Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions

ARISING FROM A GRADUATE SEMINAR at Princeton University that developed into a public colloquium, the papers in this collection address a variety of different perspectives on the celestial realm from a broad cross-section of late antique religious and philosophical movements, including such diverse materials as the Greek Magical Papyri, theurgic texts, and Patristic writings. Furthermore, as the editors point out, collecting in one place studies on late antique ideas about heaven, culled from a variety of fields normally treated by scholars as distinct, illuminates the degree of interchange, borrowing, cross-cultural influence, and exchange that occurred between diverse groups in the ancient Mediterranean, revealing the permeability of cultural boundaries at that time and the artificiality of disciplinary boundaries in our own.