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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Pre-Christian European & Mediterranean religions
This volume brings together studies on Greek animal sacrifice by
foremost experts in Greek language, literature and material
culture. Readers will benefit from the synthesis of new evidence
and approaches with a re-evaluation of twentieth-century theories
on sacrifice. The chapters range across the whole of antiquity and
go beyond the Greek world to consider possible influences in
Hittite Anatolia and Egypt, while an introduction to the burgeoning
science of osteo-archaeology is provided. The twentieth-century
emphasis on sacrifice as part of the Classical Greek polis system
is challenged through consideration of various ancient perspectives
on sacrifice as distinct from specific political or even Greek
contexts. Many previously unexplored topics are covered,
particularly the type of animals sacrificed and the spectrum of
sacrificial ritual, from libations to lasting memorials of the
ritual in art.
The first anthology ever to present the entire range of ancient
Greek and Roman stories--from myths and fairy tales to jokes
Captured centaurs and satyrs, talking animals, people who suddenly
change sex, men who give birth, the temporarily insane and the
permanently thick-witted, delicate sensualists, incompetent seers,
a woman who remembers too much, a man who cannot laugh--these are
just some of the colorful characters who feature in the
unforgettable stories that ancient Greeks and Romans told in their
daily lives. Together they created an incredibly rich body of
popular oral stories that include, but range well beyond,
mythology--from heroic legends, fairy tales, and fables to ghost
stories, urban legends, and jokes. This unique anthology presents
the largest collection of these tales ever assembled. Featuring
nearly four hundred stories in authoritative and highly readable
translations, this is the first book to offer a representative
selection of the entire range of traditional classical
storytelling. Set mostly in the world of humans, not gods, these
stories focus on figures such as lovers, tricksters, philosophers,
merchants, rulers, athletes, artists, and soldiers. The narratives
range from the well-known--for example, Cupid and Psyche, Diogenes
and his lantern, and the tortoise and the hare--to lesser-known
tales that deserve wider attention. Entertaining and fascinating,
they offer a unique window into the fantasies, anxieties, humor,
and passions of the people who told them. Complete with beautiful
illustrations by Glynnis Fawkes, a comprehensive introduction,
notes, and more, this one-of-a-kind anthology will delight general
readers as well as students of classics, fairy tales, and folklore.
Few classical stories are as exciting as that of Jason and the
Golden Fleece. The legend of the boy, who discovers a new identity
as son of a usurped king and leads a crew of demi-gods and famous
heroes, has resonated through the ages, rumbling like the clashing
rocks, which almost pulverised the Argo. The myth and its reception
inspires endless engagements: while it tells of a quest to the ends
of the earth, of the tyrants Pelias and Aetes, of dragons' teeth,
of the loss of Hylas (beloved of Hercules) stolen away by nymphs,
and of Jason's seduction of the powerful witch Medea (later
betrayed for a more useful princess), it speaks to us of more: of
gender and sexuality; of heroism and lost integrity; of powerful
gods and terrifying monsters; of identity and otherness; of
exploration and exploitation. The Argonauts are emblems of
collective heroism, yet also of the emptiness of glory. From Pindar
to J. W. Waterhouse, Apollonius of Rhodes to Ray Harryhausen, and
Robert Graves to Mary Zimmerman, the Argonaut myth has produced
later interpretations as rich, salty and complex as the ancient
versions. Helen Lovatt here unravels, like untangled sea-kelp, the
diverse strands of the narrative and its numerous and fascinating
afterlives. Her book will prove both informative and endlessly
entertaining to those who love classical literature and myth.
