This volume is an interdisciplinary investigation and contextualization of the various concepts of divine union in the private and public sphere of the Greek and Near Eastern worlds.

Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and scientist. He was considered by his contemporaries to be a polymath on a par with Pascal or Da Vinci. This book is the first comprehensive study in the English language to examine Florensky's entire philosophical oeuvre in its key metaphysical concepts. For Florensky, antinomy and symbol are the two faces of a single issue—the universal truth of discontinuity. This truth is a general law that represents, better than any other, the innermost structure of the universe. With its original perspective, Florensky’s philosophy is unique in the context of modern Russian thought, but also in the history of philosophy per se.

The book is a critical edition of the text with an English translation and commentary of Proclus’ On the Hieratic Art according to the Greeks. The Hieratic Art is the Theurgic Art, theurgy, the theurgic union with the divine. Proclus describes the theurgic union, putting an emphasis on a conceptual blending of ritual actions (teletai, e.g. the role of statues, incenses, synthêmata, symbols, purifications, invocations and epiphanies) and philosophical concepts (e.g. union of many powers, ‘one and many’, symphathy, natural sympathies, attraction, mixing and division).

During the Second World War the Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired a set of Aramaic letters, eight sealings, and the two leather bags in which the sealed letters were once stored. The letters concern the affairs of Aršāma, satrap of Egypt in the later fifth century. Taken with other material associated with him (mostly in Aramaic, Demotic Egyptian, and Akkadian), they illuminate the Achaemenid world of which Aršāama was a privileged member and evoke a wide range of social, economic, cultural, organizational, and political perspectives, from multi-lingual communication, storage and disbursement of resources, and satrapal remuneration, to cross-regional ethnic movement, long-distance travel, religious practice, and iconographic projection of ideological messages. Particular highlights include a travel authorization (the only example of something implicit in numerous Persepolis documents), texts about the religious life of the Judaean garrison at Elephantine, Aršāma's magnificent seal (a masterpiece of Achaemenid glyptic, inherited from a son of Darius I), and echoes of temporary disturbances to Persian management of Egypt. But what is also impressive is the underlying sense of systematic coherence founded on and expressed in the use of formal, even formalized, written communication as a means of control. The Aršāma dossier is not alone in evoking that sense, but its size, variety, and focus upon a single individual give it a unique quality. Though this material has not been hidden from view, it has been insufficiently explored: it is the purpose of the three volumes of Aršāma and his World: The Bodleian Letters in Context to provide the fullest presentation and historical contextualization of this extraordinary cache yet attempted. Volume I presents and translates the letters alongside a detailed line-by-line commentary, while Volume II reconstructs the two seals that made the clay bullae that sealed the letters, with special attention to Aršāma's magnificent heirloom seal. Volume III comprises a series of thematic essays which further explore the administrative, economic, military, ideological, religious, and artistic environment to which Aršāma and the letters belonged.

Mystery cults are one of the most intriguing areas of Greek and Roman religion. In the nocturnal mysteries at Eleusis, participants dramatically re-enacted the story of Demeter's loss and recovery of her daughter Persephone; in Bacchic cult, bands of women ran wild in the Greek countryside to honour Dionysus; in the mysteries of Mithras, men came to understand the nature of the universe and their place within it through frightening initiation ceremonies and astrological teachings. These cults were an important part of life in the ancient Mediterranean world, but their actual practices were shrouded in secrecy, and much of what they were about has remained unclear until now. This is the first book to describe and explain all the major mystery cults of the ancient world, cult by cult, reconstructing the rituals and exploring their origins. It makes plentiful use of artistic and archaeological evidence, as well as ancient literature and epigraphy. Greek painted pottery, Roman frescoes, inscribed gold tablets from Greek and South Italian tombs and the excavated sites of ancient religious sanctuaries all contribute to our understanding of ancient mystery cults. Making use of the most recent work on these cults, the book is also informed by crucial current work on the anthropology and cognitive science of religion. Not only is this clearly written book a significant contribution to the study of these cults, but it is also accessible to a general readership. More than any other book on ancient religion, it allows the reader to understand what it was like to participate in these life-transforming religious events.

Modern theological engagements on deification have undergone two major paradigm shifts. First, the study of deification shifted from the periphery of theological discourse to its center. For Adolf von Harnack, deification was a pagan import that fatally corrupted and distorted the Gospel message of salvation. In response, the positive retrieval of the concept of deification belongs to the early years of the twentieth century. By the 1910s in Russian religious thought and by the 1930s in much Roman Catholic theology, deification had become a magnet concept attracting attention from many different viewpoints. The second important shift relates to how deification is characterized. Recent studies question the exclusively 'Eastern' character of deification and draw attention to the engagements of this theme in Latin patristic and later Western Christian sources. Reassessing the evidence for these two major shifts, The Oxford Handbook of Deification comprehensively explores the points of convergence and difference on the constitutive elements of deification in different traditions, and offers a foundation for ecumenical and interreligious dialogues. The Handbook's first part analyzes the cultural and scriptural roots of deification; the second part explores the most significant historical contributions to the understanding of deification in the early, medieval, and modern periods; the third part develops systematic connections. Readers will discover a surprizing breadth, depth, and diversity of theologies of deification in Christian traditions. Throughout the Handbook, leading scholars in the field of Deification Studies propose vital new insights from a variety of perspectives for this central mystery at the heart of the Christian faith.

In early Greek and Near Eastern myth and religion, the gods govern the cosmos. In narrative poetry, they are frequently portrayed through scenes of divine assembly. Did Homer and early Greek poets inherit this feature from their more ancient neighbours? And what can comparison tell us besides? This book is the first to chart divine assembly scenes in ancient Babylonian and early Greek epic. It asks why similarities between the two corpora exist, and exploits those similarities to enhance understanding of Mesopotamian and early Greek literature and religion. The book discusses Sumerian narrative poems, the Akkadian works Atra-ḫasīs, Anzû, Enūma eliš, Erra and Išum and the Epic of Gilgameš; Homer's Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony and some Homeric Hymns. It studies poetic technique and probes further comparisons with Sanskrit, Old Norse, Polynesian, and Aztec mythology. It argues that Greek speakers are unlikely to have inherited the divine assembly from the Near East. Still, one can posit a long-term process of oral contact and communication fostered by common poetic structures and religious affinities. In a second part pursuing a mythological and religious comparison, the book concentrates on ideas about the cosmos and humankind, and on power dynamics within the pantheon as well as between gods and mortals. A focus on the head of the pantheon and on concepts of divine prerogatives illuminates culture-specific differences which can be related to historical socio-political discourses. The book develops a systematic approach to questions of cross-cultural literary comparison in the ancient world.

A multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It fully covers 1,144 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals.