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"Divination -- History"
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Books of fate and popular culture in early China : the daybook manuscripts of the Warring States, Qin, and Han
\"Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China is a comprehensive introduction to the manuscripts known as daybooks, examples of which have been found in Warring States, Qin, and Han tombs (453 BCE-220 CE). Their main content concerns hemerology, or \"knowledge of good and bad days.\" Daybooks reveal the place of hemerology in daily life and are invaluable sources for the study of popular culture. Eleven scholars have contributed chapters examining the daybooks from different perspectives, detailing their significance as manuscript-objects intended for everyday use and showing their connection to almanacs still popular in Chinese communities today as well as to hemerological literature in medieval Europe and ancient Babylon. Contributors include: Marianne Bujard, Lâaszlâo Sâandor Chardonnens, Christopher Cullen, Donald Harper, Marc Kalinowski, Li Ling, Liu Lexian, Ala.\"--Provided by publisher.
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Making the Gods Speak
For two millennia, Chinese society has been producing divine revelations on an unparalleled scale, in multifarious genres and formats. This book is the first comprehensive attempt at accounting for the processes of such production. It builds a typology of the various ritual techniques used to make gods present and allow them to speak or write, and it follows the historical development of these types and the revealed teachings they made possible. Within the large array of visionary, mediumistic, and mystical techniques, Vincent Goossaert devotes the bulk of his analysis to spirit-writing, a family of rites that appeared around the eleventh century and gradually came to account for the largest numbers of books and tracts ascribed to the gods. In doing so, he shows that the practice of spirit-writing must be placed within the framework of techniques used by ritual specialists to control human communications with gods and spirits for healing, divining, and self-divinization, among other purposes. Making the Gods Speak thus offers a ritual-centered framework to study revelation in Chinese cultural history and comparatively with the revelatory practices of other religious traditions.
eBook
Ancient divination and experience
The introduction to this volume describes the contribution that it makes to scholarship on ancient divinatory practices. It analyses previous and current research, arguing that while this predominantly functionalist work reveals important socio-political dimensions of divination, it also runs the risk of obscuring from view the very people, ideologies, and experiences that scholars seek to understand. It explains that the essays in this volume focus on re-examining what ancient people—primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures—thought they were doing through divination. The Introduction provides an overview of the content of each chapter and identifies key themes and questions shared across chapters. The volume explores the types of relationships that divination created between mortals and gods, and what this can tell us about the religions and cultures in which divination was practised.
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Bodies of knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia : the diviners of late Bronze Age Emar and their tablet collection
In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia Matthew Rutz investigates how libraries and archives can be used to study ancient diviners, an approach illustrated using one family's cuneiform tablet collection from Emar on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE).
eBook
The Indian System of Human Marks
In The Indian System of Human Marks, Zysk offers a literary history of the Indian system of knowledge which details divination by means of the marks on the bodies of both men and women. The history covers from earliest times to modern-day and includes the earliest texts and their translations.
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A Kingdom of Stargazers
Astrology in the Middle Ages was considered a branch of the magical arts, one informed by Jewish and Muslim scientific knowledge in Muslim Spain. As such it was deeply troubling to some Church authorities. Using the stars and planets to divine the future ran counter to the orthodox Christian notion that human beings have free will, and some clerical authorities argued that it almost certainly entailed the summoning of spiritual forces considered diabolical. We know that occult beliefs and practices became widespread in the later Middle Ages, but there is much about the phenomenon that we do not understand. For instance, how deeply did occult beliefs penetrate courtly culture and what exactly did those in positions of power hope to gain by interacting with the occult? InA Kingdom of Stargazers, Michael A. Ryan examines the interest in astrology in the Iberian kingdom of Aragon, where ideas about magic and the occult were deeply intertwined with notions of power, authority, and providence.
Ryan focuses on the reigns of Pere III (1336-1387) and his sons Joan I (1387-1395) and Martí I (1395-1410). Pere and Joan spent lavish amounts of money on astrological writings, and astrologers held great sway within their courts. When Martí I took the throne, however, he was determined to purge Joan's courtiers and return to religious orthodoxy. As Ryan shows, the appeal of astrology to those in power was clear: predicting the future through divination was a valuable tool for addressing the extraordinary problems-political, religious, demographic-plaguing Europe in the fourteenth century. Meanwhile, the kings' contemporaries within the noble, ecclesiastical, and mercantile elite had their own reasons for wanting to know what the future held, but their engagement with the occult was directly related to the amount of power and authority the monarch exhibited and applied.A Kingdom of Stargazersjoins a growing body of scholarship that explores the mixing of religious and magical ideas in the late Middle Ages.
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