This book examines magic's generally maleficent effect on humans from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages, including tales from classical mythology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures. It shows that certain magical motifs lived on from age to age, but that it took until the Italian Renaissance for magic tales to become fairy tales.

Ellen Muehlberger explores the diverse and inventive ideas Christians held about angels in late antiquity. During the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians began experimenting with new modes of piety, adapting longstanding forms of public authority to Christian leadership and advancing novel ways of cultivating body and mind to further the progress of individual Christians. Muehlberger argues that in practicing these new modes of piety, Christians developed new ways of thinking about angels. The book begins with a detailed examination of the two most popular discourses about angels that developed in late antiquity. In the first, developed by Christians cultivating certain kinds of ascetic practices, angels were one type of being among many in a shifting universe, and their primary purpose was to guard and to guide Christians. In the other, articulated by urban Christian leaders in contest with one another, angels were morally stable characters described in the emerging canon of Scripture, available to enable readers to render Scripture coherent with emerging theological positions. Muehlberger goes on to show how these two discourses did not remain isolated in separate spheres of cultivation and contestation, but influenced one another and the wider Christian culture. She offers in-depth analysis of popular biographies written in late antiquity, of the community standards of emerging monastic communities, and of the training programs developed to prepare Christians to participate in ritual, demonstrating that new ideas about angels shaped and directed the formation of the definitive institutions of late antiquity. Angels in Late Ancient Christianity is a meticulous and thorough study of early Christian ideas about angels, but it also offers a different perspective on late ancient Christian history, arguing that angels were central rather than peripheral to the emergence of Christian institutions and Christian culture in late antiquity.

From basic needs, such as lighting, heating or cooking, to symbolic or ritual engagement, hearths in indoor contexts serve as a focal point. This is especially evident, both spatially and architecturally, in structures containing central hearths. In assessing any gathering around a hearth, the types of social groups involved need to be determined and their interactions clearly assessed in each specific case. Beyond clearly domestic contexts, many rooms or buildings have been deemed religious or cultic places often based solely on the presence of a hearth, despite other possible interpretations. This volume appraises and contextualises diversity in practice centering on the hearth in the Aegean and, more widely, in areas of the Western Mediterranean closely connected to Greek civilization, notably through its colonies, revealing surprising similarities but also local adaptations. In the West, the use of the hearth often has a unique character arising from local adaptations born of indigenous practices. The combined approach presented here, detailing technical aspects of the hearths themselves, their architectural settings and any associated artefacts or furnishings, affords a rich spectrum for cross-cultural analysis between these Mediterranean regions.

Winner of The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022 Shortlisted for The Wolfson History Prize 2022 A The Times Books of the Year 2022 Three thousand years ago, in the Southwest Asian lands we now call Israel and Palestine, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had seventy children, who were gods in their own right. One of them was a minor storm deity, known as Yahweh. Yahweh had a body, a wife, offspring and colleagues. He fought monsters and mortals. He gorged on food and wine, wrote books, and took walks and naps. But he would become something far larger and far more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions. But as Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou reveals, God's cultural DNA stretches back centuries before the Bible was written, and persists in the tics and twitches of our own society, whether we are believers or not. The Bible has shaped our ideas about God and religion, but also our cultural preferences about human existence and experience; our concept of life and death; our attitude to sex and gender; our habits of eating and drinking; our understanding of history. Examining God's body, from his head to his hands, feet and genitals, she shows how the Western idea of God developed. She explores the places and artefacts that shaped our view of this singular God and the ancient religions and societies of the biblical world. And in doing so she analyses not only the origins of our oldest monotheistic religions, but also the origins of Western culture. Beautifully written, passionately argued and frequently controversial, God: An Anatomy is cultural history on a grand scale. 'Rivetingly fresh and stunning' - Sunday Times 'One of the most remarkable historians and communicators working today' - Dan Snow

