Religious Studies

Myths are grouped by theme under such headings as Creation, Fertility and Cultivation, Gods and Men, and the Afterlife, allowing readers to compare similar stories from different parts of the world and to gain insight into other cultures. Background information about historical and cultural events includes photos of places and objects mentioned in each story.

The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion offers a fully rounded (and highly authoritative) point of access to all aspects of ancient religious life and thought.

The essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars working in the rapidly developing field of witchcraft studies, explore the historical literature regarding witch beliefs and witch trials in Europe and colonial America between the early fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries.

With research sourced by the world's greatest libraries, Robbins has compiled a rational, balanced history of 300 years of horror concentrated primarily in Western Europe. Spanning from the 15th century through the 18th century, the witch-hunt frenzy marks a period of suppressed rational thought; never before have so many been so wrong.

Scholars of religion have long assumed that ritual and belief constitute the fundamental building blocks of religious traditions and that these two components of religion are interrelated and interdependent in significant ways.

Exploring the elements of reality in early modern witchcraft and popular magic, through a combination of detailed archival research and broad-ranging interdisciplinary analyses, this book complements and challenges existing scholarship, and offers unique insights into this murky aspect of early modern history.

Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.

Gideon Bohak gives a pioneering account of the broad history of ancient Jewish magic, from the Second Temple to the rabbinic period. It is based both on ancient magicians' own compositions and products in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, and on the descriptions and prescriptions of non-magicians, to reconstruct a historical picture that is as balanced and nuanced as possible. The main focus is on the cultural make-up of ancient Jewish magic, and special attention is paid to the processes of cross-cultural contacts and borrowings between Jews and non-Jews, as well as to inner-Jewish creativity. Other major issues explored include the place of magic within Jewish society, contemporary Jewish attitudes to magic, and the identity of its practitioners.

This handy guide to the Greek and Roman Myths brings classical mythology to life. The book features an engaging blend of stories, facts and quotations from ancient authors, and places ancient myths in a modern context, discussing the 'afterlives' of the myths and the relevance of their messages today. Factfiles on heroes and heroines and family trees of the gods also make this a useful book for students.

Religion & the Decline of Magic is Keith Thomas's classic history of the magical beliefs held by people on every level of English society in the 16th and 17th centuries and how these beliefs were a part of the religious and scientific assumptions of the time. It is not only a major historical and religious work, but a thoroughly enjoyable book filled with fascinating facts and original insights into an area of human nature that remains controversial today- the belief in the supernatural that still continues in the modern world.

Covering 30,000 years of goddess worship, this fascinating book is the first and most comprehensive biographical dictionary devoted exclusively to mythological deities.

Kehoe (anthropology, U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) seeks to inoculate her students against the mushy thinking she finds concerning shamans and shamanism.

This book chronicled the rise and fall of witchcraft in Europe between the twelfth and the end of the seventeenth centuries.

Michael J. Harner is at The Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

A description and gender analysis of the Reformation-era European witch hunt in which 7 million women were persecuted, tortured, and/or executed.

This overview of witchcraft for beginners covers the roots and history of witchcraft; the significance of the goddess and the god; sacred space, the magic circle and the Otherworld; the elements; power, spells, magic, and the traditional tools of the witch; and initiation rites and ethics.

In the late winter and early spring of 1692, residents of Salem Village, Massachusetts, began to suffer from strange physical and mental maladies. The randomness of the victims, and unusual symptoms that were seldom duplicated, led residents to suspect an otherworldly menace. Their suspicions and fears eventually prompted the infamous Salem Witch Trials. While most historians have concentrated their efforts on the accused, Laurie Winn Carlson, A Fever in Salem focuses on the afflicted. What were the characteristics of a typical victim? Why did the symptoms occur when and where they did? What natural explanation could be given for symptoms that included hallucinations, convulsions, and psychosis, often resulting in death?

Historians as well as anthropologists have contributed to this volume of studies on aspects of witchcraft in a variety of cultures and periods from Tudor England to twentieth-century Africa and New Guinea.

This is an engaging introduction which explores the latest thinking about Classical mythology, the history of interpreting myths and the role of myths in cultural tradition, from painting to opera, philosophy, politics, drama, and religion in the modern day. It answers such questions as what are ancient myths and who invented them where do gods come from what makes a hero how is Classical myth used in the modern world and what approaches are there to the study of myth?

Focusing on the oldest available texts, buttressed by data from archeology, comparative linguistics and human population genetics, Michael Witzel reconstructs a single original African source for our collective myths, dating back some 100,000 years.Identifying features shared by this "Out of Africa" mythology and its northern Eurasian offshoots, Witzel suggests that these common myths - recounted by the communities of the "African Eve" - are the earliest evidence of ancient spirituality. Moreover these common features, Witzel shows, survive today in all major religions.

Discourse in Ritual Studies invites you to enter a conversation on the topic of liturgy from the perspective of ritual studies. Since liturgical topics are not among the most frequently addressed issues in ritual studies, this volume supplies a need for studies of public worship that take into account the multidisciplinary and innovative research in ritual studies while dealing with basic issues of religious studies and theology. The contributing authors share an action-oriented and empirical interest in ritual studies while not losing sight of perennial and normative questions that characterize the study of liturgy. Thus, a valuable discourse unfolds that opens up new opportunities for worship research in ritual studies.

The collection explores the importance of magic within Early Christianity, an issue shared with its Old Testament and Jewish roots and with its ancient background, implying reluctance and critique. Both magical traits and the critique of non-Christian magic have an impact on later scripture and still exert influence now on modern theoretical discussion and popular ideas.

This encyclopedia provides a unique resource on the philosophical, historical, religious, and cross-cultural conceptions of miracles that cut across denominational lines. * Provides the most authoritative exposition of miracles across history currently available in English--a highly useful resource for inquirers on miraculous phenomenon.