Contenu du sommaire

The coloured horses of the "Revelation" of John How can we explain the « functional » pattern of the four riders, in the "Revelation of John" ? If the passage refers to one of the night visions to be found in "Proto-Zechariah", the colours - white, red, black - and the attributes - bow, sword, and a set of scales - clearly relate back to an Indo-European pattern, which corresponds to the three functions defined by Dumézil, to which some would propose to add a fourth function, embodied here by the last « pale » horse. One then can very likely infer that the text might have been devised by the author out of data borrowed from Iranian sources. Such borrowings are to be replaced within the current of exchanges that fared between Jewish-Christians traditions and Indo-Europeans ones, a process that partly led to the development of apocalyptic trends.

The Greek civil war and the anthropological representation of the world upside-down Is "stasis" (the Greek word for sedition or dissension), in and of itself, one of the forms, albeit « the most monstruous », of a reflexion on the « cité », centered around a potential « return to barbary » ? This interrogation is all the more crucial, in the eyes of the author, given that for many years, she has tried to demonstrate, with and sometimes in spite of the most controversial representations, that "stasis" is an integral part of Greek politics. But we will not try to choose one model over another, any more than the Greeks did. At least, since it is a question of a phenomenon which deals specifically with the « city », we are inclined to favor the political version of the civil war. To reduce the concept of "stasis" to the sole dimension of barbary, is, indeed, to risk obliterating its Greek meaning.

Deadly defiance : sacrificing oneself in Western India This study concerns several forms of suicide peculiar to Western India. Considered as « sacrificing oneself », these acts produce supernatural sanctions against those who have provoked the suicide. In the first half of the 19th century, there appears a reaction against these customs, which opposes the followers of renunciation to those who defend sacrifice. Since then, the non-violent ideas of renunciation have replaced the ideology which had legitimised self-sacrifice.