In the harsh region known as the borderlands, humans must fight an endless battle against demi-human creatures that come at them relentlessly, intent on taking their land and their gods. A young boy named Kai, fighting to defend his village, sustains a life-threatening injury that causes him to regain memories from a past life. If you’re not a guardian bearer, it’s like you’re playing life on hard mode... Kai’s newfound knowledge gives him a new sense of the unfair “rule set” that governs the world around him. One thing is clear: For those without a god to serve as their guardian, life is a constant struggle for survival. Thus begins the epic tale of a young boy’s ascent into a vast world filled with magic, bloodshed, and mystery.
When Kai became the host vessel to the god of the valley, he was made a guardian bearer with power far beyond any ordinary human. To many, he is the embodiment of an ancient god known for its fearsome power and thirst for blood, and those seeking his protection have begun to form a small nation with the valley at its center. To others, Kai is simply a poor young boy living in a remote village in the borderlands. A village whose existence is threatened by a hostile demi-human race that lurks in the nearby forest. It’s only a matter of time before Kai must fight to defend the village, but corrupt officials from the capital are driving the village to ruin before the battle even begins. The mysterious priest, with magic far more advanced than his own, could be a valuable ally as Kai struggles to understand the human nation’s politics and the power of its gods. But with the priest watching Kai’s every move, his double life could soon be exposed.
The demi-human macaques that rule the great forest have brought disaster upon their species. A profane creature, known as a diabo, drains power from their gods and threatens to turn their home into a barren wasteland. None of this would normally concern a human boy like Kai, but the macaques have named him as their protector, and his god insists that the diabo must be slain. Apparently, their diabo is his problem now. Meanwhile, the guardian bearers of the borderlands are making preparations to attend the winter solstice banquet in the provincial capital. There they will drink, feast, and fight, thereby strengthening their ties. As Lag’s most promising young soldier, Kai has been invited to attend and witness this gathering of powerful warriors for himself.
This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In classics, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of classics. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.
The publication of Volume 16 of this distinguished series brings to a close one of the largest research and documentation projects ever undertaken on the Middle American Indians. Since the publication of Volume 1 in 1964, the Handbook of Middle American Indians has provided the most complete information on every aspect of indigenous culture, including natural environment, archaeology, linguistics, social anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnology, and ethnohistory. Culminating this massive project is Volume 16, divided into two parts. Part I, Sources Cited, by Margaret A. L. Harrison, is a listing in alphabetical order of all the bibliographical entries cited in Volumes 1-11. (Volumes 12-15, comprising the Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, have not been included, because they stand apart in subject matter and contain or constitute independent bibliographical material.) Part II, Location of Artifacts Illustrated, by Marjorie S. Zengel, details the location (at the time of original publication) of the owner of each pre-Columbian American artifact illustrated in Volumes 1-11 of the Handbook, as well as the size and the catalog, accession, and/or inventory number that the owner assigns to the object. The two parts of Volume 16 provide a convenient and useful reference to material found in the earlier volumes. The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.
Volume 2 is a detailed commentary on the texts of Early Greek Mythography: Volume 1, a critical edition of the twenty-nine authors of this genre from the late 6th to early 4th centuries BC. Volume 2 provides a mythological commentary of the original works, as well as a philological commentary on separate authors.
Have you ever wondered what happens after peace is restored in a fantasy world? What happens beyond the final page of an Isekai light novel? Eiji, a thirty-year-old Japanese city clerk with a thoroughly average life and a fiancée, had not. He too answers a call to be transported to a fantasy world, but not as a hero. This fantasy world, having already been saved by a hero, was about to collapse for another reason entirely... thanks to that hero, who was also summoned from Japan. Eiji is tasked with restoring the fantasy world to its authentic form: how it was before it was infected with the technology, ideology, and societal concepts of modern-day Japan.
How should we study religion? Must we be religious ourselves to truly understand it? Do we study religion to advance our knowledge, or should the study of religions help to reintroduce the sacred into our increasingly secularized world? Juraj Franek argues that the study of religion has long been split into two competing paradigms: reductive (naturalist) and non-reductive (protectionist). While the naturalistic approach seems to run the risk of explaining religious phenomena away, the protectionist approach appears to risk falling short of the methodological standards of modern science. Franek uses primary source material from Greek and Latin sources to show that both competing paradigms are traceable to Presocratic philosophy and early Christian literature. He presents the idea that naturalists are distant heirs, not only of the French Enlightenment, but also of the Ionian one. Likewise, he argues that protectionists owe much of their arguments and strategies, not only to Luther and the Reformation, but to the earliest Christian literature. This book analyses the conflict between reductive and non-reductive approach in the modern study of religions, and positions the Cognitive Science of Religion against a background of previous theories - ancient and modern - to demonstrate its importance for the revindication of the naturalist paradigm.
Few figures from Greco-Roman antiquity have undergone as much reassessment in recent decades as Callimachus of Cyrene, who was active at the Alexandrian court of the Ptolemies during the early third century BC. Once perceived as a supreme example of ivory tower detachment and abstruse learning, Callimachus has now come to be understood as an artificer of the images of a powerful and vibrant court and as a poet second only to Homer in his later reception. For the modern audience, the fragmentation of his texts and the diffusion of source materials has often impeded understanding his poetic achievement. Brill’s Companion to Callimachus has been designed to aid in negotiating this scholarly terrain, especially the process of editing and collecting his fragments, to illuminate his intellectual and social contexts, and to indicate the current directions that his scholarship is taking.
