Speaker: Professor Robert Yelle, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich; author of several books including: Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric and the Dream of a Natural Language in Hindu Tantra

Chair: Dr. Ananya Vajpeyi

 

The lecture will address some of the parallels, as well as the differences, between Hindu mantras (especially those of the Tantric variety) and Christian prayers. Like prayers in many other cultures, each of these has been used historically for a range of purposes: to worship gods and goddesses, of course, but also to perform magic. The first part of the lecture will examine how, through the use of poetry in particular, such formulas are converted into powerful speech, supposed to be capable of achieving their objective. The second part of the lecture will trace the polemics against poetic and magical prayers that originated in the Puritan critique of “vain repetitions.” For several centuries, this polemic was directed against first Roman Catholic chants, then Hindu mantras

Chair: Dr. Ananya Vajpeyi, Fellow and Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies