Download or read book Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece written by Dennis D. Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous ancient texts describe human sacrifices and other forms of ritual killing: in 480 BC Themistocles sacrifices three Persian captives to Dionysus; human scapegoats called pharmakoi are expelled yearly from Greek cities, and according to some authors they are killed; Locrin girls are hunted down and slain by the Trojans; on Mt Lykaion children are sacrificed and consumed by the worshippers; and many other texts report human sacrifices performed regularly in the cult of the gods or during emergencies such as war and plague. Archaeologists have frequently proposed human sacrifice as an explanation for their discoveries: from Minoan Crete children's bones with knife-cut marks, the skeleton of a youth lying on a platform with a bronze blade resting on his chest, skeletons, sometimes bound, in the dromoi of Mycenaean and Cypriot chamber tombs; and dual man-woman burials, where it is suggested that the woman was slain or took her own life at the man's funeral. If the archaeologists' interpretations and the claims in the ancient sources are accepted, they present a bloody and violent picture of the religious life of the ancient Greeks, from the Bronze Age well into historical times. But the author expresses caution. In many cases alternative, if less sensational, explanations of the archaeological are possible; and it can often be shown that human sacrifices in the literary texts are mythical or that late authors confused mythical details with actual practices.Whether the evidence is accepted or not, this study offers a fascinating glimpse into the religious thought of the ancient Greeks and into changing modern conceptions of their religious behaviour.
Download or read book Greek Myth and Religion written by Albert Henrichs and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the collected papers of Albert Henrichs on numerous subjects in ancient Greek myth and religion. What was ancient Greek religion really like? What is the reality of belief and action that lies behind the unwieldy sources, which stem from vast areas and epochs of the ancient world? What is the meaning, intended and otherwise, of religious action and speech in ancient Greece? Who were the Greek gods, how were they worshipped, and how were they viewed by those who worshipped them? One of the leading students of ancient Greek religion over the past five decades, Albert Henrichs, the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard University, combines wide and deep learning, a pragmatic, incisive approach to the sources, and an apt use of comparative perspectives. Henrichs breaks new ground in discussing sacrifice, libation, cultic identity, religious action and speech, epiphany, and the personalities of the gods. Special attention is devoted to ancient Greek sources on the ancient Persian prophet Mani, founder of Manichaeism. As a group, Albert Henrichs’ papers on Greek religion offer a basic education on Greek myth and religion and constitute a blueprint for serious study of the subject.
Download or read book Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World written by Sarah Hitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together studies on Greek animal sacrifice by foremost experts in Greek language, literature and material culture. Readers will benefit from the synthesis of new evidence and approaches with a re-evaluation of twentieth-century theories on sacrifice. The chapters range across the whole of antiquity and go beyond the Greek world to consider possible influences in Hittite Anatolia and Egypt, while an introduction to the burgeoning science of osteo-archaeology is provided. The twentieth-century emphasis on sacrifice as part of the Classical Greek polis system is challenged through consideration of various ancient perspectives on sacrifice as distinct from specific political or even Greek contexts. Many previously unexplored topics are covered, particularly the type of animals sacrificed and the spectrum of sacrificial ritual, from libations to lasting memorials of the ritual in art.
Download or read book The Strange World of Human Sacrifice written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Strange World of Human Sacrifice is the first modern collection of studies on one of the most gruesome and intriguing aspects of religion. The volume starts with a brief introduction, which is followed by studies of Aztec human sacrifice and the literary motif of human sacrifice in medieval Irish literature. Turning to ancient Greece, three cases of human sacrifice are analysed: a ritual example, a mythical case, and one in which myth and ritual are interrelated. The early Christians were the victims of accusations of human sacrifice, but in turn imputed the crime to heterodox Christians, just as the Jews imputed the crime to their neighbours. The ancient Egyptians rarely seem to have practised human sacrifice, but buried the pharaoh's servants with him in order to serve him in the afterlife, albeit only for a brief period at the very beginning of pharaonic civilization. In ancient India we can follow the traditions of human sacrifice from the earliest texts up to modern times, where especially in eastern India goddesses, such as Kali, were long worshipped with human victims. In Japanese tales human sacrifice often takes the form of self-sacrifice, and there may well be a line from these early sacrifices to modern kamikaze. The last study throws a surprising light on human sacrifice in China. The volume is concluded with a detailed index
Download or read book Cults and Rites in Ancient Greece written by Michael H. Jameson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a 'Jamesonian approach' to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.
