Animism, Magic, and the Divine King

Animism, Magic, and the Divine King PDF 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).

Animism, Magic, and the Divine King

Animism, Magic, and the Divine King PDF 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).

Animism, Magic, and the Divine King

Animism, Magic, and the Divine King PDF Author: Géza Róheim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Crypts of the Gods

Crypts of the Gods PDF 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.

The King's Body

The King's Body PDF 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.

On the Animation of the Inorganic

On the Animation of the Inorganic PDF 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.

Kingship and State

Kingship and State PDF Author: Christopher Wrigley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521894357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The precolonial kingdom of Buganda, nucleus of the present Uganda state, has long attracted scholarly interest. Since written records are lacking entirely until 1862, historians have had to rely on oral traditions that were recorded from the end of the nineteenth century. These sources provide rich materials on Buganda in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in this 1996 book Christopher Wrigley endeavours to show that the stories which appear to relate to earlier periods are largely mythology. He argues that this does not reduce their value since they are of interest in their own mythical right, revealing ancient traces of sacred kingship, and also throwing oblique light on the development of the recent state. He has written an elegant and wide-ranging study of one of Africa's most famous kingdoms.

The God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory

The God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory PDF Author: David Weiss
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350271209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This book discusses how ancient Japanese mythology was utilized during the colonial period to justify the annexation of Korea to Japan, with special focus on the god Susanoo. Described as an ambivalent figure and wanderer between the worlds, Susanoo served as a foil to set off the sun goddess, who played an important role in the modern construction of a Japanese national identity. Susanoo inhabited a sinister otherworld, which came to be associated with colonial Korea. Imperialist ideologues were able to build on these interpretations of the Susanoo myth to depict Korea as a dreary realm at the margin of the Japanese empire that made the imperial metropole shine all the more brightly. At the same time, Susanoo was identified as the ancestor of the Korean people. Thus, the colonial subjects were ideologically incorporated into the homogeneous Japanese “family state.” The book situates Susanoo in Japan's cultural memory and shows how the deity, while being repeatedly transformed in order to meet the religious and ideological needs of the day, continued to symbolize the margin of Japan.

The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, V. 13

The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, V. 13 PDF Author: L. Bryce Boyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317737148
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Volume 13 includes chapters on the contributions of Weston LaBarre (B. Kilbourne); Geza Roheim's theory of myth (S. Morales); the origins of Christianity (W. Meissner); myths in Inuit religion (D. Merkur); the psychology of a Sherpa shaman (R. Paul); the psychoanalytic study of urban legends (M. Carroll); and the dogma of technology (H. Stein & R. Hill).

Studies in the History Ofr Religions

Studies in the History Ofr Religions PDF Author:
Publisher: Brill Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description


Snakes, People, and Spirits, Volume One

Snakes, People, and Spirits, Volume One PDF Author: Robert Hazel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527542920
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
This two-volume publication offers an in-depth analysis of ophidian symbolism in Eastern Africa, while setting the topic within its regional and historical context: namely, with regards to the rest of Africa, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Greek world, ancient Palestine, Arabia, India, and medieval and pre-Christian Europe. Through the ages, most of those areas have connected with Eastern Africa in a broad sense, where ophidian symbolism was as “rampant” and far-reaching, if not more so, as anywhere else on the continent, and perhaps in past civilisations. Much as in the wider context, snakes were held to be long-lived, closely related to holes, caverns, trees, and water, life and death, and credited with a liking for milk. Even though ophidian symbolism has always been developed out of the outstanding biological and ethological features of snakes, the process of symbolisation, which plays a crucial role in the elaboration of cultural systems and the shaping of human experience, was inevitably at work. This first volume deals with snakes as a zoological category; snake symbolism as perceived by encyclopaedists and psychologists; and ophidian symbolism as it occurred in ancient civilisations. It explores the traditional African scene in general with a view to set the scene for a more proximate baseline for comparison. The divide between animals and humans was porous, and snakes had a more or less equal footing in both the animal realm and the spiritual world. Key features of snake symbolism in traditional Eastern Africa are then examined in detail, especially phantasmagorical snakes, the rainbow serpent, snake-totems, and snake-related witches and ritual leaders, among others. In Eastern Africa, the meanings attributed to snakes were multifaceted and paradoxical. Overall, the two volumes of this publication show that African snake symbolism broadly echoed the diverse representations of ancient civilisations. The widely acknowledged assimilation of snakes to death and Evil is therefore unrepresentative, both historically and culturally.