Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916 is the first critical study of the religious poet and militarist Joseph M. Plunkett, who was executed with the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection of 1916. Through Plunkett the author gains access to areas of nationalist thought that were more often assumed or repressed than publicly formulated. In this eye-opening book, W. J. Mc Cormack explores and analyzes Plunkett’s brief life, work, and influence, beginning with his wealthy but dysfunctional family, irregular Jesuit education, and self-canceling sexuality. Mc Cormack continues through Plunkett’s active phase when amateur theatricals and a magazine editorship brought him into the emergent neonationalist discourse of early twentieth-century Ireland. Finally, the author arrives at Holy Week 1916, when Plunkett masterminded the forgery of official documentation in order to provoke and justify the insurrection he planned. Mc Cormack analyzes Plunkett’s significant texts and provides context through critical perspectives on his milieu. Enigmas of Sacrifice is unique in its effort to understand a major figure of Irish nationalism in terms that reach beyond political identity.
Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.
"Harry Potter (with grownups) meets Midsommer Murders with a magical version of C.S.I. thrown in for good measure." - Rob Drake The body of a beautiful girl dressed in a ceremonial robe is found on a playground roundabout. Her throat has been ripped out and the roundabout has a bad case of perpetual motion. Is it a ritualistic, magical murder or a setup to distract from the real killer? That is the question that faces twins, Theo and Remy Haward, detectives in the Sorcerous Crimes Task Force (SeCT), when they are called to the scene in the middle of the night. That and who could commit such an act. They must find the answers to these and other questions, all the while ensuring the general public finds out nothing about the magical world that co-exists with their own. Armed with their experience, their natural magical abilities and their complimentary instincts, Remy and Theo must identify the victim, follow the evidence and find the killer before anyone else dies.
A New York Times Notable Book and one of The Daily Beast's Best Books of the Year Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Since the Enlightenment, the Parthenon—the greatest example of Athenian architecture—has been venerated as the definitive symbol of Western democratic values. Here, Joan Breton Connelly challenges this conventional wisdom, drawing on previously undiscovered sources to present a revolutionary new view of this peerless building. Reaching back across time to trace the Parthenon’s story from the laying of its foundation, Connelly finds its true meaning not in the rationalist ideals we typically associate with Athens but in a vast web of ceaseless cultic observances and a unique mythic identity, in which democracy in our sense of the word would have been inconceivable. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, and full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma sheds a stunning new light on the ancient Athenians from whom we claim cultural descent—and on Western civilization itself.
The religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West's greatest thinkers. But, according to Guy Stroumsa, the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within ...
Continuing the post-television Deep Space Nine saga, this original novel shows the fall of the Cardassian empire as seen through the eyes of a young man with a foot in two worlds. Rugal is an orphaned Cardassian who has been raised by the people his race once conquered, the Bajorans. Reluctantly repatriated to Cardassia as a teenager, Rugal becomes the living witness to the downfall of the proud people to whom he was born, first by the invading Klingons, then during the Cardassians’ unholy pact with the Dominion—a partnership that culminated in a near-genocide. Through it all, Rugal’s singular perspective illuminates the choices that brought the Cardassians to their ruin...even as he learns that the Cardassian soul is not as easy to understand as he imagined.
This volume is a collection of selected poems which captures a view of life as seen through the lens of advanced years. They deal with looking back, looking forward and a lot of looking around as life unfolds. The writer blends a gift of Celtic vision and a mystical approach to life. The writer comes from Hindu background, the approach is balanced and broad minded. He always tried to connect people through his creative writing style.
When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate. Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.
An analysis of the intertwining tales of Elijah and Ahab--mercurial prophet and Machiavellian king--this book is an accessible treatment of one of the most dramatic and well-known episodes in the Bible. In contrast to the popular image of Elijah as a courageous wonder-worker who calls down fire from heaven and ascends to heaven in a fiery chariot, this book contends that the prophet was a deeply conflicted man, torn between a burning idealism and a deep disillusionment over his failure to achieve his ideals. Despite his profound sense of failure, Elijah's struggle against the paganizing regime of King Ahab and his queen, Jezebel, managed to save monotheism from eclipse, and in so doing alter the course of human history. This work further proposes that the tale presented by the Bible is more than an account of an ancient battle between two historic figures: it is a paradigm of the struggle between the ideals of human dignity and justice, and the alternative of expediency in the pursuit of power, a conflict that pervades human life to this very day.
