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\"Bats have been misunderstood and maligned in the West for centuries. Unfair associations with demons have seen their leathery wings adorn numerous evil characters, from the Devil to Bram Stoker's Dracula. But these amazing animals are ecological superheroes. In Bat Tessa Laird challenges preconceptions about these amazing animals, combining fascinating facts of bat biology with engaging portrayals of bats in mythology, literature, film, popular culture, poetry, and contemporary art. She also provides a sobering reminder of the risks bats face worldwide, from heatwaves and human harassment to wind turbines and disease. Illustrated with incredible photographs and artistic representations of bats from many different cultures and eras, this celebration of bats contains much to enthral converts and sceptics alike.\"--Provided by publisher.

Depictions of mythical beings appear in many different forms of art world-wide, including rock art of various ages. In this paper we explore a particular type of imagery, back-to-back figures, consisting of two human-like figures or animals of the same species next to each other and facing in opposite directions. Some human-like doubles were joined at the back rather than side-by-side, but also face opposite directions. In this paper, we report on new research on rock art, bark paintings and recent paintings on paper and chart a 9000-year history of making aesthetically, symbolically and spiritually powerful back-to-back figures in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia.

In France, several loups-garous, accused of transforming into wolves and committing heinous crimes, were tried and executed.5 In fact, werewolf trials were not only held in Germany and France but also in the Netherlands, Belgium, Latvia, and Estonia,6 usually near forested areas inhabited by wolves.3 This belief in marauding werewolves seems to have developed in response to the effects of a climate crisis that took place at that time.1 Between the 14th and 19th centuries, several regions of the world experienced the Little Ice Age, an era of lower average temperatures.7 The periods colder, wetter summers, shorter growing seasons, and frequent storms led to crop failures, inflation, hunger, and disease.7,8 The peasant class believed witches were using weather magic to summon the extreme \"unnatural\" weather.8,9 Accused witches became scapegoats for the effects of this climate disaster,8 especially in regions of Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, and France.10 The peak period of witch trials happens to have been especially cold.8 Amid Europe's witch panic, there were also human outbreaks of a deadly zoonotic disease.1 Until the Middle Ages, rabies had been rare in the region.9,11 In Germany, the first recorded instance of a wolf exhibiting rabid behaviour occurred in 1557.12 The virus eventually became responsible for most wolf attacks on humans.12 Researchers have suggested the unusually cold winters during the Little Ice Age caused the surfaces of Europe's rivers to freeze, providing wolves greater access to human settlements,13 a situation that may have boosted the number of rabies cases in humans. In most cases, the rabies virus, which may be carried by any mammal,20 enters the human body through the saliva of infected animals, but also through scratches or mucosal contact.21 In rare instances, the virus has been acquired through organ transplants and aerosols.21 According to the World Health Organization, the incubation period for rabies can be anywhere from a week to a year.21 It is one of the most lethal viruses, essentially killing 100% of those infected.21,22 Following incubation, non-specific flu-like symptoms and discomfort at the site of the original bite wound usually mark a prodromal stage.17,19,21 Rather than travelling in the bloodstream, the virus lurks behind the blood-brain barrier,19,22 sneaking along the nervous system at a rate between 12 to 100 mm a day.23 Sheltered from the body's immune defenses, it eventually infects the brain,21 spreads through the body, and is shed by the salivary glands.24 Once symptoms appear, death is almost certain, usually within two weeks.17 After reaching the brain, the disease enters its acute phase, usually manifested in one of two forms: paralytic rabies or furious rabies.17 The paralytic form is seen in about 20% of human cases.17 Weakness, fever, loss of speech, and ascending paralysis, starting at the bitten limb, spreads to the rest of the body.17,25 In its paralytic form, the infection is often misdiagnosed.21 Furious rabies, seen in about 80% of cases, is associated with alternating periods of hyperexcitability and lucidity.17 The patient may suffer from hyperactivity, anxiety, confusion, hallucinations, aerophobia (fear of drafts or fresh air), fever, sweating, seizures, dysphagia and hypersalivation.17,26 Pharyngeal spasms may produce a barking sound.27 The manifestation of hydrophobia (fear of water), present in more than half of furious rabies cases, is not seen in any other disease.17 Male patients may also have priapism (painful and persistent penile erections) and spontaneous ejaculations.19,27 Given rabies' shocking, agonizing, and horrifying symptoms, it is not difficult to see how human victims experiencing furious rabies - behaving like wild, barking, salivating, hypersexual animals - inspired tales of people taking on beastly characteristics.28 Although RABV subjects its human victim to a gruesome metamorphosis, we are simply \"accidental hosts. When unvaccinated people are bitten by animals that may carry RABV, timely treatment is essential.25,30 In addition to the cleaning and flushing of the wound, rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (RPEP) may involve administration of rabies vaccine and the use of rabies immunoglobulin at the site of the wound, depending on the patient's vaccination and immune status as well as other factors surrounding the bite incident.17,30 If properly performed while the virus is still exposed to the immune system, RPEP is highly effective in protecting against rabies infections.17 Globally, at least 29 million people are given RPEP every year, helping to avoid hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.21 Vaccinating dogs against rabies has been central in preventing human infections.31 Meanwhile, bait containing oral rabies vaccine has effectively reduced rabies among wildlife,31 a source of viral spillover that infects pets and farm animals.32 Efforts to control rabies have almost eliminated canine rabies carriers in Canada and the U.S.17,20 Bat bites, however, are the source of most human rabies deaths in the U.S.20,33 Similarly, in Canada, between 1970 and 2019 there were nine deaths from rabies, the majority associated with bats.34 While human cases are rare in North America, the horrifying virus is still a significant threat in many parts of the world. In particular, Africa and Asia account for 95% of human rabies cases,21 and it is estimated the virus claims more than 50,000 lives on those continents every year.35 Most rabies cases occur among the marginalized and poor who lack access to adequate health care facilities.21 Wounds inflicted by domestic dogs are responsible for 99% of the infections; disproportionately, the victims are children.21 For about half of the world's population who live in countries where canine rabies is endemic,31 the horror caused by the virus is still very real.

