Initiating women in Freemasonry : the adoption rite /
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Freemasonry is generally regarded a male phenomenon. Yet, both before 1723 and since 1744, women were initiated as well. This book is about the rituals, used for the initiation of women in the Adoption Lodges, since the middle of the 18th century. It describes their contents, roots and creation before reviewing and conceptualising their development in the past three centuries. It analyses the different families of rituals within the Adoption Rite, and gives an overview of specific developments, showing how the rituals were adapted to their changing contexts. Apart from its relevance for the history of Freemasonry in general and the Adoption Rite in particular, the book also writes a hitherto unknown chapter of women's history. Of particular interest for the history of feminism is the chapter about the 20th century, which could only be written now that the documents concerning it, which had been moved to Moscow in 1945, had been returned in 2000.
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1 online resource (xvii, 550 pages, [32] pages of plates) : illustrations (some color) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004219342 :
1871-1405 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
One god, two goddesses, three studies of South Indian cosmology /
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One, God, Two Goddesses presents three studies, one of Tamil myths of the god Murugan and two of goddess rituals: Gangamma in Tirupati and Paiditalli in Vizianagaram, both in Andhra Pradesh. All three essays search for lineaments of the cosmos that these deities inhabit and shape. These cosmoi are characterised by the dynamism of their incessant interior movement. Should they become still, they would die. Deities activate and regenerate such a cosmos. The dynamism of Murugan's cosmos eliminates the chaotic. Through ritual, Gangamma regenerates her cosmos through feminising it. Through ritual, Paiditalli annually re-grows the historic little kingdom of Vizianagaram, regenerating its kingship. All three studies point to the need to rethink cosmology in South India.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004257399 :
1570-078X ;
Belief, Bounty, and Beauty, Rituals around Sacred Trees in India.
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This study is focused on the interaction of material and symbolic values in the domain of sacred trees in India. By presenting samples from 3,000 years of Indian ritual practice, it is shown that in many sacred geographies trees continue to connect the present with the past, the material with the symbolic, and the contemporary ecological with the traditionally sacred. Although in India religion may have become very much a temple cult, its embeddedness in the natural world enhances today's 'green' interpretation of religious traditions. That in environmental matters such religious inspiration may be both successful and highly ambivalent at the same time is the thought-provoking position taken in the final chapters.
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1 online resource. :
9789047415619
Zoroastrian Rituals in Context.
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Rituals, it is agreed, play a prominent role in Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest continuous traditions of mankind. In this book, scholars from a broad range of disciplines make the first ever collective effort to address this issue. From a historical and geographical perspective, texts and contexts studied in these pages range from antiquity to modernity, all the way from Japan, China, India, Iran, Europe to California. The essays touch on questions of theory, ritual texts, change and performances, gender and professional religion (priesthood/lay-people). The rituals studied are placed in a broad scope of social and local settings ranging from the royal court to the needy, from the rural village to the urban metropolis, from the domestic to the public.
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1 online resource. :
9789047412502
Isaiah Shembe's hymns and the sacred dance in Ibandla LamaNazaretha /
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In Isaiah Shembe's Hymns and the Sacred Dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha , Nkosinathi Sithole explores the hymns of Prophet Isaiah Shembe and the sacred dance in Ibandla LamaNazaretha, and offers an emic perspective on the Church which has attracted scholars from different disciplines. Isaiah Shembe's Hymns and the Sacred Dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha posits that in the hymns, Shembe found a powerful medium through which he could voice his concerns as an African in colonial times, while praising and worshipping God. Sithole also refutes claims by some scholars that the sacred dance was a response to colonialism and oppression, showing that in fact the sacred dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha is considered to be a form of worship and is thought to exist on earth and in heaven.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004320628 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Tantra, Ritual Performance, and Politics in Nepal and Kerala : Embodying the Goddess-clan /
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In previous studies of South Asian Tantric ritual, scholars tend to focus on one region or context. For the first time, Tantra, Ritual Performance and Politics in Nepal and Kerala: Embodying the Goddess-clan offers a comparative approach to Tantric mediumship as observed in two locales: Navadurgā rituals in Bhaktapur, Nepal, and Teyyāṭṭam in North Kerala. In this book, Matthew Martin advances a new theory of ritual, which spotlights the way dancer-mediums embody medieval goddess-clans and ancestor deities, through offerings of food and sacrifice, that synchronize their denizens with the land in spiralling web-like ritual networks. Uniquely interdisciplinary in style, this study synthesizes cultural history, ethnography, and theory to explore the continuities - historical, societal, and political - that characterize these ritual traditions across the subcontinent.
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Revision of author's PhD dissertation. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004439023
9789004438996
Virtues of the Flesh - Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence /
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Robust sexuality, profound spirituality and elaborate legalism are, at first glance, strange bedfellows. The conventional Western wisdom has long conceived of these several modes as comprising an antagonistic trichotomy, in which each component is opposed to the others. Classical Islam, on the other hand, envisioned a unique system of cooperation between the sensual, the ethereal and the forensic. This study employs the vast and hitherto neglected literature of Islamic purity law as a looking glass through which to examine early Muslim attitudes to the romantic and erotic. Probing Qur'ān, Ḥadīth, Tafsīr and Fiqh, it opens a window on a world of unexpectedly explicit and unrestrainedly joyful sexual expression -- a world located squarely within the confines of God's sacred law and its elucidation.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047406235
9789004140707
Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture /
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Editing and examining source-critically for the first time the Late Babylonian ritual texts dealing with the New Year Festival, this book proposes an incisive re-interpretation of the most frequently discussed of all Mesopotamian rituals. The festival's twelve-day paradigm is dissolved in favor of a more historically dynamic model, with the ritual texts being firmly anchored in the Hellenistic period. As part of a larger group of texts constituting what can be called Late Babylonian Priestly Literature, they reflect the Babylonian priesthoods' fears and aspirations of that time much more than an actual ritual reality.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004513037
9789004512955
Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture /
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Editing and examining source-critically for the first time the Late Babylonian ritual texts dealing with the New Year Festival, this book proposes an incisive re-interpretation of the most frequently discussed of all Mesopotamian rituals. The festival's twelve-day paradigm is dissolved in favor of a more historically dynamic model, with the ritual texts being firmly anchored in the Hellenistic period. As part of a larger group of texts constituting what can be called Late Babylonian Priestly Literature, they reflect the Babylonian priesthoods' fears and aspirations of that time much more than an actual ritual reality.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004513037
9789004512955
Light of devotion : oil lamps of Kerala /
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This in-depth study of the medieval oil lamps of Kerala and beyond considers these art objects as primary sources for a broader discussion on the ritual use of Hindu oil lamps, their related and unique cultural history, their motifs, style and subject matter. From an understudied region, many of the pieces presented are previously unpublished.
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Also issued in print: 2022. :
1 online resource (x, 144 pages) : illustrations (colour) :
Specialized. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9781803272559 (PDF ebook) :