Only one of the world's mythologies has remained essentially unrecognized-the mythology of Judaism. As Howard Schwartz reveals in Tree of Souls, the first anthology of Jewish mythology in English, this mythical tradition is as rich and as fascinating as any in the world. Drawing from the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Talmud and Midrash, the kabbalistic literature, medieval folklore, Hasidic texts, and oral lore collected in the modern era, Schwartz has gathered together nearly 700 of the key Jewish myths. The myths themselves are marvelous. We read of Adam's diamond and the Land of Eretz (where it is always dark), the fall of Lucifer and the quarrel of the sun and the moon, the Treasury of Souls and the Divine Chariot. We discover new tales about the great figures of the Hebrew Bible, from Adam to Moses; stories about God's Bride, the Shekhinah, and the evil temptress, Lilith; plus many tales about angels and demons, spirits and vampires, giant beasts and the Golem. Equally important, Schwartz provides a wealth of additional information. For each myth, he includes extensive commentary, revealing the source of the myth and explaining how it relates to other Jewish myths as well as to world literature (for instance, comparing Eve's release of evil into the world with Pandora's). For ease of use, Schwartz divides the volume into ten books: Myths of God, Myths of Creation, Myths of Heaven, Myths of Hell, Myths of the Holy Word, Myths of the Holy Time, Myths of the Holy People, Myths of the Holy Land, Myths of Exile, and Myths of the Messiah. Schwartz, a renowned collector and teller of traditional Jewish tales, now illuminates the previously unexplored territory of Jewish mythology. This pioneering anthology is essential for anyone interested in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish faith and culture, and world mythology.

Based on a series of lectures delivered by Rudolf Steiner in Paris, 1906 and transcribed by Eduard Schure, An Esoteric Cosmology is a concise but powerful book and essential reading for students of Steiner. A wide variety of topics are covered, including Intellect, the Mission of Christianity, Manicheism, God, Man and Nature, Involution and Evolution, History of Yoga, The Gospel of St. John, Christian Mysticism, The Astral World, The Devachanic World (Heaven), Dreams, The Evolution of Planets and Earth, Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Human Will, Redemption and Liberation and the Apocalypse.

From the asparas of Hindu myth to the swan maidens of European fairy tales, tales of flying women-some with wings, others with clouds, rainbows, floating scarves, or flying horses-reveal both fascination with and ambivalence about female power and sexuality. In Women Who Fly, Serinity Young examines the motif of flying women as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, expressed in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. She covers a wide range of themes, including supernatural women, like the Valkyries, who transport men to immortality; winged goddesses like Iris and the Greek goddess Nike; figures of terror like the Furies, witches, and succubi; the relationship of marriage and freedom; the connections between women, death, and rebirth; dreams about flying and shamanistic journeys; airborne Christian mystics; and wayward women like Lilith and Morgan le Fay. Young also looks at the mythology surrounding real-life female aviators like Amelia Earhart and Hanna Reitsch. Throughout these examples of flying women, Young demonstrates that female power has been inextricably linked with female sexuality and that the desire to control it was and continues to be a pervasive theme in these stories. The relationship between sex and power is most vividly portrayed in the 12th-century Niebelungenlied, in which the proud warrior-queen Brunnhilde loses her great physical strength when she is tricked into losing her virginity. But even in the 20th century the same idea is reflected in the exploits of the comic book character Wonder Woman, who, posits Young, retains her physical strength only because her love for fellow aviator Steve Trevor goes unrequited. The first book to systematically chronicle the figure of the flying woman in myth, literature, and art, Women Who Fly sheds new light on the ways in which women have both influenced and been understood by society and religious traditions around the world.

This collection of Cuban legends, compiled by the ronowned essayist and literary critic Salvador Bueno, brings readers the best of a time-honored tradition of storytelling in Cuba. These tales, passed on from generation to generation throughout the island, are here retold by a diverse group of prominent Cuban literary figures. Their stories embrace a broad spectrum of Cuban history from the remote past to the modern era. The book features stories of the Taino and Siboney, the island's original inhabitants, accompanied by narratives about Afro-Cuban religious and cultural traditions, and finally tales that are typically ""Cuban"" because they illustrate both the cohesion of the various strands - Hispanic, African, and indigenous - that define Cuban nationality and the patriotism and love of freedom exemplified in the celebrated struggles against Spanish colonialism. Cuban Legends brings to life the stories of unforgettable people and words that have survived the passage of time. They are both witty and wise, and capture the essential spirit of Cuban culture.

