A headstrong Egyptian priestess, her brother, their sacked colony—and a rescue mission. When Itaweret’s beloved Per-Pehu falls to the tyrannical Scylax, she and her brother Bek lead a mission to save her captured people and depose Scylax. Along the way, they run into all kinds of perils, friends, and foes—and beasts sent by an angry goddess. Set in ancient Greece 3,500 years ago, this is a tale blending magical realism with history, high adventure with discovery . . . and Itaweret’s determination to save her people while learning her heart’s desires and realizing her deeper purpose.
The seventh book in the funny and fast-paced InCryptid urban fantasy series returns to the mishaps of the Price family, eccentric cryptozoologists who safeguard the world of magical creatures living in secret among humans. Includes an all-new Aeslin mice novella and a map of Lowryland! Penance, noun: 1. Punishment for past actions. 2. An attempt to pay for what can't be bought. 3. See also "exile." Antimony Price is on the run. With the Covenant on her tail and her family still in danger, she needs to get far, far away from anyone who might recognize her--including her own mice. For the first time in a long time, a Price is flying without a safety net. Where do you go when you need to disappear into a crowd without worrying about attracting attention? An amusement park, of course. Some people would call Lowryland the amusement park. It's one of the largest in Florida, the keystone of the Lowry entertainment empire...but for Annie, it's a place to hide. She's just trying to keep her head down long enough to come up with a plan that will get her home without getting anyone killed. No small order when she's rooming with gorgons and sylphs, trying to placate frustrated ghosts, and rushing to get to work on time. Then the accidents begin. The discovery of a dead man brings Annie to the attention of the secret cabal of magic users running Lowryland from behind the scenes. They want the fire that sleeps in her fingers. They want her on their side. They want to help her--although their help, like everything else, comes with a price. No plan. Minimal backup. No way out. Annie's about to get a crash course in the reality behind the pretty facade. If she's lucky, she'll survive the experience.
Reveals the existence of a Templar colony in the New World and how the explorer Verrazano, also a member of a secret society, attempted to reestablish contact with it • Explores Columbus’s connection to Henry Sinclair’s maps of the New World • Examines the secret alliance of Catholic Sulpicians and French Huguenots to preserve the Templar legacy • Reveals the hidden knowledge preserved in the Templar baptisteries found throughout Europe and in Newport, Rhode Island In 1524 the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano was sent by the French king Francis I on an expedition ostensibly to find a shorter route to China. However, his true mission, Steven Sora suggests, was to contact a Templar colony that might have been established in Newport, Rhode Island, by Henry Sinclair at the end of the 14th century. In his expedition log Verrazano recorded that his only stay on this journey was at Newport Harbor, the site of a tower built to the exact measurements of a Templar baptistery, a sacred sanctuary representing baptism and eternal life. This tower is a remnant of Sinclair’s voyage to America nearly a century before that of Columbus (who had access to Sinclair’s maps thanks to his wife, who was Sinclair’s great-granddaughter). While Verrazano’s mission succeeded in finding the tower, the colony itself eluded him. His backers then decided to resurrect the dream of Acadia--a place where they could aspire to higher knowledge without fear of Church or state--by creating a new Secret Society that included Huguenots and Catholic Sulpicians. This Company of the Holy Sacrament would lay the foundations for Montreal in an attempt to realize the ambitions of Sinclair and his Templar companions, as well as to stave off efforts by the Jesuits to transform Quebec into a fiefdom of the orthodox Church. Quebec’s motto, “Je me souviens” (I remember), is a reference to this secret history.
The sixth book in New York Times-bestselling Seanan McGuire's witty urban fantasy InCryptid series about a family of cryptozoologists who act as a buffer between humans and the magical creatures living in secret around us. "The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book." —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Sookie Stackhouse series Improbable, adjective: 1. Not very likely to happen; not probable. 2. Probably not a very good idea anyway. 3. See also “bad plan.” As the youngest of the three Price children, Antimony is used to people not expecting much from her. She’s been happy playing roller derby and hanging out with her cousins, leaving the globe-trotting to her older siblings while she stays at home and tries to decide what she wants to do with her life. She always knew that one day, things would have to change. She didn’t think they’d change so fast. Annie’s expectations keep getting shattered. She didn’t expect Verity to declare war on the Covenant of St. George on live television. She didn’t expect the Covenant to take her sister’s threat seriously. And she definitely didn’t expect to be packed off to London to infiltrate the Covenant from the inside…but as the only Price in her generation without a strong resemblance to the rest of the family, she’s the perfect choice to play spy. They need to know what’s coming. Their lives may depend on it. But Annie has some secrets of her own, like the fact that she’s started setting things on fire when she touches them, and has no idea how to control it. Now she’s headed halfway around the world, into the den of the enemy, where blowing her cover could get her killed. She’s pretty sure things can’t get much worse. Antimony Price is about to learn just how wrong it’s possible for one cryptozoologist to be.
