"All myths and sagas and legends are like a shimmering veil of many colours, stirred now and then by the wind of our desires, but still hiding from most of us that Council of the Wise seated at the Round Table of the Stars... But between us and them lies the gulf of our arrogance and the mists of our unbelief." The Flaming Door is perhaps Eleanor Merry's most famous work and made an important contribution to the renewal of Celtic mythology. Slumbering in the ancient sagas and legends are the secrets of initiation: when men and women found their way through the 'flaming door', the threshold between the physical and spiritual worlds. The book falls into two parts: before Christ, which includes studies of The Bards, The Cauldron of Ceridwen and Hu the Mighty; and after Christ, which includes the Legends of Odrum, St Columba and the Legends of the Rose and the Lily.

A stunning YA romantasy inspired by Greek mythology by the acclaimed author of The Fandom duology. Twin sisters, Icari and Sephie, live in a world where magical gifts are bestowed on a chosen few, divided into three callings: healers, embalmers and alchemists. Icari is a born healer. Sephie is shocked when she's told she's an embalmer; especially since she already has alchemist powers. One person holding two powers is a crime punishable by death, so Sephie now carries a fatal secret. When winged demons steal Sephie to the underworld, only a pair of wings can bring Icari to save her twin. But can a gentle healer learn to fight - and fly? A thrilling YA fantasy adventure romance inspired by Greek mythology From the acclaimed author of The Fandom duology, Anna Day A tale of love, sisterhood, magic and the triumph of life and truth over death Set in a gorgeous desert world of Oases and citadels PRAISE FOR THE FANDOM: 'I couldn't put it down' MELINDA SALISBURY 'I cannot recommend The Fandom highly enough' LOUISE O'NEILL 'I devoured The Fandom in one sitting' KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE '[A] glorious epic ode to fan culture ... For fans of Fangirl and Caraval.' BUZZFEED

Ancient Greek culture is pervaded by a profound ambivalence regarding female beauty. It is an awe-inspiring, supremely desirable gift from the gods, essential to the perpetuation of a man's name through reproduction; yet it also grants women terrifying power over men, posing a threat inseparable from its allure. The myth of Helen is the central site in which the ancient Greeks expressed and reworked their culture's anxieties about erotic desire. Despite the passage of three millennia, contemporary culture remains almost obsessively preoccupied with all the power and danger of female beauty and sexuality that Helen still represents. Yet Helen, the embodiment of these concerns for our purported cultural ancestors, has been little studied from this perspective. Such issues are also central to contemporary feminist thought. Helen of Troy engages with the ancient origins of the persistent anxiety about female beauty, focusing on this key figure from ancient Greek culture in a way that both extends our understanding of that culture and provides a useful perspective for reconsidering aspects of our own. Moving from Homer and Hesiod to Sappho, Aeschylus, and Euripides, Ruby Blondell offers a fresh examination of the paradoxes and ambiguities that Helen embodies. In addition to literary sources, Blondell considers the archaeological record, which contains evidence of Helen's role as a cult figure, worshipped by maidens and newlyweds. The result is a compelling new interpretation of this alluring figure.

Originally published in 1903, this book traces the influence of the ancient pagan legends of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, on later Christian hagiography. Rendel Harris charts how the Church not only displaced ancient religious practices centred around the Dioscuri with their own traditions, but also how Christians took pagan legends and reshaped them for their own purposes. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in comparative religious history, the history of the early church and the influences of paganism on Christianity.

This boxed set of two encyclopedias charts the rise and fall of the ancient American empires - including the Chavin, Paracas, Moche, Olmec and Zapotec. It is an absorbing guide to the lost world of the peoples of the sun, their awe-inspiring history, myths and culture. You can explore dozens of vitally important World Heritage sites, including Teotihuacan, Cuzco and the Nazca lines. It describes burial practices, mummies, ritual sacrifice and the importance of gold as well as exploring the impact on native religion of the coming of Christianity. 1000 stunning photographs, statues, sculptures, paintings, maps and illustrations reveal an amazing visual history. This two-volume comprehensive and authoritative history describes the political, military and social world of ancient America. It explores the region's vivid mythology, including tales of creation, earth and sky; legends of the gods, goddesses and heroes; and stories of fertility, harvest and the afterlife. The first book focuses on the Maya and Aztec civilizations of Mexico and Central America, and the second on the Inca Empire that stretched the length of South America. Taking in many other cultures, this is a perfect introduction to the subject and also a stunning visual record of a fascinating period that has helped to shape our world.

