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Ancient Christians invoked sin to account for an astonishing range of things, from the death of God's son to the politics of the Roman Empire that worshipped him. In this book, award-winning historian of religion Paula Fredriksen tells the surprising story of early Christian concepts of sin, exploring the ways that sin came to shape ideas about God no less than about humanity. Long before Christianity, of course, cultures had articulated the idea that human wrongdoing violated relations with the divine. ButSintells how, in the fevered atmosphere of the four centuries between Jesus and Augustine, singular new Christian ideas about sin emerged in rapid and vigorous variety, including the momentous shift from the belief that sin is something one does to something that one is born into. As the original defining circumstances of their movement quickly collapsed, early Christians were left to debate the causes, manifestations, and remedies of sin. This is a powerful and original account of the early history of an idea that has centrally shaped Christianity and left a deep impression on the secular world as well.

From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests of the Near East, William McCants looks at the ways the conquerors and those they conquered reshaped their myths of civilization's origins in response to the social and political consequences of empire.

The Gesar/Geser epic cycle is a warrior epic known throughout the Tibetan and Mongolian-speaking regions of Asia and is still largely sustained through a shamanistically tinted oral tradition. This article focuses on the epic motif of the hero’s divine descent and constructs both a “constitutional mythology” for the epic based on this motif and a reconstruction of the probable archaic core of the epic motif. It also focuses in particular on the representations of the hero’s sky-god father. The variability in the representation of this figure reflects the cross-cutting religious influences on this Silk Road epic. These range from archaic “native” Inner Asian traditions concerning sky and mountain gods, to Buddhism (and its debt to Indian Vedic religion) and even Silk Road Manichaeism.

Drawing on his extensive psychoanalytic ethnographic work among the Parintintin Indians of Brazil, the author discusses the place of dreaming in Parintintin shamanism. In this culture, dreams are spiritually significant, and there are traditional modes of interpreting them. While dream interpretation was formerly the province of shamans, even ordinary people are considered to have the capacity to use dreams to predict events and sense feelings directed toward them. The article deals primarily with the dreams of an informant who was not a shaman but had an intense interest in this practice. Because his birth had not been 'dreamed' by a shaman, he was not considered to be one; nevertheless, he experienced in dreams the cosmic journey of a shaman. While the informants' dreams manifest yearnings in what could be considered stereotypical forms, the author finds that they do express personal meanings and reflect intimate, unconscious wishes.

Ancient Egypt provides the curious case of a theology in which deep caverns play a central role, but without the presence of natural caves upon which theologians could draw for inspiration. Egyptian cosmology is filled with cave symbolism. For example, Egyptians believed that the life-giving annual flood, personified by the androgynous god Hapy, flowed forth from a cave located among the granite outcrops of the first cataract of the Nile (figure 7.1). Caves and grottoes play a central role in Egyptian solar cosmology and funerary theology, providing secretive, hidden realms where the divine was made manifest and the dead journeyed

It is so much easier to let oneself go, than to let the other go. In the early 1960s P. K. Dick studied (and was terrified by)¹ Ludwig Binswanger’s case study of Ellen West, whose delusional impasse—which took the close-range form in her own terms of “becoming fat”(Dickwerden)—inspired Binswanger to plot on his own terms her “tomb world” against the “aetherial world,” with which he sided, thus taking sides, he concluded, with his patient, whose suicidal conclusion to and escape from the tomb world’s encroachment he assisted or cosigned. Dick projected the aetherial world along the horizon

The Japanese sun-hiding myth implies that the early Japanese believed the sky was made of stone. Gravel-beds at Shinto temples might have been physical manifestations of the belief. Comparative studies show that such a belief was common throughout the world prior to the advent of modern science. One plausible explanation for the wide-spread belief in a stone sky might be cross-cultural observations of a common natural phenomenon: meteorite falls.