Throughout human history, and across many religious cultures, offerings are made into fire. The essays collected in Homa Variations provide detailed studies of this practice, known in the tantric world as the "homa," from its inception up to the present.

"Here there be dragons"--this notation was often made on ancient maps to indicate the edges of the known world and what lay beyond. Heroes who ventured there were only as great as the beasts they encountered. This encyclopedia contains more than 2,200 monsters of myth and folklore, who both made life difficult for humans and fought by their side. Entries describe the appearance, behavior, and cultural origin of mythic creatures well-known and obscure, collected from traditions around the world.

Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of rituals performed at female saint shrines in the Middle East. In the midst of turbulent political contention over land and borders, Nurit Stadler shows, religious minorities lay claim to space through rituals enacted at sacred spaces in the Holy Land. Using ethnographic analysis, Stadler explores the rise of these rituals, their focus on the body, female materiality, and their place in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. Stadler examines the varied features of the practice and implications of the rituals, looking at themes of femininity and material experience. She considers the role of the body in rituals that represent the act of birth or the circle of life and that aim to foster an intimate connection between the female saint and her worshippers. Stadler underscores the political, cultural, and spatial elements of this practice, bringing attention to how religious minorities (Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druze, among others) have utilized these rituals to assert their right to the land. Voices of the Ritual offers a valuable assessment of religious ritual practice that encrypts female themes into a landscape that has historically been defined by war and conflict.

It is true that we are passing through a critical situation during which entire society is getting divided into class and section day by day on the basis of different types of superficial parameters. Such differences are so prominent that they even hamper the normal acculturation process of early schooling and socialisation of individuals through which newly introduced fellows are allowed to gain a perfect pitching in the multi-plural community. Service oriented life of modern world is also moving on with such kind of toss and twist giving birth to regional as well as global tension of different degree and radial expansion. It is also becoming difficult for us to overcome the situation due to its deeper impression in the mind-set of individual coming out from the isolated segments of restricted mechanism of acculturation. Main objective of our discussion and analysis is to cultivate a balanced process of educational, social as well as economic acculturation which will be suitable enough for ensuring implementation and continuation of world Peace.

This volume of Essays on The Gita will cover up the doctrines and rituals explained differently by Sage Veda Vyasa. Different names are coined by saints and Philosophers time to time. It is also true that we are willingly or unwillingly move through instances when our mind and intellect get indulge in arbitrations related to our definite role in society. The Yoga of Knowledge and Actions are also closely linked up when we move on to execute some activities, claim some rights and perform some duties. We cannot claim that this volume will provide vivid translation of the Holy Scripture titled The Bhagavadgita (Chapter 3 and 4); even it is not confirmed that descriptions, comments or narratives of all types duly proposed by different narrators are converged before preparing this document. It has some sort of linkages to the modern context and the context of Epics to work out relevance of the Holy Scripture. This book will also reflect relevance of The Bhagavadgita on the basis of its applicability and justifications. We can put us easily at the place of the fellow warrior if entire society is considered as a battle field; there requires a time tested guidance upon which one can rely perfectly for working out a solution; for establishing balance of mind and intellect; for regulating senses with the help of quality segments of Ego (AHAM); for feeling the presence of the Supreme Master besides all kinds of material as well as living manifestations.