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A Calabash of Cowries: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times is a collection of tales featuring the Orishas and the wonders of the natural world. Suitable for adults and children, artists and teachers, readers of all cultures will discover in these retellings of traditional tales a resource that illuminates the mythic and the real, the ancient past and the emerging present. An offering of spiritual wisdom and cultural celebration through stories that have and will continue to endure the test of time.

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 archetype has been outwardly expressed in many cultures and periods since prehistory. He shows how the feminine has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun, vessel, and every animal from snakes to birds. Neumann discerns a universal experience of the maternal as both nurturing and fearsome, an experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized by the Great Mother. Featuring a new foreword by Martin Liebscher, this Princeton Classics edition of The Great Mother introduces a new generation of readers to this profound and enduring work.

For those who wonder what relation actual Tantric practices bear to the \"Tantric sex\" currently being marketed so successfully in the West, David Gordon White has a simple answer: there is none. Sweeping away centuries of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, White returns to original texts, images, and ritual practices to reconstruct the history of South Asian Tantra from the medieval period to the present day. Kiss of the Yogini focuses on what White identifies as the sole truly distinctive feature of South Asian Tantra: sexualized ritual practices, especially as expressed in the medieval Kaula rites. Such practices centered on the exchange of powerful, transformative sexual fluids between male practitioners and wild female bird and animal spirits known as Yoginis. It was only by \"drinking\" the sexual fluids of the Yoginis that men could enter the family of the supreme godhead and thereby obtain supernatural powers and transform themselves into gods. By focusing on sexual rituals, White resituates South Asian Tantra, in its precolonial form, at the center of religious, social, and political life, arguing that Tantra was the mainstream, and that in many ways it continues to influence contemporary Hinduism, even if reformist misunderstandings relegate it to a marginal position. Kiss of the Yogini contains White's own translations from over a dozen Tantras that have never before been translated into any European language. It will prove to be the definitive work for persons seeking to understand Tantra and the crucial role it has played in South Asian history, society, culture, and religion.

The rise of a patriarchal society has led to a prevalent perception of male superiority over women, which is reflected in the gender-based disparities within the deity system of China. However, in contrast to the situation in the Central Plains, the Lingnan region assigns a significant social status to women, as evidenced by the active worship of female deities. Among them, the Loong Mother stands out as a highly revered goddess in Lingnan’s mythology. This paper investigates the evolution of the Loong Mother’s deification from a mortal woman, and explores the varying religious principles of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, as well as their influence on the veneration of female deities in Lingnan. Additionally, this paper analyzes the Loong Mother’s portrayal within civil society. Despite undergoing continuous transformation to cater to diverse religious traditions and societal needs, the goddess’s actions and functions ultimately reflect her creation and shaping by the community.

Holme I and II were contemporary, adjacent Early Bronze Age (EBA) oak-timber enclosures exposed intertidally at Holme-next-the-sea, Norfolk, England, in 1998. Holme I enclosed a central upturned tree-stump, its function and intent unknown. Holme II is thought a mortuary structure. Both are proposed here best explained as independent ritual responses to reverse a period of severe climate deterioration recorded before 2049 BC when their timbers were felled. Holme I is thought erected on the summer-solstice, when the cuckoo traditionally stopped singing, departing to the ‘Otherworld’. It replicated the cuckoo’s supposed overwintering quarters: a tree-hole or the ‘bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the tree-stump, remembered in folklore as ‘penning-the-cuckoo’ where a cuckoo is confined to keep singing and maintain summer. The cuckoo symbolised male-fertility being associated with several Indo-European goddesses of fertility that deified Venus - one previously identified in EBA Britain. Some mortal consorts of these goddesses appear to have been ritually sacrificed at Samhain. Holme II may be an enclosure for the body of one such ‘sacral king’. These hypotheses are considered, using abductive reasoning, as ‘inferences to the best explanations’ from the available evidence. They are supported with environmental data, astronomic and biological evidence, regional folklore, toponymy, and an ethnographic analogy with indigenous Late Iron Age practices that indirect evidence indicates were undertaken in EBA Britain. Cultural and religious continuity is supported by textual sources, the material record and ancient DNA (aDNA) studies.

