Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of pilgrimage as a form of voluntary displacement. This voluntary displacement helps to constitute cultural meaning in a world constantly 'en route'. Pilgrimage, which works both on global economic and individual levels, is recognised as a highly creative and politically charged force intimately bound up in economic and cultural systems

Many philosophical approaches today seek to overcome the division between mind and body. If such projects succeed, then thinking is not restricted to the disembodied mind, but is in some sense done through the body. From a post-Cartesian perspective, then, ritual activities that discipline the body are not just thoughtless motions, but crucial parts of the way people think. Thinking Through Rituals explores religious ritual acts and their connection to meaning and truth, belief, memory, inquiry, worldview and ethics. Drawing on philosophers such as Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, and sources from cognitive science, pragmatism and feminist theory, it provides philosophical resources for understanding religious ritual practices like the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, Hatha Yoga, sacred meditation or liturgical speech. Its essays consider a wide variety of rituals in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - including political protest rituals and gay commitment ceremonies, traditional Vedic and Yogic rites, Christian and Buddhist meditation and the Jewish Shabbat. They challenge the traditional disjunction between thought and action, showing how philosophy can help to illuminate the relationship between doing and meaning which ritual practices imply.

Many philosophical approaches today seek to overcome the division between mind and body. If such projects succeed, then thinking is not restricted to the disembodied mind, but is in some sense done through the body. From a post-Cartesian perspective, then, ritual activities that discipline the body are not just thoughtless motions, but crucial parts of the way people think. Thinking Through Rituals explores religious ritual acts and their connection to meaning and truth, belief, memory, inquiry, worldview and ethics. Drawing on philosophers such as Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, and sources from cognitive science, pragmatism and feminist theory, it provides philosophical resources for understanding religious ritual practices like the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, Hatha Yoga, sacred meditation or liturgical speech. Its essays consider a wide variety of rituals in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - including political protest rituals and gay commitment ceremonies, traditional Vedic and Yogic rites, Christian and Buddhist meditation and the Jewish Shabbat. They challenge the traditional disjunction between thought and action, showing how philosophy can help to illuminate the relationship between doing and meaning which ritual practices imply.

First published in 1972. A revival of interest in primitive religion has been one of the most marked characteristics of British social anthropology of recent years. Inspired by the work of Audrey Richards, whose writing on ritual contains many of the insights that have been developed in later studies, this volume uses material drawn from all over Africa and Polynesia. The contributors include: Raymond Firth, Esther Goody, Aidan Southall, R.G. Abrahams, Edwin Ardener, J.S. La Fontaine, Monica Wilson, Elizabeth Bott, Edmund Leach and P.H. Gulliver.

Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of pilgrimage as a form of voluntary displacement. This voluntary displacement helps to constitute cultural meaning in a world constantly 'en route'. Pilgrimage, which works both on global economic and individual levels, is recognised as a highly creative and politically charged force intimately bound up in economic and cultural systems

It has often been thought that participation in fertility rituals was women's most important religious activity in classical Greece. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous other rites and cults, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men. Women invoked the gods' help in becoming pregnant, venerated the god of wine, worshipped new and exotic deities, used magic for both erotic and pain-relieving purposes, and far more besides.
Clear and comprehensive, this volume challenges many stereotypes of Greek women and offers unexpected insights into their experience of religion. With more than fifty illustrations, and translated extracts from contemporary texts, this is an essential resource for the study of women and religion in classical Greece.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203621328

Scholars of classical history and literature have for more than a century accepted `initiation' as a tool for understanding a variety of obscure rituals and myths, ranging from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiatory motifs or structures in Greek myth, comedy and tragedy.
In this books an international group of experts including Gloria Ferrari, Fritz Graf and Bruce Lincoln, critique many of these past studies, and challenge strongly the tradition of privileging the concept of initiation as a tool for studying social performances and literary texts, in which changes in status or group membership occur in unusual ways. These new modes of research mark an important turning point in the modern study of the religion and myths of ancient Greece and Rome, making this a valuable collection across a number of classical subjects.

