These timeless myths are fountains of insight and, many would argue, beacons of light that can shatter the darkness of ignorance. For those of you that are ready and willing to receive these ancient messages, your time has come. All you need to do is start reading. Then the wisdom of Thoth will begin to stir inside you.Some of the stories that you will find in this book are: The Story of Re The Book of Thoth The Story of Isis and Osiris Anubis and the Underworld The Great Queen Hatshepsut Horus: The Conquer of Set The Shipwrecked Sailor The Girl with Rose-Red Slippers The Adventure of Sinuhe The Taking of Joppa The Land of the Dead The Golden Lotus The Seven Year Famine: Khnemu of the Nile Bastet and the Cats The Peasant and the Workman Sphinx and the Prince The Treasure Thief And more! Every story has been formatted to create a clear and concise retelling for all of those who are not already familiar with the lore of ancient Egyptian culture!

    From all across the continent come tales of creation and love, of heroes and war, of animals, tricksters, and the end of the world. Alfonso Ortiz, an eminent anthropologist, and Richard Erdoes, an artist and master storyteller, Indian voices in the best folkloric sources of the nineteenth century to make this the most comprehensive and authentic volume of American Indian myths available anywhere.With black-and-white drawings throughoutPart of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

    Stories of miracles, visions of hell, jokes, fables, and legends, these tales reflect the Japanese worldview during a classic period in Japanese civilization. Masterfully edited and translated by the acclaimed translator of The Tale of Genji, these stories ably balance the lyrical and the dramatic, the ribald and the profound, offering a window into a long-vanished though perennially fascinating culture.

    A study of Arthurian romance and legend which draws together the different strands of Arthurian myth, from sources as diverse as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory, Chretien de Troyes, the Mabinogion, and the English Gawain cycles.

    That tradition continues vigorously to the present day.The 80 stories published in this volume, many for the first time in English, some for the first time in any language, are gathered from 31 countries, including India, France, England, the U.S., Greece, Sweden, Syria, Argentina, Russia, and Turkey. Here are tales in which young mothers become vampires and wolves become lawyers; where ostracism, poverty, hunger, and death are countered by resourcefulness, hospitality, and magic. Here are tales that offer imaginative explanations of why the Gypsies live all over the world, why they have no church and no alphabet, why they love music; tales that link the Gypsies' past to their recent successful efforts to organize against oppression.As varied as the tales are the tellers - factory workers, musicians, novelists, shopkeepers, dancers, professors, lacemakers, political activists - who are identified in the headnotes to individual stories. In these notes and in their introduction, Diane Tong discusses, among much else, Gypsy values, beliefs, and customs as revealed in the tales. The vivid storytelling and Tong's perceptive annotation combine to show how the Gypsies see themselves and the world.

    As you’d expect from Daniel McCoy, the creator of the enduringly popular website Norse Mythology for Smart People, it’s written to scholarly standards, but in a simple, clear, and entertaining style that’s easy to understand and a pleasure to read. It includes gripping retellings of no less than 34 epic Norse myths – more than any other book in the field – while also providing an equally comprehensive overview of the fascinating Viking religion of which Norse mythology was a part. You’ll learn about the Vikings’ gods and goddesses, their concept of fate, their views on the afterlife, their moral code, how they thought the universe was structured, how they practiced their religion, the role that magic played in their lives, and much more. With its inclusion of the latest groundbreaking research in the field, The Viking Spirit is the ultimate introduction to the timeless splendor of Norse mythology and religion for the 21st Century.

    Archaeological excavations reveal numerous local and family shrines, where sacrifices and other rituals were carried out. Intrigued by this folk religion in all its variety and vitality, Dever writes about ordinary people in ancient Israel and their everyday religious lives. Did God Have a Wife? shines new light on the presence and influence of women's cults in early Israel and their implications for our understanding of Israel's official Book religion. Dever pays particular attention to the goddess Asherah, reviled by the authors of the Hebrew Bible as a foreign deity but, in the view of many modern scholars, popularly envisioned in early Israel as the consort of biblical Yahweh. His work also gives new prominence to women as the custodians of Israel's folk religion. fascinating study critically reviews virtually all of the archaeological literature of the past generation, while also bringing fresh evidence to the table. Though Dever digs deep into the past, his discussion is extensively illustrated, unencumbered by footnotes, and vivid with colourful insights. Meant for professional and general audiences alike, Did God Have a Wife? is sure to spur wide and passionate debate.

    Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. With the long-awaited publication of this book, we have for the first time in any modern literary form one of the most vital and important of ancient myths: that of Inanna, the world's first goddess of recorded history and the beloved deity of the ancient Sumerians.The stories and hymns of Inanna (known to the Semites as Ishtar) are inscribed on clay tablets which date back to 2,000 B.C. Over the past forty years, these cuneiform tablets have gradually been restored and deciphered by a small group of international scholars. In this groundbreaking book, Samuel Noah Kramer, the preeminent living expert on Sumer, and Diane Wolkstein, a gifted storyteller and folklorist, have retranslated, ordered, and combined the fragmented pieces of the Cycle of Inanna into a unified whole that presents for the first time an authentic portrait of the goddess from her adolescence to her completed womanhood and godship. We see Inanna in all her aspects: as girl, lover, wife, seeker, decision maker, ruler; we witness the Queen of Heaven and Earth as the voluptuous center and source of all fertile power and the unequaled goddess of love.Illustrated throughout with cylinder seals and other artifacts of the period, the beautifully rendered images guide the reader through Inanna's realm on a journey parallel to the one evoked by the text. And the carefully wrought commentaries providing an historical overview, textual interpretations, and aannotations on the art at once explicate and amplify the power, wonder, and mystery embedded in these ancient tales.Inanna--the world's first love story, two thousand years older than the Bible--is tender, erotic, frightening, and compassionate. It is a compelling myth that is timely in its rediscovery."A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade

    His theories, which the French press has termed "l'hypothèse girardienne," have sparked interdisciplinary, even international, controversy. In The Scapegoat, Girard applies his approach to "texts of persecution," documents that recount phenomena of collective violence from the standpoint of the persecutor--documents such as the medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut's Judgement of the King of Navarre, which blames the Jews for the Black Death and describes their mass murder.Girard compares persecution texts with myths, most notably with the myth of Oedipus, and finds strikingly similar themes and structures. Could myths regularly conceal texts of persecution? Girard's answers lies in a study of the Christian Passion, which represents the same central event, the same collective violence, found in all mythology, but which is read from the point of view of the innocent victim. The Passion text provides the model interpretation that has enabled Western culture to demystify its own violence--a demystification Girard now extends to mythology.Underlying Girard's daring textual hypothesis is a powerful theory of history and culture. Christ's rejection of all guilt breaks the mythic cycle of violence and the sacred. The scapegoat becomes the Lamb of God; "the foolish genesis of blood-stained idols and the false gods of superstition, politics, and ideologies" are revealed.

    Two Jungian psychologists discuss the influence the classic Greek goddesses have on a woman's psyche and how women can bring the different goddess energies into harmony for greater strength and new insights into their lives.

    of what Ladislav Klíma wrote and stood for.—Bohumil HrabalKlima's intense inner life and complex mental state are reflected in his peculiar writings. The eccentricity of style and occasional violence found in his prose were intended to convey the deep conflicts attending his thought processes, and this is perhaps best exemplified in the novella Glorious Nemesis, a balladic ghost story that explores the metaphysics of love and death, crime and reincarnation. Sider, a man of twenty-eight, is confronted in the Tyrol by a giant mountain named Stag's Head and an ancient hovel standing under a high, black cliff. Out one day on a hike, he encounters two women who will mark his fate: the elder Errata, dressed in red, and the younger Orea, dressed in blue (the two colors of the Virgin Mary). From this point on Sider is on a quest for the All, the Absolute, and to achieve eternity by atoning for the misdeeds of a past life. Willing to risk his entire fortune and sanity, he succumbs to his dreams and hallucinations as Orea, or her doppelgänger, becomes for him the apotheosis of the Feminine, a representation of the goddess Nemesis who initiates him into the mysteries of life and death through her attribute of divine retribution. Published posthumously in 1932, this is the first English translation.

    Originating in the wild imagination of French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry and his schoolmates, resisting clear definition, purposefully useless, and almost impossible to understand, 'pataphysics nevertheless lies around the roots of Absurdism, Dada, futurism, surrealism, situationism, and other key cultural developments of the twentieth century. In this account of the evolution and influence of 'pataphysics, Andrew Hugill offers an informed exposition of a rich and difficult territory, staying aloft on a tightrope stretched between the twin dangers of oversimplifying a serious subject and taking a joke too seriously. Drawing on more than twenty-five years' research, Hugill maps the 'pataphysical presence (partly conscious and acknowledged but largely unconscious and unacknowledged) in literature, theater, music, the visual arts, and the culture at large, and even detects 'pataphysical influence in the social sciences and the sciences. He offers many substantial excerpts (in English translation) from primary sources, intercalated with a thorough explication of key themes and events of 'pataphysical history. In a Jarryesque touch, he provides these in reverse chronological order, beginning with a survey of 'pataphysics in the digital age and working backward to Jarry and beyond. He looks specifically at the work of Jean Baudrillard, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, J. G. Ballard, Asger Jorn, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Pr?vert, Antonin Artaud, Ren? Clair, the Marx Brothers, Joan Mir?, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and many others.

    Includes the famous Golem legend and also of many different city landmarks.

    Included are popular myths and legends from all six Celtic cultures of Western Europe-Irish, Scots, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Here for the modern reader are the rediscovered tales of cattle raids, tribal invasions, druids, duels, and doomed love that have been incorporated into, and sometimes distorted by, European mythology and even Christian figures. For example, there is the story of Lugh of the Long Hand, one of the greatest gods in the Celtic pantheon, who was later transformed into the faerie craftsman Lugh-Chromain, and finally demoted to the lowly Leprechaun. Celtic Myths and Legends also retells the story of the classic tragic love story of Tristan and Iseult (probably of Cornish origin-there was a real King Mark and a real Tristan in Cornwall) and the original tale of King Arthur, a Welsh leader who fought against the invading Anglo-Saxons. In the hands of Peter Berresford Ellis, the myths sung by long-dead Celtic bards come alive to enchant the modern reader. "The casual reader will be best entertained by ... the legends themselves ...colored with plenty of swordplay, ... quests, shape-shiftings, and druidic sorcery."-Publishers Weekly