Articles by Markus Altena Davidsen
“Narrative Prototypicality and the Depiction of Evil in The Lord of the Rings”, in Jan van Breda, Chiara Marchetti, Jonne Steen Redeker & Renée Vink (eds.), Evil in Eä (Lembas Extra 2024), Leiden: Tolkien Genootschap Unquendor, 81-94, 2025
““There Was No Dutch School of Phenomenology of Religion”: Academic Implacability and Historical Accidents – An Interview with Jan G. Platvoet (The Netherlands)”, in Satoko Fujiwara, David Thurfjell, and Steven Engler (eds.), Global Phenomenologies of Religion: An Oral History in Interviews, in T..., 2021
This chapter contains an interview with Jan G. Platvoet, a retired Associate Professor from Leide... more This chapter contains an interview with Jan G. Platvoet, a retired Associate Professor from Leiden University, about the rise and fall of the phenomenology of religion in the Netherlands (c. 1877-1973). Reviewing the complex history from Tiele and Chantepie de la Saussaye through Van der Leeuw to Waardenburg, Platvoet points out several overlooked facts of crucial importance for the history of the study of religion. As a corrective to Anglophone scholarship, Platvoet stresses that Dutch phenomenology of religion developed independently of and prior to Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that there was very little interaction among the Dutch phenomenologists of religion, and that both Van der Leeuw and Waardenburg, despite their international fame, were academically isolated figures in the Netherlands where they had little influence and no academic heirs. The absence of a ‘Dutch school’ made possible the rapid collapse of Dutch phenomenology of religion during the 1970s. The interview is followed by a commentary by Markus Altena Davidsen.
NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 74(3), 213-241, 2020
This article revisits Theo van Baaren's (1912-1989) call for a 'systematic science of religion'. ... more This article revisits Theo van Baaren's (1912-1989) call for a 'systematic science of religion'. With this call Van Baaren urged Dutch scholars of religion to do away with the religionist biases of the phenomenology of religion, while retaining comparison as a cornerstone of the discipline. Unfortunately, Van Baaren's programme was never realized in the Netherlands, and Dutch study of religion became dominated instead by a particularist paradigm that, while producing eminent studies of individual religions, lacked an interest in theorizing religion in general. Deprived of a common object and aim, Dutch scholarship on religion has become fragmented, and Dutch scholars of religion have been in no good position to fend for themselves in face of institutional restructurings, budget cuts, and general hostility towards the humanities. With an eye to the Nordic countries I propose a reorientation towards a systematic science of religion à la Van Baaren as a way out of the academic and institutional crisis.
Target article in the special issue ‘Religious Studies in the Netherlands: Debating the Field’s Future’. Link to the entire issue (open access): https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aup/jtsr/2020/00000074/00000003
NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion, 2020
Part of theme issue (open access) on 'Religious Studies in the Netherlands: Debating the Field's ... more Part of theme issue (open access) on 'Religious Studies in the Netherlands: Debating the Field's Future', framed around my target article 'Theo van Baaren's Systematic Science of Religion Revisited: The Current Crisis in Dutch Study of Religion and a Way Out'. Link to entire theme issue (open access): https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aup/jtsr/2020/00000074/00000003
Abstract: In this reply I engage with the response articles by Kocku von Stuckrad, Katja Rakow, Kees de Groot, Eric Venbrux, and Arjan Sterken. Noting where we agree, disagree, and seem to talk past each other, I clarify what I consider to be the subject matter and the fundamental problems and methods in the systematic study of religion.
Tolkien the Pagan? Reading Middle-earth through a Spiritual Lens: Proceedings of Tolkien Society Seminar 2018, ed. Anna Milon, Edinburgh: Luna Press Publishing, 2019
Keynote lecture at the Tolkien Society Seminar, Leeds 2018.
Religie & Samenleving, 2018
Kees de Groot: Een eigenzinnig auteur
Markus Altena Davidsen: Een betrokken begeleider
Implicit Religion 20(4)
Published in Implicit Religion 20.4(2017), 455-458.