Examining the diverse religious texts and practices of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, this collection of essays investigates the many meanings and functions of ritual sacrifice in the ancient world. The essays survey sacrificial acts, ancient theories, and literary as well as artistic depictions of sacrifice, showing that any attempt to identify a single underlying significance of sacrifice is futile. Sacrifice cannot be defined merely as a primal expression of violence, despite the frequent equation of sacrifice to religion and sacrifice to violence in many modern scholarly works; nor is it sufficient to argue that all sacrifice can be explained by guilt, by the need to prepare and distribute animal flesh, or by the communal function of both the sacrificial ritual and the meal.
As the authors of these essays demonstrate, sacrifice may be invested with all of these meanings, or none of them. The killing of the animal, for example, may take place offstage rather than in sight, and the practical, day-to-day routine of plant and animal offerings may have been invested with meaning, too. Yet sacrificial acts, or discourses about these acts, did offer an important site of contestation for many ancient writers, even when the religions they were defending no longer participated in sacrifice. Negotiations over the meaning of sacrifice remained central to the competitive machinations of the literate elite, and their sophisticated theological arguments did not so much undermine sacrificial practice as continue to assume its essential validity.
Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice offers new insight into the connections and differences among the Greek and Roman, Jewish and Christian religions.

This monograph begins with a puzzle: a Babylonian text from late 5th century BCE Uruk associating various diseases with bodily organs, which has evaded interpretation. The correct answer may reside in Babylonian astrology, since the development of the zodiac in the late 5th century BCE offered innovative approaches to the healing arts. The zodiac-a means of predicting the movements of heavenly bodies-transformed older divination (such as hemerologies listing lucky and unlucky days) and introduced more favorable magical techniques and medical prescriptions, which are comparable to those found in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and non-Hippocratic Greek medicine. Babylonian melothesia (i.e., the science of charting how zodiacal signs affect the human body) offers the most likely solution explaining the Uruk tablet.

Babylon under Western Eyes examines the mythic legacy of ancient Babylon, the Near Eastern city which has served western culture as a metaphor for power, luxury, and exotic magnificence for more than two thousand years. Sifting through the many references to Babylon in biblical, classical, medieval, and modern texts, Andrew Scheil uses Babylon's remarkable literary ubiquity as the foundation for a thorough analysis of the dynamics of adaptation and allusion in western literature. Touching on everything from Old English poetry to the contemporary apocalyptic fiction of the "Left Behind" series, Scheil outlines how medieval Christian society and its cultural successors have adopted Babylon as a political metaphor, a degenerate archetype, and a place associated with the sublime. Combining remarkable erudition with a clear and accessible style, Babylon under Western Eyes is the first comprehensive examination of Babylon's significance within the pantheon of western literature and a testimonial to the continuing influence of biblical, classical, and medieval paradigms in modern culture.

Various goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean world were once understood to be Virgin Mothers--creators who birthed the entire cosmos without need of a male consort. This is the first book to explore evidence of the original parthenogenetic power of deities such as Athena, Hera, Artemis, Gaia, Demeter, Persephone, and the Gnostic Sophia. It provides stunning feminist insights about the deeper meaning of related stories, such as the judgment of Paris, the labors of Heracles, and the exploits of the Amazons. It also roots the Thesmophoria and Eleusinian Mysteries in female parthenogenetic power, thereby providing what is at long last a coherent understanding of these mysterious rites.

The papers of the volume investigate how authoritative figures in the Second Temple Period and beyond contributed to forming the Scriptures of Judaism, as well as how these Scriptures shaped ideal figures as authoritative in Early Judaism. The topic of the volume thus reflects Ben Wright's research, who-especially with his work on Ben Sira, on the Letter of Aristeas, and on various problems of authority in Early Jewish texts-creatively contributed to the study of the formation of Scriptures, and to the understanding of the figures behind these texts.

