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Divided into two parts, this volume includes contributions focused on both myth and some of its contemporary reflections (Part I) and the connection between myth, music and ritual (Part II). The fifteen contributions gathered here are authored by academics and researchers from Brazil, France, Poland, Mexico, South Africa and Romania. They focus on a variety of subjects, including folklore, literature, classical and traditional music, science-fiction, philosophy, and religion, among others. The volume operates with an awareness of the capital role the study of the imaginary, with all its implications, is playing in the contemporary world.
“Our main object will be to describe one of the most incomparably beautiful myths that has ever flowered from the mind of man, or from the unconscious processes which shape it and which are in some sense more than man.… This is, furthermore, to be a description and not a history of Christian Mythology.… After description, we shall attempt an interpretation of the myth along the general lines of the philosophia perennis, in order to bring out the truly catholic or universal character of the symbols, and to share the delight of discovering a fountain of wisdom in a realm where so many have long ceased to expect anything but a desert of platitudes.” —from the Prologue
A leading scholar in the United States on Chinese archaeology challenges long-standing conceptions of the rise of political authority in ancient China. Questioning Marx's concept of an "Asiatic" mode of production, Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis," and cultural-materialist theories on the importance of technology, K. C. Chang builds an impressive counterargument, one which ranges widely from recent archaeological discoveries to studies of mythology, ancient Chinese poetry, and the iconography of Shang food vessels.
Upholds “a Disney vacation as a religious experience . . . [offers] insightful arguments relating to the nature of play as well as Nietzschean philosophy” (Reading Religion). Rituals mark significant moments in our lives—perhaps none more significant than moments of lightheartedness, joy, and play. Rituals of play are among the most sacred of any of the rites in which humanity may engage. Although we may fail to recognize them, they are always present in culture, providing a kind of psychological release for their participants, child and adult alike. Disneyland is an example of the kind of container necessary for the construction of rituals of play. This work explores the original Disney theme park in Anaheim as a temple cult. It challenges the disciplines of mythological studies, religious studies, film studies, and depth psychology to broaden traditional definitions of the kind of cultural apparatus that constitute temple culture and ritual. It does so by suggesting that Hollywood’s entertainment industry has developed a platform for mythic ritual. After setting the ritualized “stage,” this book turns to the practices in Disneyland proper, analyzing the patron’s traditions within the framework of the park and beyond. It explores Disneyland’s spectacles, through selected shows and parades, and concludes with an exploration of the park’s participation in ritual renewal. “There is much to commend in Koehler’s study . . . Surely, her work should encourage others to examine myth construction and sacred-secular rituals in popular culture.”—H-Celebration
A Musical View of the Universe is a study of the relationships between spoken myth and musical ritual in a native Brazilian community, the Carib-speaking Kalpalo of the Upper Xingu Basin. The book focuses on the meanings created and expressed through performance of artistic processes in which sound symbols provide a unifying interpretive matrix. Through sound symbols, Kalpalo ideas about types of beings, their relationships, and activities of mind are conceived, represented, and rendered apparent. The book includes the first collection of South American Indian narratives translated directly from the original language from taped performances. Ellen B. Basso's translations take into account the interaction among participants in the storytelling situation and the qualities of narrative performance that result.
A new approach to an old question - the relationship between myth and ritual. Barbara Kowalzig shows how choral performances of myth and ritual, taking place all over the ancient Greek world in the early 5th century BC, helped to effect social and political change in their own time.
This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.
This book examines the figure of the returning warrior as depicted in the myths of several ancient and medieval Indo-European cultures. In these cultures, the returning warrior was often portrayed as a figure rendered dysfunctionally destructive or isolationist by the horrors of combat. This mythic portrayal of the returned warrior is consistent with modern studies of similar behavior among soldiers returning from war. Roger Woodard's research identifies a common origin of these myths in the ancestral proto-Indo-European culture, in which rites were enacted to enable warriors to reintegrate themselves as functional members of society. He also compares the Italic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic mythic traditions surrounding the warrior, paying particular attention to Roman myth and ritual, notably to the etiologies and rites of the July festivals of the Poplifugia and Nonae Caprotinae, and to the October rites of the Sororium Tigillum.
From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, Hsia examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the Jews. "This volume combines clarity of thinking, elegance of style, and exemplary scholarly attention to detail with intellectual sobriety and human compassion."--Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Journal "Hsia has... succeeded in turning established knowledge to illuminatingly new purposes."--G.R. Elton, New York Review of Books "This meticulously researched and unusually perceptive book is social and intellectual history at its best."--Library Journal "A fresh perspective on an old problem by a major new talent."--Steven Ozment, Harvard University R. Po-chia Hsia, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is also the author of Society and Religion in Münster, 1535-1618
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