Since their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardic Jews have managed to maintain their Jewish faith and Spanish group identity and have developed a uniquely Judeo-Spanish culture wherever they settled. Among the important cultural ties within these Sephardic groups are Judeo-Spanish folktales, stories that have been passed down from generation to generation, either in the distinct language of the group, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), or in other languages, such as Hebrew. In ""The Heart Is a Mirror"", Tamar Alexander-Frizer examines the folk narratives of Sephardic Jews to view them both in relation to universal narrative traditions and the traditions of Jewish culture.In part 1, Alexander-Frizer investigates the relationship between folk literature and group identity via the stories' connection to Hebrew canonical sources, their historical connection to the land of origin, their treatment of prominent family members and historical events, and their connection to the surrounding culture in the lands of the Spanish Diaspora. Part 2 contains an analysis of several important genres and subgenres present in the folktales, including legends, ethical tales, fairy tales, novellas, and humorous tales. Finally, in part 3, Alexander-Frizer discusses the art of storytelling, introducing the other theatrical and rhetorical aspects tied up in the Sephardic folktales, such as the storyteller, the audience, and the circumstances of time and place.This thorough and thought-provoking study is based on a corpus of over four thousand stories told by descendents of the Spanish Diaspora. An introduction addresses methodological problems that arise from the need to define the stories as Judeo-Spanish in character, as well as from methods of recording and publishing them in anthologies. Jewish studies scholars, as well as those interested in folktale studies, will gain much from this fascinating and readable volume.

A pioneer in the strange art and ambiguous science of zo phagy-that is, of studying animals by eating them-British natural historian FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND (1826-1880) was a wildly popular speaker and writer of the Victorian era. In his classic four-volume Curiosities of Natural History, published between 1857 and 1872, he shared his love of creatures exotic and mysterious with readers who devoured his charming and erudite essays much in the same way he devoured his animal subjects. "If there is one person that I would have expected to have captured a sea serpent in the 19th century for the sole purpose of eating it, it would be Frank Buckland," writes cryptozoologist Loren Coleman in his new introduction to Buckland's series. One of the founding grandfathers of cryptozoology, the discipline that investigates animal mysteries, Buckland was not "a wild-eyed 'true believer' in anything strange," insists Coleman, but brought, instead, "a skeptical, open-minded approach" to his work. Indeed, here, in the "fourth series" of Curiosities of Natural History, Buckland's erudition is clear in his animated discussions of, among many other things, measuring a French giant, the "woolly woman of Hayti," performing fleas, six thousand parakeets, the intemperance of salmon, and fossil pork. This new edition, a replica of the 1888 "Popular Edition," is part of Cosimo's Loren Coleman Presents series. LOREN COLEMAN is author of numerous books of cryptozoology, including Bigfoot : The True Story of Apes in America and Mothman and Other Curious Encounters.

Covering figures ranging from Catherine Monvoisin to Vlad the Impaler, and describing murders committed in ancient aristocracies to those attributed to vampires, witches, and werewolves, this book documents the historic reality of serial murder. The majority of serial murder studies support the consensus that serial murder is essentially an American crime-a flawed assumption, as the United States has existed for less than 250 years. What is far more likely is that the perverse urge to repeatedly and intentionally kill has existed throughout human history, and that a substantial percentage of serial murders throughout ancient times, the middle ages, and the pre-modern era were attributed to imaginative surrogate explanations: dragons, demons, vampires, werewolves, and witches. Legends, Monsters, or Serial Murderers? The Real Story Behind an Ancient Crime dispels the interrelated misconceptions that serial murder is an American crime and a relatively recent phenomenon, making the novel argument that serial murder is a historic reality-an unrecognized fact in ancient times. Noted serial murderers such as the Roman Locuta (The Poisoner); Gilles De Rais of France, a prolific serial killer of children; Andres Bichel of Bavaria; and Chinese aristocratic serial killer T'zu-Hsi are spotlighted. This book provides a unique perspective that integrates supernatural interpretations of serial killing with the history of true crime, reanimating mythic entities of horror stories and presenting them as real criminals.