Priests in Exile is the first comprehensive scholarly opus in English to reconstruct the history of the mysterious Temple of Onias, a Jewish temple built by a Jerusalemite high priest in his Egyptian exile that functioned in parallel with the Temple of Jerusalem. Piotrkowski’s book addresses a topic that is mysterious, important and anomalous: a Jewish community of mercenary priests in the (Egyptian) Diaspora in which the priestly sacrificial ritual was carried out daily over a period of more than two hundred years until the first century CE, outlasting the Jerusalem Temple by about three years. Although the book focuses on the very circumscribed topic of the parallel Temple it casts a wide net, placing the story in the context of Jewish Diaspora life in ancient times. Ancient topics and texts are brought to bear, including papyri, epigraphy, archaeology, as well as the modern literature. Piotrkowski throws new light on a fascinating episode of ancient Jewish history that is usually left in the dark.
In the long-awaited return to Avalon by the beloved author of The Mists of Avalon and her collaborator, bestselling author Diana L. Paxson, Marion Zimmer Bradley fuses myth, magic and romance in a spectacular unfolding of one woman's role in the making of history and spirit...
How early modern theatrical practice helped construct the category of “pagan” as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition In Making Pagans, John Kuhn argues that drama played a powerful role in the articulation of religious difference in the seventeenth century. Tracing connections between the history of stagecraft and ethnological disciplines such as ethnography, antiquarianism, and early comparative religious writing, Kuhn shows how early modern repertory systems that leaned heavily on thrift and reuse produced an enduring theatrical vocabulary for understanding religious difference through the representation of paganism—a key term in the new taxonomy of world religions emerging at this time, and a frequent subject and motif in English drama of the era. Combining properties such as triumphal chariots, trick alters, and moving statues with music, special effects, and other elements, the spectacular set-pieces that were mostly developed for plays set in antiquity, depicting England’s pre-Christian past, were frequently repurposed in new plays, in representations of Native Americans and Africans in colonial contact zones. Kuhn argues that the recycling of these set-pieces encouraged audiences to process new cultural sites through the lens of old performance tropes, and helped produce fictitious, quasi-ethnographic knowledge for spectators, generating the idea of a homogeneous, trans-historical, trans-geographical “paganism.” Examining the common scenes of pagan ritual that filled England's seventeenth-century stages—magical conjurations, oracular prophecies, barbaric triumphal parades, and group suicides—Kuhn traces these tropes across dozens of plays, from a range of authors including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Philip Massinger. Drawing together theater history, Atlantic studies, and the history of comparative religion, Making Pagans reconceptualizes the material and iterative practices of the theater as central to the construction of radical religious difference in early modernity and of the category of paganism as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition.
Harmony, a new utopia for space-faring humans. Or is it a thinly disguised tyranny locked into a rigid caste system, slavery by another name? Either way, xenophobic Harmony holds the secret to Badger Metal, a unique ceramic-metal alloy that protects people from the radiation and hard vacuum of space. Sissy grew up Worker Caste on the planet Harmony, her only hope for survival is to remain unnoticed, hiding her full array of seven caste marks. A devastating quake appears to be a major temper tantrum by the goddess Harmony. Sissy sings the planet, and her goddess back to benign quiet—matching the vibrations of her voice to the vibrations of the planet. This one act throws her into the role of High Priestess. Then she discovers she is the only one who can prevent her world from falling out of harmony into chaos. Jake has reinvented himself from wild pilot, to spy, to Sissy’s bodyguard while he hunts for the precious formula for Badger Metal. Can he find it and protect Sissy from outraged priests who fear change more than death, before civil war, and invasion, bury them all?
The New York Times bestselling science fiction and fantasy author of the Avalon series introduces the prequel to the beloved and enduring classic The Mists of Avalon in this mesmerizing epic of one woman’s legendary role at a turning point in history. In a Britain struggling to survive Roman invasion, Eilan is the daughter of a Druidic warleader, gifted with visions and marked by fate to become a priestess of the Forest House. But fate also led Eilan to Gaius, a soldier of mixed blood, son of the Romans sent to subdue the native British. For Gaius, Eilan felt forbidden love, and her terrible secret will haunt her even as she is anointed as the new High Priestess. With mighty enemies poised to destroy the magic the Forest House shelters, Eilan must trust in the power of the great Goddess to lead her through the treacherous labyrinth of her destiny.
