“The Sacred Embrace and the Sacred Handclasp in Ancient Mediterranean Religions”

Last updated on: June 15, 2020 at 12:29 pm by Dan Peterson

“The Sacred Embrace and the Sacred Handclasp in Ancient Mediterranean Religions” 2020-06-15T12:29:54-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The pylon of the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Upper Egypt, which we have visited several times recently.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

New on the website of the Interpreter Foundation, from my longtime friend and onetime missionary companion in the onetime Switzerland Zürich Mission, Professor Stephen D. Ricks:

“The Sacred Embrace and the Sacred Handclasp in Ancient Mediterranean Religions”

Abstract: This article describes examples of the sacred embrace and the sacred handclasp in the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms of ancient Egypt, in ancient Mediterranean regions, and in the classical and early Christian world. It argues that these actions are an invitation and promise of entrance into the celestial realms. The sacred embrace may well have been a preparation, the sacred handclasp the culminating act of entrance into the divine presence.

[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the LDS community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.

See Stephen D. Ricks, “The Sacred Embrace and the Sacred Handclasp in Ancient Mediterranean Religions,” in Ancient Temple Worship: Proceedings of The Expound Symposium 14 May 2011, ed. Matthew B. Brown, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Stephen D. Ricks, and John S. Thompson (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2014), 159–70. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ancient-temple-worship/.]

Also up on the Interpreter Foundation website:

“Book of Moses Insights #007: Enoch’s Teaching Mission: Could Joseph Smith Have Borrowed “Mahijah/Mahujah” from the Book of Giants? (Moses 6:40)”

“Healing Rifts among the Nephites (Alma 16)”

A Video Supplement forCome, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 24 “Enter into the Rest of the Lord” (Alma 8-12)

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These items are made available to you and to the public at no charge. The work is done overwhelmingly by volunteers, the authors receive no royalties or commissions, the leadership of the Interpreter Foundation draws no salary, no wages. For the expenses that we cannot avoid, and for the workers whom we cannot fail to pay or are unwilling to seek to exploit for free, we depend almost entirely upon donations.

One of the things that worried me during my longtime involvement with the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and its (in a sense, temporary) successor organization, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, was its relatively limited reach. Even our best selling books would typically sell in the range of only three to five thousand copies. We had a couple of titles that sold ten thousand or so. And now they’re out of print. Having been conceived and born from the outset as an online venture, however, the Interpreter Foundation has a potentially much greater reach than that, and its audience is unlimited by oceans, customs duties, and national borders. (I don’t have the statistics at my fingertips right now for our current actual reach, but we have long been doing considerably better in many ways than our old FARMS/Maxwell books and journals used to do.)

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