Invocation
Under appeal to a request for help is a higher ranking, sacred or divine understood person. Appeals in the former sense were frequent from antiquity to the early modern period and were directed e.g. B. to rulers , governors or the jurisdiction . At the beginning of epic and hymnal poems there is often an invocation of the muse .
In the 2nd century Aelius Aristides reports that the sick and the infirm can turn to the healing god Asklepios in “prayer” (cf. also theurgical medicine ).
In Christianity , calling on saints to intercede with God (advocation, from the Latin advocare ' to call' ) was already common in the first centuries, but is differentiated from worship that is only offered to the Triune God . Theology therefore distinguishes between Latria , worship, and Dulia , worship.
In some earlier cultures, invocations of the spirits of the deceased were also common, for example during ancestral cults and in times of war or emergency, at funerals or during mourning.
In the Marxist theory of the French philosopher Louis Althusser , especially in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses , invocation is the mechanism through which ideologies exercise their functions.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Robert Jütte : History of Alternative Medicine. From folk medicine to today's unconventional therapies. CH Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN = 3-406-40495-2, pp. 66–114 ( religious and magical medicine ), here: pp. 90 f.