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Initiation has often been accepted as a common phenomenon with a coherent meaning in the Greek world, and seen as the key to understanding a wide range of cultural and literary artefacts - this ground-breaking collection challenges this.
List of contents
List of figures and tables, List of contributors, Preface, Acknowledgements, List of abbreviations and transliterations, PART I: Introduction, 1. Initiation: a concept with a troubled history, PART II: Female initiations, 2. What kind of rite of passage was the Ancient Greek wedding?, 3. Playing the bear and the fawn for Artemis: female initiation or substitute sacrifice?, PART III: Vidal-Naquet's Black Hunter, 4. Adolescent initiation in myth and tragedy: rethinking the Black Hunter, 5. Liminality as metaphor: initiation and the frontiers of Ancient Athens, PART IV: Initiation and themale community, 6. Adolescent hair-growing and hair-cutting rituals in Ancient Greece: a sociological approach, 7. Striding across boundaries: Hermes and Aphrodite as gods of initiation, PART V: Initiation and narrative patterns, 8. Initiation in myth; initiation in practice: the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and its performative context, 9. Who in hell is Heracles? Dionysus' disastrous disguise in Aristophanes' Frogs, PART VI: The initiation of ritual experts, 10. Evenius becomes a seer (Herodotus 9.93-5): a paradoxical initiation?, 11. The initiation of the magician: transition and power in Graeco-Roman Ritual, PART VII: Afterwords, 12. The initiatory paradigm in anthropology, folklore and history of religions, 13. Initiations and initiatory experience, Bibliography, Subject index, Index locorum, Foreign word index
About the author
David Dodd, Christopher A. Faraone
Summary
Initiation has often been accepted as a common phenomenon with a coherent meaning in the Greek world, and seen as the key to understanding a wide range of cultural and literary artefacts - this ground-breaking collection challenges this.
