommensurable knowledge gained by science or revelation, while not necessarily contradictory, do not always go together.

This leads to the possible contemporary significance of revealed knowledge.

10. Revelation and Modernity

The revelations of the axial age, as well as its predecessors and main follow-up, Christian revelation, took place in the context of escalating violence and a disintegration of culture. The rise of the modern world, most evidently, involves unprecedented levels of violence and disintegration, with world wars, genocides, and a series of totalitarian regimes. If one takes the previous revelations seriously, one would expect new revelations. Is something similar taking place? Or, if the answer is negative, does it invalidate the previous argument about the seriousness of revealed knowledge?

This article offers two main points in this regard. The first concerns the particular importance and modality of apocalyptic and eschatological expectations inside Christianity, connected to the ‘Second Coming’. The promise of such a ‘Second Coming’ is inseparable from the accounts, and knowledge, contained in the New Testament; belief in it, therefore, is an integral part of Christianity. However, the Gospels also very clearly state that knowledge about this ‘Second Coming’ is not accessible to humans, not even to ‘the Son’ (Mt 24: 36), so any speculation about it is meaningless. The disasters and absurdities of the modern world might allude to such an event, but it is not for us to speculate about it. The point is important in this manner, as the revelation contained in the account of the first coming offers an at once very precise and completely unspecific indication about such a ‘Second Coming’: it certainly will happen, but it cannot be known when and how.

The second point about revelations concerning modernity is quite different, though having somewhat similar modalities. These concern the series of Marian apparitions. Such apparitions seem to be the most evident, even glaringly manifest, intrusions of the transcendent into the daily reality of the modern world.

They also have a series of features that require minute theoretical and epistemological attention.

To start with, it is an empirical fact that over the history of Christianity, there was a definite increase in such apparitions (Turner and Turner 1978; Nolan and Nolan 1989; Maundner 2021). To put it in a slightly different way, Marian apparitions rose to a definite dominance among such transcendent apparitions (the others being apparitions of Christ and saints). This intensification happened in three steps: first, with the Renaissance; then, with the Counter-Reformation; and finally, with the modern world, after the French Revolution. If one takes revelations and transcendence seriously, one needs to ponder upon the reasons for such a dominance.

First, the cult of Mary, at least in the West—and modernity is a feature of the West—is limited to Catholicism: In all Protestant denominations, but especially in the most radical ones, close to the Weberian ‘spirit of capitalism’, Mary is hardly present, with her mediating role being eliminated. Instead, Protestant countries came to attribute a particularly important mediating role to ‘medias’, all the various modalities of the ‘public sphere’, based on the exclusive role they assigned to the written word of God.

Second, the mediums of the most important Marian apparitions are a quite specific group of people: children, close to adolescence, and predominantly female (essentially, young girls). This, again, and in a definitive way, goes against the main tenets of modern rationalist epistemology, which excludes children—and for a long time excluded women—as bearers of knowledge and understanding, especially so in Protestantism. Marian apparitions—or, one could say, the Virgin—evidently selected those persons who are furthest away from the tenets of modern rational thinking as bearers of knowledge. Adherents of such rationalism certainly pretend that this is because these people are the most gullible, not yet being ready for ‘rational’ understanding. However, simple familiarisation with the historical accounts would demonstrate that these girls were by no means ignorant emotional beings who had sensitivities to fantasies; rather, they were responsible and quite mature humans who persisted in their testimony against many odds, represented by various official authority figures, and were subjected to vigorous testing. They certainly were simple, but rather in the sense of being unprejudiced and not prejudiced—not force-fed by the tenets of modern rationalism, thus remaining open to experiences, wherever these might have taken them. Modern rationalists claim that such experiences could not have taken place, but this is dogmatic prejudice, supported and promoted by the mode of functioning of the ‘open public sphere’, whose mode of verification is just as partial and limited as the similar methods of modern science—repetition, uniformity, massification, and predictability—by which such people can be made fun of. But historical evidence, which is very different from scientific proof and ignores the law of large numbers, discloses that some such experience-events did take place. Ignoring this is identical to promoting prejudice and ignorance.

Third, and furthermore, such events took place under very particular circumstances—circumstances that can be considered as liminal. In an excellent book, Donal Foley (2002) collated the most important such modern Marian apparitions, claiming that all such visions took place at a very specific time and space—situations and moments that could be technically termed liminal, though he did not use this term. Such liminal moments, furthermore, are closely connected to the most important liminal moments of modern history—the major wars and revolutions, especially those of France and Russia—the 1917 apparitions in Fátima being the most striking example. The book ends by discussing the Medjugorje apparitions—though only to dismiss them as fakes.

However, we have to stop here and consider this event much more carefully.

