An unparalleled exploration of magic in the Greco-Roman world What did magic mean to the people of ancient Greece and Rome? How did Greeks and Romans not only imagine what magic could do, but also use it to try to influence the world around them? In Drawing Down the Moon, Radcliffe Edmonds, one of the foremost experts on magic, religion, and the occult in the ancient world, provides the most comprehensive account of the varieties of phenomena labeled as magic in classical antiquity. Exploring why certain practices, images, and ideas were labeled as "magic" and set apart from "normal" kinds of practices, Edmonds gives insight into the shifting ideas of religion and the divine in the ancient past and later Western tradition. Using fresh approaches to the history of religions and the social contexts in which magic was exercised, Edmonds delves into the archaeological record and classical literary traditions to examine images of witches, ghosts, and demons as well as the fantastic powers of metamorphosis, erotic attraction, and reversals of nature, such as the famous trick of drawing down the moon. From prayer and divination to astrology and alchemy, Edmonds journeys through all manner of ancient magical rituals and paraphernalia-ancient tablets, spell books, bindings and curses, love charms and healing potions, and amulets and talismans. He considers the ways in which the Greco-Roman discourse of magic was formed amid the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt and the Near East. An investigation of the mystical and marvelous, Drawing Down the Moon offers an unparalleled record of the origins, nature, and functions of ancient magic.

Today, conversion is a contested religious, political, and personal phenomenon, and that was also the case in the ancient world. Using several primary sources (Jewish and Christian) and case studies, this volume discusses what this change could have meant for various individuals or groups of people in the ancient world and argues that conversion can best be understood through an intersectional perspective, an approach that includes gender, class, ethnicity, and age, as well as political and economic elements in its analysis of conversion. The volume also acknowledges that a discussion of conversion benefits from taking into account conversion's history of reception. Case studies from the reception history as well as contemporary examples of contested conversions (for example, from Christianity to Islam or vice versa) are also brought to the table. In sum, the book addresses the complexity of conversion, using a range of cases, texts and theories, and initiates a dialogue between ancient sources and present concepts or practices. Close readings of ancient texts play a central role in the project. Yet, the book also considers how sacred texts and their receptions have influenced the way we generally think about conversation as religious change.

Snakes exist in the myths of most societies, often embodying magical, mysterious forces. Snake cults were especially important in eastern India and Bangladesh, where for centuries worshippers of the indigenous snake goddess Manasa resisted the competing religious influences of Indo-Europeans and Muslims. The result was a corpus of verse texts narrating Manasa's struggle to win universal adoration. The Triumph of the Snake Goddess is the first comprehensive retelling of this epic tale in modern English. Scholar and poet Kaiser Haq offers a composite prose translation of Manasa's story, based on five extant versions. Following the tradition of mangalkavyas-Bengali verse narratives celebrating the deeds of deities in order to win their blessings-the tale opens with a creation myth and a synopsis of Indian mythology, zooming in on Manasa, the miraculous child of the god Shiva. Manasa easily wins the allegiance of everyone except the wealthy merchant Chand, who holds fast in his devotion to Shiva despite seeing his sons massacred. A celestial couple is incarnated on earth to fulfill Manasa's design: Behula, wife to one of Chand's slain sons, undertakes a harrowing odyssey to restore him to life with Manasa's help, ultimately persuading Chand to bow to the snake goddess. A prologue by Haq explores the Bengali oral, poetic, and manuscript traditions behind this Hindu folk epic-a vibrant part of popular Bengali culture, Hindu and Muslim, to this day-and an introduction by Wendy Doniger examines the history and significance of snake worship in classical Sanskrit texts.

The history and writings of the Samaritans remain an often overlooked subject in the field of biblical studies. This volume, which assembles papers presented at a 2010 symposium held in Zurich, illuminates the history of the Samaritans as well as passages that address them in biblical sources. Through a subsequent comparison to perspectives found in Samaritan sources concerning biblical, early Jewish, and early Christian history, we are presented with counterpoising perceptions that open up new opportunities for discourse.

The Living Goddesses crowns a lifetime of innovative, influential work by one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable scholars. Marija Gimbutas wrote and taught with rare clarity in her original--and originally shocking--interpretation of prehistoric European civilization. Gimbutas flew in the face of contemporary archaeology when she reconstructed goddess-centered cultures that predated historic patriarchal cultures by many thousands of years. This volume, which was close to completion at the time of her death, contains the distillation of her studies, combined with new discoveries, insights, and analysis. Editor Miriam Robbins Dexter has added introductory and concluding remarks, summaries, and annotations. The first part of the book is an accessible, beautifully illustrated summation of all Gimbutas's earlier work on "Old European" religion, together with her ideas on the roles of males and females in ancient matrilineal cultures. The second part of the book brings her knowledge to bear on what we know of the goddesses today--those who, in many places and in many forms, live on.

