Author: E. O. James
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781585093823
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
This book provides a complete historical overview of the Mother Goddess and her influence. All of the major female goddesses found throughout history are covered.
Author: Edwin Oliver James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Goddess religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Author: Edwin Oliver James
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566196000
Category : Mother goddesses
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
"In The cult of the mother-goddess, E.O. James brings together the evidence that is now available concerning the unique position occupied by the Goddess Cult in myth and ritual, especially in the Ancient Near East, India and the eastern Mediterranean, and has subjected it to critical examination. James first inquires into the antecedents of the Cult from its earliest manifestations in the sculptured female statuettes commonly called "Venuses," to its subsequent modes of expression in Neolithic and Bronze Age sites. The association of the unmarried Mother, personifying the divine principle of maternity, with a male partner in the guise of the Young God as her son or spouse, is next considered as the Cult developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in Syria and Anatolia, in Iran and India, and in Crete and the Aegean. Against this background is set the syncretistic figure of the Magna Mater in Phrygia and the Greco-Oriental world, together with her mysteries as a dominant feature in the Hellenistic Age and the Roman Empire. Finally, the interpretation of the Cult in Christendom is examined in its mystical and theological content in relation to the Church as the Mater Ecclesia and to the Theotokos as the Madonna. The importance of the Cult is becoming increasingly recognized not only by archaeologists, but also in a number of related disciplines; there can be no doubt that a theme of such permanent significance demands the serious and objective treatment it has received in this volume"--Dust jacket flaps.
Author: Lynn E. Roller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520210247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
This is the first thorough account of the nature and the spread of the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, and the first to present her worship soberly as a religion rather than sensationally as an orgiastic celebration of self-castrated priest-attendants.
Author: David Leeming
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780235380
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.
Author: Philippe Borgeaud
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080187985X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Worshiped throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, the "Mother of the Gods" was known by a variety of names. Among peoples of Asia Minor, where her cult first began, she often shared the names of local mountains. The Greeks commonly called her Cybele, the name given to her by the Phrygians of Asia Minor, and identified her with their own mother goddesses Rhea, Gaia, and Demeter. The Romans adopted her worship at the end of the Second Punic War and called her Mater Magna, Great Mother. Her cult became one of the three most important mystery cults in the Roman Empire, along with those of Mithras and Isis. And as Christianity took hold in the Roman world, ritual elements of her cult were incorporated into the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary. In Mother of the Gods, Philippe Borgeaud traces the journey of this divine figure through Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome between the sixth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. He examines how the Mother of the Gods was integrated into specific cultures, what she represented to those who worshiped her, and how she was used as a symbol in art, myth, and even politics. The Mother of the Gods was often seen as a dualistic figure: ancestral and foreign, aristocratic and disreputable, nurturing and dangerous. Borgeaud's challenging and nuanced portrait opens new windows on the ancient world's sophisticated religious beliefs and shifting cultural identities.
Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
ISBN: 8120802136
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 665
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Book Description
Pattini-goddess, virgin, wife and mother; folk deity of Sinhala Buddhists and Jains; and assimilated goddess of the Hindu pantheon-has been worshiped in Sri Lanks and South India for fifteen hundred years or more, as she still is today. This long-awaited book is the culmination of Gananath Obeyesekere's comprehensive study of the Pattini cult and its historical, sociological, and psychoanalytical role in the culture of South Asia. A well-known anthropologist and a native of Sri Lanka, Obeyesekere displays his impeccable scholarship and a stunning range of theoretical perspectives in this work, the most detailed analysis of a single religious complex in South Asian ethnography (and possibly in all of anthropology). Since 1955 Obeyesekere has observed and participated in modern performances of the rituals of worship, healing, and propitiation in the Pattini cult, particularly the postharvest ritual known as the gammaduva. He presents detailed texts of the gammaduva, placing them in their historical and mythic traditions. Using the texts, he formulates a cultural analysis of the Buddhist pantheon and a critique of empiricist notions of South Asian historiography. Obeyesekere shows that some seemingly historical figures of South India and Sri Lanka are mythic characters and that their historical significance can best be understood by an anthropological analysis of myth rather than through a reification of myth in history. The concurrent Hindu worship of Pattini with its myths and rituals is described in detail. Obeyesekere documents the Sanskritization of Pattini, the changing physical structures of the goddess's shrines from the 1930s to the present, the assumption by Brahman priests of ritual functions formerly carried out by folk priest, and the sociocultural causes of these changes. He traces, too, the origins and diffusion of the cult throughout its entire history, as well as its survival today. Of psychological interest is the problematic status of Pattini as virgin, wife, and mother and her relationship with her god-husband Palanga and his courtesan Madevi. Obeyesekere discusses the psychodynamics of this relationship in detail and explains its role in Hindu-Buddhist socialization and family structure. Further, he uses this analysis to account for local variations in the performance and structure of the ritual. The ritual of the killing and resurrection of Pattini's husband and her role as mater dolorosa will interest scholars of comparative religion.
Author: Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya
Publisher: South Asia Books
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
Author: M. Rigoglioso
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230113125
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
This study of various female deities of Graeco-Roman antiquity is the first to provide evidence that primary goddesses were conceived of as virgin mothers in the earliest layers of their cults. By taking feminist analysis of divinities further, this book provides a fresh angle on our understanding of these deities.
Author: Edith Balas
Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
An examination of the Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance art by art historian Edith Balas.
