The Black Cathedral

The Black Cathedral PDF Author: Marcial Gala
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374719446
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Haunting and transcendently twisted, this English-language debut from a Cuban literary star is a tale of race, magic, belief, and fate The Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral. Told by a chorus of narrators—including gossips, gangsters, a ghost, and a serial killer—who flirt, lie, argue, and finish one another’s stories, Marcial Gala's The Black Cathedral is a darkly comic indictment of modern Cuba, gritty and realistic but laced with magic. It is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.

The Black Cathedral

The Black Cathedral PDF Author: Marcial Gala
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374719446
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book Here

Book Description
Haunting and transcendently twisted, this English-language debut from a Cuban literary star is a tale of race, magic, belief, and fate The Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral. Told by a chorus of narrators—including gossips, gangsters, a ghost, and a serial killer—who flirt, lie, argue, and finish one another’s stories, Marcial Gala's The Black Cathedral is a darkly comic indictment of modern Cuba, gritty and realistic but laced with magic. It is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.

Cathedral of the Black Madonna

Cathedral of the Black Madonna PDF Author: Jean Markale
Publisher: Inner Traditions
ISBN: 9781594770203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Explores the connection between ancient druidic worship of a virgin at Chartres and the veneration of the Black Madonna • Examines the Virgin Mary’s origins in the pagan worship of the Mother Goddess • Identifies Mary with the dominant solar goddess of matriarchal societies The great cathedral of Chartres is renowned the world over as a masterpiece of High Gothic architecture and for its remarkable stained glass, considered alchemical glass, and its mystical labyrinth. But the sacred foundations of this sanctuary go back to a time long before Christianity when this site was a clearing where druids worshiped a Virgo Paritura: a virgin about to give birth. This ancient meeting place, where all the druids in Gaul gathered once a year, now houses the magnificent Chartres cathedral dedicated both to the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and to one of the most venerated Black Madonnas in Europe: Our Lady of the Pillar. Coincidence? Hardly, says Jean Markale, whose exhaustive examination of the site traces Chartres’ roots back to prehistoric times and the appeal of the Black Madonna back to the ancient widespread worship of Mother Goddesses such as Cybele and Isis. Markale contends that the mother and child depicted by the Black Madonna are descended from the image worshipped by the druids of the Virgin forever giving birth. This image is not merely a representation of maternal love--albeit of a spiritual nature. It is a theological notion of great refinement: the Virgin gives birth ceaselessly to a world, a God, and a humanity in perpetual becoming.

Healing Journeys with the Black Madonna

Healing Journeys with the Black Madonna PDF Author: Alessandra Belloni
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591433436
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
An experiential guide to the ancient healing rituals of the Black Madonna • Reveals the practices and rites of the still-living cult of the Black Madonna in the remote villages of Southern Italy, including the healing rites of the tarantella dance • Details shamanic chants, rhythms, and songs and how to use them for self-healing, transformation, and recovery from abuse, trauma, depression, and addiction • Explores the many sacred sites of the Madonnas and connects them to other Great Goddesses, such as Isis, Aphrodite, Cybeles, and the Orisha Yemanja and Ochun • Includes access to 12 audio tracks The mysteries of the Black Madonna can be traced to pre-Christian times, to the ancient devotion to Isis, the Earth Goddess, and the African Mother, to the era when God was not only female but also black. Sacred sites of the Black Madonna are still revered in Italy, and, as Alessandra Belloni reveals, the shamanic healing traditions of the Black Madonna are still alive today and just as powerful as they were millennia ago. Sharing her more than 35 years of research and fieldwork at sacred sites around the world, Belloni takes you on a mystical pilgrimage of empowerment, initiation, and transformation with the Black Madonna. She explains how her love for Italian folk music led her to learn the ancient tammorriata musical tradition of the Earth Goddess Cybele and the Moon Goddess Diana and discover the still-living cult of the Black Madonna in the remote villages of Southern Italy. She vividly describes the sensual shamanic drumming and ecstatic trance dance rituals she experienced there, including the rites of the tammorriata, the transgender rite of Femminielli, and the erotic “spider dance” of the tarantella, which has been used for centuries in the Mediterranean for healing. Sharing chants, rhythms, and sacred songs, she details how she uses these therapeutic musical and trance practices to heal women and men from abuse, trauma, depression, and addiction and shows how these practices can be used for self-healing and transformation, including her personal story of using the tarantella to overcome cervical cancer. Revealing the profound transformative power of the Black Madonna, Belloni shows how She is the womb of the earth, the dark side of the moon, and the Universal Mother to all. Truly alive for all to call upon, She embraces and gives everyone access to Her divine strength and unconditional love.

The Black Guard

The Black Guard PDF Author: A.J. Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1781853827
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
The city of Ro Canarn burns. The armies of the Red march upon the northern lords. And the children of a dead god are waking from their long slumber... The Duke of Canarn is dead, executed by the King's decree. The city lies in chaos, its people starving, sickening, and tyrannized by the ongoing presence of the King's mercenary army. But still hope remains: the Duke's children, the Lord Bromvy and Lady Bronwyn, have escaped their father's fate. Separated by enemy territory, hunted by the warrior clerics of the One God, Bromvy undertakes to win back the city with the help of the secretive outcasts of the Darkwald forest, the Dokkalfar. The Lady Bronwyn makes for the sanctuary of the Grass Sea and the warriors of Ranen with the mass of the King's forces at her heels. And in the mountainous region of Fjorlan, the High Thain Algenon Teardrop launches his Dragon Fleet against the Red Army. Brother wars against brother in this, the epic first volume of the long war. Please note: Great care has been taken to make sure this ebook is both beautiful and highly functional.

