Animals in Ancient Greek Religion
Animals in Ancient Greek Religion

Author: Julia Kindt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-29

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0429754590

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This book provides the first systematic study of the role of animals in different areas of the ancient Greek religious experience, including in myth and ritual, the literary and the material evidence, the real and the imaginary. An international team of renowned contributors shows that animals had a sustained presence not only in the traditionally well-researched cultural practice of blood sacrifice but across the full spectrum of ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices. Animals played a role in divination, epiphany, ritual healing, the setting up of dedications, the writing of binding spells, and the instigation of other ‘magical’ means. Taken together, the individual contributions to this book illustrate that ancient Greek religion constituted a triangular symbolic system encompassing not just gods and humans, but also animals as a third player and point of reference. Animals in Ancient Greek Religion will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek religion, Greek myth, and ancient religion more broadly, as well as for anyone interested in human/animal relations in the ancient world.

Animals in Greek and Roman Religion and Myth
Animals in Greek and Roman Religion and Myth

Author: Patricia A. Johnston

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-08-17

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 144389821X

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This volume brings together a variety of approaches to the different ways in which the role of animals was understood in ancient Greco-Roman myth and religion, across a period of several centuries, from Preclassical Greece to Late Antique Rome. Animals in Greco-Roman antiquity were thought to be intermediaries between men and gods, and they played a pivotal role in sacrificial rituals and divination, the foundations of pagan religion. The studies in the first part of the volume examine the role of the animals in sacrifice and divination. The second part explores the similarities between animals, on the one hand, and men and gods, on the other. Indeed, in antiquity, the behaviour of several animals was perceived to mirror human behaviour, while the selection of the various animals as sacrificial victims to specific deities often was determined on account of some peculiar habit that echoed a special attribute of the particular deity. The last part of this volume is devoted to the study of animal metamorphosis, and to this end a number of myths that associate various animals with transformation are examined from a variety of perspectives.

Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism, and Christianity, 100 BC to AD 200
Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism, and Christianity, 100 BC to AD 200

Author: M.-Z. Petropoulou

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2008-03-06

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0199218544

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A study of animal sacrifice within Greek paganism, Judaism, and Christianity between 100 BC and AD 200. After a vivid account of the realities of sacrifice in the Greek East and in the Jerusalem Temple, Maria-Zoe Petropoulou explores the attitudes of early Christians towards this practice, and the reasons why they ultimately rejected it.

Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World
Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World

Author: Sarah Hitch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-08-24

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 110821004X

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This volume brings together studies on Greek animal sacrifice by foremost experts in Greek language, literature and material culture. Readers will benefit from the synthesis of new evidence and approaches with a re-evaluation of twentieth-century theories on sacrifice. The chapters range across the whole of antiquity and go beyond the Greek world to consider possible influences in Hittite Anatolia and Egypt, while an introduction to the burgeoning science of osteo-archaeology is provided. The twentieth-century emphasis on sacrifice as part of the Classical Greek polis system is challenged through consideration of various ancient perspectives on sacrifice as distinct from specific political or even Greek contexts. Many previously unexplored topics are covered, particularly the type of animals sacrificed and the spectrum of sacrificial ritual, from libations to lasting memorials of the ritual in art.

Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice
Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice

Author: Christopher A. Faraone

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-03-22

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1107011124

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The first general critique of the interpretations of animal sacrifice established by Walter Burkert, the late J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne.

Animals, Gods and Humans
Animals, Gods and Humans

Author: Ingvild Saelid Gilhus

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-09-27

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 1134169159

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Consulting a wide range of key texts and source material, Animals, Gods and Humans covers 800 years and provides a detailed analysis of early Christian attitudes to, and the position of, animals in Greek and Roman life and thought. Both the pagan and Christian conceptions of animals are rich and multilayered, and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus expertly examines the dominant themes and developments in the conception of animals. Including study of: biographies of figures such as Apollonus of Tyana; natural history; the New Testament via Gnostic texts; the church fathers; and from pagan and Christian criticism of animal sacrifice, to the acts of martyrs, the source material and detailed analysis included in this volume make it a veritable feast of information for all classicists.

Animals and their Relation to Gods, Humans and Things in the Ancient World
Animals and their Relation to Gods, Humans and Things in the Ancient World

Author: Raija Mattila

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-03-11

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 3658243880

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While Human-Animal Studies is a rapidly growing field in modern history, studies on this topic that focus on the Ancient World are few. The present volume aims at closing this gap. It investigates the relation between humans, animals, gods, and things with a special focus on the structure of these categories. An improved understanding of the ancient categories themselves is a precondition for any investigation into the relation between them. The focus of the volume lies on the Ancient Near East, but it also provides studies on Ancient Greece, Asia Minor, Mesoamerica, the Far East, and Arabia.

Mixanthrôpoi
Mixanthrôpoi

Author: Emma Aston

Publisher: Presses universitaires de Liège

Published: 2017-10-25

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 2821895631

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Many of the beings in this book – Cheiron, Pan, Acheloos, the Sirens and others – will be familiar from the narratives of Greek mythology, in which fabulous anatomies abound. However, they have never previously been studied together from a religious perspective, as recipients of cult and as members of the ancient pantheon. This book is the first major treatment of the use of part-animal – mixanthropic – form in the representation and visual imagination of Greek gods and goddesses, and of its significance with regard to divine character and function. What did it mean to depict deities in a form so strongly associated in the ancient imagination with monstrous adversaries? How did iconography, myth and ritual interact in particular sites of worship? Drawing together literary and visual material, this study establishes the themes dominant in the worship of divine mixanthropes, and argues that, so far from being insignificant curiosities, they make possible a greater understanding of the fabric of ancient religious practice, in particular the tense and challenging relationship between divinity and visual representation.

The Cattle of the Sun
The Cattle of the Sun

Author: Jeremy McInerney

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-05-30

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0691140073

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Includes selections translated from the Ancient Greek.

Mixanthrôpoi
Mixanthrôpoi

Author: Emma Aston

Publisher: Presses Universitaires Liège

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 9782960071788

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"Many of the beings in this book - Cheiron, Pan, Acheloos, the Sirens and others - will be familiar from the narratives of Greek mythology, in which fabulous anatomies abound. However, they have never previously been studied together from a religious perspective, as recipients of cult and as members of the ancient pantheon. This book is the first major treatment of the use of part-animal - mixanthropic - form in the representation and visual imagination of Greek gods and goddesses, and of its significance with regard to divine character and function. What did it mean to depict deities in a form so strongly associated in the ancient imagination with monstrous adversaries? How did iconography, myth and ritual interact in particular sites of worship? Drawing together literary and visual material, this study establishes the themes dominant in the worship of divine mixanthropes, and argues that, so far from being insignificant curiosities, they make possible a greater understanding of the fabric of ancient religious practice, in particular the tense and challenging relationship between divinity and visual representation."--Publisher's website.