Was Ancient Greek religion really 'mere ritualism'? Early
Christians denounced the pagans for the disorderly plurality of
their cults, and reduced Greek religion to ritual and idolatry;
protestant theologians condemned the pagan 'religion of form' (with
Catholicism as its historical heir). For a long time, scholars
tended to conceptualize Greek religion as one in which belief did
not matter, and religiosity had to do with observance of rituals
and religious practices, rather than with worshipers' inner
investment. But what does it mean when Greek texts time and again
speak of purity of mind, soul, and thoughts? This book takes a
radical new look at the Ancient Greek notions of purity and
pollution. Its main concern is the inner state of the individual
worshipper as they approach the gods and interact with the divine
realm in a ritual context. It is a book about Greek worshippers'
inner attitudes towards the gods and rituals, and about what kind
of inner attitude the Greek gods were envisaged to expect from
their worshippers. In the wider sense, it is a book about the role
of belief in ancient Greek religion. By exploring the Greek notions
of inner purity and pollution from Hesiod to Plato, the
significance of intrinsic, faith-based elements in Greek religious
practices is revealed - thus providing the first history of the
concepts of inner purity and pollution in early Greek religion.
Andrew R. Dyck ranks among the top Latinists in Ciceronian studies.
In this new volume, he offers the first commentary on Cicero's De
Divinatione II in nearly a century. This commentary aims to equip
students and scholars of Latin with the kinds of historical and
philosophical background and linguistic and stylistic information
needed to understand and appreciate Cicero's text on Roman religion
and divination. Dyck situates Cicero's text in the context of Roman
religion in antiquity, and he traces the subsequent reception of
the text. The introduction reviews recent interpretations of De
Divinatione. Dyck rejects the view that has recently been
widespread in Anglophone studies that De Divinatione stages a
debate between roughly equal opponents and without the emergence of
a clear authorial point of view. Instead he argues that a careful
reading shows that Cicero as author is invested in the argument,
with the particular aim of countering superstition. Celia Schultz's
earlier volume in this series presented the text and commentary for
De Divinatione I. With Andrew Dyck's companion volume on the second
book of De Divinatione, students and teachers are well served with
crucial texts from one of Rome's most famous philosophers, as he
considers important Roman practices and beliefs.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship
Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected
open access locations. At the heart of this volume are three trials
held in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The defendants were all
women and in each case the charges involved a combination of ritual
activities. Two were condemned to death. Because of the brevity of
the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise
charges are unclear, and the reasons for taking these women to
court remain mysterious. Envy, Poison, and Death takes the
complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a riddle to be
solved, but as revealing multiple social dynamics. It explores the
changing factors - material, ideological, and psychological - that
may have provoked these events. It focuses in particular on the
dual role of envy (phthonos) and gossip as processes by which
communities identified people and activities that were dangerous,
and examines how and why those local, even individual, dynamics may
have come to shape official civic decisions during a time of
perceived hardship. At first sight so puzzling, these trials reveal
a vivid picture of the socio-political environment of Athens during
the early-mid fourth century BCE, including responses to changes in
women's status and behaviour, and attitudes to ritual activities
within the city. The volume reveals some of the characters, events,
and even emotions that would help to shape an emergent concept of
magic: it suggests that the boundary of acceptable behaviour was
shifting, not only within the legal arena but also through the
active involvement of society beyond the courts.
The nineteenth century is a key period in the history of the
interpretation of the Greek gods. The Greek Gods in Modern
Scholarship examines how German and British scholars of the time
drew on philology, archaeology, comparative mythology,
anthropology, or sociology to advance radically different theories
on the Greek gods and their origins. For some, they had been
personifications of natural elements, for others, they had begun as
universal gods like the Christian god, yet for others, they went
back to totems or were projections of group unity. The volume
discusses the views of both well-known figures like K. O. Muller
(1797-1840), or Jane Harrison (1850-1928), and of forgotten, but
important, scholars like F. G. Welcker (1784-1868). It explores the
underlying assumptions and agendas of the rival theories in the
light of their intellectual and cultural context, laying stress on
how they were connected to broader contemporary debates over
fundamental questions such as the origins and nature of religion,
or the relation between Western culture and the 'Orient'. It also
considers the impact of theories from this period on twentieth- and
twenty-first-century scholarship on Greek religion and draws
implications for the study of the Greek gods today.
