Kaarle Krohn's Folklore Methodology was the first systematic attempt to state a method of studying folkloristic materials. For centuries scholars had collected folkloristic texts and had commented on them, but they had not tried to formulate a method of investigating folklore.

Folklore Methodology became the handbook for the great Finnish School of folklore research. It provided for its students a guide to the geographical research of traditional materials, a radical departure from the literary scholarship that had dominated folklore studies.

Krohn's book explores the causes and modes of folklore diffusion, development, and destruction; it outlines the influences that cause change in folklore; it provides valuable insights into the nature of folklore; and, finally, it develops geographic methods for analyzing, classifying, and reconstructing individual items from the folk repertoire.

While many developments have taken place since Krohn first published his guide, important new concepts of folklore research sprang from his efforts. For this reason, Folklore Methodology is mandatory reading for every serious student of folklore.

Based on a series of lectures delivered by Rudolf Steiner in Paris, 1906 and transcribed by Eduard Schure, An Esoteric Cosmology is a concise but powerful book and essential reading for students of Steiner. A wide variety of topics are covered, including Intellect, the Mission of Christianity, Manicheism, God, Man and Nature, Involution and Evolution, History of Yoga, The Gospel of St. John, Christian Mysticism, The Astral World, The Devachanic World (Heaven), Dreams, The Evolution of Planets and Earth, Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Human Will, Redemption and Liberation and the Apocalypse.

From the mysterious disappearance of hijacker D.B. Cooper to persistent rumors of bigfoot, this selection of thirteen stories from Oregon's past explores some of the Beaver State's most compelling mysteries and debunks some of its most famous myths. Read about the mysterious disappearances of several people over the years around Mount Emily, relive the gruesome discovery of three murdered trappers near the Deschutes River, and learn why many people believe an eleven-ton meteorite might be hidden in the mountains of southwestern Oregon.

Covering figures ranging from Catherine Monvoisin to Vlad the Impaler, and describing murders committed in ancient aristocracies to those attributed to vampires, witches, and werewolves, this book documents the historic reality of serial murder. The majority of serial murder studies support the consensus that serial murder is essentially an American crime-a flawed assumption, as the United States has existed for less than 250 years. What is far more likely is that the perverse urge to repeatedly and intentionally kill has existed throughout human history, and that a substantial percentage of serial murders throughout ancient times, the middle ages, and the pre-modern era were attributed to imaginative surrogate explanations: dragons, demons, vampires, werewolves, and witches. Legends, Monsters, or Serial Murderers? The Real Story Behind an Ancient Crime dispels the interrelated misconceptions that serial murder is an American crime and a relatively recent phenomenon, making the novel argument that serial murder is a historic reality-an unrecognized fact in ancient times. Noted serial murderers such as the Roman Locuta (The Poisoner); Gilles De Rais of France, a prolific serial killer of children; Andres Bichel of Bavaria; and Chinese aristocratic serial killer T'zu-Hsi are spotlighted. This book provides a unique perspective that integrates supernatural interpretations of serial killing with the history of true crime, reanimating mythic entities of horror stories and presenting them as real criminals.

This remarkably rich and multifaceted study of early Greek exploration makes an original contribution to current discussions of the encounters between Greeks and non-Greeks. Focusing in particular on myths about Odysseus and other heroes who visited foreign lands on their mythical voyages homeward after the Trojan War, Irad Malkin shows how these stories functioned to mediate encounters and conceptualize ethnicity and identity during the Archaic and Classical periods. Synthesizing a wide range of archaeological, mythological, and literary sources, this exceptionally learned book strengthens our understanding of early Greek exploration and city-founding along the coasts of the Western Mediterranean, reconceptualizes the role of myth in ancient societies, and revitalizes our understanding of ethnicity in antiquity. Malkin shows how the figure of Odysseus became a proto-colonial hero whose influence transcended the Greek-speaking world. The return-myths constituted a generative mythology, giving rise to oral poems, stories, iconographic imagery, rituals, historiographical interpretation, and the articulation of ethnic identities. Reassessing the role of Homer and alternative return-myths, the book argues for the active historical function of myth and collective representations and traces their changing roles through a spectrum of colonial perceptions--from the proto-colonial, through justifications of expansion and annexation, and up to decolonization.

