|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
Recently discovered ancient silk and bamboo manuscripts have
transformed our understanding of classical Chinese thought. In this
book, Wang Zhongjiang closely examines these texts and, by parsing
the complex divergence between ancient and modern Chinese records,
reveals early Chinese philosophy to be much richer and more complex
than we ever imagined. As numerous and varied cosmologies sprang up
in this cradle of civilization, beliefs in the predictable
movements of nature merged with faith in gods and their divine
punishments. Slowly, powerful spirits and gods were stripped of
their potency as nature's constant order awakened people to the
possibility of universal laws, and those laws finally gave birth to
an ideally conceived community, objectively managed and rationally
ordered.
The fear of parasites - with their power to invade, infest, and
transform the self - writhes and wriggles through cultures and
religions across the globe, reflecting a very human revulsion of
being invaded and consumed by both internal and external forces.
However, in ancient China, the parasitic wasp and the worm
illuminate the relationship between the sage and his pupil. On the
Indian sub-continent, Hindu cultures worship Nagas, entities who
protect sources of drinking water from parasitic contamination, and
the reciprocal relationship between parasite and host is a
recurring theme in Vedic literature and ayurvedic texts. In
medieval Europe, worms are symbols of both corruption through sin
and redemption through Christ. In traditional African American
culture, disease is attributed to infestation by supernatural
spiders, bugs, and worms, while in the rainforests of southern
Argentina, parasitologists fight against very real parasitic
invaders. The worm represents our Jungian shadow, and we fear their
bodies for they are our own - soft and vulnerable, powerfully
destructive, mindlessly living off the corpses of others, and
feeding on the corpse of the world. This book gathers together
scholarly research from diverse disciplines, including
anthropology, the health sciences, history, literature, the medical
humanities, parasitology, sociology, and religious studies.
|
|