Magna Mater

Among their topics are public priests and religious innovation in Imperial Rome, a roadmap to heaven: high-priestly vestments and the Jerusalem temple in Flavius Josephus, contesting religious and medical expertise: the <i>therapeutai</i> of Pergamum as religious and medical entrepreneurs, enforcing priesthood: the struggle for the monopolization of religious goods and the construction of the Christian religious field, and <i>tertium genus</i>: representations of religious practitioners in the cult of Magna Mater.

One such woman is Claudia Quinta, who performs a miracle in the service of the Magna Mater and thereby, at least according to legend, saves Rome from Hannibal's invading Punic armies.

This idea of a constant "flow" or "change" in an eternal return reveals a deep connection with the Mediterranean myth and, consequently, with the correlated mythical process of eternal change expressed by the Moon Goddess as well as by the Magna Mater, as D.H.

Similarly, the decadent Romans would bear gifts to honour the goddess Magna Mater, or great mother over a three-day festival celebration.

Schuler, having also read Bachofen's accounts of matriarchy, grafted onto his Nietzscheanism a wild neo-pagan cult of the Magna Mater. Morgenstern, who thought that Christ needed to be rescued from Christians, found a spiritual home in the anthroposophy (also inspired by Nietzsche) of Rudolf Steiner.

Her counterparts in the ancient world included Ishtar in Babylon, Assyria's Belit, Astarte and Asherah in Canaan, the Ugaritic Anat, Magna Mater in Phrygia, both Venus and Juno in Rome, Aphrodite or Hera in Greece, and more.

The concentration of the first forty pages is on Nelson's childhood intermingled with her own first child's infancy, on the quotidian constrictions of a young mother's life and, framing those, on the configuration of a kind of Magna Mater growing from images of the poet's mother and of the speaker herself to a usually beneficent but potentially destructive locus of creative energy, in ironic contrast with the real young mother's daily rounds.

explores the ancient Magna Mater along with feminine manifestations of the divine in Hinduism and Buddhism to arrive at an "unfinished conclusion" about Mary as a female icon of divine presence, all the while that she is a poor working woman of Nazareth and an ideal model of discipleship.

Imperial Rome is also the subject of a chapter by Beard, who arrives at a novel interpretation of the ecstatic cult of Magna Mater, which was imported into the capital from Asia Minor in 204 B.C.

Subsequent sections address processional movement, including religious processions (the March festival of Magna Mater, the transvectio equitum, and the festival of Dea Dia) between the Urbs and suburbium, Augustus' triumphal-like returns, ceremonial movements to and within Christian catacombs, Christian processions within the city and the litanies to alleviate sufferings from flooding and the plague, and rituals of the catacombs and urban processions in the context of the martyrdom of Lawrence, and movement and urban form, including the impact of river traffic and urban development, the relationship between movement and monument, and mithraea and their movement patterns.