New Directions in Folklore, Dec 28, 2017
The Jedi Community is a loose confederation of groups and individuals who, inspired by George Luc... more The Jedi Community is a loose confederation of groups and individuals who, inspired by George Lucas' Star Wars movies, have adopted an identity as Jedi Knights. Contrary to Star Wars fans who may occasionally and temporarily play as Jedi, members of the Jedi Community aim to simply be Jedi Knights – always and everywhere. They will even say that they are the real Jedi – as opposed to the fictional Jedi of the movies. Members of the Jedi Community also believe that the Force, the cosmic power from Star Wars, actually exists in the real world. An important part of the practice as Jedi Knights is thus to study the Force and connect with it in ritual. This article provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the Jedi Community. It sketches the history of the Jedi Community since its emergence from the online Star Wars roleplaying community in the late 1990s, and presents an overview of the Community members' core beliefs and practices. Throughout, due attention is paid to the divergent views on issues of doctrine, practice, and identity held by the two main factions within the Jedi Community, the Jedi Realists, for whom the Jedi Path is a spiritual way of life, and the Jediists who seek to develop Jediism into a full-fledged and legally recognized religion. As Henry Jenkins has famously pointed out, fans of popular culture are no passive consumers, but active agents – " textual poachers " even – who engage in " a type of cultural bricolage through which [they] fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprint " (1992, 26). In other words: fans use popular culture as a resource for the creation of their own folk culture or folklore. This process of turning popular culture into folklore can arguably take place at three levels. At the most basic level, any consumption of popular culture involves the co-construction of " folk meaning. " Readers interpret popular culture in light of their own experience, and use fan texts to make sense of situations, relationships, and aspirations in their own lives. This interpretative freedom is what Michel de Certeau
In tandem with the professionalization of research on esotericism over the past two decades, anot... more In tandem with the professionalization of research on esotericism over the past two decades, another sub-discipline has risen to prominence within the study of religion: the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Both of these fields, CSR and the study of esotericism, have made significant impact on how we study religion. Research on esotericism, as Aries readers well know, has deepened our understanding of the historical complexities of religion and its others in the West (the European countries and their spheres of influence), identifying blind spots relating to heterodox religion, radically experiential practices, and overlaps between "religion" , "magic", and "science" that may look curious with the hindsight of history. Meanwhile, CSR is changing the way scholars think about and approach key aspects of religious thought and practice while adding new experimental and analytical tools to the scholar's toolbox, by grounding the study of religion in our best current theories of how the human mind works. This special issue is the first collaborative attempt to date at exploring the potential of bringing these two innovative fields together. Two questions motivate this endeavour. First, what can CSR approaches add to the study of empirical material from the field of esotericism? Secondly, and conversely, can key problems in the study of esotericism, such as the notion of experiential gnosis, correspondence thinking, the role of imagination, and the use of esoteric hermeneutical strategies applied to obscure texts contribute to the development of CSR approaches?
A curious aspect of late modern religion is the emergence of fiction-based religions, such as Jed... more A curious aspect of late modern religion is the emergence of fiction-based religions, such as Jediism, based on George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, and Tolkien spirituality, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythology about Middle-earth. This article draws on narrative semiotics to explain why some fictional narratives (and not others) afford religious use and have hence given rise to fiction-based religions. I show that to afford religious use it is not enough that supernatural fiction tells about supernatural agents; it must also, to some extent, construct an aura of factuality around these supernatural agents. The main aim of this article is to identify and discuss those textual ‘veracity mechanisms’ that in various ways can help achieve such a sense of factuality. Each veracity mechanism is discussed and illustrated with examples from supernatural fiction, especially from Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. I furthermore show how conceptual blending theory can be used to analyse the cognitive processes involved in the religious interpretation of supernatural fiction. While the empirical focus is on supernatural fiction and fiction-based religion, the wider implications for the study of religious narratives are discussed throughout.
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Religion 46(4); http://www-tandfonline.com/ <10.1080/0048721X.2016.1210392>
This article introduces a thematic issue of Religion that interrogates the religious use of fanta... more This article introduces a thematic issue of Religion that interrogates the religious use of fantasy and science fiction in the contemporary religious field. The overall aim of the thematic issue is to identify those textual features that make it possible for a given fictional story to be used as a religious narrative, that is, to inspire belief in the supernatural beings of the story-world, and to facilitate ritual interaction with said beings. The contributions analyse the religious affordance and actual use of a wide range of texts, spanning from Harry Potter and Star Wars, over The Lord of the Rings and late 19th-century Scandinavian fantasy, to the Christian Gospels. Over the course of the thematic issue, the conclusion emerges that there exists a hierarchy of three levels of religious affordance that fictional narratives can possess: to afford belief in the supernatural beings of the story, a text must present those supernatural beings as real within the story-world; to afford ritual interaction with said beings, a text must include model rituals and inscribe the reader into the narrative; to afford belief in the historicity of the narrated events, a text must anchor the story-world in the actual world. Although we focus on the religious affordance of fictional texts, we also spell out implications for the study of religious narratives in general, and for the narrativist study of religion.