'This readable anthology is a good introduction to a civilization
that fascinates like few others ... in this book there are animals
who talk, princesses who are locked up at the top of towers, wicked
stepmothers and many other themes ... An enjoyable book by a
skilled author' Financial Times The civilization we know as Ancient
Egypt stretched over three thousand years. What was life like for
ancient Egyptians? What were their beliefs - and how different were
they from ours? Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt uses Egypt's
vivid narratives to create a panorama of its history, from the
earliest settlers to the time of Cleopatra. Gathered from pyramid
texts, archaeological finds and contemporary documents, these
stories cover everything from why the Nile flooded annually to
Egyptian beliefs about childbirth and what happened after death.
They show us what life was really like for rich and poor, man and
woman, farmer and pharaoh. Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt
brings a long-dead culture back to life.
Sex: how should we do it, when should we do it, and with whom? How
should we talk about and represent sex, what social institutions
should regulate it, and what are other people doing? Throughout
history human beings have searched for answers to such questions by
turning to the past, whether through archaeological studies of
prehistoric sexual behaviour, by reading Casanova's memoirs, or as
modern visitors on the British Museum LGBT trail. In this
ground-breaking collection, leading scholars show that claims about
the past have been crucial in articulating sexual morals, driving
political, legal, and social change, shaping individual identities,
and constructing and grounding knowledge about sex. With its
interdisciplinary perspective and its focus on the construction of
knowledge, the volume explores key methodological problems in the
history of sexuality, and is also an inspiration and a provocation
to scholars working in related fields - historians, classicists,
Egyptologists, and scholars of the Renaissance and of LGBT and
gender studies - inviting them to join a much-needed
interdisciplinary conversation.
Many scholars today believe that early Greek literature, as
represented by the great poems of Homer and Hesiod, was to some
extent inspired by texts from the neighbouring civilizations of the
ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamia. It is true that, in the
case of religious poetry, early Greek poets sang about their gods
in ways that resemble those of Sumerian or Akkadian hymns from
Mesopotamia, but does this mean that the latter influenced the
former, and if so, how? This volume is the first to attempt an
answer to these questions by undertaking a detailed study of the
ancient texts in their original languages, from Sumerian poetry in
the 20th century BC to Greek sources from the times of Homer,
Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus. The Gods Rich in Praise presents the
core groups of sources from the ancient Near East, describing the
main features of style and content of Sumerian and Akkadian
religious poetry, and showing how certain compositions were
translated and adapted beyond Mesopotamia. It proceeds by comparing
selected elements of form and content: hymnic openings, negative
predication, the birth of Aphrodite in the Theogony of Hesiod, and
the origins and development of a phrase in Hittite prayers and the
Iliad of Homer. The volume concludes that, in terms of form and
style, early Greek religious poetry was probably not indebted to
ancient Near Eastern models, but also argues that such influence
may nevertheless be perceived in certain closely defined instances,
particularly where supplementary evidence from other ancient
sources is available, and where the extant sources permit a
reconstruction of the process of translation and adaptation.
The history and writings of the Samaritans remain an often
overlooked subject in the field of biblical studies. This volume,
which assembles papers presented at a 2010 symposium held in
Zurich, illuminates the history of the Samaritans as well as
passages that address them in biblical sources. Through a
subsequent comparison to perspectives found in Samaritan sources
concerning biblical, early Jewish, and early Christian history, we
are presented with counterpoising perceptions that open up new
opportunities for discourse.
In a moonlit graveyard somewhere in southern Italy, a soldier
removes his clothes in readiness to transform himself into a wolf.
He depends upon the clothes to recover his human shape, and so he
magically turns them to stone, but his secret is revealed when,
back in human form, he is seen to carry a wound identical to that
recently dealt to a marauding wolf. In Arcadia a man named
Damarchus accidentally tastes the flesh of a human sacrifice and is
transformed into a wolf for nine years. At Temesa Polites is stoned
to death for raping a local girl, only to return to terrorize the
people of the city in the form of a demon in a wolfskin. Tales of
the werewolf are by now well established as a rich sub-strand of
the popular horror genre; less widely known is just how far back in
time their provenance lies. These are just some of the werewolf
tales that survive from the Graeco-Roman world, and this is the
first book in any language to be devoted to their study. It shows
how in antiquity werewolves thrived in a story-world shared by
witches, ghosts, demons, and soul-flyers, and argues for the
primary role of story-telling-as opposed to rites of passage-in the
ancient world's general conceptualization of the werewolf. It also
seeks to demonstrate how the comparison of equally intriguing
medieval tales can be used to fill in gaps in our knowledge of
werewolf stories in the ancient world, thereby shedding new light
on the origins of the modern phenomenon. All ancient texts bearing
upon the subject have been integrated into the discussion in new
English translations, so that the book provides not only an
accessible overview for a broad readership of all levels of
familiarity with ancient languages, but also a comprehensive
sourcebook for the ancient werewolf for the purposes of research
and study.
