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"The Victorian Era. The Age of Enlightenment. The post-9/11 years. We are accustomed to demarcating history, fencing off one period from the next. But societies have not always operated in this way. Paul Hay returns to Rome in the first century BCE to glimpse the beginnings of periodization as it is still commonly practiced, exploring how the ancient Romans developed a novel sense of time and used it to construct their views of the past and of the possibilities of the future. It was the Roman general Sulla who first sought to portray himself as the inaugurator of a new age of prosperity, and through him Romans adopted the Etruscan term saeculum to refer to a unique era of history. Romans went on to deepen their investment in periodization by linking notions of time to moments of catastrophe, allowing them to conceptualize their own epoch and its conclusion, as in the literature of Vergil and Horace. Periodization further introduced the idea of specific agents of change into Roman thought--agents that were foundational to narratives of progress and decline. An eye-opening account, Saeculum describes nothing less than an intellectual and cognitive revolution, which fundamentally reorganized the meanings of history and time"--

History --- Historiography. --- Periodization. --- Rome --- Rome, Augustus, Vergil, Sulla, politics, literature, philosophy, periodization, Golden Age, culture hero, history, time, temporality, intellectual history, social history, Cicero, Horace.

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"One of the world's preeminent cultural anthropologists leaves a last work that fundamentally reconfigures how we study most other cultures. From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of "religion" and the "supernatural." The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights.In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Arawete swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of "economics" and "politics" emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods.The New Science of the Enchanted Universe offers a road map for a new practice of anthropology that takes seriously the enchanted universe and its transformations from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America"-- "The vast majority of human societies known to us have been organized along "immanentist" lines. In such societies, as Marshall Sahlins argues, everything we associate with religion, gods and spirits of every sort is part of the daily, embodied (immanent) lives of people. Plants and animals have souls and the same essential attributes as other persons, and supposedly long-dead ancestors continue to live among people, communicate with them, and have sway over the course of events. In this "enchanted" type of society, there is no strict separation between economics, politics, religion, philosophy, and culture. Some 2,500 years ago, at the dawn of the so-called Axial Age, a radical transformation in human societies began when civilizations spread around the globe from their origins in Greece, the Near East, northern India, and China. These civilizations effected a cultural revolution, creating a new type of society in which the things we typically associate with religion move from immanent infrastructure to transcendent superstructure. Only in a transcendentalist society does it make sense to speak of a god or God, and of a heaven, "out there," "above us," or in a separate realm entirely. And only in such a society do we have a division of labour separating out an economic sphere from a political sphere and a sphere of culture. Transcendentalist worldviews and modes of life are, of course, pervasive today. They are so much a part of who we are that when we attempt to understand the nature and workings of immanentist societies, we often misdescribe them in transcendentalist terms. This confusion, observes Sahlins, has long bedeviled the social sciences and consequently has impeded our understanding of many Indigenous religions and worldviews past and present. Sahlins, drawing on a vast array of recent and older ethnographic and historical research, offers this book as both diagnosis of these ills and a call to correction-to develop a "new science" that would be better positioned to grasp the realities of immanentist societies, and to take seriously the cultures of others"--

