Author : Gary Gilligan
Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 41,41 MB
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN : 1906510008
This book takes on the controversial subject of catastrophism in the history of mankind
Author : Norman Cohn
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 38,77 MB
Release : 2001-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780300090888
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Author : Peter Hessler
Publisher : Text Publishing
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 50,22 MB
Release : 2019-05-21
Category : History
ISBN : 1925774554
An intimate account of the Arab Spring, and Egypt’s past and present, seen through the eyes of a wide range of Egyptians: political operators, archaeologists and garbage collectors; women, the queer community and migrants.
Author : Brian Fagan
Publisher : Hachette UK
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 45,15 MB
Release : 2021-09-21
Category : Science
ISBN : 1541750888
A thirty-thousand-year history of the relationship between climate and civilization that teaches powerful lessons about how humankind can survive. Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history’s mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought. The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we can now reconstruct seasonal weather going back thousands of years and see just how people and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are those that plan ahead. Climate Chaos is a book about saving ourselves. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani show in remarkable detail what it was like to battle our climate over centuries and offer us a path to a safer and healthier future.
Author : Gary Gilligan
Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 30,20 MB
Release : 2009-12-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781848763098
In the 1950s, Immanuel Velikovsky propounded catastrophism in several popular books including the bestselling Worlds in Collision. He speculated that the ‘planet’ Venus was in fact a former comet which had been ejected from Jupiter. Subsequently, 3,500 years ago, it made two catastrophically close passes by Earth 52 years apart. It later interacted with Mars, which had a series of near collisions with Earth ending in 687 BCE, before finally settling into its current orbit.Was Velikovsky correct, did Venus appear as a gigantic comet in ancient times? Comet Venus is the second book in the God King Scenario Series. The first book, An Ancient World in Chaos, presented a fascinating model whereby Mars, Venus, Mercury and the Moon played havoc with Earth for an incredible 3,000 years, coming so close they loomed larger than the Sun. In support of such incredible claims, Gilligan calls upon the most fascinating civilisation of ancient times – the Ancient Egyptians. He proposes that the divine god-kings of Pharaonic Egypt were first and foremost guises of planetary bodies as they appeared to move back and forth to Earth. He further proposes that these heavenly monarchs were represented by human ‘doubles’ – mortal Pharaohs who were believed to be earthly manifestations of god-king planets.The primary objective of Comet Venus is to vindicate Velikovsky and conclusively demonstrate that the comet images on the front and back covers of this book have nothing whatsoever to do with the Sun! They are exact physical representations of the planet Venus as it took on the attributes of a comet in the skies above Earth only a few thousand years ago.
Author : Immanuel Velikovsky
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,15 MB
Release : 1991-12
Category : Bible
ISBN : 9780848814977
Author : Karen Ann Lang
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 37,17 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780801488559
Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos, Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany--the period from the 1880s to 1940--she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena--chaos--into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry.Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur.Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge.
Author : Colin Gray
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 40,77 MB
Release : 2004-08-02
Category : History
ISBN : 1135754756
In this volume, Professor Colin Gray develops and applies the theory and scholarship on the allegedly historical practice of the 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA), in order to improve our comprehension of how and why strategy 'works'. The author explores the RMA hypothesis both theoretically and historically. The book argues that the conduct of an RMA has to be examined as a form of strategic behaviour, which means that, of necessity, it must "work" as strategy works. The great RMA debate of the 1990s is reviewed empathetically, though sceptically, by the author, with every major school of thought allowed its day in court. The author presents three historical RMAs as case studies for his argument: those arguably revealed in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon; in World War I; and in the nuclear age. The focus of his analysis is how these grand RMAs functioned strategically. The conclusions that he draws from these empirical exercises are then applied to help us understand what, indeed, is - and what is not - happening with the much vaunted information-technology-led RMA of today.
Author : Joanne Wieland-Burston
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 13,98 MB
Release : 2015-06-18
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1317404173
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me – everything’s upside down; the whole world seems chaotic’ Chaos may erupt in our lives in many different ways – through death, divorce, conflict with family, friends or colleagues. It is a frightening and negative experience, destabilizing the individual and provoking feelings of insecurity. Originally published in English in 1992, the author, through her work as a Jungian analyst, frequently acted as a companion, support and guide to those whose lives were in chaotic turmoil. She describes how therapy helps people to meet chaos, to accept and see it in a different way – as a starting point for a new kind of order in their lives. This ‘organic’ order is better suited to their own personal needs and personality and provides the strong and flexible basis necessary to meet the chaos that belongs to life. Drawing upon the myths, tales and rites of ancient cultures, upon modern chaos theory, and upon her experience as an analyst the author shows the way through the chaos to a fuller, happier and more satisfying life.
Author : Donald H. Mills
Publisher : Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 32,55 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0865165084
Ancient myths about watery chaos uniquely transcend time and culture to speak to the universal human condition as expression to the hopes, aspirations and fears that have defined--for ancient thinkers as well as modern scientists--what it means to be human in a chaotic world. "The Hero and the Sea examines the mythological pattern of heroic battles with watery chaos in the "Gilgamesh Epic, the "Iliad, the "Odyssey, and the Old Testament, in the light of anthropology, comparative religion, literature, mythology, psychology, and modern chaos theory; how mythic patterns of heroic battle with chaotic adversaries respond to the cultural needs, religious concerns, and worldview of their audience. The last chapter explores points of contact between the ancient mythic patterns and the discoveries of modern scholars engaged in the theoretical study of chaos and chaotics.
