Questioning the Secularization Theleology: Zalmoxianism and the Re-Enchantment of the World

Abstract

Starting off by categorizing the specific means through which modernity manifests itself in the field of religion and utilizing an ethnography-based methodological strategy, the following paper documents the emergence of Zalmoxianism, a contemporary replica of the religion of the Dacians, which are considered the ancestors of Romanians; they used to inhabit areas around the Carpathians and the Lower Danube before the Roman Conquest (106 A.D.). While subscribing to the theoretical precepts meant to surpass the sociological prejudice according to which modernity exhausts a religiously transcendent view on the world, this paper closely analyzes the conceptual deconstruction of secularization as a total phenomenon while sat the same time isolating the social actor as a non-secularized segment.