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Religion 46(4) http://www-tandfonline.com/ <10.1080/0048721X.2016.1210392>
Full bibliographical information:
Davidsen, Markus Altena (2016), “From Star Wars to Jediism: Th... more Full bibliographical information:
Davidsen, Markus Altena (2016), “From Star Wars to Jediism: The Emergence of Fiction-based Religion”, in Ernst van den Hemel & Asja Szafraniec (eds.), Words: Religious Language Matters, New York: Fordham University Press, 376-389 (plus endnotes pp. 571-575).
The article is a revision of an article published in Danish in 2010 as "Fiktionsbaseret religion: Fra Star Wars til jediism", Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift 55, 3-21.
Unfortunately the volume took a long time coming along; the volume is based on a conference in Groningen, the Netherlands in June 2009. My article was submitted in 2011. Sorry if it is already pretty outdated - and please get in touch if you have newer or better information on Jediism.
Religie & Samenleving, 2015
This article discusses how 'believing' works in Tolkien spirituality, a fiction-based religious m... more This article discusses how 'believing' works in Tolkien spirituality, a fiction-based religious milieu that uses J. R. R. Tolkien's narratives, in particular The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, as authoritative texts. Members of this milieu engage in ritual communication with the supernatural beings from Tolkien's universe, including the elves and the Valar (gods). After presenting the history of Tolkien spirituality and describing the main groups, I develop a model for analysing religious rationalisation. By this term I refer to the process through which theology is developed within religious traditions as a second-order reflection on ritual practices and authoritative narratives. I demonstrate that contrary to what one might expect the strategies of religious rationalisation in Tolkien spirituality are not that different from what we see in other new religions. While one might think that members of fiction-based religions (can) believe only in a cautious and playful manner, practitioners of Tolkien spirituality in fact tend to believe literally and to legitimise their beliefs with supposed proof. It is striking, however, that they tend to believe in a 'cosmological' rather than in a 'historical' mode, i.e. they believe in the existence of the Valar as spiritual beings, but not in the historical factuality of Tolkien's narratives. In this sense, Tolkien spirituality may be a good illustration of a broader 'dehistoricising turn' in contemporary religion. The development of reflective beliefs in Tolkien spirituality is further shown to be governed by three principles that together seek to reduce tension between conflicting ideas within the tradition and to strike a balance between fabulousness and plausibility. It is suggested that these three principles of belief elaboration govern religious rationalisation also in other religious traditions, at least in traditions with a low level of institutionalisation.
During the last decade, scholars of religion have researched Star Wars-based Jediism, the Tolkien... more During the last decade, scholars of religion have researched Star Wars-based Jediism, the Tolkien-inspired Elven community, and other religious movements inspired by popular fiction. This article raises two related questions about this new kind of religion: what should we call it?, and what differentiates it from conventional religion on the one hand, and from fandom on the other? Referring to Jean Baudrillard, Adam Possamai has suggested referring to new religions based on popular culture as ‘hyper-real religions’. I contend, however, that for Baudrillard, all religions are hyper-real in the sense that they ascribe reality to the socially constructed. I therefore offer fiction-based religion as a more accurate term. Fiction-based religions draw their main inspiration from fictional narratives (e.g. Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings) which do not claim to refer to the actual world, but create a fictional world of their own. As such, they can be contrasted with conventional (or ‘history’-based) religions whose core narratives (e.g. the Gospels) do claim to refer to the actual world and therefore fall under the narrative meta-genre of history, although they do not correspond with the actual world from a historian's perspective. Despite their fictional basis, fiction-based religions are genuine religions because the activity and beliefs of which they consist refer to supernatural entities which are claimed to exist in the actual world. As such, fiction-based religions can be contrasted with fandom which, as a form of play, creates a fictional play world rather than making assertions about the actual world. Fiction-based religion emerges when fictional narratives are used as authoritative texts for actual religious practice.
This review essay takes a critical look at the new field of "pagan studies" by examining the Hand... more This review essay takes a critical look at the new field of "pagan studies" by examining the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism. It demonstrates that pagan studies is dominated by the methodological principles of essentialism, exclusivism, loyalism and supernaturalism, and shows how these principles promote normative constructions of 'pure' paganism, insider interpretations of the data, and theological speculations about gods, powers, and a special "magical consciousness." It seems thus that the methodological discussions in MTSR have little effect on pagan scholars. In the concluding discussion, I raise the questions why this is so, and how we might do better in promoting a naturalist and theoretically oriented approach to studying religion.