Memory in a Time of Prose investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about a past that consumed so many of their writings? Daniel D. Pioske attempts to answer this question by studying the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a time that preceded the composition of these writings by a generation or more. This book is comprised of a series of case studies that compare biblical references to an early Iron Age world (ca. 1175-830 BCE) with a wide range of archaeological and historical evidence from the era in which these stories are set. Pioske examines the relationship between the past disclosed through these historical traces and the past represented within the biblical narrative. He discovers that the biblical scribes drew the knowledge of the past that they used to create their prose narratives from memory and word of mouth, rather than from a corpus of older narrative documents. For those Hebrew scribes who first set down these stories in prose writing, the means for knowing a past and the significance attached to it were primarily wed to the faculty of memory. Memory in a Time of Prose reveals how the past was preserved, transformed, or forgotten in the ancient world of oral, living speech that informed biblical storytelling.

Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues, and patterns of hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's landmark book, first published in 1972, recast long-standing ideas about the fertility myth of Adonis. The author challenges Sir James Frazer's thesis that the vegetation god Adonis - whose premature death was mourned by women and whose resurrection marked a joyous occasion - represented the annual cycle of growth and decay in agriculture. Using the analytic tools of structuralism, Detienne shows instead that the festivals of Adonis depict a seductive but impotent and fruitless deity - whose physical ineptitude led to his death in a boar hunt, after which his body was found in a lettuce patch. Contrasting the festivals of Adonis with the solemn ones dedicated to Demeter, the goddess of grain, he reveals the former as a parody and negation of the institution of marriage. Detienne considers the short-lived gardens that Athenian women planted in mockery for Adonis's festival, and explores the function of such vegetal matter as spices, mint, myrrh, cereal, and wet plants in religious practice and in a wide selection of myths. His inquiry exposes, among many things, the way sin which women of various martial statuses were regarded and attitudes toward sexual activity ranging from "perverse" acts to marital relations.

A comprehensive guide to a growing religious movement

If you want to study Paganism in more detail, this book is the place to start. Based on a course in Paganism that the authors have taught for more than a decade, it is full of exercises, meditations, and discussion questions for group or individual study.

This book presents the basic fundamentals of Paganism. It explores what Pagans are like; how the Pagan sacred year is arranged; what Pagans do in ritual; what magick is; and what Pagans believe about God, worship, human nature, and ethics. For those who are exploring their own spirituality, or who want a good book to give to non-Pagan family and friends A hands-on learning tool with magickal workings, meditations, discussion questions, and journal exercises Offers in-depth discussion of ethics and magick

A book on the religious, mystic origins and substance of philosophy. This is a critical survey of ancient and modern sources and of scholarly works dealing with Orpheus and everything related to this major figure of ancient Greek myth, religion and philosophy. Here poetic madness meets religious initiation and Platonic philosophy. This book contains fascinating insights into the usually downplaid relations between Egyptian initiation, Greek mysteries and Plato's philosophy and followers, right into Hellenistic Neoplatonic and Hermetic developments.

The essays in this compendium examine Late-Biblical writings dating from the Hellenistic period that relate to religion and society. A focus is placed on threat scenarios and on the drawing of differences to the Hellenistic environment and the question of identity for believers during the pre-Christian centuries.

Hailed as "a feast" (Washington Post) and "a modern-day bestiary" (The New Yorker), Stephen Asma's On Monsters is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Beginning at the time of Alexander the Great, the monsters come fast and furious-Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, Satan and his demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today and the post-human cyborgs of tomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring sources as diverse as philosophical treatises, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unravels traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era's fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated. Asma suggests that how we handle monsters reflects how we handle uncertainty, ambiguity, and insecurity. And in a world that is daily becoming less secure and more ambiguous, he shows how we might learn to better live with monsters-and thereby avoid becoming one.

