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This article examines Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist art in the context of negative (apophatic) theology, as a crucial tool in analyzing both the artist’s theoretical conclusions and his new visual optics. Our analysis rests on the point that the artist intuitively moved towards recognizing the ineffability of the multidimensional universe and perceiving God as the Spiritual Absolute. In his attempt to see the invisible in the formulas of Emptiness and Nothingness, Malevich turned to the primary forms of geometric abstraction—the square, circle and cross—which he endows with symbolic concepts and meanings. Malevich treats his Suprematism as a method of perceiving the ineffability of the Absolute. With the Black Square seen as a face of God, the patterns of negative theology rise to become the philosophical formula of primary importance. Malevich’s Mystical Suprematism series (1920–1922) confirms the presence of complex metaphysical reflection and apophatic thought in his art. Not only does the series contain icon paraphrases and the Christian symbolism of the cross and mandorla, but it also advances the formulas of the apophatic faith of the modern times, since Suprematism presents primary forms as the universals of “the face of the future” and the energy of the non-objective art.

Edward Phillips is central to our understanding of Milton's life due to his role as lead amanuensis during the composition of Paradise Lost. Yet Milton's nephew has long been considered a failed product of his uncle's educational method. This article recovers the intellectual dimension of Phillips's literary and publishing activities and their neglected place in the reception of Paradise Lost as sublime. Enduring claims that Phillips was a Cavalier renegade to Miltonic principles and inveterate plagiarist are shown to be of less interest than how he can be seen to have applied the methods in which he had been schooled.

For decades, it has been debated whether people converted to the ancient mystery cults, or whether the experience of conversion was restricted to Christianity, Judaism, and philosophy. Some refer to all members of the mystery cults as converts; some say that conversion did take place among pagans, although very rarely; some argue that Lucius' experiences in the Metamorphoses are proof of this (although the only \"pagan\" proof); but many others see conversion as a Christian phenomenon and flatly reject that Lucius or any other pagans ever experienced conversion. Here, after a theoretical and methodological discussion of the problems related to the term \"conversion\" as well as to the arguments that have earlier been raised against the possibility of conversion in the mystery cults, Bogh arguees that modern conversion studies can nuance the understanding of conversion in antiquity and provide a fruitful approach to studies of the mysteries.

Jones talks about the five letters attributed to Dio of Prusa, a philosopher and a model of the epistolary form. Adolphus Emperius in his fundamental edition of Dio was the first to print the five letters, having found them in a fifteenth-century Vatican manuscript, which also contains a selection of Dio's speeches. Rudolf Hercher reprinted the letters in 1873, also citing a Florentine manuscript, and in addition mentioned readings of J. F. Boissonade, some of them drawn from a manuscript in Paris. Finally, Howard L. Crosby reprinted all five letters in his Loeb edition of Dio, basing his text on Hercher but adding some comments and emendations of his own.

Recent research reveals that in the so-called Mithraic tauroctony, the god is, in fact, wounding a bull, not killing it. I argue that the scene combines the overall design of evil-eye amulets with the pose of the goddess Nike performing a military sphagion and I suggest that the scene must have been understood by its creator and by some viewers, at least, to offer protective power in this world, as well as salvific assurance about the next, a dual focus that seems to have been especially strong in Mithraism.

An inscription at Sardes, carved in the second century AD, preserves a dedication of a statue by an Achaemenid governor (fifth or fourth century BC) and two unusual injunctions banning the therapeutai who tend the statue from participating in mysteries of Sabazius, Agdistis, and Ma. The paper argues that the two injunctions date from Roman Imperial times, the privileged therapeutai reacting against cults that they regarded as novel and exotic.