2012 Future Directions in the Sociology of Non-institutional Religion
Implicit Religion 15(4): 2012, Jan 2013
A shift is taking place in the religious field from collective, institutional, and tradition-boun... more A shift is taking place in the religious field from collective, institutional, and tradition-bound religion to increasingly individual, non-institutional, and post-traditional religious forms. This article examines how the sociology of religion has responded to this empirical development, paying special attention to two issues to which Meerten Ter Borg has contributed, namely the typologization
of the various modes of non-institutional religion and the foundation of non-institutional religion in human nature. I suggest that the sociology of noninstitutional religion can advance, particularly if it adopts a substantial definition of religion, opens up for co-operation with cognitive scholars, and turns its attention to religious bricolage, the modes of belief, and the effect of the internet on non-institutional religion.
Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift, Jan 1, 2010
Fiktionsbaseret religion RV T 5 5 ( 2 0 1 0 ) 3 -2 1 Fiktionsbaseret religion Fra Star Wars til j... more Fiktionsbaseret religion RV T 5 5 ( 2 0 1 0 ) 3 -2 1 Fiktionsbaseret religion Fra Star Wars til jediisme M A R K U S D AV I D S E N ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Jediism is a new religion which is based on George Lucas' Star Wars movies. The core traits of Jediism are the identifi cation with the Jedi Knights from Star Wars, the belief that the Force exists outside the fi ctional universe, and the ritual interaction with the Force. Based on an analysis of the home pages of seven Jediist groups, this article sketches the self-understanding of the Jediists focusing on their self-identifi cation, Force teachings, practice and ethics, and on the negotiation of the relation to Star Wars. Further it is argued why Jediism must be interpreted as a religion and not simply as a fan phenomenon. Finally the category 'fi ction-based religion' is suggested to denote a series of new religions based largely on 'fi ctive religions' embedded in works of fi ction.
PhD _Dissertation by Markus Altena Davidsen
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and development of the spiritual To... more This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and development of the spiritual Tolkien milieu, a largely online-situated network of individuals and groups that draw on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythology for spiritual inspiration. It is the first academic treatment of Tolkien spirituality and one of the first mono¬graphs on fiction-based religion, a type of religion that uses fiction as authori¬ta¬tive texts. Adopting a semiotic approach to religion, the book raises questions about the persuasive power of narrative, about religious blending, and about rationalisation of beliefs. How can some readers come to believe that supernatural agents from fictional narratives are real? How do fiction-based religions emerge when their authoritative texts lack important religious building-blocks, such as descriptions of rituals? And how do adherents of fiction-based religions legitimise their beliefs, given the fact that their religion is based on fiction? In short, with Tolkien religion as a case the dissertation aims to uncover the semio¬tic structures and processes involved in the construction and maintenance of fiction-based religion, and the social structures that sup¬port the plausibility of such religion.
English Summary of the PhD Dissertation "The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction-based R... more English Summary of the PhD Dissertation "The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction-based Religion". The public defence took place on Thursday 16 October, 1.45 in the Large Auditorium of the Academy Building of Leiden University. The doctoral degree was awarded cum laude.
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Articles by Markus Altena Davidsen
Target article in the special issue ‘Religious Studies in the Netherlands: Debating the Field’s Future’. Link to the entire issue (open access): https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aup/jtsr/2020/00000074/00000003
Abstract: In this reply I engage with the response articles by Kocku von Stuckrad, Katja Rakow, Kees de Groot, Eric Venbrux, and Arjan Sterken. Noting where we agree, disagree, and seem to talk past each other, I clarify what I consider to be the subject matter and the fundamental problems and methods in the systematic study of religion.
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Religion 46(4); http://www-tandfonline.com/ <10.1080/0048721X.2016.1210392>
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Religion 46(4) http://www-tandfonline.com/ <10.1080/0048721X.2016.1210392>
Davidsen, Markus Altena (2016), “From Star Wars to Jediism: The Emergence of Fiction-based Religion”, in Ernst van den Hemel & Asja Szafraniec (eds.), Words: Religious Language Matters, New York: Fordham University Press, 376-389 (plus endnotes pp. 571-575).
The article is a revision of an article published in Danish in 2010 as "Fiktionsbaseret religion: Fra Star Wars til jediism", Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift 55, 3-21.
Unfortunately the volume took a long time coming along; the volume is based on a conference in Groningen, the Netherlands in June 2009. My article was submitted in 2011. Sorry if it is already pretty outdated - and please get in touch if you have newer or better information on Jediism.
of the various modes of non-institutional religion and the foundation of non-institutional religion in human nature. I suggest that the sociology of noninstitutional religion can advance, particularly if it adopts a substantial definition of religion, opens up for co-operation with cognitive scholars, and turns its attention to religious bricolage, the modes of belief, and the effect of the internet on non-institutional religion.
PhD _Dissertation by Markus Altena Davidsen