Encyclopedia of Gods

Encyclopedia of Gods PDF Author: Michael Jordan
Publisher: Echo Point Books & Media, LLC
ISBN: 9781648372254
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This reference book offers a comprehensive survey of gods and goddesses from cultures across the globe, with each entry covering specific cultures, dates of worship, the role the god played, and defining characteristics and symbols.

Encyclopedia of Gods

Encyclopedia of Gods PDF Author: Michael Jordan
Publisher: Echo Point Books & Media, LLC
ISBN: 9781648372254
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This reference book offers a comprehensive survey of gods and goddesses from cultures across the globe, with each entry covering specific cultures, dates of worship, the role the god played, and defining characteristics and symbols.

A World Full of Gods

A World Full of Gods PDF Author: Keith Hopkins
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452282616
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
“Evokes the sights and sounds of the ancient world with daring and imagination… An intellectual tour-de-force that challenges us to see the history of Christianity through the eyes of those who actually lived it.”—Los Angeles Times In this provocative, irresistibly entertaining book, Keith Hopkins takes readers back in time to explore the roots of Christianity in ancient Rome. Combining exacting scholarship with dazzling invention, Hopkins challenges our perceptions about religion, the historical Jesus, and the way history is written. He puts us in touch with what he calls "empathetic wonder"—imagining what Romans, pagans, Jews, and Christians thought, felt, experienced, and believed-by employing a series of engaging literary devices. These include a TV drama about the Dead Sea Scrolls; the first-person testimony of a pair of time-travelers to Pompeii; a meditation on Jesus' apocryphal twin brother; and an unusual letter on God, demons, and angels.

Gods and Heroes

Gods and Heroes PDF Author: Korwin Briggs
Publisher: Workman Publishing
ISBN: 1523503785
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Meet the Original Superheroes. Before there was Batman, Wonder Woman, or Black Panther...there was Indra, Hindu king of gods, who battled a fearsome snake to save the world from drought. Athena, the powerful Greek goddess of wisdom who could decide the fate of battles before they even began. Okuninushi, the Japanese hero who defeated eighty brothers to become king and then traded it all for a chance at immortality. Featuring more than 70 characters from 23 cultures around the world, this A-to-Z encyclopedia of mythology is a who's who of powerful gods and goddesses, warriors and kings, enchanted creatures and earthshaking giants whose stories have been passed down since the beginning of time—and are now given fresh life for a new generation of young readers. Plus, You'll Learn All About: Dragons: The Hydra, St. George's Dragon, and the Australian Rainbow Snake Giants: Grendel, Balor of the Evuil Eye, Polyphemus, and the Purusha with the thousand heads Monsters: Manticore, Sphinx, Minotaur, Thunderbird, and Echidne, mother of the Nemean lion that nearly killed Heracles Underworlds: Travel to Hades, Valhalla, and the Elysian Fields

Gods of World Mythology

Gods of World Mythology PDF Author: Don Nardo
Publisher: Referencepoint Press Incorporated
ISBN: 9781678200831
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Certain universal themes run throughout mythologies of the many and diverse peoples of the past. Each pantheon of deities has at least one creator god, for instance. Gods of justice, war, and love are also common. Gods of World Mythology explores some of the leading gods of the Greeks, Romans, Norse, Hindus, Chinese, Aztecs, and Igbo.

Destroyer of the Gods

Destroyer of the Gods PDF Author: Larry W. Hurtado
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481305389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"Silly," "stupid," "irrational," "simple." "Wicked," "hateful," "obstinate," "anti-social." "Extravagant," "perverse." The Roman world rendered harsh judgments upon early Christianity--including branding Christianity "new." Novelty was no Roman religious virtue. Nevertheless, as Larry W. Hurtado shows in Destroyer of the gods, Christianity thrived despite its new and distinctive features and opposition to them. Unlike nearly all other religious groups, Christianity utterly rejected the traditional gods of the Roman world. Christianity also offered a new and different kind of religious identity, one not based on ethnicity. Christianity was distinctively a "bookish" religion, with the production, copying, distribution, and reading of texts as central to its faith, even preferring a distinctive book-form, the codex. Christianity insisted that its adherents behave differently: unlike the simple ritual observances characteristic of the pagan religious environment, embracing Christian faith meant a behavioral transformation, with particular and novel ethical demands for men. Unquestionably, to the Roman world, Christianity was both new and different, and, to a good many, it threatened social and religious conventions of the day. In the rejection of the gods and in the centrality of texts, early Christianity obviously reflected commitments inherited from its Jewish origins. But these particular features were no longer identified with Jewish ethnicity and early Christianity quickly became aggressively trans-ethnic--a novel kind of religious movement. Its ethical teaching, too, bore some resemblance to the philosophers of the day, yet in contrast with these great teachers and their small circles of dedicated students, early Christianity laid its hard demands upon all adherents from the moment of conversion, producing a novel social project. Christianity's novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another.

