"Gods and Scholars"

EXHIBITION: 'Gods and Scholars' brings religious artifacts to light (Melanie Lefkowitz, Cornell Chronicle).

Just because Cornell University is nonsectarian doesn’t mean its founders objected to the discussion, practice or study of religion.

In fact, Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White both recognized religion’s importance, and White was an avid collector of religious texts, from 15th-century prayer books to a first edition of the Book of Mormon. Their once-controversial views inspired the latest exhibition at Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, “Gods and Scholars: Studying Religion at a Secular University.”

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To illustrate the relationship between religion and academics, the exhibition is organized not by faith or geographic region but by subject.

For example, a display on architecture includes a Burmese manuscript with illustrations of Buddhist temples; a Buddhist text containing a manual on building pagodas; and a photograph from White’s collection of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria, which was destroyed this summer by members of ISIS. Within the subject of language are Aramaic incantation bowls, believed to help catch demons when buried upside-down, that are inscribed with prayers or, for illiterate buyers, fragments from the “Book of the Dead,” dating to 1000 B.C.; and a 1685 bible printed in Algonquin.

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That last sentence is quite a run-on and it looks like something is missing. The Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls (background here and links) are inscribed with incantations that include prayers. Some of them, evidently for illiterate practitioners and clients, just bear letter-like squiggles. The fragments from the Book of the Dead are entirely unrelated.