Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks

Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks PDF Author: Esther Eidinow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199277788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
A study of the question tablets from the oracle at Dodona and binding-curse tablets from across the ancient Greek world, These tablets reveal the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, and help us to understand some of the ways in which they managed risk and uncertainty in their daily lives.

Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks

Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks PDF Author: Esther Eidinow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199277788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
A study of the question tablets from the oracle at Dodona and binding-curse tablets from across the ancient Greek world, These tablets reveal the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, and help us to understand some of the ways in which they managed risk and uncertainty in their daily lives.

BLESSINGS, CURSES, AND SPIRITUAL ATTACKS

BLESSINGS, CURSES, AND SPIRITUAL ATTACKS PDF Author: GODSWORD GODSWILL ONU
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1312915870
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
All of us want blessings, while we detest curses and spiritual attacks. But how do blessings, curses, and spiritual attacks come? And, do we have any part to play as far as their coming is concerned? Though some blessings, curses, and spiritual attacks come without link to what we, as individuals, did and do, yet some of them are connected to our actions and speeches. And you can bless or curse yourself. Spiritual attacks are projected by the wicked spirits and their human agents. The devil has no true or real blessing. Even though God's Judgment does not come immediately because we are in the New Testament, God does punish sins and disobedience with curses, losses, death, and destruction. Sin and disobedience will open the door for the devil in your life.

Ancient Christian Magic

Ancient Christian Magic PDF Author: Marvin W. Meyer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691004587
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
This thought-provoking collection of magical texts from ancient Egypt shows the exotic rituals, esoteric healing practices, and incantatory and supernatural dimensions that flowered in early Christianity. These remarkable Christian magical texts include curses, spells of protection from "headless powers" and evil spirits, spells invoking thunderous powers, descriptions of fire baptism, and even recipes from a magical "cookbook." Virtually all the texts are by Coptic Christians, and they date from about the 1st-12th centuries of the common era, with the majority from late antiquity. By placing these rarely seen texts in historical context and discussing their significance, the authors explore the place of healing, prayer, miracles, and magic in the early Christian experience, and expand our understanding of Christianity and Gnosticism as a vital folk religion.

The Complete Euripides

The Complete Euripides PDF Author: Euripides
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195388771
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Four major works by Euripides all set in Athens: 'Hippoltos', an interpretation of the tragedy of Phaidra; 'Suppliant Women', an examination of the human psyche; 'Ion', an enactment of the changing relations between the human & divine orders; & 'The Children of Herakles', a tale of the descendants of Herakles & their journey home.

Cursed Are You!

Cursed Are You! PDF Author: Anne Marie Kitz
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575068745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
This is a book about curses. It is not about curses as insults or offensive language but curses as petitions to the divine world to render judgment and execute harm on identified, hostile forces. In the ancient world, curses functioned in a way markedly different from our own, and it is into the world of the ancient Near East that we must go in order to appreciate the scope of their influence. For the ancient Near Easterners, curses had authentic meaning. Curses were part of their life and religion. They were not inherently magic or features of superstitions, nor were they mere curiosities or trifling antidotes. They were real and effective. They were employed proactively and reactively to manage life’s many vicissitudes and maintain social harmony. They were principally protective, but they were also the cause of misfortune, illness, depression, and anything else that undermined a comfortable, well-balanced life. Every member of society used them, from slave to king, from young to old, from men and women to the deities themselves. They crossed cultural lines and required little or no explanation, for curses were the source of great evil. In other words, curses were universal. Because curses were woven into the very fabric of every known ancient Near Eastern society, they emerge frequently and in a wide variety of venues. They appear on public and private display objects, on tomb stelae, tomb lintels, and sarcophagi, on ancient kudurrus and narûs. They are used in political, administrative, social, religious, and familial contexts. They are the subject of incantations. They are tools that exorcise demons and dispel disease; they ban, protect, and heal. This is the phenomenology of cursing in the ancient Near East, and this is what the present work explores.

Jesus and the Ossuaries

Jesus and the Ossuaries PDF Author: Craig A. Evans
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 0918954886
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Evans concludes his volume with a measured consideration of the historical value of the archaeological data afforded by the several inscriptions.

Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World

Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World PDF Author: John G. Gager
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195134827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
For the first time text from tablets have been translated into English with substantial translator's introduction revealing the cultural, social and historical context for these spells and tablets of the ancient world.