Anthropology of religion. --- Acculturation. --- Ambivalence. --- Ancient Mesopotamian religion. --- Animism. --- Anthropologist. --- Axial Age. --- City-state. --- Civilization. --- Concept. --- Confucius. --- Consciousness. --- Copernican Revolution (metaphor). --- Cosmogony. --- Cousin marriage. --- Cultural relativism. --- Culture hero. --- Deference. --- Deity. --- Deus otiosus. --- Disenchantment. --- Divinity. --- Early modern period. --- Ekur. --- Empirical evidence. --- Energy (esotericism). --- Enki. --- Enlil. --- Epitome. --- Ethnography. --- Explanation. --- Fertility. --- Fountain of Life. --- Genius loci. --- God. --- Great power. --- Honorific. --- Igloo. --- Illustration. --- Immanence. --- Immortality. --- In This World. --- Inua. --- Inuit. --- Invisibility. --- Luck. --- Magic (paranormal). --- Magical texts. --- Mainspring. --- Marsupial. --- Matricide. --- Matrilateral. --- Mervyn Meggitt. --- Metahuman. --- Modernity. --- Morpheme. --- Mother goddess. --- Multitude. --- Natural language. --- New Caledonia. --- New Guinea. --- Nidaba. --- Ninhursag. --- Ninurta. --- Normal science. --- Nuliajuk. --- Ontology. --- Otherworld. --- Pantheism. --- Personal god. --- Personhood. --- Phenomenon. --- Potentate. --- Proscription. --- Reincarnation. --- Relevance. --- Religion. --- Religiosity. --- Reproduction. --- Rite. --- Rodney Needham. --- Ruler. --- Science. --- Scientist. --- Shamanism. --- Spirit. --- Subjectivity. --- Supernatural. --- Supplication. --- Supreme Being. --- The New Science. --- The Other Hand. --- The Transcendentalist. --- The Various. --- Theory. --- Thought. --- Transcendence (religion). --- Transcendental idealism. --- Transcendentalism. --- Vision quest. --- Western esotericism.

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In Quest of the Hero makes available for a new generation of readers two key works on hero myths: Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Hero and the central section of Lord Raglan's The Hero. Amplifying these is Alan Dundes's fascinating contemporary inquiry, "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus." Examined here are the patterns found in the lore surrounding historical or legendary figures like Gilgamesh, Moses, David, Oedipus, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Romulus, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Arthur, and Buddha. Rank's monograph remains the classic application of Freudian theory to hero myths. In The Hero the noted English ethnologist Raglan singles out the myth-ritualist pattern in James Frazer's many-sided Golden Bough and applies that pattern to hero myths. Dundes, the eminent folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, applies the theories of Rank, Raglan, and others to the case of Jesus. In his introduction to this selection from Rank, Raglan, and Dundes, Robert Segal, author of the major study of Joseph Campbell, charts the history of theorizing about hero myths and compares the approaches of Rank, Raglan, Dundes, and Campbell.

Heroes --- Mythology. --- Jesus Christ --- Mythological interpretations. --- Aarne–Thompson classification systems. --- Afrasiab. --- Alan Dundes. --- Alcmene. --- Amulius. --- Archetype. --- Areoi. --- Astyages. --- Attis. --- Biography. --- Books of Kings. --- Carl Jung. --- Castor and Pollux. --- Castration. --- Combatant. --- Consciousness. --- Consummation. --- Counter-Reformation. --- Creation myth. --- Cuckold. --- Culture hero. --- Dhritarashtra. --- Dirce. --- Etymology. --- Euhemerism. --- Eunuch. --- Eurystheus. --- Fairy tale. --- Flood myth. --- Gottfried von Strassburg. --- Grandparent. --- Great King. --- Greek mythology. --- Gwydion. --- Herder. --- Hero Tales. --- Herodotus. --- Historical Jesus. --- Historical figure. --- Historicity of Jesus. --- Historicity. --- Important People. --- Incest. --- John Badby. --- Justin Martyr. --- Laius. --- Legend. --- Legendary creature. --- Longus. --- Mendicant. --- Menelaus. --- Morganatic marriage. --- Mr. --- Myth and ritual. --- Myth. --- Mythological Cycle. --- Narrative. --- Neurosis. --- Nimrod. --- Numitor. --- Oedipus complex. --- Oedipus. --- Ogier the Dane. --- Otto Rank. --- Our Hero. --- Parricide. --- Pelias. --- Persecution. --- Poetry. --- Priam. --- Proetus. --- Pseudohistory. --- Quibble (plot device). --- Religion. --- Rite. --- Romanticism. --- Romulus and Remus. --- Self-interest. --- Telephus. --- Teuthras. --- The Hero with a Thousand Faces. --- The Interpretation of Dreams. --- The Other Hand. --- The Persecutor. --- The Persians. --- The Power of Myth. --- The Various. --- Theocritus. --- Theory. --- Thomas Kuhn. --- Triptolemus. --- Trojan War. --- Unless. --- Uther Pendragon. --- V. --- Vladimir Propp. --- Warfare. --- Zahhak. --- Zoroaster.