This book explores ancient Egypt's feminine anointing mysteries and how these are reflected in both royal art and ritual life. It also traces their subsequent influence in early Christianity. This means there are five broad audiences for the book in addition to those interested in Egyptology, ancient history and archaeology. Religion -- the book provides new insights in religion and mythology. It includes a detailed study of the New Year ritual of anointing the pharaoh , so it will appeal to readers interested in ritual and ancient mysteries. As a discussion of the oldest known African religion it is also relevant to black history. Women's Studies -- the book carefully elucidates the place of feminine divinity and the Egyptian queen in these anointing mysteries. Emphasising the crucial role of the feminine in Egyptian ritual life, it gives a new perspective on women's theology and women's history. Early Christianity -- the book traces the influence of the Egyptian New Year rites in the Christian anointing mysteries, as recorded both in the canonical gospels and the alchemically inspired Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi Library. It is therefore relevant to readers interested in early Christianity, Christian sacramentalism and the Nag Hammadi writings. Alchemy and Hermeticism -- the book's study of the relationship between early Christianity, Graeco-Egyptian alchemy and Hermeticism will interest those drawn to early esoteric traditions. Fine Arts -- the book will also appeal to readers interested in a history, since it gives a high priority to visual images for understanding Egyptian religion. It includes many striking colour illustrations, which are closely Integrated within the text.

This outstanding collection brings together the novelist and scholar Rex Warner's knack for spellbinding storytelling with Edward Gorey's inimitable talent as an illustrator in a memorable modern recounting of the most beloved myths of ancient Greece. Writing in a relaxed and winning colloquial style, Warner vividly recreates the classic stories of Jason and the Argonauts and Theseus and the Minotaur, among many others, while Gorey's quirky pen-and-ink sketches offer a visual interpretation of these great myths in the understated but brilliantly suggestive style that has gained him admirers throughout the world. These tales cover the range of Greek mythology, including the creation story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the heroic adventures of Perseus, the fall of Icarus, Cupid and Psyche's tale of love, and the tragic history of Oedipus and Thebes. Men and Godsis an essential and delightful book with which to discover some of the key stories of world literature.

A Companion to Greek Mythology presents a series of essays that explore the phenomenon of Greek myth from its origins in shared Indo-European story patterns and the Greeks contacts with their Eastern Mediterranean neighbours through its development as a shared language and thought-system for the Greco-Roman world. * Features essays from a prestigious international team of literary experts * Includes coverage of Greek myth s intersection with history, philosophy and religion * Introduces readers to topics in mythology that are often inaccessible to non-specialists * Addresses the Hellenistic and Roman periods as well as Archaic and Classical Greece

Just as we speak of "dead" languages, we say that religions "die out." Yet sometimes, people try to revive them, today more than ever. New Antiquities addresses this phenomenon through critical examination of how individuals and groups appeal to, reconceptualize, and reinvent the religious world of the ancient Mediterranean as they attempt to legitimize developments in contemporary religious culture and associated activity. Drawing from the disciplines of religious studies, archaeology, history, philology, and anthropology, New Antiquities explores a diversity of cultic and geographic milieus, ranging from Goddess Spirituality to Neo-Gnosticism, from rural Oregon to the former Yugoslavia. As a survey of the reception of ancient religious works, figures, and ideas in later twentieth-century and contemporary alternative religious practice, New Antiquities will interest classicists, Egyptologists, and historians of religion of many stripes, particularly those focused on modern Theosophy, Gnosticism, Neopaganism, New Religious Movements, Magick, and Occulture. The book is written in a lively and engaging style that will appeal to professional scholars and advanced undergraduates as well as lay scholars.

Since the first edition of "Approaches to Greek Myth" was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of "myth" in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and what do they mean today?

Here, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important contemporary approaches to the subject. Whether exploring myth from a historical, comparative, or theoretical perspective, each contributor lucidly describes a particular approach, applies it to one or more myths, and reflects on what the approach yields that others do not. Edmunds's new general and chapter-level introductions recontextualize these essays and also touch on recent developments in scholarship in the interpretation of Greek myth.

Contributors are Jordi Pamias, on the reception of Greek myth through history; H. S. Versnel, on the intersections of myth and ritual; Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, on the near Eastern contexts; Joseph Falaky Nagy, on Indo-European structure in Greek myth; William Hansen, on myth and folklore; Claude Calame, on the application of semiotic theory of narrative; Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, on reading visual sources such as vase paintings; and Robert A. Segal, on psychoanalytic interpretations.

