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From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism
"Examines the intriguing link between magic and Gnosticism. There were two main reasons why Christian thinkers identified Gnosticism with magic: the fact that the roots of Gnosticism lay in the Hellenistic Judaism influenced by the Chaldeans and the Magi, and the need felt by orthodox Christians to distinguish themselves from Christian Gnostics by proving that the latter were magicians"--back cover.
The Mysteries of Mithras
Attilio Mastrocinque explains the mysteries of Mithras in a new way, as a transformation of Mazdean elements into an ideological and religious reading of Augustus' story. The author shows that the character of Mithras played the role of Apollo in favoring Augustus' victory and the birth of the Roman Empire.
Demeter, Isis, Vesta, and Cybele
Foreign cults of female divinities were often accepted among different cultures and female cults were often reshaped after new models. The transcultural nature of many goddesses and the related problems are at the core of this book, which is dedicated to a prominent scholar in this field, G. Sfameni Gasparro. Social, political and cultural factors are especially taken into account in order to explain different iconographies, names, and kinds of worship which were adopted for goddesses in different areas and times. The multifaceted nature of many female cults is focussed thanks to different methodologies, according to the topics which are investigated.
Bona Dea and the Cults of Roman Women
Bona Dea, also known as Fauna, was a very important goddess of female initiations in Rome, and several features of hers were shared by similar goddesses in ancient Italy. This book sheds light on two hitherto unexplored features: the Dionysiac character and the Lydian style of her festivals. The wife of a consul took on the attitude and the attire of Omphale as the president of Dionysiac ceremonies. Faunus was supposed to precede Bacchus and give fecundity to the bride (i.e. Ariadne), whereas Hercules was thought of as an effeminate musician who created harmony. This was the correct ritual behaviour of prenuptial ceremonies, as it was depicted on many Dionysiac sarcophagi. The iconography of these monuments depicts important features of Faunus and Fauna. Believers are depicted on sarcophagi in the attitude of Bacchus or, in case of women, of either Ariadne or Omphale. A final comparison with initiations among native tribes of Oceania clarifies many rituals of the ancients.
Antike Mythen
Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge von namhaften europäischen und amerikanischenAltertumswissenschaftlern und Religionswissenschaftlern, die einen repräsentativen Querschnitt der zeitgenössischen Erforschung des Mythos, seiner Erscheinungsformen und seiner Transformationen in unterschiedlichen Bereichen und Epochen darbieten.
Animals in Greek and Roman Religion and Myth
This volume brings together a variety of approaches to the different ways in which the role of animals was understood in ancient Greco-Roman myth and religion, across a period of several centuries, from Preclassical Greece to Late Antique Rome. Animals in Greco-Roman antiquity were thought to be intermediaries between men and gods, and they played a pivotal role in sacrificial rituals and divination, the foundations of pagan religion. The studies in the first part of the volume examine the role of the animals in sacrifice and divination. The second part explores the similarities between animals, on the one hand, and men and gods, on the other. Indeed, in antiquity, the behaviour of several animals was perceived to mirror human behaviour, while the selection of the various animals as sacrificial victims to specific deities often was determined on account of some peculiar habit that echoed a special attribute of the particular deity. The last part of this volume is devoted to the study of animal metamorphosis, and to this end a number of myths that associate various animals with transformation are examined from a variety of perspectives.
Greek Translations of Roman Gods
A comprehensive study of the Greek translations of Latin terminology has long been recognized as a desideratum in classical philology and ancient history. This volume is the first in a planned series of monographs that will address that need. It is based on a large and growing database of Greek translations of Latin, the GRETL project. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the translations of Roman gods in literary Greek, addressing Roman and Greek cult, shrines, legend, mythology, and cultural interaction. Its primary focus is on Greek literature, especially the works of Plutarch, Appian, Cassius Dio, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Diodorus, but it also incorporates important translations from many other authors, as well as evidence from epigraphy and the Byzantine Glossaria. Although its focus is on Greek literature and translation, the process of translation was a joint endeavor of ancient Greeks and Romans, beginning in the prehistoric interactions in the Forum Boarium, Etruria, and Magna Graecia, and continuing through late antiquity. This volume thus provides an essential resource for philologists, religious scholars, and historians of Rome and Greece alike.
Unwritten Rome
In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society of pre-literary Rome—as a free and uninhibited world in which the arts and popular entertainments flourished. This original angle allows the voice of the Roman people to be retrieved empathetically from contemporary artefacts and figured monuments, and from selected passages of later literature.How do you understand a society that didn’t write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some possibly authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out – like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen attempts to find such material and make sense of it.
Persia
A fascinating study of Persia’s interactions and exchanges of influence with ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The founding of the first Persian Empire by the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE established one of the greatest world powers of antiquity. Extending from the borders of Greece to northern India, Persia was seen by the Greeks as a vastly wealthy and powerful rival and often as an existential threat. When the Macedonian king Alexander the Great finally conquered the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE, Greek culture spread throughout the Near East, but local dynasties—first the Parthian (247 BCE–224 CE) and then the Sasanian (224–651 CE)—reestablished th...
SENSORIVM: The Senses in Roman Polytheism
SENSORIVM publishes the first results of a collective investigation into how Roman rituals smelled, sounded, felt and struck the eye. It brings Roman religious experience into the realm of the senses.
