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Sacred Geography: Conversations with Place considers the meaning and nature of sacred spaces and landscapes. It asks profound questions, weaving together historical insights, philosophical musings, and contemporary studies to explore the sacredness embedded within our environments. In this volume, contributors explore these themes with a phenomenological approach, allowing places to speak for themselves. They ask: What draws life to a particular place? How do places maintain their identity and resist change? What sacredness do they hold, whether in the quiet solitude of a mountain or the bustling energy of a city street? Sacred Geography invites readers to view their surroundings with fresh eyes, to recognize the sacred in the mundane, and to appreciate the deep connections between land, sky, and human existence. Whether through ancient rituals or modern urban planning, this book offers a rich tapestry of thought, urging us to listen to the landscapes that shape our lives.

The word Harmony appears in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development no less than three times, yet with no definition. This anthology gathers together an interdisciplinary array of experts, academics and practitioners to explore what Harmony means and how we can use it.One traditional view of Harmony holds that everything in the universe operates in a state of balance, another assumes the interconnectedness of all things - an idea central to ecological thought. Such thoughts also lead to action and policy decisions: for example, how do we conduct business, educate children, conduct business, protect the environment, resolve conflict and promote health and well-being in a world in which all things are fundamentally connected?The chapters in this volume explore Harmony from a range of perspectives, historical and philosophical, academic and personal. Rather than suggesting fixed answers, the goal is to ask questions about how we relate to each other, engage with the wider environment, face the challenges of the modern world, and work towards holistic solutions for today''s problems.

For millennia human beings have imagined a journey to the heavens. This dream finally became a reality on 12 April 1961 when Yuri Gagarin made his single, historic orbit of the Earth. This volume celebrates Gagarin's historic achievement and provides a valuable resource in the emerging discipline of Cultural Astronomy.

Lomsdalen situates Maltese temples in Mnajdra in their archaeological archaeoastronomical contexts, introducing new insights into the quixotic architecture and its relationships with the sky.

In modern science the cosmos is 'out there', but in traditional societies it is also 'in here', permeating everything. This book explores various approaches to understanding how human beings relate their lives to the cosmos from the ancient world to the modern, using perspectives informed by history and anthropology.

Astrology has recently become a subject of interest to scholars of the highest calibre. However, the tendency has been to look at the social context of astrology, the attacks on astrologers and their craft, and on astrological iconography and symbolism; i.e., largely looking on astrology from the outside. The intention of this book is to do is to look at the subject from the inside: the ideas and techniques of astrologers themselves. In both Western and Eastern cultures astrology was regarded as a pure science by most scholars, mathematicians, physicians, philosophers and theologians, and was taught in schools and universities. The greatest astronomers of the period under consideration, al-Kindi, Thabit ibn Qurra, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Galileo and Kepler, also wrote about and practised astrology. What did astrologers write about astrology and how did they teach their subject and practise their craft? What changes occurred in astrological theory and practice over time and from one culture to another? What cosmological and philosophical frameworks did astrologers use to describe their practice? What role did diagrams, tables and illustrations play in astrological text-books? What was astrology's place in universities and academies? This book contains surveys of astrologers and their craft in Islamic, Jewish and Christian culture, and includes hitherto unpublished and unstudied astrological texts.

This issue of Culture and Cosmos stems out of the 'Land, Sea and Sky: a "3-scape" approach to Archaeology' session of the 2013 meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), at the University of Bournemouth. It features articles by Daniel Brown, Pamela Armstrong, Olwyn Pritchard, Tore Lomsdalen, Fernando Pimenta and collaborators, and book reviews by Liz Henty and Lionel Sims. The contributions to this issue demonstrate how the study of the celestial environment-the skyscape-complements the more traditional archaeological approaches to landscapes and seascapes, and how approaching this trinity holistically sheds further light into past societies, their beliefs and practices. -Fabio Silva, PhD

This work radically rethinks astrology's place in society. Emerging when cultures were embedded in chaotic creation mythology, astrology has persisted into modern society. Reasons for this longevity are an enigma, yet the answer may lie in chaos theory and complexity. These theories reveal that the themes of coincidence and cycles, constitutive of chaotic creation mythologies, are in fact the common features of a lived life experience. Brady argues that astrology is actually a vernacular expression of chaos and complexity, and it thus offers insights into the efficacy of the synchronicities of life. Brady thereby offers us a profound reassessment of astrology and its cultural contexts.