A full-length study and new translation of the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa's famed Meghaduta (literally "The Cloud Messenger,") The Cloud of Longing focuses on the poem's interfacing of nature, feeling, figuration, and mythic memory. This work is unique in its attention given to the natural world in light of the nexus of language and love that is the chief characteristic (lakshana) of the poem. Along with a scrupulous study of the approximately 111 verses of the poem, The Cloud of Longing offers an extended look at how nature was envisioned by classical India's supreme poet as he portrays a cloud's imagined voyage over the fields, valleys, rivers, mountains, and towns of classical India. This sustained, close reading of the Meghaduta will speak to contemporary readers as well as to those committed to developing a more in-depth experience of the natural world. The Cloud of Longing fills a gap in the translation of classical Indian texts, as well as in studies of world literature, religion, and into an emerging integrative environmental discipline.

In the early sixth-century eastern Roman empire, anti-Chalcedonian leaders Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus debated the nature of Jesus' body: Was it corruptible prior to its resurrection from the dead? Viewing the controversy in light of late antiquity's multiple images of the 'body of Christ,' Yonatan Moss reveals the underlying political, ritual, and cultural stakes and the long-lasting effects of this fateful theological debate. Incorruptible Bodies combines sophisticated historical methods with philological rigor and theological precision, bringing to light an important chapter in the history of Christianity.

Judith Hadley deploys recent archaeological discoveries, alongside biblical material and nonbiblical inscriptions, to examine the evidence for the worship of Asherah as the partner of God in the Bible. She asks how Israelites construed the relationship between "Yahweh and his Asherah," and whether in fact the term referred to an object of worship rather than a female deity. This is a well-crafted study that promises to make a significant contribution to the debate about the exact nature of Asherah and her significance in pre-exilic Israel and Judah.

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, also known as Gregory the Theologian, lived an illustrious life as an orator, poet, priest, and bishop. Until his death, he wrote scores of letters to friends and colleagues, clergy members and philosophers, teachers of rhetoric and literature, and high-ranking officials at the provincial and imperial levels, many of which are preserved in his self-designed letter collection. Here, for the first time in English, Bradley K. Storin has translated the complete collection, offering readers a fresh view on Gregory's life, social and cultural engagement, leadership in the church, and literary talents. Accompanying the translation are an introduction, a prosopography, and annotations that situate Gregory's letters in their biographical, literary, and historical contexts. This translation is an essential resource for scholars and students of late antiquity and early Christianity.

The authors (a mycologist, chemist, and classics scholar, each respected in his field) make an informed and plausible case that the famed Mysteries conducted at Eleusis in Greece for a period of nearly two millennia in antiquity entailed psychoactive substances in a ritual context. In so doing, they find valuable lessons for the modern world in the solution of an ancient mystery. Although controversial when first published, the book's hypothesis has got much more serious attention in recent years, as scholars have increasingly come to realize the prime importance of entheogenic substances in religious rituals worldwide.All three authors have written significant books and papers relating to entheogens, and this book presents an authoritative exposition of their discoveries. This will be the first popularly accessible edition of a work that has acquired a cult reputation in the three decades since its first publication, and will attract an audience of open-minded students of earth-based spiritual practices as well as those familiar with the authors in related contexts. Its underlying theme of the universality of experiential religion, and its suppression by forces of exploitation and repression, should give it a receptive audience among many who are interested in earth religions and the reconciliation of the human and natural worlds.

Our knowledge of ancient Greece has been transformed in the last century by an increased understanding of the cultures of the Ancient Near East. This is particularly true of ancient religion. This book looks at the relationship between the religious systems of Ancient Greece and the Hittites, who controlled Turkey in the Late Bronze Age (1400-1200 BC). The cuneiform texts preserved in the Hittite archives provide a particularly rich source for religious practice, detailing festivals, purification rituals, oracle-consultations, prayers, and myths of the Hittite state, as well as documenting the religious practice of neighbouring Anatolian states in which the Hittites took an interest. Hittite religion is thus more comprehensively documented than any other ancient religious tradition in the Near East, even Egypt. The Hittites are also known to have been in contact with Mycenaean Greece, known to them as Ahhiyawa. The book first sets out the evidence and provides a methodological paradigm for using comparative data. It then explores cases where there may have been contact or influence, such as in the case of scapegoat rituals or the Kumarbi-Cycle. Finally, it considers key aspects of religious practices shared by both systems, such as the pantheon, rituals of war, festivals, and animal sacrifice. The aim of such a comparison is to discover clues that may further our understanding of the deep history of religious practices and, when used in conjunction with historical data, illuminate the differences between cultures and reveal what is distinctive about each of them.