Winged Goddesses of Sexuality, Death, and Immortality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serinity Young
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Funeral Rites ◽  
Monstrous Feminine

The winged Egyptian goddess Isis is an ancient and complex deity, whose mythology presents her as bestower of fertility and immortality. This chapter follows up on these themes, and the linked relationship between fertility and immortality, by exploring the involvement of women with funeral rites, and concepts of the afterlife in the Ancient Near East and Ancient Greece involving goddesses, who combine sexuality and fertility, war and death, and the promise and hope of immortality. There is a further exploration of ancient bird goddesses demonized via the concept of the monstrous-feminine: furies, harpies, and sirens—all of whom pose a particular danger to men, not women.

Materialität und Spiritualität im altisraelitischen Opferkult: Religionsgeschichtliche Abstraktionsprozesse

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Jan Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Economic Sphere ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
The Way

Abstract In the ancient near East, including ancient Israel, the material value of sacrifice was held in high esteem. In the sacrificial system of Leviticus 1-5, however, we find modes of abstraction from the material value of offerings which have parallels to the invention of money in ancient Greece. Here, money as an accepted medium of exchange, was invented with the value of the coin not totally dependent on its metal weight. While in ancient Greece this form of abstraction developed in the economic sphere, in ancient Israel it developed in the religious sphere and paved the way to regard prayers or confessions of faith as equivalent substitutions of material sacrifice.

For whom did the bell toll in ancient Greece? Archaic and Classical Greek bells at Sparta and beyond

2002 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 223-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Villing
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
South Italy ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
First Time

Bells of fairly small size were known across ancient Greece from the Archaic period onwards, both in bronze and terracotta. They are found in sanctuaries, graves and, more rarely, in houses, and served a variety of purposes, both practical and more abstract, in daily life and ritual, and in both male and female contexts. Archaeological, iconographical and literary sources attest to their use as votive offerings in ritual and funerary contexts, as signalling instruments for town-guards, as amulets for children and women as well as, in South Italy, in a Dionysiac context. A use as animal (notably horse) bells, however, was not widespread before the later Roman period. The bells' origins lie in the ancient Near East and Caucasian area, from where they found their way especially to Archaic Samos and Cyprus and later to mainland Greece. Here, the largest known find complex of bronze and terracotta bells, mostly of Classical date, comes from the old British excavations in the sanctuary of Athena on the Spartan acropolis and is published here for the first time. Spartan bells are distinctive in shape yet related particularly to other Lakonian and Boiotian bells as well as earlier bells from Samos. At Sparta, as elsewhere, the connotation of the bells' bronze sound as magical, protective, purificatory and apotropaic was central to their use, although specific functions varied according to place, time, and occasion.

PHILHELLENISM AND THE FUROR ORIENTALIS

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUZANNE MARCHAND
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Historical School ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Dominant Tendency

Focusing on the study of the ancient Orient in fin-de-siècle Germany, this essay argues that “orientalism” had a wider range of cultural consequences than the term usually evokes in studies of Western imperialism and its ideologies. The essay describes the development of a generational movement in German scholarship that was characterized by its vigorous championing of the Orient over and against the dominant tendency to isolate and exalt classical civilizations, and especially ancient Greece, and by its role in destabilizing Western presumptions. It demonstrates that the furor orientalis did contribute to the decentering of the Greeks and the ancient Hebrews, bequeathing to the twentieth century both a much deeper and more diverse picture of the ancient Near East and an obsession with origins that could be mobilized by racist propagandists. The essay offers three case studies of groups which exemplified this furor—the Panbabylonists; the Religious-Historical School; and the iconoclastic mythographer Heinrich Zimmer, who represents a strong strain of Schopenhauerian Indology. It concludes by suggesting the more constructive directions taken by orientalists outside Germany in the 1920s–1940s, and poses the question: how long will the peaceful solutions they promoted last?

Prologue to Genesis (1, 1-11, 26): Prophetic Revelation, History, Myth or Metahistory?

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
Михаил Анатольевич Скобелев
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Near East ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Book Of Genesis

В статье рассматриваются богословие, композиция и литературная форма сюжетов, входящих в состав Пролога книги Бытия (1, 1-11, 26). Во второй половине XIX - начале XX вв. в результате появления Документальной гипотезы и сопоставления Священного Писания с литературными памятниками Древнего Ближнего Востока большая часть сюжетов, составляющих Пролог, была объявлена мифами и древнееврейским фольклором (Ю. Велльгаузен, Г. Гунекель, Дж. Фрезер). Кроме выявленных ближневосточных параллелей, новому отношению к повествованиям Пролога книги Бытия способствовали: отсутствие в нём ясно выраженной исторической задачи и символичность изложения. Защищая традиционный взгляд на Пролог как на священную историю и пророческое откровение, епископ Кассиан (Безобразов) предложил рассматривать все библейские сюжеты, содержащие теофанию, как метаисторию. Протоиерей Сергий Булгаков, А. Ф. Лосев, Б. П. Вышеславцев, занимавшиеся феноменом мифотворчества, назвали библейское повествование о начале мироздания мифом, но в ином смысле, чем это делали Г. Гункель и Дж. Фрезер. Они обосновали новый положительный взгляд, согласно которому миф не есть выдумка или фантазия, а реальность, основанная на мистическом опыте. В статье анализируется каждый из перечисленных терминов: «история», «миф», «метаистория» применительно к Прологу, а также рассматривается возможность их согласования с традиционным церковным взглядом на эту часть книги Бытия. The article deals with the theology, composition and literary form of the narrations which constitute the prologue part of the book of Genesis (1, 1-11, 26). During the second half of the 19th and at the turn of the 20th cent., following the emergence of the Documentary hypothesis as well as the comparison of the Holy Scripture with the newly-discovered literary monuments of Ancient Near East, the greater part of the narrations that constitute the Prologue were labeled myths and ancient Hebrew folklore (J. Wellhausen, H. Gunkel, J. Frazer). In addition to the then detected Near Eastern parallels, this new attitude towards the narrations of the Prologue was fostered by its lack of a clearly expressed historical dedication and the symbolic form of their exposition. Defending the traditional view of the Prologue as sacred history and prophetic revelation, bishop Kassian (Bezobrazov) proposed to consider all the biblical narrations that contain theophanies as metahistorical. Archpriest Sergey Bulgakov, A. F. Losev and B. P. Vysheslavtsev, who analyzed the phenomenon of myth-making, called the Biblical narration of the origins of the world a myth, but in a sense different from that proposed by Gunkel and Frazer. They have founded a new and positive conception according to which a myth is not fiction but rather a kind of reality based upon mystical experience. The author of the article analyzes each of the terms enumerated - «history», «myth», «metahistory» - in their use relating them to the Prologue; he also examines the possibility of their harmonizing with the traditional ecclesiastical view of this part of the book of Genesis.

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