Sleeve Notes from Brazilian Edition We see in the present century, after its relative decline in European societies in the seventeenth century, a return of astrology in modern urban centres, where the number of astrological consultants increases and the newspapers publish 'horoscopes' with predictions for the natives of each Sun sign. Astrology, the ancient divinatory system which has been experiencing growing popularity in large Brazilian cities in recent years, has rarely received attention in the social sciences. This book analyses the beliefs and cultural constructions of their world in a group of individuals belonging to the middle classes in Rio and involved in the use of astrology. By means of research and interviews, the author, approaching the urban middle classes, takes the following question as his hypothesis: to what extent can we say that astrology contributes to the construction of [a] particular lifestyle? The author begins his analysis from the main principles of the symbolic system of astrology and its divinatory practice, attempting to show that, in the same way as the structure of myth investigated by Lévi-Strauss, the structure of this system remains constant across its various versions. Despite this stability throughout its history, it is capable of receiving several different social appropriations. In the case of interest here, it is the appropriation made of it among sectors of the urban middle class in Rio de Janeiro, for whom psychotherapy is already an influence, and whose views are analysed in detail in the last chapter. Relating itself to varying degrees with psychoanalysis and religion, astrology shows itself to be a symbolic language capable of engaging the fragmentation of modern daily life. Thus it becomes clear that this little-known phenomenon of contemporary culture cannot be reduced to a mere irrational survival. This book is an original contribution to the study of the middle classes in Brazil, and of astrology as an "alternative culture", an area little studied by the social sciences. In addition to discussing the classics and more recent anthropological works on the subject, the author examines the ambiguous relation which modernity has with astrology: 'arising in its very heart, it presents a discourse marked by criticism of the values of modernity'. Complementing this volume, the reader will find a glossary explaining astrological terms in Appendix 2. About the Author Luis Rodolfo da Paixão Vilhena took his Master's degree in Social Anthropology in the Postgraduate Programme in Social Anthropology of the National Museum (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ). He was a researcher at the National Institute of Folklore (FUNARTE), 1988-1989, where he studied the history of Folklore Studies in Brazil and was a lecturer at UERJ and of the Faculty Veiga de Almeida. He died in 1997.

This issue of CULTURE AND COSMOS presents a collection of articles that delve into the intersections between textuality and cultural astronomy and astrology. Clifford J. Cunningham and Günter Oestmann discuss a robust collection of verse concerning the discovery of new astronomical bodies at the turn of the nineteenth century. Dorian Knight explores a potential covert encoding of astronomical observation in poetic form in the Eddic myth Hávamál, suggesting how this astronomical knowledge aids in unraveling the mythological content of the narrative. Karen Smyth discusses the role of technical astronomical and astrological expressions in medieval literature by authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Adelard of Bath, among others. Then, Kirk Little performs a literary analysis of Washington Irving's 1832 tale, 'The Legend of the Arabian Astrologer'. Moving from a fictional Egypt to a real one, Guiliano Masola and Nicola Reggiani examine a curious papyrus, dated to 194 CE, that offers insight into the role astrology may have played in everyday life in ancient Eygpt. Finally, Reinhard Mussik presents a research note about a fascinating text from former East Germany in terms of its Marxist cosmology. Together these articles display the myriad angles from which one can approach the intersections of literary analysis and cultural astronomy and astrology. -Jennifer Zahrt, editor

The growth of the occult 'underground' is one of the most fascinating features of late 19th and early 20th century British society. After decades of neglect, a growing body of scholarship is now dedicated to various aspects of Victorian and Edwardian magical practices and personalities, in an effort to understand why such a powerful cultural current could emerge simultaneously with the rise of modern science, and why it continues to exercise such a pervasive influence in many contemporary spiritualities. The books, articles, letters, and diaries produced by major figures in the occult revival, such as Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, reveal the centrality of the Jewish Kabbalah in occultist thought and practice. However, the ways in which these individuals, and the secret societies they founded, sourced and utilised Jewish esoteric lore are largely ignored in current research. Current scholarship generally assumes that 'occultist' Kabbalah is a modernreinvention of older traditions, with little relationship to its Jewish roots. This assumption ignores the documented contributions of Jewish scholars and Kabbalists to the occultists' work, and there is little, if any, in-depth comparison of the ideas expressed by British occultists and the Jewish Kabbalistic literature of the medieval and early modern periods. And why was the Jewish Kabbalah was so compellingly attractive to non-Jewish occultists at a time of turbulent social and scientific change, when religious, political, and racial antisemitism constituted a normative attitude in many circles of British society? This book provides a new, exciting, and penetrating analysis of how and why the Jewish Kabbalah was adopted and integrated, rather than reinvented or recreated, by important figures in the British occult revival, and why it remains a dominant theme in the spiritual currents of the twenty-first century

First issue of the Culture and Cosmos journal