At a glance, the Hebrew Bible presents the Levites as a group of ritual assistants and subordinates in Israel's cult. A closer look, however, reveals a far more complicated history behind the emergence of this group in Ancient Israel. A careful reconsideration of the sources provides new insights into the origins of the Levites, their social function and location, and the development of traditions that grew around them. The social location and self-perception of the Levites evolved alongside the network of clans and tribes that grew into a monarchic society, and alongside the struggle to define religious and social identity in the face of foreign cultures. This book proposes new ways to see not only how these changes affected Levite self-perception but also the manner in which this perception affected larger trends as Israelite religion evolved into nascent Judaism. By consulting the textual record, archaeological evidence, the study of cultural memory and social-scientific models, Mark Leuchter demonstrates that the Levites emerge as boundary markers and boundary makers in the definition of what it meant to be part of "Israel."

Moving out from a particular problem about a particular Athenian festival, the late Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood investigates central questions concerning Athenian festivals and the myths that underlay them. She studies the role played at festivals by hereditary religious associations, showing how simple actions of undressing, veiling, bathing, and re-dressing a statue created a symbolic drama of abnormality, reversion to primeval time, and renewal for the Athenians. Sourvinou-Inwood also offers a reading of the ever controversial Parthenon frieze. Her book, brought to completion by Robert Parker, displays all the attention to detail and the concern for methodological rigour that have made her an iconic figure among students of Greek religion.

Ritual manuals are among the most common and most personal forms of Buddhist literature. Since at least the late fifth century, individual practitioners-including monks, nuns, teachers, disciples, and laypeople-have kept texts describing how to perform the daily rites. These manuals represent an intimate counterpart to the canonical sutras and the tantras, speaking to the lived experience of Buddhist practice. Conjuring the Buddha offers a history of early tantric Buddhist ritual through the lens of the Tibetan manuscripts discovered near Dunhuang on the ancient Silk Road. Jacob P. Dalton argues that the spread of ritual manuals offered Buddhists an extracanonical literary form through which to engage with their tradition in new and locally specific ways. He suggests that ritual manuals were the literary precursors to the tantras, crucial to the emergence of esoteric Buddhism. Examining a series of ninth- and tenth-century tantric manuals from Dunhuang, Dalton uncovers lost moments in the development of rituals such as consecration, possession, sexual yoga, the Great Perfection, and the subtle body practices of the winds and channels. He also traces the use of poetic language in ritual manuals, showing how at pivotal moments, metaphor, simile, rhythm, and rhyme were deployed to evoke carefully sculpted affective experiences. Offering an unprecedented glimpse into the personal practice of early tantric Buddhists, Conjuring the Buddha provides new insight into the origins and development of the tantric tradition.

Ritual is one of the most pervasive religious phenomena in the Tibetan cultural world. Despite its ubiquity and importance to Tibetan cultural life, however, only in recent years has Tibetan ritual been given the attention it deserves. This is the first scholarly collection to focus on this important subject. Unique in its historical, geographical and disciplinary breadth, this book brings together eleven essays by an international cast of scholars working on ritual texts, institutions and practices in the greater Tibetan cultural world - Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Mongolia. While most of the chapters focus on Buddhism, two deal with ritual in Tibet's indigenous Bon religion. All of the essays are original to this volume. An extensive introduction by the editor provides a broad overview of Tibetan ritual and contextualizes the chapters within the field of Buddhist and Tibetan studies. The book should find use in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on Tibetan religion. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of ritual generally.

"The Goodly Word: Al-Kalim al-Tayyib"-written by the renowned fourteenth century jurist, Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya-is one of the most referred to works on prayer and the merits of prayer. Exclusively based on what the Prophet Muhammad himself said and did, "The Goodly Word" includes prayers for every moment of the Muslim's life. It is presented in a bi-lingual edition so that the exact prayers of the Prophet can be read in the original Arabic. "The Goodly Word" has been translated into English by the late Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies, two distinguished scholars who have also translated "An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith" and "Forty Hadith Qudsi", both published by the Islamic Texts Society.

Meditation from Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist Perspectives engages readers with its original philosophical and pragmatic analysis of traditional Asian religions, philosophy, meditation practice, and the supreme spiritual ideals associated with the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions. The text boldly bridges the theory/practice distinction. A central underpinning of Meditation from Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist Perspectives rests on the assumption that meditation practice without theory is groundless and that theory without practice is useless. Robert Altobello identifies and analyzes common elements found across traditions in which the practice of meditation plays a central role in human development, and readers will find a wealth of detailed reflection on the relationship between spiritual growth and meditation practice from the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist perspectives. In the spirit of these traditions, the exploration of meditation practice requires examination of the principal elements that sustain the core worldviews as well as the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical presumptions that animate these traditions. Throughout the text, the author demonstrates why these philosophies are all best understood as psychologies of happiness and/or contentment and that by viewing them as such, practitioners can reap the great promises of all these traditions without the need to accept any compromising metaphysical assumptions.