In Truly Beyond Wonders Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis investigates texts and material evidence associated with healing pilgrimage in the Roman empire during the second century AD. Her focus is upon one particular pilgrim, the famous orator Aelius Aristides, whose Sacred Tales, his fascinating account of dream visions, gruelling physical treatments, and sacred journeys, has been largely misunderstood and marginalized. Petsalis-Diomidis rehabilitates this text by placing it within the material context of the sanctuary of Asklepios at Pergamon, where the author spent two years in search of healing. The architecture, votive offerings, and ritual rules which governed the behaviour of pilgrims are used to build a picture of the experience of pilgrimage to this sanctuary. Truly Beyond Wonders ranges broadly over discourses of the body and travel and in so doing explores the place of healing pilgrimage and religion in Graeco-Roman society and culture. It is generously illustrated with more than 80 drawings and photographs, and four colour plates.

"The object of the present little book is to provide in connected form enough information to cover all the ordinary allusions met with, so that by reading it through, the student may get a conspectus of the whole field; while, by means of a copious index, it may also fulfill the function of the Classical Dictionary,"

Shulgi-simti is an important example of a woman involved in sponsoring religious activities though having a family life. An Ox of One's Own will be of interest to Assyriologists, particularly those interested in Early Mesopotamia, and scholars working on women in religion. An Ox of One's Own centers on the archive of a woman who died about 2050 B.C., one of King Shulgi's many wives. Her birth name is unknown, but when she married, she became Shulgi-simti, "Suitable for Shulgi." Attested for only about 15 years, she existed among a court filled with other wives, who probably outranked her. A religious foundation was run on her behalf whereby courtiers, male and female, donated livestock for sacrifices to an unusual mix of goddesses and gods. Previous scholarship has declared this a rare example of a queen conducting women's religion, perhaps unusual because they say she came from abroad. The conclusions of this book are quite different. An Ox of One's Own lays out the evidence that another woman was queen at this time in Nippur while Shulgi-simti lived in Ur and was a third-ranking concubine at best, with few economic resources. Shulgi-simti's religious exercises concentrated on a quartet of north Babylonian goddesses.

A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity. Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time:" I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.

Archetypal images, Carl Jung believed, when elaborated in tales and ceremonies, shape culture's imagination and behavior. Unfortunately, such cultural images can become stale and lose their power over the mind. But an artist or mystic can refresh and revive a culture's imagination by exploring his personal dream-images and connecting them to the past. Dante Alighieri presents his Divine Comedy as a dream-vision, carefully establishing the date at which it came to him (Good Friday, 1300), and maintaining the perspective of that time and place, throughout the work, upon unfolding history. Modern readers will therefore welcome a Jungian psychoanalytical approach, which can trace both instinctual and spiritual impulses in the human psyche. Some of Dante's innovations (admission of virtuous pagans to Limbo) and individualized scenes (meeting personal friends in the afterlife) more likely spring from unconscious inspiration than conscious didactic intent. For modern readers, a focus on Dante's personal dream-journey may offer the best way into his poem.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic field research among the Navajos, this book explores a controversial Native American ritual and healthcare practice: ceremonial consumption of the psychedelic Peyote cactus in the context of an indigenous postcolonial healing movement called the Native American Church (NAC), which arose in the 19th century in response to the creation of the reservations system and increasing societal ills, including alcoholism. The movement is the locus of cultural conflict with a long history in North America, and stirs very strong and often opposed emotions and moral interpretations. Joseph Calabrese describes the Peyote Ceremony as it is used in family contexts and federally funded clinical programs for Native American patients. He uses an interdisciplinary methodology that he calls clinical ethnography: an approach to research that involves clinically informed and self-reflective immersion in local worlds of suffering, healing, and normality. Calabrese combined immersive fieldwork among NAC members in their communities with a year of clinical work at a Navajo-run treatment program for adolescents with severe substance abuse and associated mental health problems. There he had the unique opportunity to provide conventional therapeutic intervention alongside Native American therapists who were treating the very problems that the NAC often addresses through ritual. Calabrese argues that if people respond better to clinical interventions that are relevant to their society's unique cultural adaptations and ideologies (as seems to be the case with the NAC), then preventing ethnic minorities from accessing traditional ritual forms of healing may actually constitute a human rights violation.