Across Time and Space
Hydrological Insights from the Ramayana: A Comparative Study of Ancient and Modern Concepts of the Water Cycle
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Jyoti Yadav
Throughout ancient India, science and technology studies encompassed every major field of human knowledge and endeavor. The drawing of Indian culture in antiquity marked the beginning of geographical studies in India. Certain important Hindu philosophies, epics, and mythology contain information. The primary goal of this manuscript is to extract and analyze the concept of the hydrological cycle from the Ramayana and to collate the hydrological cycle of Ramayanic period and modern period. For this, different research papers, Vedas, Puranas, Mahabharata and many ancient Indian literature has been studied thoroughly and more focus given to Ramayana. The epic Ramayana's Kishkindha Kanda (Chapter 28; Verses: 03, 07, 22, 27, 46) covers a number of topics related to the hydrological cycle. The production of clouds by the sun and wind and the precipitation are mentioned, and the overflowing of rivers during the rainy season is mentioned. Verse 22 describes the water-laden cloud transportation method as well as how the mountain's height affects the entire system. This is used to create a picture of the different phases of the hydrological cycle that is comparable to Horton;s description. The study concludes that insolation, evaporation, transportation, condensation, precipitation, and run-off are some of the components that make up the modern concept of the hydrological cycle. Interestingly, most of these processes and components were documented in the literature during Valmiki’s time while condensation, infiltration, and subsurface flow were absent.
Featured Science, Spirit and Secular Vulnerabilities : Turkish Spiritism's Response to Modernity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Hatice Sena Arıcıoğlu Senaaricioglu
This study investigates Turkish spiritism, as a response to the moral and existential vulnerabilities emerging from Turkey’s modernization and secularization. Against the backdrop of the Republic's modernizing reforms, spiritism emerged as an effort to harmonize scientific inquiry and spiritual belief, challenging binary narratives that cast modern science and religion as irreconcilable. Turkish spiritists embraced spiritism as a "scientific" approach to spirituality, investigating metaphysical questions through structured séances and documentation while seeking to address what they perceived as a “moral gap” within secular reform. Using a combination of sociological and historical methods, the research analyses a wide array of primary sources, including spiritist biographies, official documents, doctrinal publications, and over 300 coded issues from six spiritist journals. Through prosopographical and qualitative text analysis, this study reveals the motivations and teachings of Turkish spiritists, constructing a group biography of over 200 spiritists and investigating their beliefs and practices within Turkey’s socio-political transformations. Examining how Turkish spiritists challenged dualistic frameworks of science versus religion and secular versus religious identities, the research explores how spiritists negotiated power, identity, and ideology within a dynamic religious field, often aligning spiritist doctrine with scientific methods to counteract secular vulnerabilities. Highlighting congruencies and conflicts in views on the natural world’s design, this study argues for a more nuanced understanding of secularization, one that acknowledges hybrid identities and diverse expressions of secularity. Ultimately, Turkish spiritism serves as a case study on how intellectuals reimagined science and religion to address vulnerabilities in an era of profound social change.
The Achilles' Heel of Heroic Lives: Examples of Drama in the Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat and the Biblical Song of Deborah
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Eva Vymětalová Hrabáková
The question of how heroes may perish is a central theme in ancient Levantine texts, where the vulnerability of these figures serves as a crucial plot point. This paper examines the profiles of heroes in the ancient Mediterranean and explore how those around them learned from their failures. Rather than presenting a static ancient text alongside parallel clues from another ancient story, this offers an ever-evolving interpretation of the narrative in the contemporary world. The paper investigates the concept of envisioning the Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat and Biblical The Song of Deborah as dramatic scripts, aiming not to reconstruct a ritual performance, but rather to stage a performance of epic drama that conveys ethical implications for the present.
