Encyclopedia of Religion

turn of a prodigal son to his father, may seem like a cursing match as one after another participant admits “anger in the heart, ...

or reveal the affairs of her husband. Often there are taboo words and riddles with a set answer, knowledge of which are taken as ...

in the belief that certain evil people have raised others from the dead to work their fields for them. The form of witch belief ...

SEE ALSO Affliction, article on African Cults of Affliction; Bemba Religion; Central Bantu Religions; Interlacustrine Bantu Reli ...

(Oxford, 1968), The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969), and Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); togethe ...

rain, is poured through the roof and onto the infant. Three months after birth, the Tsonga present the baby to the new moon, thr ...

story collected by Frobenius. A snake spirit used to dwell in a lake on the Zimbabwe plain. The king’s daughters are thought to ...

The Lovedu’s mythic and historical traditions throw light upon this structural transformation of the ideal twin model. A very lo ...

placing a knife between the legs (Pedi). The southern Sotho designate both feminine initiation and masculine circumci- sion with ...

is feminine and terrestrial water masculine. Menstruation and pregnancy have to do with heat. The profound symbolic changes sepa ...

added to the circumcision rituals their own practice of using masks. Naturally, in each case the model is transformed from one r ...

with the natural environment (more precisely, the means of access to natural resources). This approach can also be ham- pered by ...

beings and which depend on a woman’s activity without symbolic value. Likewise, only game that is consumed forms the subject of ...

make him laugh, so that he will be easily persuaded to release the game: The catch involves some cunning. Whereas these two syst ...

tial constituents conceived of, respectively, as giver of game and giver of fish. CATTLE BREEDING AND THE VERTICAL CONCEPTION OF ...

Donner, Kai. Among the Samoyed in Siberia. Edited by Genevieve A. Highland and translated by Rinehart Kyler. New Haven, The acc ...

guments to refute the skeptical views of those who doubted the divine authority of the Bible. In 1586, Sozzini married Elzbieta ...

BIBLIOGRAPHY The most comprehensive work yet written on Spektor’s life is Ephraim Shimoff’s “Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor: His L ...

erful. The gnostics of North Africa, for instance, made an abundant use of talismans and incantations. Two words in particular h ...

Mormon, moon of a thousand forms, accept my sacri- fice. (Caro Baroja, 1964) Medieval Europe. In Europe, the practitioners of wi ...