Agents of World Renewal

Agents of World Renewal PDF Author: Takashi Miura
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824880374
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This volume examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of “world renewal” (yonaoshi). In the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), a number of entities, both natural and supernatural, came to be worshipped as “gods of world renewal.” These included disgruntled peasants who demanded their local governments repeal unfair taxation, government bureaucrats who implemented special fiscal measures to help the poor, and a giant subterranean catfish believed to cause earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich. In the modern period, yonaoshi gods took on more explicitly anti-authoritarian characteristics. During a major uprising in Saitama Prefecture in 1884, a yonaoshi god was invoked to deny the legitimacy of the Meiji regime, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new religion Ōmoto predicted an apocalyptic end of the world presided over by a messianic yonaoshi god. Using a variety of local documents to analyze the veneration of yonaoshi gods, Takashi Miura looks beyond the traditional modality of research focused on religious professionals, their institutions, and their texts to illuminate the complexity of a lived religion as practiced in communities. He also problematizes the association frequently drawn between the concept of yonaoshi and millenarianism, demonstrating that yonaoshi gods served as divine rectifiers of specific economic injustices and only later, in the modern period and within the context of new religions such as Ōmoto, were fully millenarian interpretations developed. The scope of world renewal, in other words, changed over time. Agents of World Renewal approaches Japanese religion through the new analytical lens of yonaoshi gods and highlights the necessity of looking beyond the boundary often posited between the early modern and modern periods when researching religious discourses and concepts.

Battling the Gods

Battling the Gods PDF Author: Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.

In a World of Gods and Goddesses

In a World of Gods and Goddesses PDF Author: James H. Bae
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Expressing his spirituality through art, Sharma’s unique masterpieces are meant to inspire peace and reflection in the viewer. With sections on major Hindu deities and classic Vedic texts that include both art and accompanying descriptions, In a World of Gods and Goddesses is the definitive collection of Indra Sharma’s lifework. By combining contemporary and traditional artistic styles, Sharma creates icons of Hindu gods and goddesses that are altars of worship for millions. Steeped in India’s ancient Vedic cosmology, these prayerful, captivating paintings contain a complete who’s who of the Hindu pantheon—Ganesh, Devi, Shiva, Vishnu, Laxmi, and Krishna all come alive in this unique and richly colored work.

The End of the World

The End of the World PDF Author: Fantasy Flight Games
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781633441880
Category : Role playing
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The supernatural enters the physical world in Wrath of the Gods, the second book in The End of the World roleplaying line! With the scenarios included in this book, you can take up arms with heroes of yore and the Norse gods, or flee from the mind-bending terror of Cthulhu. You may hide from the Four Horsemen as the events of Revelation take place, speak to Quetzalcoatl as the Mayan apocalypse unfolds, or battle wild beasts as Earth itself turns on us. Wrath of the Gods brings you as close as you can (safely) come to supernatural powers ending civilization! This roleplaying game offers you the chance to play as yourself during the tumult of the apocalypse, using an elegant, narrative ruleset. Wrath of the Gods contains five unique scenarios, each offering a different take on the end of humanity by divine wrath. Each scenario also contains an apocalypse and a post-apocalypse, allowing you to survive the initial panic and make your way in life after the world's ending.

The Book of the Gods

The Book of the Gods PDF Author: Chas Saunders
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780752458045
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Are you tired of the same old boring god you've worshipped for years? Looking for something new and exciting? The Book of the Gods has the answer! Explore hundreds of deities of all shapes, sizes, genders, colours with myriad powers.This is the official book of the leading mythological website Godchecker and is packed full of extraordinary facts and mythological trivia. Who is the god of shoes? The god of football? The god of fluff?From the gods of Greece and Rome to the bizarre and often downright scary gods of Oceania and the Aztecs you will find there is a deity for every occasion. Alongside the A-Z listings are 20 introductory essays that give an entertaining and accessible overview of each pantheon.