In the winter of 1922-23 archaeologist Howard Carter and his
wealthy patron George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon,
sensationally opened the tomb of Tutenkhamen. Six weeks later
Herbert, the sponsor of the expedition, died in Egypt. The popular
press went wild with rumours of a curse on those who disturbed the
Pharaoh's rest and for years followed every twist and turn of the
fate of the men who had been involved in the historic discovery.
Long dismissed by Egyptologists, the mummy's curse remains a part
of popular supernatural belief. Roger Luckhurst explores why the
myth has captured the British imagination across the centuries, and
how it has impacted on popular culture. Tutankhamen was not the
first curse story to emerge in British popular culture. This book
uncovers the 'true' stories of two extraordinary Victorian
gentlemen widely believed at the time to have been cursed by the
artefacts they brought home from Egypt in the nineteenth century.
These are weird and wonderful stories that weave together a cast of
famous writers, painters, feted soldiers, lowly smugglers,
respected men of science, disreputable society dames, and spooky
spiritualists. Focusing on tales of the curse myth, Roger Luckhurst
leads us through Victorian museums, international exhibitions,
private collections, the battlefields of Egypt and Sudan, and the
writings of figures like Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and
Algernon Blackwood. Written in an open and accessible style, this
volume is the product of over ten years research in London's most
curious archives. It explores how we became fascinated with Egypt
and how this fascination was fuelled by myth, mystery, and rumour.
Moreover, it provides a new and startling path through the cultural
history of Victorian England and its colonial possessions.
Based on extensive archival research, The Power of Huacas is the
first book to take account of the reciprocal effects of religious
colonization as they impacted Andean populations and,
simultaneously, dramatically changed the culture and beliefs of
Spanish Christians. Winner, Award for Excellence in the Study of
Religion in the category of Historical Studies, American Academy of
Religion, 2015 The role of the religious specialist in Andean
cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries
was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the
culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder
reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists
and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how
the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish
and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The
Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural
exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural
studies. Taking Andean religious specialists-or hechizeros
(sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology-as a starting point,
she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards
thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous
studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the
colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research
in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United
States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art
historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of
the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout
the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists
retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas
about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of
Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of
assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural
exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately
changed more than Andean ones.
English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History traces the influence
of Old Norse myth - stories and poems about the familiar gods and
goddesses of the pagan North, such as Odin, Thor, Baldr and Freyja
- on poetry in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day.
Especial care is taken to determine the precise form in which these
poets encountered the mythic material, so that the book traces a
parallel history of the gradual dissemination of Old Norse mythic
texts. Very many major poets were inspired by Old Norse myth. Some,
for instance the Anglo-Saxon poet of Beowulf, or much later, Sir
Walter Scott, used Old Norse mythic references to lend dramatic
colour and apparent authenticity to their presentation of a distant
Northern past. Others, like Thomas Gray, or Matthew Arnold, adapted
Old Norse mythological poems and stories in ways which both
responded to and helped to form the literary tastes of their own
times. Still others, such as William Blake, or David Jones,
reworked and incorporated celebrated elements of Norse myth -
valkyries weaving the fates of men, or the great World Tree
Yggdrasill on which Odin sacrificed himself - as personal symbols
in their own poetry. This book also considers less familiar
literary figures, showing how a surprisingly large number of poets
in English engaged in individual ways with Old Norse myth. English
Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History demonstrates how attitudes
towards the pagan mythology of the north change over time, but
reveals that poets have always recognized Old Norse myth as a vital
part of the literary, political and historical legacy of the
English-speaking world.