Since Late Antiquity, relics have provided a privileged spiritual bond between life and death, between human beings and divinity. Royalty, nobility and clergy all tried to obtain the most prestigious remains of sacred bodies, since they granted influence and fame and allowed the cult around them to be used as a means of sacralization, power and propaganda. This volume traces the development of the veneration of relics in Europe and how these objects were often catalysts for the establishment of major pilgrimage sites that are still in use today. The book features an international panel of contributors taking a wide-ranging look at relic worship across Europe, from Late Antiquity until the present day. They begin with a focus on the role of relics in Jacobean pilgrimage, before looking at the link between relics and their shrines more generally. The book then focuses in on two major issues in the study of relics, the stealing of relics (Furta Sacra) and their modern-day scientific examination and authentication. These topics demonstrate not only symbolic importance of relics, but also their role as physical historical objects in material religious expression. This is a fascinating collection, featuring the latest scholarship on relics and pilgrimage across Europe. It will, therefore, be of great interested to academics working in Pilgrimage, Religious History, Material Religion and Religious Studies as well as Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Cultural Studies.

Demonstrates that Buddhists appropriated the practice, vocabulary, and ideology of sacrifice from Vedic religion, and discusses the relationship of this sacrificial discourse to ideas of karma in the Pali canon and in early Buddhism.

Modern scholars have seen women's most important religious activity in classical Greece as their participation in fertility rituals. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging new study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous rites and cults besides such festivals, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men.
Women invoked the gods for help in becoming pregnant, venerated the god of wine, worshipped exotic gods new to the Greek pantheon, used magic and potions for both erotic and pain-relieving purposes - and far more besides. While traditional scholarship has seen such involvement in religion as 'escapist', Dillon's skilful presentation of the evidence proves that this denigrates women's religiosity, and the real importance which they attached to their mediation with the divine.

The Big Festival of Lights: Stories and Plays for Hanukkah is a collection of short fiction and plays by nine prominent Jewish figures of the early twentieth-century meant to capture and celebrate the spirit of the holiday. In, "By the Light of Hanukkah: A Play in Three Acts," by Solomon Fineberg, a young man named David awaits to hear about his admittance to the American Rabbinical College while his blind sister Esther quietly wishes to regain her sight. Elma Levinger's "The Unlighted Menorah: A Hanukkah Fantasy," tells the story of Abraham Mendelssohn, an old man at the end of his life grappling with his decision to assimilate his son into American culture; and "Hanukkah Evening" is a charming story of a family waiting for their father to return home to light the first candle on the Menorah. With these and eight additional stories, The Big Festival of Lights: Stories and Plays for Hanukkah is a collection that features tales of families, tradition and culture pride for readers young and old. Professionally typeset with a beautifully designed cover, this edition of The Big Festival of Lights: Stories and Plays for Hanukkah is a celebration of Jewish culture reimagined for a modern audience.

Series Information:
Caucasus World

This major work highlights the importance of Sufi ritual and locates it within the broader domain of the Islamic world. It reveals the world of Sufi ritual with particular reference to two major Sufi orders, examining their ritual and practices, and surveying their organisation and hierarchy, initiation ceremonies, and aspects of their liturgy such as dhikr (litany) and sama (mystical concert). Comparisons are made with the five pillars of Islam (arkan).

This volume investigates the historic and ethnographic accounts of the ongoing religious contestations over the status of the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002) and its surrounding landscape to critically analyse the working and construction of sacredness. It endeavours to make a ground-up assessment of ways in which human participants in the past and present respond to and interact with the Mahabodhi Temple and its surroundings. The volume argues that sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts and archaeological remains. The Mahabodhi Temple is complex and its surround ing landscape is a 'living' heritage, which has been produced socially and constitutes differential densities of human involvement, attachment, and experience. Its significance lies mainly in the active interaction between religious architecture within its dynamic ritual settings. This endless con testation of sacredness and its meaning should not be seen as the 'death' of the Mahabodhi Temple; on the contrary, it illustrates the vitality of the ongoing debate on the meaning, understanding, and use of the sacred in the Indian context. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Cries from the Heart answers a specific hunger millions share - a longing for a personal connection to the divine. In times of crisis, all of us reach for someone,or something, greater than ourselves. Some call it prayer. Others just do it. For many, it's often like talking to a wall. People are looking for assurance that someone hears them when they cry out in their despair, loneliness, or frustration. The last thing they need is another book telling them how to pray or what to say, holding out religion like a good-luck charm. So instead of theorizing or preaching, Johann Christoph Arnold tells stories about real men and real women dealing with adversity. Their difficulties - which range from extreme to quite ordinary and universal - resonate with readers, offering a challenge, but also comfort and encouragement. People will see themselves in these glimpses of anguish, triumph, and peace.

Magic is a universal phenomenon. Everywhere we look people perform ritual actions in which desirable qualities are transferred by means of physical contact and objects or persons are manipulated by things of their likeness. In this book Sorensen embraces a cognitive perspective in order to investigate this long-established but controversial topic. Following a critique of the traditional approaches to magic, and basing his claims on classical ethnographic cases, the author explains magic's universality by examining a number of recurrent cognitive processes underlying its different manifestations. He focuses on how power is infused into the ritual practice; how representations of contagion and similarity can be used to connect otherwise distinct objects in order to manipulate one by the other; and how the performance of ritual prompts representations of magical actions as effective. Bringing these features together, the author proposes a cognitive theory of how people can represent magical rituals as purposeful actions and how ritual actions are integrated into more complex representations of events. This explanation, in turn, yields new insights into the constitutive role of magic in the formation of institutionalised religious ritual.

A study of the death and mourning practices of the founders of Judaism - the Rabbis of late antiquity. The text examines the earliest canonical texts - the Misnah, the Tosefta, the Midrashim and the Talmud of the Land of Israel. It outlines the rituals described in these texts, from preparation for death to reburial of bones and the end of mourning. David Kraemer explores the relationships between the texts and interprets the rituals to uncover the beliefs which informed their foundation. He discusses the material evidence preserved in the largest Jewish burial complex in antiquity - the catacombs at Beth Shearim. Finally, the author offers an interpretation of the Rabbis' interpretations of death rituals - those recorded in the Babylonian Talmud.

There are many books devoted to explicating Jewish laws and customs relating to death and mourning and a wealth of studies addressing the significance of death practices around the world. However, never before has there been a study of the death and mourning practices of the founders of Judaism - the Rabbis of late antiquity. The Meanings of Death in Rabinic Judaism fills that gap.
The author examines the earliest canonical texts - the Misnah, the Tosefta, the Midrashim and the Talmud of the Land of Israel. he outlines the rituals described in these texts, from preparation for death to reburial of bones and the end of mourning. David Kraemer explores the relationships between the texts and interprets the rituals to uncover the beliefs which informed their foundation. He discusses the material evidence preserved in the largest Jewish burial complex in antiquity - the catacombs at Beth Shearim. Finally, the author offers an interpretation of the Rabbis interpretations of death rituals - those recorded in the Babylonian Talmud.
The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism provides a comprehensive and illuminating introduction to the formation, practice and significance of death rituals in Rabbinic Judaism.

European Paganism provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of ancient pagan religions throughout the European continent.
Before there where Christians, the peoples of Europe were pagans. Were they bloodthirsty savages hanging human offerings from trees? Were they happy ecologists, valuing the unpolluted rivers and mountains? In European Paganism Ken Dowden outlines and analyses the diverse aspects of pagan ritual and culture from human sacrifice to pilgrimage lunar festivals and tree worship. It includes:
* a 'timelines' chart to aid with chronology
* many quotations from ancient and modern sources translated from the original language where necessary, to make them accessible
* a comprehensive bibliography and guide to further reading.


eBook available with sample pages: EB:0203011775

In Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, Jon Davies charts the significance of death to the emerging religious cults in the pre-Christian and early Christian world. He analyses the varied burial rituals and examines the different notions of the afterlife. Among the areas covered are:
* Osiris and Isis: the life theology of Ancient Egypt
* burying the Jewish dead
* Roman religion and Roman funerals
* Early Christian burial
* the nature of martyrdom.
Jon Davies also draws on the sociological theory of Max Weber to present a comprehensive introduction to and overview of death, burial and the afterlife in the first Christian centuries which offers insights into the relationship between social change and attitudes to death and dying.

In Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, Jon Davies charts the significance of death to the emerging religious cults in the pre-Christian and early Christian world. He analyses the varied burial rituals and examines the different notions of the afterlife. Among the areas covered are:
* Osiris and Isis: the life theology of Ancient Egypt
* burying the Jewish dead
* Roman religion and Roman funerals
* Early Christian burial
* the nature of martyrdom.
Jon Davies also draws on the sociological theory of Max Weber to present a comprehensive introduction to and overview of death, burial and the afterlife in the first Christian centuries which offers insights into the relationship between social change and attitudes to death and dying.