The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends

The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends PDF Author: Jan Harold Brunvand
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346722
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
America's premier folk detective is back on the case, sniffing out those zany but dubious stories that "really happened" to a friend of your sister's boyfriend's accountant's mechanic. Jan Harold Brunvand—''Mr. Urban Legend" [Smithsonian]—tracks the most fabulous tales making today's cocktail-party circuit and shows why those stories that sound too good to be true probably are too good to be true. The eponymous episode—"The Baby Train"—sheds light on certain predawn activities that have linked unusually high birth rates to the whim of train schedule makers. Other stories offer a revealing peek behind the story of "The Exploding Bra," expose the embarrassing source of "The Hairdresser's Error," resurrect a "Failed Suicide" Buster Keaton would have died for, and show why adults are better off not bringing their comic book fantasies out of the closet. From "Superhero Hijinx" to "The Shocking Videotape" to "The Accidental Cannibal," The Baby Train uncovers the mysteries behind some of the bawdiest, goriest, funniest, most pyrotechnic urban legends yet.

The Creature

The Creature PDF Author: Prasanta Chakravarty
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9354351328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The Creature is an invitation to follow the mechanics between power and pain, which begets the creature. Creatures confront power in, and through, conjunctures of radical contingency. The casual use of power is an exercise in distraction. It is an abiding conundrum that those who endure affliction also exert it as a force over other living bodies in equal measure-not as acts of vengeance or bad faith, but through deeds of forgetful randomness. To ensure social indemnity and security, creatures exercise force over kindred embodiments through a process of collective mimicry. In the bargain, creatures begin to disfigure and distort each other. The line between mutual slaughter and mutual embrace begins to blur. Each transgresses its own soul. At other times, power is an opaque, magisterial and disdainful style of conveyance. It reveals itself out of nowhere. But the steadfast creature is as resilient as it is vulnerable. The more it endures, the greater its perdurance. Perduring creatures may sometimes gain a second sight, forged out of a sense of lyricality, love and abdication. But is abdication, or taking refuge in the wondrous, sufficient to release all creatures from the fatal loop of power and pain? Or will they have to slowly shed creaturely affliction by a rigorous process of decreation? Sifting through the writings of Giambattista Vico, Niccolò Machiavelli, Gabriel Tarde, Miguel de Unamuno, Jibanananda Das, Lev Shestov, Raymond Geuss, Jean Starobinski, Ernst Bloch, Simone Weil, Simon Critchley, Sarah Kane and others, this volume explores the creaturely predicament and its possibilities of freedom. The five chapters in Book I lay down fundamental questions for the creaturely condition: the question of mimicry, the relationship between taking initiative and being hounded, the bridge between senses and destitution, and the vehemence of radical contingency. Book II posits the question of skepticism, fideism and their connection to resilience and generosity in creatures. Book III is entirely devoted to various ways of conceiving the aesthetic: through the tragic, the epiphanic, the catastrophic and through militant material eruptions. Book II and III essentially delve into the sites of freedom that lurk within the condition of the creaturely. Book IV is constituted of a single chapter on the subject of decreation; it grapples with questions of attention, anonymity and abdication.

Petitioning Osiris

Petitioning Osiris PDF Author: Edward O. D. Love
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110985675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 710

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Book Description
Petitioning Osiris re-edits, re-analyses, and re-contextualises the "Old Coptic Schmidt Papyrus" and "Curse of Artemisia" – written petitions to different manifestations of Osiris – among the Letters to Gods in Demotic, Greek, and Old Coptic from Egypt. The textual traditions of the Letters to Gods, to the Dead, and Oracle Questions which evidence that ritual tradition of petitioning deities are contextualised among contemporary textual traditions, such as Letters and Petitions to Human Recipients, and Documents of Self-Dedication, and compared to later ritual traditions such as proactive and reactive curses without and with judicial features (so-called Prayers for Justice) in Greek and Coptic from Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. As with all other Letters to Gods, the Old Coptic Schmidt Papyrus and Curse of Artemisia evidence not only the struggles and aspirations of their petitioners, but also the way in which they conceptualised that they could bring about desired outcomes in their lived experience by engaging divine agency through a reciprocal relationship of human-divine interaction. Petitioning Osiris therefore provides a starting point and springboard for readers interested in these, or comparable, textual and ritual traditions from the Ancient World.