ABSTRACT
Thus far, our cases have been drawn mainly from encounters between bearers of the Judeo-Christian and Muslim monotheistic religions with each other, or with polytheistic belief systems. To those who follow the monotheisms, artistic and symbolic representations of other religions are at best false representations, and at worst sacrilegious. The well-publicized destruction by the so-called Islamic State in 2014–15 of Christian, Sufi and other non-Sunni Muslim, and even ancient religious sites in the Middle East is an extreme example of such iconoclasm, but similar destruction was performed in many other historical periods and places (see Boldrick et al. 2013). While we consider destruction of the art, symbols and structures of other religions throughout this volume, we have found that there is another tactic for establishing dominance that is practiced by followers of polytheistic religions: the seizure and appropriation of the sacred spaces and objects of other religions, and even the use of such captured sacra by the community that has seized them. In this chapter, we discuss such “deity capture” in polytheistic political entities through examples from pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru, ancient India and Late Antique Europe. In keeping with our emphasis on the critical importance of changing configurations of political dominance, we also discuss the strategic hiding, transference and even, when possible, return of deities to sites from which they had been taken to avoid their capture. We think that similar practices can also be seen in the actions of secular and atheist states, and in post-secular ones as well, but we leave discussion of those practices to Chapter 7.
