This book provides an introduction to centuries-old beliefs, myths and folk tales relating to individual destiny, love and family, the birth of heroes, the universe, ghosts, gods and exorcists, and includes a wide selection of both old artworks, including rare shamanist painting…
Explores well-known heroic figures as well as the demigods, nymphs, sorceresses, and other creatures that inhabited the mortal world and figured prominently in the myths of the heroes and heroines of Greece and Rome.
"This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how hea…
The storytelling tradition has long been an important piece of Kentucky history and culture. Folktales, legends, tall tales, and ghost stories hold a special place in the imaginations of inventive storytellers and captive listeners. In Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Trut…
Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, ofte…
Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, ofte…
"Not so long ago zombies rarely shuffled out of B-grade horror movies and cult comic books, but today they are everywhere. Zombies are proliferating, demonstrating an extraordinary capacity to transport fluidly from genre to genre, from the apocalyptic future to the already surv…
"This book details magic's generally maleficent effect on human beings from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages, including tales from classical mythology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures. Bottigheimer shows that certain magical motifs lived on from age to age, but that …
The Greek myths are the founding narratives of Western civilization: to understand them is to know the origins of philosophy, literature, art, science, law, and more. Indeed, as Luc Ferry shows in this masterful book, they remain a great store of wisdom, as relevant to our lives…
Memorates & mdash;personal experience narratives of encounters with the supernatural & mdash;that recount individuals & rsquo; personal revelations, primarily through the Holy Ghost, are a pervasive aspect of the communal religious experience of Mormons, members of the Church of…
Bruno Bettelheim was one of the great child psychologists of the twentieth century and perhaps none of his books has been more influential than this revelatory study of fairy tales and their universal importance in understanding childhood development. Analyzing a wide range of t…
The legend of King Arthur has been told and retold for centuries. As the king who united a nation, his is the story of England itself. But what if Arthur wasn't English at all? As writer and activist Adam Ardrey discovered, the reason historians have had little success identifyi…
"The legend of King Arthur has been told and retold for centuries. As the king who united a nation, his is the story of England itself. But what if Arthur wasn't English at all? As writer and activist Adam Ardrey discovered, the reason historians have had little success identify…
"The legend of King Arthur has been told and retold for centuries. As the king who united a nation, his is the story of England itself. But what if Arthur wasn't English at all? As writer and activist Adam Ardrey discovered, the reason historians have had little success identify…
"The legend of King Arthur has been told and retold for centuries. As the king who united a nation, his is the story of England itself. But what if Arthur wasn't English at all? As writer and activist Adam Ardrey discovered, the reason historians have had little success identify…
"The legend of King Arthur has been told and retold for centuries. As the king who united a nation, his is the story of England itself. But what if Arthur wasn't English at all? As writer and activist Adam Ardrey discovered, the reason historians have had little success identify…
""In Marxist anthropological theory, shamanism represented one of the early forms of religion that later gave rise to more sophisticated beliefs in the course of human advancement ... The premise of Marxism was that eventually, at the highest levels of civil.