Purple star is an angelic being, who is a star that shines in the night sky but also can transform into human shape living on the spiritual realm. This book is her story to what she has witnessed with the fight between heaven and hell and how earth is always in the middle. Purple star is a seerer and can see the path in which knights and warriors are to take. She is also known as a path finder as she sees things that others do not. This book is all based on the spiritual realm known as the angelic realm. She tells of fights between the light and the dark, a rescue mission and how her life becomes in danger, and a dark star angel that lives in the dark and who has fallen in love with purple star, and she knows it, but they both accept their own path and side they live. Many keep them apart, and the dark will not release him to be with her in the light. He is punished many times for protecting her to the point his life force flows from his body. Together they are a mighty fighting force their gifts combined, and they would withstand all that is thrown at them; one protects the other, and nobody would be able to come between them. The light accepts him as he has harm none.

Dartmoor Legends By Eva C. Roberts 296 pages Contents include: The magic mist - The vengeance of belus - The bards of the wood of Wistman - The story of the spinners rock - The golden maze - The legend of the grey wethers - The nymph Tamara - The wrath of Taranis - The pixies of Ockington wood - The legend of the Abbots way - The legend of Guile bridge Originally published in 1912. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Obscure Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The story of King Solomon has fascinated spiritual and religious writers for millennia - this book advances a theory that Solomon was infact a Magi who created many of the rituals, spells and symbols important to occultists. Although the idea that Solomon carried some sort of mystical powers is not new, this book purports to be written in the ancient king of the Jews' own hand. The magical symbols and diagrams which are situated alongside the various rituals and incantations are intricate, containing pentacles and other shapes. Towards the end of the book a large table is appended, detailing a selection of mystical alphabets and their English. For his investigation, Mathers delved deep into the archives of the British Museum, unearthing an old French manuscript of the text which he duly translated into English. He also replicated the diagrams and symbols; these efforts resulted in this modern English version of the old Solomon manuscripts, and an increase in interest toward writings hitherto obscure.

This book by renowned anthropologist Harald Haarmann illuminates the acquisition of knowledge, and the meanings underlying forms of knowledge, in a broad temporal scope, ranging from the Neolithic through the modern era. Spiritual knowledge is at the heart of this work, which views myth and religion encoded in Neolithic female figurines and revived in the contemporary "primitive" artwork of artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore. Within such a framework, this study employs the knowledge and insights of the relatively new, and very important, interdisciplinary field of archaeomythology, which ties together information from archaeology, DNA studies, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, other ancient language studies, and linguistics. This study does so with a wealth of information in these fields, offering meaningful resolutions to many questions regarding antiquity, and shedding light upon several previously misunderstood phenomena, from the true function of Stonehenge (that its purpose was not astronomical), to the fact that there could not have been a mass movement of agriculturalists from Anatolia to Europe (this is a currently hotly contested issue), to important Eurasian religious beliefs and mythological motifs (with an excellent discussion of shamanism), to systems of writing (with a wonderful discourse upon ancient writing systems), religious expression, and mythology of the exceptionally significant cultures of Old Europe (Neolithic southeastern Europe). The book further discourses upon the legacy of this culture in Minoan and then Greek culture, Old European (pre-Indo-European) lexical items (that is, substrate vocabulary) in Greek, and finally the preservation of Neolithic spirituality in Modern Art. With this interdisciplinary approach, the study demonstrates that all of the subjects of this manuscript are interconnected, in a powerful wholeness. Ancient knowledge, Ancient know-how, Ancient reasoning is an unprecedented study that will appeal across many disciplines, including archaeology, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, ancient language studies, and linguistics. The book also includes many images that will prove helpful to the reader.