Download or read book Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice written by Christopher A. Faraone and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first general critique of the interpretations of animal sacrifice established by Walter Burkert, the late J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne.
Download or read book King of Sacrifice written by Sarah Hitch and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. Hitch explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech.
Download or read book Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition written by Karin Finsterbusch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume asks to which extent ancient practices and traditions of human sacrifice are reflected in medieval and modern Judeo-Christian times. The first part of the volume, on antiquity, focuses on rituals of human sacrifice and polemics against it, as well as on transformations of human sacrifice in the Israelite-Jewish and Christian cultures, while the Ancient Near East and ancient Greece are not excluded. The second part of the volume, on medieval and modern times, discusses human sacrifice in Jewish and Christian traditions as well as the debates about euthanasia and death penalty in the Western world.
Download or read book Smoke Signals for the Gods written by F. S. Naiden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal sacrifice has been critical to the study of ancient Mediterranean religions since the 18th century. Two leading views on sacrifice have dominated the subject: the psychological approach of Walter Burkert and the sociological one by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne. These two perspectives have argued that the main feature of sacrifice is allaying feelings of guilt at the slaughter of sacrificial animals. Naiden redresses the omission of these salient features to show that animal sacrifice is an attempt to make contact with a divine being, and that it is so important for the worshippers that it becomes subject to regulations of unequaled extent and complexity.
Download or read book Baby and Child Heroes in Ancient Greece written by Corinne Ondine Pache and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Baby and Child Heroes in Ancient Greece is the first systematic study of the considerable number of Greek babies and children who became enduring myths, objects of worship, and the recipients of sacrifice." "Examining literary, pictorial, and numismatic representations, Pache opens up a vast territory once occupied by children such as Charila, Opheltes, Melikertes, and the children of Hercules and Medea. She argues that the stories, songs, and sanctuaries honoring these heroes express parental fears and guilt about children's death."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Sacrificial Rituals of Greek Hero Cults in the Archaic to the Early Hellenistic Period written by Gunnel Ekroth and published by Presses universitaires de Liège. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study questions the traditional view of sacrifices in hero-cults during the Archaic to the early Hellenistic periods. The analysis of the epigraphical and literary evidence for sacrifices to heroes in these periods shows, contrary to the traditional notion, that the main ritual in hero-cults was a thysia at which the worshippers consumed the meat from the animal victim. A particular handling of the animal’s blood or a holocaust, rituals previously taken to be typical for heroes, can rarely be documented and must be considered as marginal features in hero-cults. The terms eschara, escharon, bothros, enagizein, enagisma, enagismos and enagisterion, believed to be characteristic for hero-cults, are seldom used in hero-contexts before the Roman period and occur mainly in the Byzantine lexicographers and in the scholia. Since the main kind of sacrifice in hero-cults was a thysia, a ritual intimately connected with the social structure of society, the heroes must have fulfilled the same role as the gods within the Greek religious system. The fact that the heroes were dead seems to have been of little significance for the sacrificial rituals and it is questionable whether the rituals of hero-cults are to be considered as originating in the cult of the dead.