In the final years of the Soviet Union and into the 1990s, Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel at an unprecedented rate, bringing about profound changes in Israeli society and the way immigrants understood their own identity. In this volume ex-Soviets in Israel reflect on their immigration experiences, allowing readers to explore this transitional cultural group directly through immigrants' thoughts, memories, and feelings, rather than physical artifacts like magazines, films, or books. Drawing on their fieldwork as well as on analyses of the Russian-language Israeli media and Internet forums, Larisa Fialkova and Maria N. Yelenevskaya present a collage of cultural and folk traditions--from Slavic to Soviet, Jewish, and Muslim--to demonstrate that the mythology of Soviet Jews in Israel is still in the making. The authors begin by discussing their research strategies, explaining the sources used as material for the study, and analyzing the demographic profile of the immigrants interviewed for the project. Chapters use immigrants' personal recollections to both find fragments of Jewish tradition that survived despite the assimilation policy in the USSR and show how traditional folk perception of the Other affected immigrants' interaction with members of their receiving society. The authors also investigate how immigrants' perception of time and space affected their integration, consider the mythology of Fate and Lucky Coincidences as a means of fighting immigrant stress, examine folk-linguistics and the role of the lay-person's view of languages in the life of the immigrant community, and analyze the transformation of folklore genres and images of the country of origin under new conditions. As the biggest immigration wave from a single country in Israel's history, the ex-Soviet Jews make a fascinating case study for a variety of disciplines. Ex-Soviets in Israel will be of interest to scholars who work in Jewish and immigration studies, modern folklore, anthropology, and sociolinguistics.

This book provides students, instructors, and lay-readers with a cross-cultural understanding of storytelling as an art form that has existed for centuries, from the first spoken and sung stories to those that are drawn and performed today. This book serves as an indispensable resource for students and scholars interested in storytelling and in multicultural approaches to the arts. By taking an evolutionary approach, this book begins with a discussion of origin stories and continues through history to stories of the 21st century. The text not only engages the stories themselves, it also explains how individuals from all disciplines, from doctors and lawyers to priests and journalists, use stories to focus their readers' and listeners' attention and influence them. This text addresses stories and storytelling across both time (thousands of years) and geography, including in-depth descriptions of storytelling practices occurring in more than 40 different cultures around the world. Part I consists of thematic essays, exploring such topics as the history of storytelling, common elements across cultures, different media, lessons stories teach us, and storytelling today. Part II looks at more than 40 different cultures, with entries following the same outline: Overview, Storytellers: Who Tell the Stories, and When, Creation Mythologies, Teaching Tales and Values, and Cultural Preservation. Several tales/tale excerpts accompany each entry. Describes the earliest evidence of storytelling, which dates back thousands of years, and discusses how we can learn about our ancestors and their lives and concerns going all the way back to the stories depicted in the cave art they left behind Discusses how the content of stories has changed over time, influenced by such things as the development of agriculture, the establishment of the first urban centers, the invention of the printing press, widespread literacy, the industrial revolution, and scientific discoveries Explains how our response to storytelling-why stories interest us and why we continue to tell and listen to stories-is an inheritance from our ancient ancestors Investigates storytelling practices from more than 40 different culture groups around the world Incorporates text and translations of original stories told across cultures, almost verbatim, for thousands of years

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2000. Relationships between dress and the body have existed in European and Anatolian folk cultures well into the twentieth century. Traditional cultures have long held the belief that certain articles of dress could protect the body from harm by warding off the 'evil eye,' bring fertility to new brides, or assure human control of supernatural powers. Ritual fringes, archaic motifs, and colors such as black and red were believed to have powerful, magical effects. This absorbing and interdisciplinary book examines dress in a broad range of folk cultures - from Turkey, Greece, and Slovakia to Norway, Latvia, and Lithuania, to name but a few. Authors reveal the connection between folk dress and ancient myths, cults and rituals, as well as the communicative aspects of folk dress. How is an individual attired in a specific ensemble located within a community? Is the community the gendered one of women, the village of residence, the larger geographical region or the nation? The intriguing connections between dress and the supernatural beliefs of agrarian communities, as well as the reinvention of such beliefs as part of nationalism, are also discussed. This book represents a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the cultural meanings of dress, as well as to material culture, anthropology, folklore, art history, ethnohistory, and linguistics. Nominated for Millia Davenport award

First published in a Yiddish edition in 1958, Profiles of a Lost World is an incomparable source of information about Eastern Europe before World War II as well as an invaluable touchstone for understanding a rich and complex cultural environment. Hirsz Abramowicz (1881-1960), a prominent Jewish educator, writer, and cultural activist, knew that world and wrote about it, and his writings provide a rare eyewitness account of Jewish life during the first half of the twentieth century.