Religious icons have been a contested terrain across the world. Their implications and understanding travel further than the artistic or the aesthetic and inform contemporary preoccupations.This book traces the lives of religious sculptures beyond the moment of their creation. It lays bare their purpose and evolution by contextualising them in their original architectural or ritual setting while also following their displacement. The work examines how these images may have moved during different spates of temple renovation and acquired new identities by being relocated either within sacred precincts or in private collections and museums, art markets or even desecrated and lost. The book highlights contentious issues in Indian archaeology such as renegotiating identities of religious images, reuse and sharing of sacred space by adherents of different faiths, rebuilding of temples and consequent reinvention of these sites. The author also engages with postcolonial debates surrounding history writing and knowledge creation in British India and how colonial archaeology, archival practices, official surveys and institutionalisation of museums has influenced the current understanding of religion, sacred space and religious icons. In doing so it bridges the historiographical divide between the ancient and the modern as well as socio-religious practices and their institutional memory and preservation. Drawn from a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study of religious sculptures, classical texts, colonial archival records, British travelogues, official correspondences and fieldwork, the book will interest scholars and researchers of history, archaeology, religion, art history, museums studies, South Asian studies and Buddhist studies.

The town of Deopatan, three kilometers northeast of Kathmandu, is above all famous for its main sanctum, the temple of Pasupati, the "lord of the animals," a form of Siva and the tutelary deity of the kings of Nepal since ancient times. By its name alone, the temple attracts thousands of pilgrims each year and has made itself known far beyond the Kathamndu Valley. However, for the dominant Newar population the town is by no means merely the seat of Siva or Pasupati. It is also a city of wild goddesses and other deities. Due to this tension between two strands of Hinduism -- the pure, vegetarian Smarta Hinduism and the Newar Hinduism which implies alcohol and blood sacrifices -- Siva/Pasupati has more than once been in trouble, as the many festivals and rituals descripbed and analyzed in this book reveal. Deopatan is a contested field. Different deities, agents social groups, ritual specialists, and institutions are constantly seeking dominance, challenging and even fighting each other, thus contributing to social and political dynamics and tensions that are indeed distinct in South Asia. It is these aspects on which Axel Michaels concentrates in this book.

This pioneering, interdisciplinary work shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. Drawing on a variety of cultural settings, the authors utilize psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives to describe how ritual--like play--creates "as if" worlds, rooted in the imaginative capacity of the human mind to create a subjunctive universe. The ability to cross between imagined worlds is central to the human capacity for empathy. Ritual, they claim, defines the boundaries of these imagined worlds, including those of empathy and other realms of human creativity, such as music, architecture and literature.
The authors juxtapose this ritual orientation to a "sincere" search for unity and wholeness. The sincere world sees fragmentation and incoherence as signs of inauthenticity that must be overcome. Our modern world has accepted the sincere viewpoint at the expense of ritual, dismissing ritual as mere convention. In response, the authors show how the conventions of ritual allow us to live together in a broken world. Ritual is work, endless work. But it is among the most important things that we humans do.

This book presents a range of case-studies of pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman antiquity, drawing on a wide variety of evidence. It rejects the usual reluctance to accept the category of pilgrimage in pagan polytheism and affirms the significance of sacred mobility not only as an important factor in understanding ancient religion and its topographies but also as vitally ancestral to later Christian practice.

Connecting to Our Ancestral Past is a pragmatic, spiritual journey that introduces a variety of specific rituals and conversations in connection with Constellations work, an experiential process that explores one’s history and powerful events of the past in order to understand and resolve problems of the present. Constellations facilitator and author Francesca Mason Boring presents this therapeutic method in the context of cultures like the Shoshone, of which she is a member, that have seen the world through a prism of interrelationships for millennia. In Constellations work there is an organic quality that requires a discipline of non-judgment, one that is embraced in traditional native circles, where the whole truth of a person’s life, roots, and trans-generational trauma or challenge is understood and included.