Originally published in 1934, this book contains the Cromer Greek Prize-winning essay for that year on the subject of the still little-understood Greek religion Orphism. Watmough examines Orpheus and Orphism through a distinctly Protestant lens, arguing that both were religions 'of reform' sharing similar views on asceticism and the wages of sin in the afterlife. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Greek mysticism and ancient religion.

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

Originally published in 1902, this book provides an extensive survey of the tradition of votive offerings in ancient Greece. Rouse details the various motives behind offerings, including propitiation, tithes, and domestic purposes, drawing on the evidence of inscriptions and ancient eyewitnesses, and also examines ancient votive formulae. Thirteen indices containing an exhaustive list of epigraphical references to votive offerings at various shrines are also included. This well-written and richly-illustrated book will be of value to anyone with an interest in ancient Greek religion and the history of votive offerings.

Knossos is one of the most important sites in the ancient Mediterranean. It remained amongst the largest settlements on the island of Crete from the Neolithic until the late Roman times, but aside from its size it held a place of particular significance in the mythological imagination of Greece and Rome as the seat of King Minos, the location of the Labyrinth and the home of the Minotaur. Sir Arthur Evans’ discovery of ‘the Palace of Minos’ has indelibly associated Knossos in the modern mind with the ‘lost’ civilisation of Bronze Age Crete. The allure of this ‘lost civilisation’, together with the considerable achievements of ‘Minoan’ artists and craftspeople, remain a major attraction both to scholars and to others outside the academic world as a bastion of a romantic approach to the past. In this volume, James Whitley provides an up-to-date guide to the site and its function from the Neolithic until the present day. This study includes a re-appraisal Bronze Age palatial society, as well as an exploration of the history of Knossos in the archaeological imagination. In doing so he takes a critical look at the guiding assumptions of Evans and others, reconstructing how and why the received view of this ancient settlement has evolved from the Iron Age up to the modern era.

This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a 'Jamesonian approach' to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.

Historians often regard the police as a modern development, and indeed, many pre-modern societies had no such institution. Most recent scholarship has claimed that Roman society relied on kinship networks or community self-regulation as a means of conflict resolution and social control. This model, according to Christopher Fuhrmann, fails to properly account for the imperial-era evidence, which argues in fact for an expansion of state-sponsored policing activities in the first three centuries of the Common Era. Drawing on a wide variety of source material--from art, archaeology, administrative documents, Egyptian papyri, laws, Jewish and Christian religious texts, and ancient narratives--Policing the Roman Empire provides a comprehensive overview of Roman imperial policing practices with chapters devoted to fugitive slave hunting, the pivotal role of Augustus, the expansion of policing under his successors, and communities lacking soldier-police that were forced to rely on self-help or civilian police.
Rather than merely cataloguing references to police, this study sets policing in the broader context of Roman attitudes towards power, public order, and administration. Fuhrmann argues that a broad range of groups understood the potential value of police, from the emperors to the peasantry. Years of different police initiatives coalesced into an uneven patchwork of police institutions that were not always coordinated, effective, or upright. But the end result was a new means by which the Roman state--more ambitious than often supposed--could seek to control the lives of its subjects, as in the imperial persecutions of Christians.
The first synoptic analysis of Roman policing in over a hundred years, and the first ever in English, Policing the Roman Empire will be of great interest to scholars and students of classics, history, law, and religion.

The 'Orphic' gold tablets, tiny scraps of gold foil found in graves throughout the ancient Greek world, are some of the most fascinating and baffling pieces of evidence for ancient Greek religion. This collection brings together a number of previously published and unpublished studies from scholars around the world, making accessible to a wider audience some of the new methodologies being applied to the study of these tablets. The volume also contains an updated edition of the tablet texts, reflecting the most recent discoveries and accompanied by English translations and critical apparatus. This survey of trends in the scholarship, with an up-to-date bibliography, not only provides an introduction to the serious study of the tablets, but also illuminates their place within scholarship on ancient Greek religion.