Strange Creatures: Anthropology in AntiquityBloomsbury Academic, 2006 M06 8 - 256 pages Traces the anthropological and ethnological theories of the ancient Greeks and Romans from the creation of the world to the invention of the Americas. In ancient Greek and Roman thinking, whether the world is flat or spherical it will have imaginary boundaries and liminal areas where the norms of nature and culture are thought to break down. Analogies are constantly drawn between 'primitive' peoples at the 'edges of the world' and 'primitive' people in prehistory. Distance, both in time and space, leads to difference, and the idea that strange things happen out there or happened back then dominates Greek and Roman thinking on other cultures. This book examines ancient ideas of the creation of the world, the beginnings of life and origin of species, humans and animals, utopias and blessed islands, and 'barbarian' cultures beyond the Mediterranean world, before going on to trace the influence of ancient anthropological and ethnological thought on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.We begin with primordial chaos and end with the invention of the Americas, taking in on the way many strange creatures, among them the noble or ignoble savages of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, the Man-faced Ox-creatures of Empedocles, the Dog-heads of India, the Amazons, Centaurs, Columbus, and the Tupinamba of Brazil. |
From inside the book
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... hieros gamos between a god and a goddess or the result of a conflict between two deities . In both cases , there is an encounter between the principle , or the representative , of the sky , and the principle , or the representative , of ...
... hieros gamos , the sacred marriage of king and goddess , the latter represented by a priestess . We have discovered through our psychoanalytic approach to the epic how both the trials of Gilgamesh and the story of Ishtar's descent to ...
A Holistic Vision of Creation Thomas Schipflinger. 25 Sophia and The Hieros Gamos , OR Sacred Marriage THE THE IDEA OF HIEROGAMY or sacred union relates to the fundamental polarity inherent to all of ... HIEROS GAMOS, OR SACRED MARRIAGE.
Contents
The Origin of Life and the Origin of Species | 17 |
Ancient Theories of Prehistory and the Evolution of Society | 39 |
Blessed Islands and Blessed Lands | 61 |
Copyright | |
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