The narrativist perspective focuses on the functioning of discourses and prac-tices of religious memory; on ritual, symbolic and narrative patterns; icon-ographic strategies and modes of staging.11 A number of mechanisms in the dynamics of devotion and memory seem to be especially interesting: the rela-tion between the visible and invisible, between the present and absent, the past, the future, and the eternal; the relation between the corporeal and the spiri-tual, sensual and emotional; the creation of sacred spaces and objects and their transformation.
Based on research by the author on religious memory,12 a number of mech-anisms can be systematised: (a) detemporalisation is a central mechanism of religious memory – and also of non- religious memory, as research on national memory construction shows – an effect created a) by the construction of conti-nuity from the past to the present and future, in which retro- projection (espe-cially in narratives) and/ or repetition (espe(espe-cially in rites) play a central role; b) by a teleological perspective from the past into the future and into ‘eternity’,
10 Cf. the contributions in Heinz- Gerhard Haupt & Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert, Frankfurt a.M. 2004; Kerstin Armborst- Weihs & Stefanie Wiehl (eds), Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein zwischen religiöser und konfessioneller Toleranz und Identitätsfindung, Göttingen 2010; Urs Altermatt &
Franziska Metzger (eds), Religion und Nation: Katholizismus im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 2007; Metzger 2010.
11 Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris 1969.
12 Metzger 2010; Metzger 2016.
which in religious memory is expression of a providential dimension; and c) by the synchronisation of different times (different past times; past, present and future) creating simultaneity (in narratives, paintings, ritual practices).
The creation of presence (b), both temporally and spatially, or in Hans- Georg Soeffner’s words ‘appresentation’13 is a second important mechanism of religious memory – in rites, paintings, monuments, places and spaces, but also in narra-tives. It relies on repetition, ritualisation, and personalisation, creating immediacy and making transcendence present. We could speak of a mise en scène of the tran-scendent having at the same time an effect of disembodiment and spiritualisation (somatisation).
Visualisation of the invisible (c) cannot be underestimated as mechanism of religious memory. It fixes the absent past as well as the eternal and transcendent.
Visualisation of the invisible is of great importance in the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, of Mary and Saints and their respective iconography, for instance.
A fourth mechanism (d) is related to the dimension of space: the creation of sacred spaces through memory. (Ritual) objects, images, human bodies, bodies of Saints and of Christ, sacralised places, paths of pilgrimage, processions in the public sphere, but in a more abstract sense also narrative spaces are trans-formed into sacred spaces through memory. They include both created, shaped spaces and ‘natural’ spaces. Sacred spaces can be conceptualised as ‘heterotopia’
in Michel Foucault’s conception, as real, but utterly different spaces, as ‘contes-tation à la fois mythique et réelle de l’espace où nous vivons’14, inasmuch as they link immanence to transcendence, the past, present and future, creating eter-nity through memory.15
13 Hans- Georg Soeffner, ‘Protosoziologische Überlegungen zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals’, in Rudolf Schlögl, Bernhard Giesen & Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Die Wirklichkeit der Symbole: Grundlagen der Kommunikation in historischen und gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften, Konstanz 2004, pp. 41– 72; Hans- Georg Soeffner, Symbolische Formung: Zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals, Weilerswist 2010.
14 As ‘mythic and at the same time real contestation of the space we live in.’ Michel Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’ (1967/ 1984). Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, Vol.
4. Paris 1994, pp. 752– 762, 756 (translation by the author). Cf. Michail M. Bachtin, Chronotopos, Frankfurt a.M. 2008 (in Russian: 1937/ 38).
15 Cf. Dimiter Daphinoff, ‘Sakraler Raum, Erinnerungsraum und das Ringen um Deutungshoheit: T.S. Eliots Murder in the Cathedral und G.B. Shaws Saint Joan’, pp. 121– 132; Jürgen Mohn, ‘Inszenierte Sinnsysteme – Gärten als Heterotopien in der europäischen Religionsgeschichte’, pp. 55– 87; Joachim Valentin, ‘Spiegel, Reisen, Klänge: Jim Jarmuschs Filme eröffnen Räume jenseits der Alltagsrealität’, pp. 133–
146; Franziska Metzger, ‘Apokalyptische Erwartungs- und Erinnerungsräume als
Furthermore and across all four mechanisms mythicisation (e) can be described as a central mechanism in the sacralisation of memory in narratives, images and ritual practices. Mythicisation stages transcendence. In a semiotic perception going back to Claude Lévi- Strauss16, myth is principally regarded as language and narration or in Roland Barthes’ terminology as ‘un mode de sig-nification’, a ‘mode of meaning’17. With Hayden White myth can be conceptu-alised as ‘plot- structure’ and mode of emplotment.18 Mythicisation essentialises history, transforming history into ‘nature’ – as Roland Barthes had put it: ‘Le mythe a pour charge de fonder une intention historique en nature, une contin-gence en éternité’.19 The concept of ‘mythicisation’ emphasises the dynamic of construction, transmission, reconfiguration and transformation of narratives of memory rather than ‘given’ myths, looking at their functioning, that is, at their deep structures20, their functionalisation and political use by different agents. Mythicisation thus creates broadly connective components of memory, highly polyvalent symbolic particles that can be appropriated and used in dif-ferent ways, transformed and rewritten.
All mechanisms reduce contingency, stabilise and essentialise the past, foster difference, form communities as ‘moral’ communities, and legitimise
narrative und visuelle Heterotopien’, pp. 147– 168; Elke Pahud de Mortanges, ‘ “Be a somebody with a body”: Christus- Heterotopien in Kunst und Kommerz des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel von Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys und Conchita Wurst’, pp. 223– 245, all in: Franziska Metzger & Elke Pahud de Mortanges (eds), Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.– 21. Jahrhundert, Paderborn 2016.
16 Claude Lévi- Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, in The Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955), pp. 428– 444; Claude Lévi- Strauss, Myth and Meaning, London 1978. For narrativist approaches in recent years: Chiara Bottici & Benoît Challand (eds), Myth, Memory, and Identity, Cambridge 2013; Laura Cruz & Willem Frijhoff (eds), Myth in History, History in Myth, Leiden & Boston 2009; Silvio Vietta & Herbert Uerlings (eds), Moderne und Mythos, München 2006; Stephanie Wodianka & Dietmar Rieger (eds), Mythosaktualisierungen: Tradierungs- und Generierungspotentiale einer alten Erinnerungsform, Berlin & New York 2006.
17 Roland Bartes, Mythologies, Paris 1957.
18 Hayden White, ‘Catastrophe, Communal Memory and Mythic Discourse: The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society’, in Bo Stråth (ed.), Myth and Memory in the Construction of Society, Brussels 2000, pp. 49– 74, 51: ‘Myth emplots stories about specific actions and sets of events.’ Cf. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore 1978.
19 ‘The myth has the task of founding a historical intention on nature, contingency on eternity.’ Barthes 1957, p. 216 (translation by the author).
20 Cf. Michel Foucault’s ‘regularity’, Foucault 1969.
action.21 The reduction of contingency can be seen in the abolition of tem-poral differences in the superposition of past, present and future. Regarding the analysis of narratives of mythicisation, the actualisation and reuse of ‘old’
narratives, the superposition of different myths, intertextuality and webs of narratives are highly important.