Abramowicz was a witness to war, revolution, and major cultural transformations in the Jewish world. His essays, written and originally published in Yiddish between 1920 and 1955, document the local history of Lithuanian Jewry in rural and small-town settings, and in the city of Vilna -- the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" -- which was a major center of East European Jewish intellectual and cultural life. They shed important light on the daily life of Jews and the flourishing of modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe during the early twentieth century and offer a personal perspective on the rise of Jewish radical politics.

The collection incorporates local history of Lithuanian Jewry, shtetl folklore, observations on rural occupations, Jewish education, and life under German occupation during World War I. It also includes a series of profiles of leading social and intellectual Jewish personalities of the authors day, from traditional scholars to revolutionaries. Together the selections provide a unique blend of social and personal history and a window on a lost world.

Purple star is an angelic being, who is a star that shines in the night sky but also can transform into human shape living on the spiritual realm. This book is her story to what she has witnessed with the fight between heaven and hell and how earth is always in the middle. Purple star is a seerer and can see the path in which knights and warriors are to take. She is also known as a path finder as she sees things that others do not. This book is all based on the spiritual realm known as the angelic realm. She tells of fights between the light and the dark, a rescue mission and how her life becomes in danger, and a dark star angel that lives in the dark and who has fallen in love with purple star, and she knows it, but they both accept their own path and side they live. Many keep them apart, and the dark will not release him to be with her in the light. He is punished many times for protecting her to the point his life force flows from his body. Together they are a mighty fighting force their gifts combined, and they would withstand all that is thrown at them; one protects the other, and nobody would be able to come between them. The light accepts him as he has harm none.

Folktales of Mizoram is a translated collection of sixty-six short stories from northeast India taken up for a critical evaluation. The stories depict a typical Mizo culture in spirit and practice. This study focuses on the transformation of oral literature into written narratives. Folk practices, folk medicine, folk narratives, traditional songs, and received wisdom dominate these stories. A more insightful approach into folk narratives and songs emphasizes the world of new hermeneutics. The land, the culture, the language, the traditions have been remarkably explored through an elegant reading and evaluation of this collection. Antiquity speaks through the folk tales. The spirit of folktales becomes one of unique exploration of hermeneutics in the end.

Untying the Knot collects eighteen previously unpublished essays on the riddle-a genre of discourse found in virtually every human culture. Hasan-Rokem and Shulman have drawn these essays from a variety of cultural perspectives and disciplines; linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, and religion and literature scholars consider riddling practices in Hebrew, Finnish, Indian languages, Chinese, and classical Greek. The authors seek to understand the peculiar expressive power of the riddle, and the cultural logic of its particular uses; they scrutinize the riddle's logical structure and linguistic strategies, as well as its affinity to neighboring genres such as enigmas, puzzles, oracular prophecy, proverbs, and dreams. In this way, they begin to answer how riddles relate to the conceptual structures of a particular culture, and how they come to represent a culture's cosmology or cognitive map of the world. More importantly, these essays reveal the human need for symbolic ordering-riddles being one such form of cultural ritual.

Arizona Myths and Legends explores unusual phenomena, strange events, and mysteries in Arizona's history. From strange Grand Canyon deaths, to ghosts at the Hotel Vendome, and the last stagecoach robbery, settle in to learn all the scintillating and unsettling details of the Grand Canyon State's mysterious history.