Rebbetzin Batsheva Kanievsky (1932–2011) served as a spiritual guide for many; her prominence and influence were a unique phenomenon in the Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) community in which she grew up, where women, lacking Talmudic knowledge or other sources of authority, are generally found only at the margins of the public sphere. Her multi-faceted activity was focused on offering blessings and advice. She also innovated a few segulot (magical techniques) and religious rituals. Her leadership is characterized, on the one hand, by the preservation and even strengthening of the existing Lithuanian Haredi ethos, particularly in the context of the wife’s complete self-abnegation for her husband’s Torah study. On the other hand, it fostered emotional and experiential elements that are closer to the ethos of the Hasidic and Sephardi communities and are associated with folk piety and a quasi-magical orientation. Rebbetzin Kanievsky thus created a type of female religious leadership that can be characterized as anti-leadership, in which she embodied the Haredi conception of ideal womanhood. Consequently, she was not perceived as a threat to Haredi values but rather as their promoter. However, this model of leadership enabled her to break, almost despite herself, the limitations of the gender hierarchy of the Haredi community and serve as an almost singular female role model in that community’s pantheon.

According to Wednesday, people in other times and in other places would build \"temples, or cathedrals, or erect stone circles,\" yet contemporary Americans instead create a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they have never visited, or [erect] a gigantic bat-house inside part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. [...]incorporation of the past is one of the three constitutive elements that Mikhail Bakhtin said formed the epic genre (13). [...]this story provides a challenge to conceptions of American-ness, which may popularly begin-even if such accounts are acknowledged to be inaccurate - with the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Low Key is Shadow's mentor of sorts in prison, encouraging him to read Herodotus's Histories and practice coin tricks, the latter skill which he carries with him throughout the narrative. Since Low Key turns out to be Loki in disguise, who then further disguises himself as Mr. World, the leader of the New Gods, Shadow has never really been solely on the side of the Old Gods but has been associated with the New from the very first page of the work since Low Key/Loki/Mr.

The phoenix is the rarest of game birds, indeed so rare that its snob appeal by far supersedes that of all other luxury foods. As described by Ovid in his classic account, the Metamorphoses, this mythical creature spontaneously bursts into flame at maturity, to subsequently be reborn from its own ashes. The life cycle of the phoenix is thus the very allegory of cuisine, taken in its structural instance, as it spans the antithetical conditions of raw/cooked, cold/hot, fresh/rotten, dry/moist, aromatic/gamy. The phoenix would therefore be the perfect dish and the ideal offering, paradoxically encompassing the contradictory possibilities of diverse cooking techniques, inherent alimentary differences, and sacred symbolism. Like the trans substantiation of the host, or cannibalistic communion, the eating of the phoenix would constitute a truly transcendental gastronomic act. Given the phoenix's origin and its habitat in biblical lands, as well as its transcendental destiny, the question as to whether the bird is kosher is of the essence. Such an investigation will illuminate not only the symbolic structure of koshruth, but also the imaginary of gastronomy, untainted by prejudiced considerations of real cuisine.