Starry Nights: A Celestial History of Religion in the Mediterranean
March 2 & 9, 2025
Class Description
These lectures are drawn from Dr. Ferg’s in-progress book, Starry Nights: A Celestial History of Religion, which is a history of the celestial (solar, lunar, constellatory) influences on the development of religion(s) in and around the Mediterranean region.
Lecture One (Mar. 02) is drawn from an area of the book called “Sky as Calendar.” It will cover an introduction to our night sky as a calendar and investigates the history of four Christian religious holidays and their relationship to Celtic cross-quarter-point celestial holidays.
Lecture Two (Mar. 09) continues the “Sky as Calendar” theme and investigates the history of our (solar) Gregorian calendar, its relationship to the sky, and to Church, Roman, and pre-Roman (Greek and Babylonian) history, as well as our system of counting months and the seven-day week. If there is time, we will end in this lecture on some relationships between the Christian (solar), Jewish (lunisolar), and Islamic (lunar) calendars.
About Erica Ferg
Dr. Erica Ferg teaches courses on Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Mediterranean religious history, and religious studies theories and methods. Her doctorate is in the Study of Religion, and her area of specialization is Eastern Mediterranean comparative religious history. Her research focuses on Mediterranean comparative religion, religious texts, comparative linguistics, and archaeoastronomy. Prior to academia, Erica was a Persian linguist in the United States Air Force. Erica’s first book, Geography, Religion, Gods, and Saints in the Eastern Mediterranean, was published in paperback in January 2022 by Routledge. Erica currently is at work on two book projects, titled Starry Nights: A Celestial History of Religion in the Mediterranean, and a co-authored philosophy and religious studies book, titled Benighted Enlightenment: Belief, Religious Toleration, and the Legacy of the Christian Enlightenment.