A marvelous book, at once comprehensive and highly readable, a fascinating analysis of doomsday cults and apocalyptic anxiety. --Michael Owen Jones, University of California, Los Angeles The End of the World As We Know It makes accessible to both scholars and general readers the amazing panorama of millenarian scenarios abounding in America at the end of the millennium. --Robert S. Ellwood, University of Southern California Will stand for some time as the best survey and analysis of the meaning and place of apocalypticism and millennialism in American culture. --Religion and Literature Fascinating and] intelligent . . . should be required reading. --Psychotronic From religious tomes to current folk prophesies, recorded history reveals a plethora of narratives predicting or showcasing the end of the world. The incident at Waco, the subway bombing by the Japanese cult Aum Supreme Truth, and the tragedy at Jonestown are just a few examples of such apocalyptic scenarios. And these are not isolated incidents; millions of Americans today believe the end of the world is inevitable, either by a divinely ordained plan, nuclear catastrophe, extraterrestrial invasion, or gradual environmental decay, Examining the doomsday scenarios and apocalyptic predictions of visionaries, televangelists, survivalists, and various other endtimes enthusiasts, as well as popular culture, film, music, fashion, and humor, Daniel Wojcik sheds new light on America's fascination with worldly destruction and transformation. He explores the origins of contemporary apocalyptic beliefs and compares religious and secular apocalyptic speculation, showing us the routes our belief systems have traveled over the centuries to arrive at the dawn of a new millennium. Included in his sweeping examination are premillennial prophecy traditions, prophecies associated with visions of the Virgin Mary, secular ideas about nuclear apocalypse, the transformation of apocalyptic prophecy in the post-Cold War era, and emerging apocalyptic ideas associated with UFOs and extraterrestrials. Timely, yet of lasting importance, The End of the World as We Know It is a comprehensive cultural and historical portrait of an age-old phenomenon and a fascinating guide to contemporary apocalyptic fever. Daniel Wojcik is Associate Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon and author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art. He received his Ph.D. in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Each episode included in this book explores unusual phenomena, strange events, and mysteries in Texas's history. From rumors of Jean Lafitte's buried treasures to the hanging of Chipita Rodriguez and the love story of Frenchy McCormick, Texas Myths and Legends makes history fun and pulls back the curtain on some of the state's most fascinating and compelling stories.

The story of King Solomon has fascinated spiritual and religious writers for millennia - this book advances a theory that Solomon was infact a Magi who created many of the rituals, spells and symbols important to occultists. Although the idea that Solomon carried some sort of mystical powers is not new, this book purports to be written in the ancient king of the Jews' own hand. The magical symbols and diagrams which are situated alongside the various rituals and incantations are intricate, containing pentacles and other shapes. Towards the end of the book a large table is appended, detailing a selection of mystical alphabets and their English. For his investigation, Mathers delved deep into the archives of the British Museum, unearthing an old French manuscript of the text which he duly translated into English. He also replicated the diagrams and symbols; these efforts resulted in this modern English version of the old Solomon manuscripts, and an increase in interest toward writings hitherto obscure.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834 - 1924) was an English hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist and eclectic scholar. His folkloric studies resulted in The Book of Werewolves, one of the most frequently cited studies of lycanthropy.

The Druids and the Arthurian legends are all most of us know about early Britain, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (4500 BC-AD 43). Drawing on archaeological discoveries and medieval Welsh texts like the Mabinogion, this book explores the religious beliefs of the ancient Britons before the coming of Christianity, beginning with the megaliths-structures like Stonehenge-and the role they played in prehistoric astronomy. Topics include the mysterious Beaker people of the Early Bronze Age, Iron Age evidence of the Druids, the Roman period and the Dark Ages. The author discusses the myths of King Arthur and what they tell us about paganism, as well as what early churches and monasteries reveal about the enigmatic Druids.

The dazzling companion volume to the bestselling MYTHOS. There are heroes - and then there are Greek heroes.

Few mere mortals have ever embarked on such bold and heart-stirring adventures, overcome myriad monstrous perils, or outwitted scheming vengeful gods, quite as stylishly and triumphantly as Greek heroes.

In this companion to his bestselling Mythos, Stephen Fry brilliantly retells these dramatic, funny, tragic and timeless tales. Join Jason aboard the Argo as he quests for the Golden Fleece. See Atalanta - who was raised by bears - outrun any man before being tricked with golden apples. Witness wily Oedipus solve the riddle of the Sphinx and discover how Bellerophon captures the winged horse Pegasus to help him slay the monster Chimera.

Heroes is the story of what we mortals are truly capable of - at our worst and our very best.