The article examines the rare phenomenon of a hind crowned as a stag, a creature that only male red deer typically embody due to their antlers. In mythology and folklore, creature is fantastical, akin to the unicorn or phoenix.Only male red deer possess antlers. Hinds crowned as stags are an exceptionally rare phenomenon in nature. In mythology and folklore, this creature is seen as phantasmagoric, akin to the unicorn or the phoenix. Such a being, inherently ambivalent, was often perceived as a monstrum, violating the natural order and evoking both wonder and fear.However, when a majestically antlered hind is described as miraculously saving starving humans by breastfeeding them, it introduces the wondrous world of the divine, life-giving female deer, symbol of fertility and renewal. Emblematic of this is the mythical rescue of ancient heroes, such as the Greek Telephus, the son of Herakles, as documented in related archaeological records.In the archaic folklore of Central-Eastern Europe, the antlered female deer is sometimes compared to a girl or bride, acting as a substitute for her or embodying her most intimate nature. The parallels between a young virgin and a doe sprouting horns are deeply rooted in ancient Greek myths, particularly those involving metamorphoses orchestrated by the goddess Artemis-Diana. Noteworthy examples include Taygete and Titanis (Cos), who were transformed into golden-horned does. Additionally, in some versions of the myth, a horned hind is offered by Artemis-Diana as a substitute for the sacrifice of Princess Iphigenia. The mythological figure of the female deer with antlers is also associated with the goddess’s chariot, as well as the Ceryneian Hind, a target of one of Herakles’ labors.Expanding the focus to ancient Celtic and Gallo-Roman religion, we find the goddess Cernunna, a female equivalent and partner to the god Cernunnos, “The Horned One,” depicted with antlers—a feature typically reserved for male deities.These ancient goddesses, either with antlers or transformed into antlered hinds, are rooted in ancestral mythological traditions where dominant women were larger-than-life figures capable of transforming into deer, or vice versa. According to this totemic narrative, these supernatural women, initiated into the Deer-Mother cult, ruled the world and appeared as stags, covered in hair and with enormous branching antlers. The enduring figure of the Stag Goddess has been reinterpreted in neo-Pagan and Wiccan spirituality as a continuation and revision of these ancient divinities.This article aims to explore the archaeological evidence that, in ancient times, brought to life the extraordinary creature of the crowned hind and her transformation into an antlered goddess.

During the 2017 Taipei City Lantern Festival, a twenty-foot-tall lantern of Moniang, a character from Taiwanese artist Wei Tsung-cheng’s manga series Apocalypse of Darkness Warfare, was inaugurated and put on parade. Moniang represents a new image of the goddess Mazu, incarnated as a cute-sexy high school student. This article examines how this display allowed a new image of Mazu to move from the subculture of “male-oriented” manga creators and fans into a broader public sphere. Debates over the lantern reveal a gap in both generational and political leanings in terms of ideas about the relationship between deities and worshippers. The display of Moniang has opened up the possibility for the younger generation’s reconceptualization of divinity to challenge some of the traditional images and rituals at the core of Chinese folk religion.

Encountering Kali explores one of the most remarkable divinities the world has seen—the Hindu goddess Kali. She is simultaneously understood as a blood-thirsty warrior, a goddess of ritual possession, a Tantric sexual partner, and an all-loving, compassionate Mother. Popular and scholarly interest in her has been on the rise in the West in recent years. Responding to this phenomenon, this volume focuses on the complexities involved in interpreting Kali in both her indigenous South Asian settings and her more recent Western incarnations. Using scriptural history, temple architecture, political violence, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, autobiographical reflection, and the goddess's recent guises on the Internet, the contributors pose questions relevant to our understanding of Kali, as they illuminate the problems and promises inherent in every act of cross-cultural interpretation.

The reindeer that they were so intent on protecting from the wolves will enter their dreams as prey. The delicate throats of the calves will become objects of ardent desires until they imagine their own teeth protruding through their lips, sharpened for the moment when they will strike and the warm blood of the calf will fill their mouths and satiate their souls. Wheeled suitcases clatter past her sitting spot as reminders that she, too, will go away soon, clattering a bag behind her, the important baggage of a life lived amongst strangers and strangeness. The mountains provided a soft bed for those who wanted to rest, and within a few generations the people had put down roots in the small villages where they left the old and the young and the infirm behind, throughout migration.