Download Free Goddess Of The East Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Goddess Of The East and write the review.

From the tragic young Adonis to Zašhapuna, first among goddesses, this handbook provides the most complete information available on deities from the cultures and religions of the ancient Near East, including Anatolia, Syria, Israel, Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam. The result of nearly fifteen years of research, this handbook is more expansive and covers a wider range of sources and civilizations than any previous reference works on the topic. Arranged alphabetically, the entries range from multiple pages of information to a single line—sometimes all that we know about a given deity. Where possible, each record discusses the deity’s symbolism and imagery, connecting it to the myths, rituals, and festivals described in ancient sources. Many of the entries are accompanied by illustrations that aid in understanding the iconography, and they all include references to texts in which the god or goddess is mentioned. Appropriate for both trained scholars and nonacademic readers, this book collects centuries of Near Eastern mythology into one volume. It will be an especially valuable resource for anyone interested in Assyriology, ancient religion, and the ancient Near East.
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.
Resheph was quite a popular god in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC - especially in Syria - but during the 1st millennium his cult became extinct. Finally it was only maintained in several peripheral and isolated sites, such as in the Palmyra desert and in Cyprus. Maciej M. Munnich presents the written sources which mentioned Resheph and analyzes the features of Resheph's cult. He emphasizes that there is no confirmation for the theory that Resheph was a lord of the netherworld. Resheph was a belligerent, aggressive god who used diseases to attack people, but who could also heal. Because of the long period of the cult and the geographical range, one can notice some local features: In Egypt, for instance, Resheph originally was venerated as the deity supporting the Pharaoh in battles, but then he was summoned mainly because of illness and everyday needs.
In this comprehensive study of a common deity found in the ancient Near East as well as many other cultures, Green brings together evidence from the worlds of myth, iconography, and literature in an attempt to arrive at a new synthesis regarding the place of the Storm-god. He finds that the Storm-god was the force primarily responsible for three major areas of human concern: (1) religious power because he was the ever-dominant environmental force upon which peoples depended for their very lives; (2) centralized political power; and (3) continuously evolving sociocultural processes, which typically were projected through the Storm-god’s attendants. Green traces these motifs through the Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Syrian, and Levantine regions; with regard to the latter, he argues that Yahweh of the Bible can be identified as a storm-god, though certain unique characteristics came to be associated with him: he was the Creator of all that is created and the self-existing god who needs no other.
The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Graves's works on the psychological and mythological sources of poetry. In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.
A cultural history of the goddess of love, from a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian. Aphrodite was said to have been born from the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam. But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus -- and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East. Proving that this fabled figure is so much more than an avatar of commercialized romance, historian Bettany Hughes reveals the remarkable lifestory of one of antiquity's most potent myths. Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today -- and how we trivialize her power at our peril.
Gillian Alban meticulously pursues the Fairy Melusine snake-woman image through the plot and the poetry of A. S. Byatt's novel Possession, into medieval legend, and beyond into her antecedents in ancient myth. The book describes the erotically inspiring force of Melusine's love story and draws parallels with goddesses such as Lamia, Ishtar or Inanna, Isis, and Asherah. Mother, creator, and leader, the figure of Melusine was ultimately vilified and tellingly converted into the demon of patriarchal accounts, as seen in the examples of Lilith, Medusa, Scylla, and the serpent in the Garden. Alban deconstructs part of Genesis, including the roles of Adam and Eve and Cain's crime, and illuminates the Old Testament worship of the goddess Asherah alongside the male Yahweh. A forceful exploration of literature, history, and myth, this study sweeps away limiting assumptions about the female sex. Melusine the Serpent Goddess restores the dignity acknowledged to women of old, making a forceful statement about the power and creativity of women.
The book presents in depth histories of the cults of seven major goddesses and many excerpts from their literature--hymns, prayers, and magical spells as well as descriptions of ritual, temples and clergy.
This text is presented in English and German. This book contains 19 articles dealing with various aspects of the Greek goddess Artemis and the Roman goddess Diana. The themes presented in the volume deal with the Near Eastern equivalents of Artemis, the Bronze Age Linear B testimonies, and Artemis in Homer and in the Greek tragedies. Sanctuaries and cult, and regional aspects are also dealt with - encompassing Cyprus, the Black Sea region, Greece and Italy. Pedimental sculpture, mosaics and sculpture form the basis of investigations of the iconography of the Roman Diana; the role of the cult of Diana in a dynastic setting is also examined. There is a single section that deals with the reception of the iconography of the Ephesian Artemis during the Renaissance and later periods.
Javier Teixidor has found evidence that belief in a supreme god developed during the first millennium B.C. The Phoenician and Aramaic inscriptions he discusses indicate a trend toward monotheism that facilitated the spread of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The author concludes that the traditional characteristics of the popular religions were preserved during this period and that the Hellenistic culture and the mystery cults did not have a significant effect on popular piety. Here, then, is a major reinterpretation of the religious life of the Near East in the Greco-Roman period based on a reliable source of information. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.