Oaths, Autonomic Ordeals, and Power1

Hindu Devotional Ordeals and Their Shamanic Parallels

The English term “ordeal,” deriving from Proto-Germanic *uz-dailjam (lit. ‘that which is dealt out [by the gods]’, namely, ‘God’s judgment’), originated in the early Middle Ages (Old English ordēl) to designate an ancient Germanic mode of trial consisting of some arduous and/or injurious tests, which a person charged with guilt might be occasionally forced to undergo and whose result was believ...

Hippocratic oaths: medicine and its discontents.

Raymond Tallis is Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester, but in addition to his medical interests has contributed to philosophy. In this book, professor Tallis reviews the current state of medicine, and observes a dissociation between what medicine has achieved and the way in which it is perceived. He argues that we need to rethink the relationship of medicine to socie...

Stock Market Reactions to Executive Oaths:

Responding to the recent accounting scandals, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) required chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) of large publicly traded companies to swear by their financial statements. Focusing on executive oaths that were filed by the first deadline of August 14, 2002, this study finds that stock markets, on average, reacted positively ...

Oaths in The Battle of Maldon

In 1968, in a remark as wise as it is learned, Professor George Clark wrote of The Battle of Maldon that “what the poet does not create does not exist even if history inspires his poem.” Readers of the poem have been mulling this over for forty years. The historical information the poem affords us has been subject, in some degree, to alteration by imagination, to the formulae of verse, and to t...

Taking Oaths Seriously: A Comment on Carter and Sunstein