Download or read book Virgin Sacrifice in Classical Art written by Anthony F. Mangieri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trojan War begins and ends with the sacrifice of a virgin princess. The gruesome killing of a woman must have captivated ancient people because the myth of the sacrificial virgin resonates powerfully in the arts of ancient Greece and Rome. Most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans did not practice human sacrifice, so why then do the myths of virgin sacrifice appear persistently in art and literature for over a millennium? Virgin Sacrifice in Classical Art: Women, Agency, and the Trojan War seeks to answer this question. This book tells the stories of the sacrificial maidens in order to help the reader discover the meanings bound up in these myths for historical people. In exploring the representations of Iphigeneia and Polyxena in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art, this book offers a broader cultural history that reveals what people in the ancient world were seeking in these stories. The result is an interdisciplinary study that offers new interpretations on the meaning of the sacrificial virgin as a cultural and ideological construction. This is the first book-length study of virgin sacrifice in ancient art and the first to provide an interpretive framework within which to understand its imagery.
Download or read book The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks written by Marcel Detienne and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the Greeks, the sharing of cooked meats was the fundamental communal act, so that to become vegetarian was a way of refusing society. It follows that the roasting or cooking of meat was a political act, as the division of portions asserted a social order. And the only proper manner of preparing meat for consumption, according to the Greeks, was blood sacrifice. The fundamental myth is that of Prometheus, who introduced sacrifice and, in the process, both joined us to and separated us from the gods—and ambiguous relation that recurs in marriage and in the growing of grain. Thus we can understand why the ascetic man refuses both women and meat, and why Greek women celebrated the festival of grain-giving Demeter with instruments of butchery. The ambiguity coded in the consumption of meat generated a mythology of the "other"—werewolves, Scythians, Ethiopians, and other "monsters." The study of the sacrificial consumption of meat thus leads into exotic territory and to unexpected findings. In The Cuisine of Sacrifice, the contributors—all scholars affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies of Ancient Societies in Paris—apply methods from structural anthropology, comparative religion, and philology to a diversity of topics: the relation of political power to sacrificial practice; the Promethean myth as the foundation story of sacrificial practice; representations of sacrifice found on Greek vases; the technique and anatomy of sacrifice; the interaction of image, language, and ritual; the position of women in sacrificial custom and the female ritual of the Thesmophoria; the mythical status of wolves in Greece and their relation to the sacrifice of domesticated animals; the role and significance of food-related ritual in Homer and Hesiod; ancient Greek perceptions of Scythian sacrificial rites; and remnants of sacrificial ritual in modern Greek practices.
Download or read book Greek Religion written by Walter Burkert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the religious beliefs of ancient Greece covers sacrifices, libations, purification, gods, heroes, the priesthood, oracles, festivals, and the afterlife.
Download or read book Animals in Ancient Greek Religion written by Julia Kindt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-29 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first systematic study of the role of animals in different areas of the ancient Greek religious experience, including in myth and ritual, the literary and the material evidence, the real and the imaginary. An international team of renowned contributors shows that animals had a sustained presence not only in the traditionally well-researched cultural practice of blood sacrifice but across the full spectrum of ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices. Animals played a role in divination, epiphany, ritual healing, the setting up of dedications, the writing of binding spells, and the instigation of other ‘magical’ means. Taken together, the individual contributions to this book illustrate that ancient Greek religion constituted a triangular symbolic system encompassing not just gods and humans, but also animals as a third player and point of reference. Animals in Ancient Greek Religion will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek religion, Greek myth, and ancient religion more broadly, as well as for anyone interested in human/animal relations in the ancient world.
Download or read book The Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry written by Charles H. Stocking and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new interpretation of sacrifice based on Greek myth and poetics in conjunction with recent research in anthropology.
Download or read book Homo Necans written by Walter Burkert and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A milestone, not only in the field of classics but in the wider field of the history of religion. . . . It will find a place alongside the works of Jane Ellen Harrison, Sir James George Frazer, Claude Levi-Strauss, and van Gennep."—Wendy Flaherty, Divinity School, University of Chicago "This book is a professional classic, an absolute must for any serious student of Greek religion."—Albert Henrichs, Harvard University
