Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Assmann is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of many books, of which the following have been translated into English: Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005), The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (2002), The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (2001), and Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1998).

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RELIGION AND CULTURAL MEMORY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface........................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: What is "Cultural Memory"?.......................................................................................11. Invisible Religion and Cultural Memory......................................................................................312. Monotheism, Memory, and trauma: Reflections on Freud's Book on Moses........................................................463. Five Stages on the Road to the Canon: Tradition and Written Culture in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism.....................634. Remembering in Order to Belong: Writing, Memory, and Identity...............................................................815. Cultural Texts Suspended Between Writing and Speech.........................................................................1016. Text and Ritual: The Meaning of the Media for the History of Religion.......................................................1227. Officium Memoriae : Ritual as the Medium of Thought.........................................................................1398. A Life in Quotation: Thomas Mann and the Phenomenology of Cultural Memory...................................................1559. Egypt in Western Memory.....................................................................................................178Notes..........................................................................................................................191

Chapter One

1. Preliminary Remarks

In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that the concept of "tradition" does not reveal its own meaning in a transparent way. Concepts such as traditio, paradosis, and gabbalah refer only to the process, the technique of handing down and receiving as such, without reference to the driving forces, interests, and needs that motivate this incessant labor of passing things on and adopting them. Two concepts that have been placed in the foreground in research in the sociology of culture in recent decades appear to me to be especially well suited to shedding new light on the problem of the function of tradition. One is the concept of "invisible religion," introduced by Thomas Luckmann. The other is the concept of memory that has been made so productive for cultural theory in the writings of Freud, Warburg, Halbwachs, and others, particularly in the form of "cultural memory" that we find, for example, in the volume edited by Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth with the title Mnemosyne. Both concepts refer to the knowledge shared by a group, the question of its extent, elaboration, and transmission. The concept of religion highlights the binding character of this knowledge; the concept of memory emphasizes its ability to establish connections and constitute identity.

Invisible religion relates to individual religions much as "language" relates to particular languages. It designates the general, functionally determined framework that the individual religions fill out in their own particular way. To that extent the analogy with language is valid. But in the case of religion there is a further factor that has no parallel in language. Invisible religion is not merely an abstract function standing above the many specific religious systems. It also exists within a given culture as a higher and ultimately validating framework of meaning for the different fields of cultural practice, communication, and reflection that have emerged as distinct forms within this framework or "world picture" and to which this "visible religion" belongs as one field among others specific to this culture. Thus Luckmann's concept of an invisible religion leads to a distinction within the concept of religion. For simplicity's sake we can label them IR and VR. IR is the higher, invisible religion that determines the relationship of the individual to society and the "world." VR is the religion that has become visible in the specific institutions of the cult and the priesthood and that is responsible for the tasks involved in transactions with the sacred and the administration of the sacred properties associated with them.

What Luckmann makes clear in his essay is twofold: (1) The failure to make this distinction between IR and VR leads to an ethnocentric narrowing of our conception of religion, since we tacitly base our definition of religion on the familiar characteristics of VR and thereby mistakenly "identify religion with one of its particular forms" (2). We can speak of processes of secularization, loss of validity, and marginalization only with regard to VR-that is to say, the religion of the institutionalized churches-but not with regard to IR.

The following contribution is concerned with this intracultural tension that we have described as the tension between IR and VR. With Luckmann we understand by IR "symbolic universes in general," and by VR, a "religious cosmos in particular" (43), and inquire into the forms of its social objectivation. I would like to begin with the example of the ancient Egyptian conceptual world and attempt to show how both Luckmann's distinction and the resulting tension between the comprehensive and the specific can be clearly seen. In the process I shall treat the concepts "invisible religion" and "cultural memory" as largely synonymous. I then wish to take a further step and sketch in the transformations of cultural memory that emerge from specific applications of writing.

2. Invisible and Visible Religion in Ancient Egypt: "The Egyptian Triangle"

Ancient Egyptian culture confronts us with a model that explicitly fleshes out Luckmann's distinction between visible and invisible religion. That is surprising because on the basis of our own religious tradition we would have supposed that visible religion-VR-would claim a competence, indeed a monopoly of interpretation that includes IR too, in other words, the whole "world" as the totality of reality and the norms and values contained in it. We might have supposed therefore that the norms that govern the conduct of the individual and his orientation in the world, and the purely theoretical distinction between IR and VR in the concrete conceptual world of the Egyptians, would have collapsed into a compact religious concept. That is the precise opposite of what happened. What, after reading Luckmann's essay, we might think of as specific to modernity, namely the drifting apart of visible and invisible religion, turns out to characterize an early stage of culture. Looked at from the vantage point of Egypt, the cultural process in fact runs in the opposite direction, toward a progressive unification of religion. The initial differentiation between invisible religion, which is responsible for a view of the world as a whole and is not capable of being institutionalized, and visible religion as one of the institutions responsible for keeping the world going, gives way to a model that makes the institutions of visible religion responsible for the universe.

The Egyptians had a concept that comes close to what Luckmann calls invisible religion: maat. Maat signifies the principle of a universal harmony that manifests itself in the cosmos as order and in the world of human beings as...