ABSTRACT
Secular distant pasts, religious far futures? I would like to start off this chapter with two chronologically disparate scenes. The two moments I have selected, though, should not be taken to stand as either a point of origin or the potential realization of a human telos. Rather, they are merely effective temporal horizons different enough from one another in their subject matter to give us a certain parallax on our actual object, the current state of the anthropology of religion and ritual.