Melania the Younger: From Rome to Jerusalem explores the richly detailed story of Melania, an early fifth-century Roman Christian aristocrat who renounced her staggering wealth to lead a life of ascetic renunciation. Hers is a tale of "riches to rags." Born to high Roman aristocracy in the late fourth century, Melania encountered numerous difficulties posed by family members, Roman officials, and historical circumstances in disposing of her wealth, property (spread across at least eight Roman provinces), and thousands of slaves. Leaving Rome with her entourage a few years before Alaric the Goth's sack of Rome in 410, she journeyed to Sicily, then to North Africa, finally settling in Jerusalem-all while founding monasteries along the way. Towards the end of her life, she traveled to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) in an attempt to convert to Christianity her still-pagan uncle, who was on a state mission to the eastern Roman court. Throughout her life, she was accustomed to meet and be assisted by emperors and empresses, bishops, and other high dignitaries. Embracing a fairly extreme asceticism, Melania died in Jerusalem in 439. A new English translation of her Life, composed by a long-time assistant who succeeded her in the direction of the male and female monasteries in Jerusalem, accompanies this biographical study.

This revised translation of Fritz Graf's highly acclaimed introduction to Greek mythology offers a chronological account of the principal Greek myths that appear in the surviving literary and artistic sources and concurrently documents the history of interpretation of Greek mythology from the 17th century to the present. First surveying the various definitions of myth that have been advanced, Graf proceeds to examine topics such as the relationship between Greek myths and epic poetry, the connection between particular myths and shrines or holy festivals, the use of myth in Greek song and tragedy, and the uses and interpretations of myth by philosophers and allegorists.

The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life-and even invented real automated machines The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life-and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, "life through craft." In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements-and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines. Revealing how science has always been driven by imagination, and how some of today's most advanced tech innovations were foreshadowed in ancient myth, Gods and Robots is a gripping new story of mythology for the age of AI.

Rome's Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire's holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome's most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This is the first book that follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early middle ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill's tonnage of marble and gold bedecked monuments, but rather an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh centuries CE. During this time, the imperial triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill's different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill's role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state's disintegration in the fifth century were the hill's associations with the raw power of Rome's empire.

Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia on Cyprus from 367 to 403 CE, was incredibly influential in the last decades of the fourth century. Whereas his major surviving text-the Panarion, an encyclopedia of heresies-is studied for lost sources, Epiphanius himself is often dismissed as an anti-intellectual eccentric, a marginal figure of late antiquity. In this book, Andrew S. Jacobs moves Epiphanius from the margin back toward the center and proposes we view major cultural themes of late antiquity in a new light altogether. Through an examination of the key cultural concepts of celebrity, conversion, discipline, scripture, and salvation, Jacobs shifts our understanding of late antiquity from a transformational period open to new ideas and peoples toward a Christian Empire that posited a troubling, but ever-present, otherness at the center of its cultural production.

Appearing earlier in the multivolume series "A History of Private Life", this text is a history of the Roman Empire in pagan times. It is an interpretation of the universal civilization of the Romans, so much of it Hellenic, that later gave way to Christianity. The civilization, culture, literature, art, and even religion of Rome are discussed in this work.

Whatever we may think of Alexander-whether Great or only lucky, a civilizer or a sociopath-most people do not regard him as a religious leader. And yet religion permeated all aspects of his career. When he used religion astutely, he and his army prospered. In Egypt, he performed the ceremonies needed to be pharaoh, and thus became a god as well as a priest. Babylon surrendered to him partly because he agreed to become a sacred king. When Alexander disregarded religion, he and his army suffered. In Iran, for instance, where he refused to be crowned and even destroyed a shrine, resistance against him mounted. In India, he killed Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus by the hundreds of thousands until his officers, men he regarded as religious companians, rebelled against him and forced him to abandon his campaign of conquest. Although he never fully recovered from this last disappointment, he continued to perform his priestly duties in the rest of his empire. As far as we know, the last time he rose from his bed was to perform a sacrifice. Ancient writers knew little about Near Eastern religions, no doubt due to the difficulty of travel to Babylon, India, and the interior of Egypt. Yet details of these exotic religions can be found in other ancient sources, including Greek, and in the last thirty years, knowledge of Alexander's time in the Near East has increased. Egyptologists and Assyriologists have written the first thorough accounts of Alexander's religious doings in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Recent archaeological work has also allowed scholars to uncover new aspects of Macedonian religious policy. Soldier, Priest, and God, the first religious biography of Alexander, incorporates this recent scholarship to provide a vivid and unique portrait of a remarkable leader.