Daughters Of Chaos

An epic novel about Civil War–era Nashville’s “public women,” an age-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of the female “A beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the 4th century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity.” ––Kevin Brockmeier, O. Henry Prize-winning author of The Ghost Variations In 1862, after a tragedy at home, twenty-two-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her twin brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that’s landed on their doorstep. This text leads her to Nashville, an occupied city bustling with soldiers, saboteurs, partisans, powerful men––and powerful women. Sylvie trans lates the playscript by day, but at night, drawn into the work by the chief of the Union Army’s Secret Service, she acts as a spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with a sisterhood whose members—including Hannah, a fiery revolutionary to whom Sylvie is increasingly drawn—possess potentially monstrous powers. Sylvie soon becomes entangled in the Cult of Chaos, a feminist society steadfast in its ancient mission to eradicate the violence of men. Inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the American Civil War, Daughters of Chaos weaves together “found” texts, fabulism, and queer themes to question familiar notions of history and family, warfare and power.

Wisdom is Women’s Gift to the World. In the many cultural stories that speak about the changing of the ages, it is always Feminine Spirit which brings about the transition to new life, for Feminine Spirit knows the rhythms of life, death, and rebirth and is the “opener of the way.” In times of cultural transformation, it is also our right-brain, feminine consciousness that is our best guide, for it opens us to the creative imagination, the realm of possibility. The return of the Goddess awakens the transformative energy that births the changing of the ages. In the western story of worldwide spiritual transformation, there is a powerful image of Cosmic Woman, an image of the archetypal Feminine Spirit who transforms and gives birth to this new age. And her archetypal image gives us instructions for opening to and incarnating wisdom. This image of the awakening Feminine Spirit is an image of the Conscious Woman: a woman, clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, crowned with stars, who is in labor, giving birth to a savior. In earlier times and different traditions, this archetypal image was understood as Lady Wisdom. Today I feel this Goddess image of conscious woman can be incarnated by women everywhere. This woman clothed with the sun is Lady Wisdom, who calls all women to become her daughters. “I love Cathy’s insights into fairy tales, mythology, dreams, astrological energies, and archetypes. She makes sense of how our lives are impacted by these complex yet very beautiful elements, making them accessible and keeping them profound. Her wisdom can only enhance anyone lucky enough to have crossed her path.” —Alix Toland, Artist & Creator of Color-Scope: An Astrological Mandala

Children of Chaos is the start of a stirring, politically-charged quest duology by acclaimed fantasy author Dave Duncan. On a dodecahedral world in thrall to the tyrannical, war-obsessed Hrag dynasty, no one could stop the Bloodlord from sending troops over the Edge to Florengia, invading its major cities, and offering them a choice between strict colonial rule and immediate and total destruction. When the doge of Celebre was faced with this ultimatum, he gave his children up as hostages so that the rest of Celebre might live. Thus the four young Florengians were taken from their homes and scattered across the Vigaelian face. Fifteen years later, and you'd never guess that they're siblings. Fabia was adopted by a wealthy landowner and spoiled rotten, Orlando desperately yearns to overcome his Florengian blood and fight for the Vigaelian army, Benard is a flighty but talented artist, and Wisdom has it that Dantio, the eldest, died fighting his captors. But when Celebre suddenly takes on crucial political significance, one of the siblings must return home to serve as Celebre's puppet ruler, and the others must be eliminated so that there are no rival claimants to the throne. It's going to be tough enough finding one another, let alone deciding whether enough kinship remains after fifteen years apart that the siblings will care to help each other out of their respective predicaments. If they're feeling particularly altruistic, the Celebres might even take on the bonus round: trying to save Dodec from the culture of death and war imposed on it by its evil warlords. One thing's for certain: the Celebre children are going to have a lot of adjusting to do . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In response to Bergson's claim that modern science has not found its metaphysics, Deleuze remarked that it was this metaphysics that particularly interested him. In recent years, as the complexities of Deleuze's work have been critically evaluated, interest has grown in the important part that science and a corresponding metaphysics plays in this work, including the publications that were co-authored with Felix Guattari. Necessarily, much of this critical work has explored the precise nature of Deleuze's expressive materialism. It has been suggested, by Manuel DeLanda for example, that Deleuze's realist ontology has much in common with an intensive science that concentrates on the divergent processes that underpin the extensive world of finished products that we see around us. John Protevi and Mark Bonta have suggested that, in the same way that Kant's Critiques corresponded to a world of Euclidean space, Aristotelian time, and Newtonian physics, so Deleuze's philosophy helps to make sense of the world of fragmented space, twisted time and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics that science is now exploring. This collection brings together a series of papers that deal with Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of science in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, as well as looking in detail at scientific issues such as emergence, complexity theory, non-linear dynamics, modern mathematics and physics and nanotechnology. As well showing how science functions in Deleuze and Guattari's work, these papers also explore the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari were keenly aware of the related revolutions in physics, biology and information technology that gathered pace in the post-war period. Much exegetical work on Deleuze in recent times has emphasised the importance of the articulation between the virtual and the actual as the key co-ordinates of Deleuze's 'image of thought'. The papers in this collection show just how important science was for Deleuze in elaborating th

In this sequel to Faust, Mephistopheles takes Faust on a journey through ancient Greek mythology, conjuring for him the insurpassably beautiful Helen of Troy, as well as the classical gods. Faust falls in love with and marries Helen, embodying for Goethe his 'imaginative longing to join poetically the Romantic Medievalism of the germanic West to the classical genius of the Greeks'. Further to the themes of redemption and salvation in this great drama, are Goethe's eerie premonitions of modern phenomena such as inflation and the creation of life by scientific synthesis.

A comprehensive exploration of Dr. Faust, the man who sold his soul to the devil, and those who lived to tell his tale. Volume I includes: New insights into the life and times of the historical Dr. Faustus, the notorious occultist and charlatan who reputedly declared the devil was his brother-in-law. A detailed study of the first Faust books and the popular Faustian folk tales. Original discussions on Christopher Marlowes famous drama and his atheistic rendition of the Faustian myth, including a unique and controversial analysis of the A and B texts. The days of the Faust puppet plays. Gotthold Ephraim Lessings unfinished Faust drama. Volume II features: A unique, in-depth account of Johann Wolfgang von Goethes masterpiece, Faust, Parts One and Two. An examination of the early sketches of his classic drama. Includes detailed explanations of Goethes hidden symbolism in the text, his interest in history and science, the occult, alchemy, Freemasonry and his warnings to future generations.

This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard's philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard's many excellent jokes about assistant professors as a guide to how not to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy; specifically: - Don't cease to be human. - Don't be a parasite, merely feeding off other people's creations and never creating anything new. - Don't reduce or simplify or systematize Kierkegaard's ideas in order to make life easier for everyone (because that was never the point). - Don't kill Kierkegaard's philosophy by lecturing on it, thereby turning it into a collection of dead ideas for nonhumans rather than subjective truths that need to be lived. Following these guidelines, the book attempts to extend and amplify some of Kierkegaard's most important ideas in a way that combats the persistent problem of nihilism--a disease that even Kierkegaard succumbed to at the end of his life.

Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. The problem with Gunkel’s theory is that it did not simply identify common elements in the mythologies of the ancient Near East but imposed upon them a structure dictating the relationships between the elements, a structure that was based on inadequate knowledge and a forced interpretation of his sources. On the other hand, one is not entitled to insist that there was no cultural conversation among peoples who spent the better part of several millennia trading with, fighting, and conquering one another. Creation and Chaos attempts to address some of these issues. The contributions are organized into five sections that address various aspects of the issues raised by Gunekl’s theories.