Biblical and Pagan SocietiesUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2001 - 168 من الصفحات In the ancient Near East, the art of influencing the natural course of events by means of spells and other ritual forms was universal. The social and political role of magic is apparent, too, in the competition to achieve precedence over rival systems of ritual practice and belief. Within a region filled with petty kingdoms competing for power, the Jews of ancient Palestine maintained control over adherents by developing distinct ritual practices and condemning as heretical those of nearby cults. Texts from Mesopotamia reveal a striking number of incantations, rituals, and medical recipes against witchcraft, attesting to a profound fear of being bewitched. Magical rituals were also used to maintain harmony between the human and divine realms. The roots of European witchcraft and magic lie in Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern cultures and in the Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic traditions of the continent. For two millennia, European folklore and ritual have been imbued with the belief in the supernatural, yielding a rich trove of histories and images. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe combines the traditional approaches of political, legal, and social historians with a critical synthesis of cultural anthropology, historical psychology, and gender studies. The series, complete in six volumes, provides a modern, scholarly survey of the supernatural beliefs of Europeans from ancient times to the present day. Each volume of this ambitious six-volume series contains the work of distinguished scholars chosen for their expertise in a particular era or region. |
من داخل الكتاب
النتائج 1-3 من 13
... event seems to have been feared as a bad omen and such cases were even reported to the king as for instance when a fox had entered the city of Aššur and fallen into a well in the temple garden . The fox was brought up and killed in ...
... events it relates , even though it no doubt contains some valid information about much earlier times . The burden of this remark is merely to point out that the Old Testament cannot be regarded as what a historian would term a ' primary ...
... event a contract was broken . But in the event that human witness should prove inadquate to the task , both the leading deity and the reigning king are usually invoked in ancient Mesopotamian contracts , so that the matter is then ...