Mason Boring provides a transformational walk through the universal indigenous field— that place of healing and knowledge used by Native healers and teachers for centuries—by describing stories and rituals designed to help people with their particular struggles. These rituals, such as “Facing the Good Men”—designed to help women who have suffered abuse in relationships with men—reject Western notions of over-the-counter medication. Instead, they stress a comfortable environment whereby the “client,” with the help of a facilitator, interacts with people chosen to represent concepts, things, and other people. In Western culture the word “medicine” is thought of as a concrete object, but Mason Boring explains that indigenous cultures favor a process of healing as opposed to an itemized substance. She re-opens doors that have been closed due to the exclusion of indigenous technology in the development of many Western healing traditions and introduces new concepts to the lexicon of Western psychology.

A range of voices from around the world—leaders in the fields of systems constellations, theoretical physics, and tribal traditions—contribute to this exploration of aboriginal perspectives that will benefit facilitators of Constellations work, therapists, and human beings who are trying to walk with open eyes and hearts.

A groundbreaking anthropological analysis of Islam as experienced by Muslims, "By Noon Prayer" builds a conceptual model of Islam as a whole, while traveling along a comparative path of biblical, Egyptological, ethnographic, poetic, scriptural, and visual materials. Grounded in long-term observation of Arabo-Islamic culture and society, this study captures the rhythm of Islam weaving through the lives of Muslim women and men. Examples of the rhythmic nature of Islam can be seen in all aspects of Muslims' everyday lives. Muslims break their Ramadan fast upon the sun setting, and they receive Ramadan by sighting the new moon. Prayer for their dead is by noon and burial is before sunset. This is space and time in Islam--moon, sun, dawn and sunset are all part of a unique and unified rhythm, interweaving the sacred and the ordinary, nature and culture in a pattern that is characteristically Islamic.

A groundbreaking anthropological analysis of Islam as experienced by Muslims, "By Noon Prayer" builds a conceptual model of Islam as a whole, while traveling along a comparative path of biblical, Egyptological, ethnographic, poetic, scriptural, and visual materials. Grounded in long-term observation of Arabo-Islamic culture and society, this study captures the rhythm of Islam weaving through the lives of Muslim women and men. Examples of the rhythmic nature of Islam can be seen in all aspects of Muslims' everyday lives. Muslims break their Ramadan fast upon the sun setting, and they receive Ramadan by sighting the new moon. Prayer for their dead is by noon and burial is before sunset. This is space and time in Islam--moon, sun, dawn and sunset are all part of a unique and unified rhythm, interweaving the sacred and the ordinary, nature and culture in a pattern that is characteristically Islamic.

Ritual manuals are among the most common and most personal forms of Buddhist literature. Since at least the late fifth century, individual practitioners-including monks, nuns, teachers, disciples, and laypeople-have kept texts describing how to perform the daily rites. These manuals represent an intimate counterpart to the canonical sutras and the tantras, speaking to the lived experience of Buddhist practice. Conjuring the Buddha offers a history of early tantric Buddhist ritual through the lens of the Tibetan manuscripts discovered near Dunhuang on the ancient Silk Road. Jacob P. Dalton argues that the spread of ritual manuals offered Buddhists an extracanonical literary form through which to engage with their tradition in new and locally specific ways. He suggests that ritual manuals were the literary precursors to the tantras, crucial to the emergence of esoteric Buddhism. Examining a series of ninth- and tenth-century tantric manuals from Dunhuang, Dalton uncovers lost moments in the development of rituals such as consecration, possession, sexual yoga, the Great Perfection, and the subtle body practices of the winds and channels. He also traces the use of poetic language in ritual manuals, showing how at pivotal moments, metaphor, simile, rhythm, and rhyme were deployed to evoke carefully sculpted affective experiences. Offering an unprecedented glimpse into the personal practice of early tantric Buddhists, Conjuring the Buddha provides new insight into the origins and development of the tantric tradition.

Social scientists sometimes seem not to know what to do with religion. In the first century of sociology's history as a discipline, the reigning concern was explaining the emergence of the modern world, and that brought with it an expectation that religion would simply fade from the scene as societies became diverse, complex, and enlightened. As the century approached its end, however, a variety of global phenomena remained dramatically unexplained by these theories. Among the leading contenders for explanatory power to emerge at this time were rational choice theories of religious behavior. Researchers who have spent time in the field observing religious groups and interviewing practitioners, however, have questioned the sufficiency of these market models. Studies abound that describe thriving religious phenomena that fit neither the old secularization paradigm nor the equations predicting vitality only among organizational entrepreneurs with strict orthodoxies. In this collection of previously unpublished essays, scholars who have been immersed in field research in a wide variety of settings draw on those observations from the field to begin to develop more helpful ways to study religion in modern lives. The authors examine how religion functions on the ground in a pluralistic society, how it is experienced by individuals, and how it is expressed in social institutions. Taken as a whole, these essays point to a new approach to the study of religion, one that emphasizes individual experience and social context over strict categorization and data collection.