Sharing with the Gods examines one of the most ubiquitous yet
little studied aspects of ancient Greek religion, the offering of
so-called 'first-fruits' (aparchai) and 'tithes' (dekatai), from
the Archaic period to the Hellenistic. While most existing studies
of Greek religion tend to focus on ritual performance, this volume
investigates questions of religious belief and mentality: why the
Greeks presented these gifts to the gods, and what their behaviour
tells us about their religious world-view, presuppositions, and
perception of the gods. Exploiting an array of ancient sources, the
author assesses the diverse nature of aparchai and dekatai, the
complexity of the motivations underlying them, the role of
individuals in shaping tradition, the deployment of this religious
custom in politics, and the transformation of a voluntary practice
into a religious obligation. By synthesizing a century of
scholarship on 'first-fruits' practices in Greek and other
religious cultures, the author challenges prevailing
interpretations of gift-exchange with the gods in terms of do ut
des and da ut dem, which emphasize the reciprocal, obligatory, and
sometimes commercial aspects of the gift, and explores hitherto
neglected notions including gratitude and thanksgiving. Drawing on
current approaches to gift-giving in anthropology, sociology, and
economics, in particular the French anthropologist Godelier's idea
of 'debt', the volume offers new perspectives with which to
conceptualize human-divine relations, and challenges traditional
views of the nature of gift-giving between men and gods in Greek
religion.
The fourth century of our common era began and ended with a
miracle. Traditionally, in the year 312, the Roman emperor
Constantine experienced a "vision of the Cross" that led him to
convert to Christianity and to defeat his last rival to the
imperial throne; and, in 394, a divine wind carried the emperor
Theodosius to victory at the battle of the Frigidus River. In A
Century of Miracles, historian H. A. Drake explores the role
miracle stories such as these played in helping Christians, pagans,
and Jews think about themselves and each other. These stories, he
concludes, bolstered Christian belief that their god wanted the
empire to be Christian. Most importantly, they help explain how,
after a century of trumpeting the power of their god, Christians
were able to deal with their failure to protect the city of Rome
from a barbarian sack by the Gothic army of Alaric in 410.
Thoroughly researched within a wide range of faiths and belief
systems, A Century of Miracles provides an absorbing illumination
of this complex, polytheistic, and decidedly mystical phenomenon.
In Ancient Egypt: State and Society, Alan B. Lloyd attempts to
define, analyse, and evaluate the institutional and ideological
systems which empowered and sustained one of the most successful
civilizations of the ancient world for a period in excess of three
and a half millennia. The volume adopts the premise that all
societies are the product of a continuous dialogue with their
physical context - understood in the broadest sense - and that, in
order to achieve a successful symbiosis with this context, they
develop an interlocking set of systems, defined by historians,
archaeologists, and anthropologists as culture. Culture, therefore,
can be described as the sum total of the methods employed by a
group of human beings to achieve some measure of control over their
environment. Covering the entirety of the civilization, and
featuring a large number of up-to-date translations of original
Egyptian texts, Ancient Egypt focuses on the main aspects of
Egyptian culture which gave the society its particular character,
and endeavours to establish what allowed the Egyptians to maintain
that character for an extraordinary length of time, despite
enduring cultural shock of many different kinds.
This introduction to modern Druidism provides a comprehensive
overview of today's Pagan religion and philosophy, whose roots go
back to the Celtic tribal societies of ancient Britain and Ireland.
The author covers Druidism's mythology, history and important
figures and its beliefs and moral system, and describes practices,
rituals and ceremonies. A gazetteer of important sacred sites in
Europe and America is included, along with information about modern
Druid groups and organizations.
Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant
cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most
important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a
collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and
Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither
half of the cosmos can exist without its twin; both halves are,
therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically
shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth," but this
erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a
hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this
Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous
American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the
continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of
Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality
among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be
determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Mann rescues the
authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially
missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source
material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as
possible to early sources, and Indian records, including
pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann
respects each Native culture as a discrete unit, rather than
generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this
end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical,
linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with
traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by
speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists
alike a window into the seemingly lost, and often caricatured world
of Indigenous American thought.
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