The Harry Potter series is rich in allusions to Celtic, Greek, Roman, Norse, and Hindu mythology, Arthurian legends, and Christianity. These religious and mythological elements are taken out of their original context and re-combined in a postmodern bricolage, reflecting the series' emphasis on cultural diversity and the forging of individual meaning.
The Upaniṣads (ca. 800 BCE) were composed during a transitional time period in Hinduism when Vedic ritual and cosmogonic ideas began to give way to new worldviews. The intriguing Upaniṣadic notions of time have received little attention in the scholarly literature compared to the elaborate models of cyclical time that develop in later texts. I propose, however, that the Upaniṣads represent a seminal reorientation in Hindu conceptions of time. We still find an older view of time in the Upaniṣads as something that marks the rhythms of the ritual year, but later Upaniṣadic texts begin to explore entirely new ways of thinking about time. I propose that the movement away from the more integrated view of the material and immaterial as one reality in the Vedas towards a radical dualism between the spiritual and the material in later Hindu thought informs many of the new ideas of time that emerge in the Upaniṣads, including that of time as an abstract construct. The authors of the Upaniṣads investigate—and ultimately reject—the notion of time itself as the cause of the visible world, ponder the idea that time is something that is created by a divine being in order to structure the world, speculate that time may be a mere intellectual construct, and postulate that the highest reality may be situated in a realm that is outside of time altogether.
This essay analyzes the interconnection between memory, desire, and verbal performance in the three so called “women’s love spells” in Atharvaveda 6.130–132. This study unpacks the many interconnected meanings of the term smará, which is used repeatedly in these poems, “memory”, “desire”, or “efficacious ritual speech”. I challenge the traditional definition of these texts as “magical” and argue that applying “magic” as an analytical category to ancient Hindu texts is deeply problematic. Instead, I propose that these poems are better understood in their historical and religious context as examples of ritual speech.
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