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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".