In the final years of the Soviet Union and into the 1990s, Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel at an unprecedented rate, bringing about profound changes in Israeli society and the way immigrants understood their own identity. In this volume ex-Soviets in Israel reflect on their immigration experiences, allowing readers to explore this transitional cultural group directly through immigrants' thoughts, memories, and feelings, rather than physical artifacts like magazines, films, or books. Drawing on their fieldwork as well as on analyses of the Russian-language Israeli media and Internet forums, Larisa Fialkova and Maria N. Yelenevskaya present a collage of cultural and folk traditions--from Slavic to Soviet, Jewish, and Muslim--to demonstrate that the mythology of Soviet Jews in Israel is still in the making. The authors begin by discussing their research strategies, explaining the sources used as material for the study, and analyzing the demographic profile of the immigrants interviewed for the project. Chapters use immigrants' personal recollections to both find fragments of Jewish tradition that survived despite the assimilation policy in the USSR and show how traditional folk perception of the Other affected immigrants' interaction with members of their receiving society. The authors also investigate how immigrants' perception of time and space affected their integration, consider the mythology of Fate and Lucky Coincidences as a means of fighting immigrant stress, examine folk-linguistics and the role of the lay-person's view of languages in the life of the immigrant community, and analyze the transformation of folklore genres and images of the country of origin under new conditions. As the biggest immigration wave from a single country in Israel's history, the ex-Soviet Jews make a fascinating case study for a variety of disciplines. Ex-Soviets in Israel will be of interest to scholars who work in Jewish and immigration studies, modern folklore, anthropology, and sociolinguistics.

Kaarle Krohn's Folklore Methodology was the first systematic attempt to state a method of studying folkloristic materials. For centuries scholars had collected folkloristic texts and had commented on them, but they had not tried to formulate a method of investigating folklore.

Folklore Methodology became the handbook for the great Finnish School of folklore research. It provided for its students a guide to the geographical research of traditional materials, a radical departure from the literary scholarship that had dominated folklore studies.

Krohn's book explores the causes and modes of folklore diffusion, development, and destruction; it outlines the influences that cause change in folklore; it provides valuable insights into the nature of folklore; and, finally, it develops geographic methods for analyzing, classifying, and reconstructing individual items from the folk repertoire.

While many developments have taken place since Krohn first published his guide, important new concepts of folklore research sprang from his efforts. For this reason, Folklore Methodology is mandatory reading for every serious student of folklore.

A pioneer in the strange art and ambiguous science of zo phagy-that is, of studying animals by eating them-British natural historian FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND (1826-1880) was a wildly popular speaker and writer of the Victorian era. In his classic four-volume Curiosities of Natural History, published between 1857 and 1872, he shared his love of creatures exotic and mysterious with readers who devoured his charming and erudite essays much in the same way he devoured his animal subjects. "If there is one person that I would have expected to have captured a sea serpent in the 19th century for the sole purpose of eating it, it would be Frank Buckland," writes cryptozoologist Loren Coleman in his new introduction to Buckland's series. One of the founding grandfathers of cryptozoology, the discipline that investigates animal mysteries, Buckland was not "a wild-eyed 'true believer' in anything strange," insists Coleman, but brought, instead, "a skeptical, open-minded approach" to his work. Indeed, here, in the "third series" of Curiosities of Natural History, Buckland's erudition is clear in his animated discussions of, among many other things, a monster lobster, a zoological auction, traps for wild monkeys, the sensation of camel-riding, and determining the temperature of a porpoise's breath. This new edition, a replica of the 1888 "Popular Edition," is part of Cosimo's Loren Coleman Presents series. LOREN COLEMAN is author of numerous books of cryptozoology, including Bigfoot : The True Story of Apes in America and Mothman and Other Curious Encounters.

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2000. Relationships between dress and the body have existed in European and Anatolian folk cultures well into the twentieth century. Traditional cultures have long held the belief that certain articles of dress could protect the body from harm by warding off the 'evil eye,' bring fertility to new brides, or assure human control of supernatural powers. Ritual fringes, archaic motifs, and colors such as black and red were believed to have powerful, magical effects. This absorbing and interdisciplinary book examines dress in a broad range of folk cultures - from Turkey, Greece, and Slovakia to Norway, Latvia, and Lithuania, to name but a few. Authors reveal the connection between folk dress and ancient myths, cults and rituals, as well as the communicative aspects of folk dress. How is an individual attired in a specific ensemble located within a community? Is the community the gendered one of women, the village of residence, the larger geographical region or the nation? The intriguing connections between dress and the supernatural beliefs of agrarian communities, as well as the reinvention of such beliefs as part of nationalism, are also discussed. This book represents a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the cultural meanings of dress, as well as to material culture, anthropology, folklore, art history, ethnohistory, and linguistics. Nominated for Millia Davenport award