Staying Sane in an Age of Mad Kings: What Religion and Other Fictions Teach Us About ‘Reality’

From Athenian politicians, Mithraic mysteries and trinitarian debates to QAnon, fake news, and the apparent US plans to control or conquer Greenland, Canada, Panama and Mars, the right to define reality communicatively and the ability to exert power over physical reality were and are still intrinsically connected.

In this talk I will discuss the role of fiction and factuality in religious, artistic and political communication – and action. Inspired by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic 1966 theory about the social construction of reality and informed by later scholarly and philosophical works on the role, definitions, and meaning of terms such as ‘fiction’, ‘imagination’, ‘art’ and ‘reality’ I trace the historical struggle to define what is ‘real’ as a key component in human interaction and power relations.

Spanning human history from Antiquity to the 21^st century, a new age of disruption, artificial intelligence and digital ‘reality’ I approach these questions through a transhistorical and comparative lens. From a point of departure in my own academic background, the history of religion, I will investigate these issues in a manner informed by interdisciplinarity, visiting along the way both religious rituals, theological debates, philosophical inquiry, rhetorical, aesthetic and semiotic perspectives, and finally, tie it all to the complex, and mercurial political events of 2025 and the current presidency of Donald Trump.

Tao Thykier Makeeff holds a PhD in the history of religion from Lund University and is currently Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. He has published extensively on historical reception, Contemporary Paganism, digital and physical culture, and gender identities. He is co-editor of the Brill Handbook of Rituals in Contemporary Studies of Religion (2024). His monograph on the reception of Ancient Greek religion in Contemporary Paganism will be published within the next year.

Alle er velkommen til å bli med oss ​​på dette webinaret! Foredraget vil foregå på engelsk og varer i omtrent 45 minutter. Det vil bli etterfulgt av spørsmål og livlig diskusjon. Her er lenken: https://uib.zoom.us/j/69047662263?pwd=t0ekM8UyPO0runhpBZURPCsIo1Yr7Q.1