There is a great deal of interest in bringing a better appreciation of ritual into religious studies classes, but many teachers are uncertain how to go about doing this. Religious studies faculty know how to teach texts, but they are often unprepared to teach something for which the meaning lies in the doing. How much doing should a class do? How does the teacher talk about religious concepts that exist in practical relationships, not textual descriptions? These practical issues also give rise to theoretical questions. Giving more attention to ritual effectively suggests a reinterpretation of religion itselfless focused on what people have thought and written, and more focused on how they order their universe. Much of the useful analysis of ritual derives from anthropological and sociological premises, which are often foreign to religious studies faculty and are seen by some as theologically problematic. This is the first resource to address the issues specific to teaching this subject. A stellar cast of contributors, who teach ritual in a wide variety of courses and settings, explain what has worked for them in the classroom, what hasn't, and what they've learned from experience. Their voices range from personal to formal, and their topics from Japanese theatre to using field trips. The result is a thoughtful guide for teachers who are new to the subject as well as experienced ones looking for fresh angles and approaches.

The Fifth Prapathaka of the Vadhula Srautasutra includes a critical edition, followed by a translation and a commentary, of the fifth chapter (prapathaka) of the Vadhula Srautasutra. This chapter is dedicated to the description of the so-called "independent" animal sacrifice (nirudhapasubandha) in Vedic ritual. This series of short monographs relates to particular aspects of the animal sacrifice described in the Veda and to problems of exegesis of Vedic texts. The first part of this edition presents the translation and commentary, while the critical edition makes up the second part. The commentary highlights the peculiarities of the Vadhula version of the nirudhapasubandha. In the conclusion of the first part, the ancientness of the Vadhula school is discussed, as well as its place within the corpus of Taittiriya texts.

Buddhism in the Global Eye focuses on the importance of a global context and transnational connections for understanding Buddhist modernizing movements. It also explores how Asian agency has been central to the development of modern Buddhism, and provides theoretical reflections that seek to overcome misleading East-West binaries. Using case studies from China, Japan, Vietnam, India, Tibet, Canada, and the USA, the book introduces new research that reveals the permeable nature of certain categories, such as "modern", "global", and "contemporary" Buddhism. In the book, contributors recognize the multiple nodes of intra-Asian and global influence. For example, monks travelled among Asian countries creating networks of information and influence, mutually stimulating each other's modernization movements. The studies demonstrate that in modernization movements, Asian reformers mobilized all available cultural resources both to adapt local forms of Buddhism to a new global context and to shape new foreign concepts to local Asian forms.

Jerusalem has long been one of the most sought-after destinations for the followers of three world faiths and for secularists alike. For Jews, it has the Western (Wailing) Wall; for Christians, it is where Christ suffered and triumphed; for Muslims, it offers the Dome of the Rock; and for secularists, it is an archeological challenge and a place of tragedy and beauty. This work concentrates on Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular pilgrimages to Jerusalem over the last three millennia, drawing from over 165 accounts of travels to the ancient city. Chapters are devoted to ghostly and other pilgrims, the significance of Jerusalem, the beginnings of the pilgrimage in the time of kings David and Solomon, pilgrimages under Roman and Byzantine rule, Christian and Muslim pilgrimages in the early Islamic period, pilgrimages in the First Crusade and its aftermath, more crusades and pilgrims during the Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties, pilgrimages under Ottoman rule, pilgrimages under the British and Israelis, and the unity among pilgrims and the symbolism of the journey.

This book examines the ways in which two distinct biblical conceptions of impurity-"ritual" and "moral"-were interpreted in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature, and the New Testament. In examining the evolution of ancient Jewish attitudes towards sin and defilement, Klawans sheds light on a fascinating but previously neglected topic.

Adapting Wittgenstein's concept of the human species as 'a ceremonial animal', Wendy James writes vividly and readably. Her new overview advocates a clear line of argument: that the concept of social form is a primary key to anthropology and the human sciences as a whole. Weaving memorable ethnographic examples into her text, James brings together carefully selected historical sources as well as references to current ideas in neighbouring disciplines such as archaeology, paleoanthropology, genetics, art and material culture, ethnomusicology, urban and development studies, politics, economics, psychology, and religious studies. She shows the relevance of anthropology to pressing world issues such as migration, humanitarian politics, the new reproductive technologies, and religious fundamentalism.
Wendy James's engaging style will appeal to specialist and non-specialist alike. The Foreword is written by Michael J. Lambek, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto.