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Religions in the Graeco-Roman World
The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions of Harran
This study treats the religious and intellectual history of the city of Harran (Eastern Turkey) from biblical times down to the establishment of Islam. The author starts from the well-known reference in the Qur'an and the early Islamic histories to the people of Harran as Sabians, one of the 'peoples of the book.'
The author unravels strands of religious tradition in Harran that run from the old Semitic planetary cults through Hellenistic hermeticism, gnosticism, and Neo-Pythagoreanism and Christian cults to esoteric Islamic sects such as the Sufis and Shiites.
The author unravels strands of religious tradition in Harran that run from the old Semitic planetary cults through Hellenistic hermeticism, gnosticism, and Neo-Pythagoreanism and Christian cults to esoteric Islamic sects such as the Sufis and Shiites.
240 pages, Leather Bound
First published July 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 11, 2017
A very dense, scholarly monograph on the ancient city of Harran, which since earliest times sat at the crossroads of Babylonian and Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Christian, Gnostic, Hermetic and Muslim forms of belief.
This is a book for specialists or for those with a perverse, personal interest in comparative ancient religion — NOT a book for people seeking "ancient secrets" and occult magical knowledge from ancient times, because it doesn't provide those kind of answers. Rather, it is resolutely fact-based, sticking to what we can know from the fragmentary textual and archeological record, which is exceptionally muddled and contradictory.
Still, if you happen to be interested in Harran, said to be both the place where Abraham the patriarch made his home and a center of esoteric Greek learning and Hermetic magical lore — and if you are interested in these things because you are hoping to understand the forces that shaped religious beliefs in the Near East from ancient Babylon through to the Islamic golden age — this may be the only book in existence that covers that precise ground. Which is why I looked for a copy for many years, and spent two weeks trudging through its dense and often frustrating thicket of inconclusive data points from beginning to end.
Having read Garth Fowden's Before and After Mohammed immediately prior, I can say that where they overlap, they confirm each other remarkably well. The author, Tamara Green, has done a remarkable job of drawing together every possible resource that covers the 3000-year religious history of Harran in once place, giving us a summary of the material. It's true that she doesn't seem to do much original scholarship, preferring instead to rely on secondary sources. But she is exhaustively thorough and doesn't have an agenda to push. She simply presents the available evidence and leaves it to the reader to give it what meaning s/he will.
So this is hardly a book for everyone, but if you are here on this page, you know why you are here — and this is a book you must read.
This is a book for specialists or for those with a perverse, personal interest in comparative ancient religion — NOT a book for people seeking "ancient secrets" and occult magical knowledge from ancient times, because it doesn't provide those kind of answers. Rather, it is resolutely fact-based, sticking to what we can know from the fragmentary textual and archeological record, which is exceptionally muddled and contradictory.
Still, if you happen to be interested in Harran, said to be both the place where Abraham the patriarch made his home and a center of esoteric Greek learning and Hermetic magical lore — and if you are interested in these things because you are hoping to understand the forces that shaped religious beliefs in the Near East from ancient Babylon through to the Islamic golden age — this may be the only book in existence that covers that precise ground. Which is why I looked for a copy for many years, and spent two weeks trudging through its dense and often frustrating thicket of inconclusive data points from beginning to end.
Having read Garth Fowden's Before and After Mohammed immediately prior, I can say that where they overlap, they confirm each other remarkably well. The author, Tamara Green, has done a remarkable job of drawing together every possible resource that covers the 3000-year religious history of Harran in once place, giving us a summary of the material. It's true that she doesn't seem to do much original scholarship, preferring instead to rely on secondary sources. But she is exhaustively thorough and doesn't have an agenda to push. She simply presents the available evidence and leaves it to the reader to give it what meaning s/he will.
So this is hardly a book for everyone, but if you are here on this page, you know why you are here — and this is a book you must read.
March 31, 2021
The extensive study of religious traditions of Harran and its political dimensions is too much to describe in a review by an amateur history and mysteries' buff. I've read this book primarily for a greater insight into the shifts in mysteries throughout centuries in this particular region, and to sieve them for personal benefit and as a part of a continuous study in writing a historical novel mixed with magical realism. I would dare not summarize the content, as this is not the purpose, it may be described as an endeavour in narrating the "genius loci" in shifts spanning 2500 years. One book leads to another and inspired by "The City of the Moon God" I will reach for Chaldeana of Levy (I was not aware of this book's existence thus far, and I'm relatively well acquainted with neoplatonism and Chaldean schools, or so I thought). If you are interested in a localized, yet laborous and fascinating analysis of mysteriosophical schools, religious' traditional threads, historical anecdotes linking various religious traditions and cults, that is a good excercise in specialized focus on the geography of belief.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews