Keel and Uehlinger's unique study brings the massive Palestinian archaeological evidence of 8,500 amulets and inscriptions to bear on these questions. Vindicating the use of symbols and visual remains to investigate ancient religion, the authors employ iconographic evidence from around 1750 B.C.E. through the Persian period (c. 333 B.C.E.) to reconstruct the emergence and development of the Yahweh cult in relation to its immediate neighbors and competitors. They also fully explore whether female characteristics were present in the early Yahweh figure and how they might have evolved in Israelite religion. Keel and Uehlinger's major study marks the maturation of iconographical studies and affords an exciting glimpse into the vibrant religious life of ancient Canaan and Israel.

This is the first English translation of, and commentary on, Valerius Maximus, an early first century AD author. His collection of examples of Roman religious practice and thought offers a unique perspective from the early principate on Roman beliefs about their religious heritage.

The numerous portrayals of gods and humans on horseback which occur in Graeco-Roman art may appear to the unaccustomed eye to have many variations but, according to Mackintosh, are in fact based on a few stock images, which could be manipulated to fit the occasion. In this thorough study, she approaches the questions of how and where the genre first arose in art, how ot developed as it was adapted' by subsequebt artists and how, in particular, imperial Rome made its mark on and through the Divine Rider. The author bases her study on close examination of horse and rider' statues, votives and reliefs from across Europe, taking into consideration the dating, material and mythological association.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This book is about the multiplicity of gods and religions that characterized the Roman world before Constantine. It was not the noble gods such as Jove, Apollo and Diana, who were crucial to the lives of the common people in the empire, but gods of an altogether more earthly, earthy level, whose rituals and observances may now seem bizarre.

The book opens with an account of the nature of popular religion and the way in which the gods and myths of subject peoples were taken up by the Roman colonizers and spread throughout the empire. Successive chapters are devoted to the Great Mother, Isis, the cults of Syria, Mithras, The Horsemen, Dionysus, and to practices related to the performance of magic. It was above all with these popular religions that the early Christians fought for supremacy. In the concluding part of the book Professor Turcan describes this contest and its eventual outcome in the triumph of Christianity throughout the Roman world.

The author assumes little background or specialist knowledge. Each chapter is fully referenced and where appropriate illustrated with photographs and diagrams. The book includes a guide for further reading specifically for English-speaking students.

As well as being of wide general interest, this book will appeal to students of the Roman Empire and of the history of religion.

The decline of Mithraism in the fourth century AD is used as a case-study for understanding the end of other classes of paganism' in the Roman western provinces. The author reviews epigraphic and numismatic evidence to date the final uses of Mithraea. He then discusses examples of wilful damage to Mithraic monuments. Drawing all this archaeological evidence into a historical framework, Sauer argues that rather than losing its social function as the Roman army became splintered, Mithraism was a healthy religion with active shrines until the very late fourth century. Rather than fading away, its desecrated monuments indicate that the religion was the victim of a sustained Christian attack which was also directed at other established faiths in the western provinces.

Contents: The Chaldeans; Sketch of the History of Chaldean Astronomy and Its Influence Upon the Religion; Babylonia and Greece; Dissemination in the West; Power of Astrology; Hermetic Books; Israel and Astrology; The Oriental Mysteries; Theology; Sacred Numbers; The Sun as the Highest God; Development of Solar Theology; Astral Mysticism Ethics and Cult; Mystic Element in Astral Religion; Cosmic Emotion; Eschatology; Astral Mysticism as a Preparation for the Future Life; Principal Doctrines; Magic Processes.

The momentous encounter between Christian thought and Greek philosophy reached a high point in fourth-century Byzantium, and the principal actors were four Greek-speaking Christian thinkers whose collective influence on the Eastern Church was comparable to that of Augustine on Western Latin Christendom. In this erudite and informative book, a distinguished scholar provides the first coherent account of the lives and writings of these so-called Cappadocians (named for a region in what is now eastern Turkey), showing how they managed to be Greek and Christian at the same time. Jaroslav Pelikan describes the four Cappadocians-Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Macrina, sister and teacher of the last two-who were trained in Classical culture, philosophy, and rhetoric but who were also defenders and expositors of Christian orthodoxy. On one issue of faith and life after another-the nature of religious language, the ways of knowing, the existence of God, the universe as cosmos, time, and space, free will and immortality, the nature of the good life, the purpose of the universe-they challenged and debated the validity of the Greek philosophical tradition in interpreting Scripture. Because the way they resolved these issues became the very definition of normative Christian belief, says Pelikan, their system is still a key to our understanding not only of Christianity's diverse religious traditions but also of its intellectual and philosophical traditions. This book is based on the prestigious Gifford Lectures, presented by Jaroslav Pelikan at the University of Aberdeen in 1992 and 1993.

This volume provides new directions for thinking about the structure, organization, and "function" of the gods of the Levantine and ancient Near Eastern worlds, arguing that the structure of the pantheon worshiped in Syria-Palestine mirrored the social structure of the city-states of that region.

In "Honor Thy Gods" Jon Mikalson uses the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to explore popular religious beliefs and practices of Athenians in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and examines how these playwrights portrayed, manipulated, and otherwise represented popular religion in their plays. He discusses the central role of honor in ancient Athenian piety and shows that the values of popular piety are not only reflected but also reaffirmed in tragedies.
Mikalson begins by examining what tragic characters and choruses have to say about the nature of the gods and their intervention in human affairs. Then, by tracing the fortunes of diverse characters -- among them Creon and Antigone, Ajax and Odysseus, Hippolytus, Pentheus, and even Athens and Troy -- he shows that in tragedy those who violate or challenge contemporary popular religious beliefs suffer, while those who support these beliefs are rewarded.
The beliefs considered in Mikalson's analysis include Athenians' views on matters regarding asylum, the roles of guests and hosts, oaths, the various forms of divination, health and healing, sacrifice, pollution, the religious responsibilities of parents, children, and citizens, homicide, the dead, and the afterlife. After summarizing the vairous forms of piety and impiety related to these beliefs found in the tragedies, Mikalson isolates "honoring the gods" as the fundamental concept of Greek piety. He concludes by describing the different relationships of the three tragedians to the religion of their time and their audience, arguing that the tragedies of Euripides most consistently support the values of popular religion.

Most modern studies of Athenian religion have focused on festivals, cult practices, and individual deities. Jon Mikalson turns instead to the religious beliefs citizens of Athens spoke of and acted upon in everyday life. He uses evidence only from reliable, mostly contemporary sources such as the orators Lysias and Demosthenes, the historian Xenophon, and state decrees, sacred laws, religious dedications, and epitaphs.
"This is in no sense a general history of Athenian religion," Mikalson writes, "even within the narrow historical boundaries set. It is rather an investigation of what might be termed the consensus of popular religious belief, a consensus consisting of those beliefs which an Athenian citizen thought he could express publicly and for which he expected fo find general acceptance among his peers."
What emerges in Mikalson's study is a remarkable homogeneity of religious beliefs at the popular level. The topics discussed at length in "Athenian Popular Religion" include the areas of divine intervention in human life, the gods and human justice, gods and oaths, divination, death and the afterlife, the nature of the gods, social aspects of popular religion, and piety and impiety.
Mikalson challenges the common opinion that popular religious belief in Athens deteriorated significantly from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth century B.C. "The error in understanding the development of Athenian religion has arisen, it seems to me, because scholars have failed to distinguish properly between the differing natures of the sources for our knowledge of religious beliefs in the earlier and later periods," Mikalson writes. The difference between those sources "is more than simply one of years. It is a difference between poetry and prose, with all the factors which that difference implies."

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the author has re-created 32 classic Norse Myths that compete in power with Greek mythology.

"MacMullen...has published several books in recent years which establish him, rightfully, as a leading social historian of the Roman Empire. The current volume exhibits many of the characteristics of its predecessors: the presentation of novel, revisionist points of view...; discrete set pieces of trenchant argument which do not necessarily conform to the boundaries of traditional history; and an impressive, authoritative, and up-to-date documentation, especially rich in primary sources...A stimulating and provocative discourse on Roman paganism as a phenomenon worthy of synthetic investigation in its own right and as the fundamental context for the rise of Christianity."-Richard Brilliant, History "MacMullen's latest work represents many features of paganism in its social context more vividly and clearly than ever before."-Fergus Millar, American Historical Review "The major cults...are examined from a social and cultural perspective and with the aid of many recently published specialized studies...Students of the Roman Empire...should read this book."-Robert J, Penella, Classical World "A distinguished book with much exact observation...An indispensable mine of erudition on a grand theme." Henry Chadwick, Times Literary Supplement Ramsay MacMullen is Dunham Professor of History and Classics at Yale University and the author of Roman Government's Response to Crisis, A.D. 235-337 and Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C. to A.D. 284

The primary aim of this book is to serve as a kind of religious companion to the Greek classics. It does not so much set out to interest specialists as to be useful to those who enjoy Greek literature, whether original or in translation, and have made the inevitable discovery that almost every branch of it is permeated by religion.

"Wayward Shamans" tells the story of an idea that humanityOCOs first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continentOCOs eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.

"Living With Honour" is a provocative and uncompromising exploration of how Paganism can provide the philosophical guidance to live honourably in a twenty-first Western society. Part One explores the history of Paganism, its undercurrents of anarchy, heresy, environmentalism and animism, finding its place within the history of Western philosophy. Questioning the morality of some reaches of modern Paganism, it presents a context of nature-based animistic Paganism, and proffers a contemporary understanding of honour.Part Two addresses key moral issues from that animistic perspective, beginning with the foundation of human relationships and attitudes towards the Other. It considers how these play out in our practical relationships with friends, colleagues, children and those with whom we have an intimate bond, including the love affair, commitment and polyamory. Exploring how we value life, it looks first at human life, dying, suicide and euthanasia, birth, abortion and IVF. It then examines the human abuse of nonhuman animals, discussing sentience, personhood and inherent value. Considering the environment, it explores the worldview of nature as a resource, and presents an animistic understanding of nature's sanctity, and how sustainable relationship can be achieved. Finally, it focuses on current global crises, exploring need as opposed to desire. While ethics may be agreed, willingness to compromise desire for ethics is less easy.Part Three explores the factors that hinder ethical action, allowing careless passivity: fear, habit, a sense of impotence and a disconnection from the environment. It considers free will and the powerful fuel of deep inspiration. This is the first book to give an account of ethics from a pagan viewpoint for the modern world.

Though ancient rabbinic texts are fundamental to analyzing the history of Judaism, they are also daunting for the novice to read. Rabbinic literature presumes tremendous prior knowledge, and its fascinating twists and turns in logic can be disorienting. Rabbinic Drinking helps learners at every level navigate this brilliant but mystifying terrain by focusing on rabbinic conversations about beverages, such as beer and wine, water, and even breast milk. By studying the contents of a drinking vessel-including the contexts and practices in which they are imbibed-Rabbinic Drinking surveys key themes in rabbinic literature to introduce readers to the main contours of this extensive body of historical documents. Features and Benefits: Contains a broad array of rabbinic passages, accompanied by didactic and rich explanations and contextual discussions, both literary and historical Thematic chapters are organized into sections that include significant and original translations of rabbinic texts Each chapter includes in-text references and concludes with a list of both referenced works and suggested additional readings

The Nile is arguably the most famous river in the world. For millennia, the search for its source defeated emperors and explorers. Yet the search for its source also contained a religious quest - a search for the origin of its divine and life-giving waters. Terje Oestigaard reveals how the beliefs associated with the river have played a key role in the cultural development and make-up of the societies and civilizations associated with it. Drawing upon his personal experience and fieldwork in Africa, including details of rites and ceremonies now fast disappearing, the author brings out in rich detail the religious and spiritual meanings attached to the life-giving waters by those whose lives are so bound to the river. Part religious quest, part exploration narrative, the author shows how this mighty river is a powerful source for a greater understanding of human nature, society and religion.