Charisma, Magic, and Spirituality as Socially Engaged Processes: Lucian’s (circa 120-200) “Alexander the False Prophet” and People’s Accounts of the Supernatural
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on Alexander the False Prophet and The Lover of Lies, two texts from the Greek poet-philosopher Lucian of Samosata (circa 120-200) of the Classical Roman era, this paper considers (a) charisma, magic, and spirituality as aspects of an interconnected, collectively achieved, developmental process associated with the emergence of a religious cult. Somewhat relatedly, this paper also acknowledges (b) people’s broader, longstanding fascinations with matters that seem incredulous. Depicting a more sustained realm of prophetic activity and an account of people’s intrigues with the supernatural, Lucian’s texts offer some especially valuable transhistorical and transcultural reference points for the broader sociological study of human knowing and acting. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of these matters for the study of people’s involvements in religion and spirituality as humanly-engaged realms of endeavor and interchange.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".