Author: Giza Rsheim
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1596053879
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
If the ancient kingdom of Sumer was the due of the serpent or bull hero who defeated the old serpent or bull and had access to the Divine Mother we can understand why her love appears to be a dangerous boon in later ages. For year by year the chosen of Ishtar has to encounter a foe of his own blood and one of the two "bulls" is dispatched to the country without return. -from "The Divine King" Thoroughly fascinating and totally engrossing, this 1930 work is an exploration of myth and magic in ancient cultures and how they tapped into the most elemental of human experiences-sex, death, tribalism, and war-to lay the foundations of modern religion, contemporary politics, and even the tradition of scientific inquiry. Armchair anthropologists, readers of comparative mythology, and anyone interested in the fundamental basis of the human subconscious will find this book extraordinarily enlightening. Hungarian anthropologist GZA RHEIM (1891-1953) was the first professor of anthropology at the University of Budapest, a position he held from 1919 to 1938, when he fled to the United States to escape the unrest of Europe just prior to World War II. He is also the author of The Riddle of the Sphinx (1934), The Origin and Function of Culture (1943), The Eternal Ones of the Dream (1945), and The Gates of the Dream (1952).
Author: Géza Róheim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Kuel Maluil Jok
Publisher: Sidestone Press
ISBN: 908890054X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Animism as a religion and a culture of the Nilotic peoples of the Upper River Nile in modern "Southern Sudan". It gives an account of how the animistic ritual performances of the divine chief-priests are strategies in conflict management and resolution. For centuries, the Nilotic peoples have been resisting changes to new religious identities and conservatively remained Animists. Their current interactions with the external world, however, have transformed their religious identities. At present, the Nilotics are Animist-Christians or Animist-Muslims. This does not mean that the converted Nilotics relinquish Animism and become completely assimilated to the new religious prophetic dogmas, instead, they develop compatible religious practices of Animism, Christianity and Islam. New Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan which is sweeping Africa into Islamic religious orthodoxy, where Sharia (Islamic law) is the law of the land, rejects this compatibility and categorises the Nilotics as "heathens" and "apostates". Such characterisation engenders opposing religious categories, with one side urging Sharia and the other for what this study calls "gradable" culture. Kuel Jok is a researcher at the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki. In Sudan, Jok obtained a degree in English Linguistics and Literature and diplomas in Philosophy and Translation. He also studied International Law in Egypt. In Europe, Jok acquired an MA in Sociology from the University of Joensuu, Finland and a PhD in the same field from the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Author: Randa Kassis
Publisher: E-Kutub Ltd
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Randa Kassis starts from an anthropological challenge, saying that the system of religious ethics which is intended to form templates of what is forbidden or acceptable in sexual relationships between humans was only a modification of myths and dominating social experiences that sought to control this instinct to serve the power of forbidding. These myths have raised that form of ethics to a sacred rank, not only because they were unable to understand sex but because they were unable to understand the mysteries of nature too. Kassis takes up this challenge in order to say that life and liberty are parts of each other and they are linked to our capacity of awareness. If we discover that religious morality was a result of historical misunderstanding, then we will need to free this morality from the prison of human virtue.
Author: Spyros Papapetros
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638019X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
Throughout human history, people have imagined inanimate objects to have intelligence, language, and even souls. In our secular societies today, we still willingly believe that nonliving objects have lives of their own as we find ourselves interacting with computers and other equipment. In On the Animation of the Inorganic, Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century—a period of great technical innovation whose effects continue to reverberate today. Exploring key works of art historians such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Alois Riegl, as well as architects and artists like Fernand Léger, Mies van der Rohe, and Salvador Dalí, Papapetros tracks the evolution of the problem of animation from the fin de siècle through the twentieth century. He argues that empathy—the ability to identify with objects of the external world—was repressed by twentieth-century modernist culture, but it returned, projected onto inorganic objects such as machines, automobiles, and crystalline skyscrapers. These modern artifacts, he demonstrates, vibrated with energy, life, and desire of their own and had profound effects on people. Subtle and insightful, this book will change how we view modernist art, architecture, and their histories.
Author: Randall Styers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190287926
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.
Author: Alvin Miller
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 0961643501
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 95
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Book Description
An unusual perspective on current End Time Events including the Rapture and the Great Tribulation.
Author: Sergio Bertelli
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271041390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
The King's Body offers a unique and up-to-date overview of a central theme in European history: the nature and meaning of the sacred rituals of kingship. Informed by the work of recent cultural anthropologists, Sergio Bertelli explores the cult of kingship, which pervaded the lives of hundreds of thousands of subjects, poor and rich, noble and cleric. His analysis takes in a wide spectrum, from the Vandal kings of Spain and the long-haired kings of France, to the beheaded kings of England and France, Charles I and Louis XVI. Bertelli explores the multiple meanings of the rites related to the king's body, from his birth (with the exhibition of his masculinity) to the crowning (a rebirth) to his death (a triumph and an apotheosis). We see how particular occasions such as entrances, processions, and banquets make sense only as they related directly to the king's body. Bertelli also singles out crowd-participatory aspects of sacred kingship, including the rites of violence connected with the interregnum (perceived as a suspension of the law) and the rites of expulsion for a tyrant's body, emphasizing the inversion of crowning rituals. First published in Italy in 1990, The King's Body has been revised and updated for English-speaking readers and expertly translated from the Italian by R. Burr Litchfield. Deftly argued and amply illustrated, this book is a perfect introduction to the cult of kingship in the West; at the same time, it illuminates for modern readers how strangely different the medieval and early modern world was from our own.
Author: Alkis Kontos
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442655704
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
One is usually conscious of tyranny and oppression; domination is more subtle. It is an abandonment of our freedom, our will, and our love of justice, and yet socially, psychologically, and ontologically domination in some degree seems inevitable. There is now in the western world an uneasy sense that more domination is going on than necessary, and this work tries to outline the theoretic modalities of this human predicament. The twelve essays in Domination examine such questions as: Does the ego of the infant require for its development some experiences of dominance? Is it men or the system that causes the domination of women? How has capitalism with its property laws entailed limits on national and personal freedom? What do existentialism and critical theory have to tell us about violence and reason, or about magic and science, as modes of life that constrain everyone? What is racialism? And, if the world is beyond the powers of reason, what does modern man now make his public and private raison d’être? Those who are looking for amelioration of the quality and quantity of human freedom will find this book helpful in defining and cracking the chains. The contributors, in order of their appearance of their essays, are O. Weininger, Elizabeth Brady, R.T. Naylor, R.O. Matthews, C.B. Macpherson, Monika Langer, Keith McCallum, Ato Sekyi-Out, Christian Lenhardt, Ben Agger, David Cook, and Alkis Kontos.
Author: Robert Alan Segal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815322559
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