How to Build a Cathedral

How to Build a Cathedral PDF Author: Malcolm Hislop
Publisher: Herbert Press
ISBN: 9781408171776
Category : Architecture, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Gothic cathedrals are monuments to God, witnesses to the historic power of the Church, and symbols of the faith of the thousands of believers who contributed to their creation. They are also astonishing feats of construction and engineering, from a period before steel-making, machine tools and computer simulation; breathtaking in their scale and grandeur even hundreds of years after the religious impulse that produced them has largely faded away.How to Build a Cathedral is a visual exploration of the building of these masterpieces, from the initial groundplan to the topping out of the spire. Illustrated throughout with beautiful engravings, it looks at each element of the structure in turn, explaining the process of construction and the methods that were used. At intervals though the book, special gatefold pages offer a detailed snapshot of the evolution of the building as it rises into the heavens. A 16-page colour section allows for appreciation of stained glass and decorative stonework. With text written by a leading architectural historian, How to Build a Cathedral is an illuminating portrait of the genius of the medieval architect.

Origins of the Black Atlantic

Origins of the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Laurent Dubois
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136096345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Between 1492 and 1820, about two-thirds of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were Africans. With the exception of the Spanish, all the European empires settled more Africans in the New World than they did Europeans. The vast majority of these enslaved men and women worked on plantations, and their labor was the foundation for the expansion of the Atlantic economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Until relatively recently, comparatively little attention was paid to the perspectives, daily experiences, hopes, and especially the political ideas of the enslaved who played such a central role in the making of the Atlantic world. Over the past decades, however, huge strides have been made in the study of the history of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world. This collection brings together some of the key contributions to this growing body of scholarship, showing a range of methodological approaches, that can be used to understand and reconstruct the lives of these enslaved people.

Understanding Philip K. Dick

Understanding Philip K. Dick PDF Author: Eric Carl Link
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643363468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
A guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legend Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction. Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

Puzzleman: A Macabre Thriller

Puzzleman: A Macabre Thriller PDF Author: Christopher Alan Broadstone
Publisher: BCP/Texas POĒtrope
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
If you love POE, BARKER and THE TWILIGHT ZONE, you'll love “PUZZLEMAN”! “It’s impossible,” Erik told Amanda. “Ya can’t kill him. Not even God can do that.” Fall into a world of Grumemonsters––hideous zombie-like creatures that thrive in a living hell created by the Puzzleman––where no one is sane down a drain, and down a drain no one is sane. Follow Amanda Zimmerman, a young sculptress despondently searching for understanding after the tragic death of her infant son... John Rainbow (a professor of classical history) and Jeannette Orfèvre (a beautiful French vintner) still longing for the love they shared during World War II... The legless man, seeking retribution and escape from a horror worse than death... And Ben Henfry, a retired detective itching to get back in the game... Disparate lives, yet each are meticulously woven together over time to play a special part in the Puzzleman’s twisted vision of eternal life. Into the black Cathedral Fleur du Sang and into the pipes they must go––into a terrifying world of Grumemonsters, where the inaccuracies of accepted history and the gruesome future of mankind are laid bare. For Amanda, Professor Rainbow, Jeannette, the legless man, and Detective Henfry, the Puzzleman is a personal demon awakened into a living nightmare––and it’s up to them alone to wage their fight for sanity and salvation. A fight that swells into a harrowing escape, spanning two continents and the supernatural perversion of time and dimension. Welcome to the Pipeworld. Welcome to truth and eternity. Welcome to the world of the Puzzleman...where no one is sane down a drain. And down a drain no one is sane.

Hammer of Time

Hammer of Time PDF Author: Erica Lindquist
Publisher: Loose Leaf Stories
ISBN: 1643190431
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
Time heals all wounds. Duaal Sinnay may have banished Xartasia and the Devourers from Prianus, but they’re not gone. Maeve has gone to warn the Central World Alliance, but they have no interest in fairy tales and stories of monsters. So when rumors start of a mysterious White Queen promising the return of Arcadia, the Alliance takes no notice. Now it falls to the crew of the Blue Phoenix to discover what is happening. Maeve has little doubt that Xartasia is this White Queen, but if that’s true, then how can Devourers help her to bring back the kingdom that they themselves destroyed a century ago? Whatever the answer, it promises nothing good for the rest of the galaxy… Hammer of Time is the third book of the Reforged Trilogy.

Book 1: The Crown Prince

Book 1: The Crown Prince PDF Author: Jason W Chan
Publisher: Jason W Chan
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
A kid who discovers he's the Emperor of the Supernatural World! 12 year-old Max has never felt like he belonged at school or in his family. But one day, he is whisked away to a supernatural world where he discovers the very features that make him unique help him survive and even to claim his birthright as the Emperor of Occultoria, the government of the Supernatural World. With his wits, some magical abilities and some friends to assist him, Max must reunite all the rebellious parts of the strife-ridden Occultorian Empire to restore the balance of and keep the peace between the Natural and Supernatural Worlds. His first task is to force the Queen of Purgatorio into submission. As Max steps into the eerie land of wailing ghosts, he discovers that part of growing up means being courageous and confident - even when he doesn’t feel it. An inspirational story of growing up, belonging and believing in yourself, the Crown Prince of Occultoria is the first in a children’s coming-of-age series that combines elements of mystery, adventure, fantasy, thrillers, romance, magic, enchantment and the supernatural.