Mythos: The Princeton/Bollingen Series in World Mythology⁵²

The crowning cultural achievement of medieval India, Tantric Buddhism is known in the West primarily for the sexual practices of its adherents, who strive to transform erotic passion into spiritual ecstasy. Historians of religion have...

Pandora waas the "pagan Eve," and she is one of the rare mythological figures to have retained vitality up to our day. Glorified by Calderon, Voltaire, and Goethe, she is familiar to all of us, and "Pandora's box" is a household word....

A landmark work that demystifies the rich tradition of Indian art, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization analyzes key motifs found in legend, myth, and folklore taken directly from the Sanskrit. It provides a comprehensive...

This landmark book explores the Great Mother as a primordial image of the human psyche. Here the renowned analytical psychologist Erich Neumann draws on ritual, mythology, art, and records of dreams and fantasies to examine how this...

The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G....

This volume presents the most important portions of Erwin Goodenough's classic thirteen-volume work, a magisterial attempt to encompass human spiritual history in general through the study of Jewish symbols in particular. Revealing that...

Perhaps the most famous modern-day millenarian movements are the "cargo cults" of Melanesia, active especially during the 1930s and 1950s. Melanesians had long believed that the sign of the millennium would be the arrival of their...

In this work a distinguished scholar of Islamic religion examines the mysticism and psychological thought of the great eleventh-century Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna (Ibn Sina), author of over a hundred works on theology...

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) was a wide-ranging thinker whose ideas affected almost every branch of the social sciences. And nowhere is this impact more evident or more persistent than on the study of myth, ritual, and religion. He...

In this in-depth exploration of the symbols found in Navaho legend and ritual, Gladys Reichard discusses the attitude of the tribe members toward their place in the universe, their obligation toward humankind and their gods, and their...

The ancient Athenians were "quarrelsome as friends, treacherous as neighbors, brutal as masters, faithless as servants, shallow as lovers--all of which was in part redeemed by their intelligence and creativity." Thus writes Philip...

In this landmark book, first published in English in 1958, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a...

Symbolism is the most powerful and ancient means of communication available to humankind. For centuries people have expressed their preoccupations and concerns through symbolism in the form of myths, stories, religions, and dreams. The...

This exploration of cultural resilience examines the complex fate of classical Egyptian religion during the centuries from the period when Christianity first made its appearance in Egypt to when it became the region's dominant religion...

This thought-provoking collection of magical texts from ancient Egypt shows the exotic rituals, esoteric healing practices, and incantatory and supernatural dimensions that flowered in early Christianity. These remarkable Christian...

The Holy Grail and its quest is a legend that has had a powerful impact on our civilization and culture. The Grail itself is an ancient Celtic symbol of plenty as well as a Christian symbol of redemption and eternal life, the chalice...

Zohar, or "brilliant light," is the central text of Kabbalah. In Jewish mystical tradition, it is the meeting of midrash (storytelling that expands on events in the Bible) and myth. This selection offers original translations of eight...

"Henry Corbin's works are the best guide to the visionary tradition.... Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a scholar of genius. He was uniquely equipped not only to recover Iranian Sufism for the West, but also to defend...

Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers and theologians, polytheists and monotheists alike. Finding it difficult to account for...

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) was a pioneer in Indian art history and in the cultural confrontation of East and West. A scholar in the tradition of the great Indian grammarians and philosophers, an art historian convinced that the...

Prometheus the god stole fire from heaven and bestowed it on humans. In punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock, where an eagle clawed unceasingly at his liver, until Herakles freed him. For the Greeks, the myth of Prometheus's release...

No other god of the Greeks is as widely present in the monuments and nature of Greece and Italy, in the sensuous tradition of antiquity, as Dionysos. In myth and image, in visionary experience and ritual representation, the Greeks...

The enigmatic sixteenth-century Swiss physician and natural philosopher Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, is known for the almost superhuman energy with which he produced his innumerable...

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son...

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber spoke directly to the most profound human concerns in all his works, including his discussions of Hasidism, a mystical-religious movement founded in Eastern Europe by Israel ben Eliezer, called the...

This paperback edition brings to a wide audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted...

Abridged from the four-volume The Passion of al-Hallaj, one of the major works of Western orientalism, this book explores the life and teaching of a famous tenth-century Sufi mystic and martyr, and in so doing describes not only his...

Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues, and patterns of Hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's landmark book recasts long-standing ideas about the fertility myth of Adonis. The author challenges Sir...

For this new anthology, Anthony Bonner has chosen central texts from his acclaimed two-volume compilation Selected Works of Ramon Llull (Princeton, 1985). Available for the first time in an affordable format, these works serve as an...

One of the three great gods of Hinduism, Siva is a living god. The most sacred and most ancient book of India, The Rg Veda, evokes his presence in its hymns; Vedic myths, rituals, and even astronomy testify to his existence from the...

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed in the late seventh or early sixth century B.C.E., is a key to understanding the psychological and religious world of ancient Greek women. The poem tells how Hades, lord of the underworld, abducted...

Written reputedly by an Egyptian magus, Horapollo Niliacus, in the fourth century C.E., The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo is an anthology of nearly two hundred "hieroglyphics," or allegorical emblems, said to have been used by the...

The tales told of Orpheus are legion. He is said to have been an Argonaut--and to have saved Jason's life. Rivers are reported to have stopped their flow to listen to the sounds of his lyre and his voice. Plato cites his poetry and...

Sage, scientist, and sorcerer, Hermes Trismegistus was the culture-hero of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. A human (according to some) who had lived about the time of Moses, but now indisputably a god, he was credited with the authorship...

Acknowledged by T. S. Eliot as crucial to understanding "The Waste Land," Jessie Weston's book has continued to attract readers interested in ancient religion, myth, and especially Arthurian legend. Weston examines the saga of the...

The only Freudian to have been originally trained in folklore and the first psychoanalytic anthropologist to carry out fieldwork, Gza Rcheim (1891-1953) contributed substantially to the worldwide study of cultures. Combining a global...

The Swiss thinker J. J. Bachofen is most often connected with his theory of matriarchy, or "mother right," but that concept is only a small part of his contribution to our understanding of cultural history. This book includes an...

Gnosticism, together with alchemy, was for C. G. Jung the chief prefiguration of his analytical psychology. Jung did not simply interpret Gnostic texts psychologically but also cited them as confirmation of his psychology. An authority...

The medieval legend of the Grail, a tale about the search for supreme mystical experience, has never ceased to intrigue writers and scholars by its wildly variegated forms: the settings have ranged from Britain to the Punjab to the...

The Sanctuary of Eleusis, near Athens, was the center of a religious cult that endured for nearly two thousand years and whose initiates came from all parts of the civilized world. Looking at the tendency to "see visions," C. Kerenyi...

Mircea Eliade--one of the most renowned expositors of the psychology of religion, mythology, and magic--shows that myth and symbol constitute a mode of thought that not only came before that of discursive and logical reasoning, but is...

Jane Harrison examines the festivals of ancient Greek religion to identify the primitive "substratum" of ritual and its persistence in the realm of classical religious observance and literature. In Harrison's preface to this remarkable...

In this transcription of the Medicine Rite, the most sacred ritual of the Winnebago Indians, anthropologist Paul Radin captured a poetic source of profound importance to the understanding of mystical experience. Performed by medicine...

In Quest of the Hero makes available for a new generation of readers two key works on hero myths: Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Hero and the central section of Lord Raglan's The Hero. Amplifying these is Alan Dundes's fascinating...

The tribal initiation of the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exemplifies the death of the self and a rebirth into transcendent life. This book traces the images of spiritual initiation in religious rituals and myths of...

Jan Bremmer presents a provocative picture of the historical development of beliefs regarding the soul in ancient Greece. He argues that before Homer the Greeks distinguished between two types of soul, both identified with the...

Drawing from Eastern and Western literatures, Heinrich Zimmer presents a selection of stories linked together by their common concern for the problem of our eternal conflict with the forces of evil. Beginning with a tale from the...

The renowned tale of Amor and Psyche, from Apuleius's second-century Latin novel The Golden Ass, is one of the most charming fragments of classical literature. Neumann chose it as the exemplar of an unusual study of feminine psychology....

Essays on a Science of Mythology is a cooperative work between C. Kerényi, who has been called "the most psychological of mythologists," and C. G. Jung, who has been called "the most mythological of psychologists." Kerényi contributes...

The gods of Olympus died with the advent of Christianity--or so we have been taught to believe. But how are we to account for their tremendous popularity during the Renaissance? This illustrated book, now reprinted in a new, larger...