To begin with, the apparition that first took place on 24–25 June 1981 in Medjugorje, Bosnia–Herzegovina, happened at an extremely liminal time and place. The time was Midsummer Night; thus, it was even an astronomical liminal moment, associated furthermore in most cultures with liminal activities such as carnivals and other rituals. In Christianity, it is feast day of St John the Baptist, the most ‘liminal’ saint (and perhaps thus a favourite subject of the painting–meditation of Leonardo da Vinci), who performed the baptism of Christ, while the same feast day (6 January) also celebrates the visit of the Magi and the wedding at Cana—which, incidentally, is almost the only place, apart from the birth and the crucifixion of Christ, where Mary appears in the Gospels. In terms of place, ‘medju gorje’ literally means ‘in between mountains’, thus again evoking liminality, furthermore identifying ‘the valley’, and the contrast between mountains and valleys is central for apocalyptic and eschatological imagination, back to Deutero Isaiah (40: 4). But Medjugorje is also a liminal place culturally and historically, almost serving as the actual spot where Western and Eastern Christianity and Islam are meeting. Even further, the former Yugoslavia was the place where the first warfare in Europe after the Second World War broke out—something that was certainly not foreseeable humanly in 1981—and this warfare broke out with the declaration of independence of Slovenia on 25 June 1991, or the tenth anniversary of the Medjugorje apparitions.12

Even further, such apparitions are not only technically liminal, in many senses of the word, but permanently liminal. Most of the other famous apparitions took place only once, or very few times—in the case of Fatima, they took place on a series of occasions but were well within the scope of a year. The Medjugorje apparitions have continued to take place, practically on a daily basis, since 1981. This has no precedent but aligns well with claims about the permanent liminality of modernity.

The last, and perhaps most important, feature of the Medjugorje apparitions is that they so far have defeated any attempt at authentication—whether positive or negative. They took place in a Communist country, leading to systematic official attempts to eliminate them, which, however, failed. After a time, still in Communist Yugoslavia, the local bishop officially declared their inauthenticity, but there are, for very good reasons, serious doubts about the validity of this decree. However, since then, the Catholic Church has neither reversed nor affirmed this judgement; the official position is that the apparitions are ‘neither approved or condemned—not determined’.

Here, the two most important revelation-related pieces of modern knowledge become joined: evidently, neither the apocalyptic character of modernity nor the truthfulness of the Medjugorje apparitions is something about which human knowledge can come to a definite conclusion. And, simply, ‘here we are now’.

11. The Revelatory Relevance of Medjugorje

The Medjugorje phenomenon not only highlights the connections between liminality and Marian apparitions but also indicates how closely both are tied to the notion of revelation. A revelation is not only an intrusion of the incommensurable Beyond into our world, following the logic of an inscrutable will of a ‘hidden god’, or a kind of ‘divine pleasure principle’, as certain Puritan–absolutistic trends in the main revealed religions claim; rather, while such intrusions certainly cannot be predicted or ‘explained’ by purely human means, they follow up on, or try to rectify, certain deviations or dead ends of human history. This is indicated by the highly liminal character of the times and places where such revelations took place—in so far as they can be identified. Furthermore, Marian apparitions can be considered as revelations exactly in this sense: beyond the liminal character of their time and place, and the characteristics of the visionaries—adolescence, according to the standard anthropological reading, is a most liminal moment in the human life course—they also show characteristics of the classical revelations, and they contain messages, often warnings, about the way to mend our conduct to avoid grave consequences.

12. Conclusions

The aim of this article was to offer, through some of the central concepts of political anthropology, like liminality, the trickster, and imitation, a philosophical–epistemological perspective on the phenomenon of divine revelation. While the standard rationalistic–scientistic perspective claims that the truth of such revelations cannot be ascertained, if not outright declaring them as, by definition, products of delusion, it has shown that, in their time and place, the seriousness and validity of such claims were properly ascertained in the human community where such revelations happened. Modern science, with its methods and techniques, is only one way to reach truthful knowledge, and extending it to areas where it has no competence can bring about very serious disturbances—as is now happening, in all sorts of ways, in our current hyper-modern global world. Even further, this article showed that revelation is connected, in manifold ways, to liminal conditions, or situations when normal, ordinary human life is disturbed by phenomena that are not commensurable to our daily life. Revelations thus offer knowledge about the incommensurable.

As such incommensurable knowledge is not accessible via ordinary human experience, the relation between commensurable and incommensurable knowledge is delicate and can be upset. This offers an opportunity for trickster figures, who were recognised and identified by anthropologists and mythologists in all human cultures, to generate serious confusion, especially between magic and religion, and insinuate themselves into central positions in the social order. If this happens, not only do the lines between magic and religion become blurred, but also even the solid traditions of commensurable knowledge can be dislocated. This article argues that the kind of scientistic rationalism inaugurated by Bacon and Descartes not only undermined, unjustifiably, belief in the validity of revealed knowledge but also contributed to the invalidation of age-old European cultural traditions in everyday life.

This article ended by presenting modern Marian apparitions, exemplified by the Medjugorje phenomenon, depicting them as being highly liminal in their modalities and showing the classical features of revelations. Specifically, a key aspect of Medjugorje, apart from its extremely heightened liminal character, is its close affinity with apocalyptic expectations, best revealed by its character that its actual truthfulness became humanly impossible to assess.