Empty Cauldrons

"Depression is a universal condition that people of all walks of life face. Author Terence P Ward shares his experiences with depression and the spiritual methods he has used to cope. With contributions from Pagan clergy, depression sufferers, and therapists, Ward offers hands-on rituals, prayers, and exercises for readers to practice on their own journey. This book explores the isolating influence of this common affliction and why many people resist professional help. Empty Cauldrons shows readers how to tend to their life of prayers, offerings, and dreams, and also provides spells and strategies for developing a non-monotheistic relationship with depression. You will discover rituals for drawing off miasma and appealing to the gods of the wind, traditional Hellenic ancestor feasts, ideas for tending a depression shrine, and much more."--

Andropov’s Cuckoo A dying man recounts the story of the most amazing person he has ever met, a brilliant, Soviet linguist whom he calls Youriko. It is a tale of love, daring-do, spies and danger set in Japan, Germany, Turkey, the USA, Canada and the UK, but mostly in the Soviet Union of the Seventies. Two girls, born thousands of miles apart in Kazakhstan and Japan just after World War II, meet and are like peas in a pod. They also get on like sisters and keep n touch for the rest of their lives. However, one wants to help her battle-scarred country and the other wants to leave hers for the West. They dream up a daring, dangerous plan to achieve both goals, which Andropov, the chief of the Soviet KGB, is told about. He dubs it Operation Youriko and it is set in motion, but does it have even the remotest chance of success? Andropov’s Cuckoo is based on a ‘true story’ related to the author by one of the protagonists.

Two men stand guard over the entrance to a forgotten Cold War bunker. There’s something down there. Something locked behind ancient steel doors. Something that scrapes around in the dark. If you come looking for it, you die. Naturally, somebody comes looking for it... Not so best-selling author Ross Vittachi becomes convinced a lost Nazi artefact – a golden cauldron once in the hands of Heinrich Himmler – may be hidden somewhere in Outback Australia, and he’s on a mission to find it. Teaming with newspaper reporter Larry Kirby and Larry’s no-nonsense girlfriend, Jasmine ‘Jazz’ Reilly, Vittachi embarks on an unlikely hunt for Nazi treasure – a hunt that will soon see them chopping their way through hordes of ravenous, reanimated corpses and straight into the malevolent heart of the Third Reich’s darkest secret. Bon appétit.

Ten years after Alex and Aaron Stowe brought peace to Quill and Artimé, their younger twin sisters journey beyond Artimé in the sixth novel in the New York Times bestselling sequel series to The Unwanteds, which Kirkus Reviews called “The Hunger Games meets Harry Potter.” As the greatest army ever assembled in the seven islands flies to the land of the dragons, everyone’s mind is haunted by the same thought: Thisbe Stowe betrayed them all. Thisbe struggles to regain the trust of her brother Aaron and the people of Artimé after one crucial mistake forces her to abandon her intricate plan against the Revinir. Aaron is devastated by Thisbe’s actions and refuses to hear her explanation, feeling a sense of responsibility for the wrong she’s done mixed with his own deep regret and fears over his dark history. Complicating things are Thisbe’s conflicted feelings about the Revinir, leaving her wondering if she allowed herself to get too close to the dragon-woman…and if she really is more evil than good after all. Risking everything they’d fought for since first being declared Unwanted, the people, creatures, and statues of Artimé and their allies make a final desperate attempt to take down the Revinir and bring peace to their world. But is the Revinir too powerful to defeat? And will the Artiméans ever find out what’s behind that last secret door?

Graham Twelftree extensively examines the miracles of each Gospel narrative. He weighs their historical reliability and considers the question of miracles and the modern mind.

The polygraph from Chaeronea includes in Moralia and Lives a wide range of interesting views on religious and philosophical matters: philosophical theology, cult, ethics, politics, natural sciences, hermeneutics, atheism, and the afterlife. The essays included in Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes offer a glance into these views.

“Why, when we take such care to disguise our true selves from others, would we expect them to be an open book to us?” Harry Steen, a businessman travelling in Mexico, ducks into an old bookstore to escape a frightening deluge. Inside, he makes a serendipitous discovery: a mid-nineteenth-century account of a sinister storm cloud that plagued an isolated Scottish village and caused many gruesome and unexplainable deaths. Harry knows the village well; he travelled there as a young man to take up a teaching post following the death of his parents. It was there that he met the woman whose love and betrayal have haunted him every day since. Presented with this astonishing record, Harry resolves to seek out the ghosts of his past and return to the very place where he encountered the fathomless depths of his own heart. With Cloud, critically acclaimed Canadian author Eric McCormack has written a masterpiece of literary Gothicism, a gripping, darkly imagined story about the nature of love in a world where menace hovers at every turn.

Bringing together the research of internationally renowned scholars, Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age contributes significantly to our understanding of the epoch-making artistic and cultural exchanges that took place across the Near East and Mediterranean in the early first millennium B.C. This was the world of Odysseus, in which seafaring Phoenician merchants charted new nautical trade routes and established prosperous trading posts and colonies on the shores of three continents; of kings Midas and Croesus, legendary for their wealth; and of the Hebrew Bible, whose stories are brought vividly to life by archaeological discoveries. Objects drawn from collections in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and the United States, reproduced here in sumptuous detail, reflect the cultural encounters of diverse populations interacting through trade, travel, and migration as well as war and displacement. Together, they tell a compelling story of the origins and development of Western artistic traditions that trace their roots to the ancient Near East and across the Mediterranean world. Among the masterpieces brought together in this volume are stone reliefs that adorned the majestic palaces of ancient Assyria; expertly crafted Phonecian and Syrian bronzes and worked ivories that were stored in the treasuries of Assyria and deposited in tombs and sanctuaries in regions far to the west; and lavish personal adornments and other luxury goods, some imported and others inspired by Near Eastern craftsmanship. Accompanying texts by leading scholars position each object in cultural and historical context, weaving a narrative of crisis and conquest, worship and warfare, and epic and empire that spans both continents and millennia. Writing another chapter in the story begun in Art of the First Cities (2003) and Beyond Babylon (2008), Assyria to Iberia offers a comprehensive overview of art, diplomacy, and cultural exchange in an age of imperial and mercantile expansion in the ancient Near East and across the Mediterranean in the first millennium B.C.—the dawn of the Classical age.