Folklore & Mythology

A radical, ground-breaking examination of the role of ancient myth in the origins of Christianity, challenging the idea of the Gospels as historical truth - it will change the way many think about religion, faith, history, myth and belief. more...

Price: $26.00

Religion and Hopi Life tells the story of Hopi religious life in a way that makes sense to both Hopis and outsiders. In his interpretation of Hopi religion, Loftin does not subject religious meaning to secular analysis. While not the Hopi's own story, his account attempts to honor and do justice to the way in which the Hopi embody religious meaning through the living of their lives. more...

Price: $12.75

This book contains an overview of the current state of scholarship on Beowulf, looking back over the history of the field and suggesting new directions for future research. More than 1,000 books, articles, recordings and websites are surveyed and a nuanced sense is offered of the great variety of views that have been expressed on this greatest of all remaining Old English texts. The book is intended to offer guidance and stimulus to all readers of Beowulf, whether scholars, students or first-time readers of the most complex, engaging, and gripping work to survive from Anglo-Saxon England. more...

Price: $85.00

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Price: $25.00

The trilogy of the Oresteia, of which this play is the first part, centres on the old and everlastingly unsolved problem of "The ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong.". Every wrong is justly punished; yet, as the world goes, every punishment becomes a new wrong, calling for fresh vengeance. And more; every wrong turns out to be itself rooted in some wrong of old. It is never gratuitous, never untempted by the working of Peitho (Persuasion), never merely wicked. The Oresteia first shows the cycle of crime punished by crime which must be repunished, and then seeks for some gleam of escape, some breaking of the endless chain of "evil duty." In the old order of earth and heaven there was no such escape. Each blow called for the return blow and must do so ad infinitum. But, according to Aeschylus, there is a new Ruler now in heaven, one who has both sinned and suffered and thereby grown wise. He is Zeus the Third Power, Zeus the Saviour, and his gift to mankind is the ability through suffering to Learn. At the opening of the Agamemnon we find Clytemnestra alienated from her husband and secretly befriended with his ancestral enemy, Aigisthos. The air is heavy and throbbing with hate; hate which is evil but has its due cause. Agamemnon, obeying the prophet Calchas, when the fleet lay storm-bound at Aulis, had given his own daughter, Iphigenia, as a human sacrifice. And if we ask how a sane man had consented to such an act, we are told of his gradual temptation; the deadly excuse offered by ancient superstition; and above all, the fact that he had already inwardly accepted the great whole of which this horror was a part. At the first outset of his expedition against Troy there had appeared an omen, the bloody sign of two eagles devouring a mother-hare with her unborn young.... The question was thus put to the Kings and their prophet: Did they or did they not accept the sign, and wish to be those Eagles? And they had answered Yes. T more...

Price: $3.95