In Search Of Lost Gods

Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.

In Lost Gods, Brom, the artist and author of The Child Thief and Krampus, brings readers into a dark, fantastical, masterful mix of brilliant illustrations and dazzling prose. A young man descends into Purgatory to save his wife and unborn child in this gorgeous, illustrated tale of wonder and terror from the mind of master storyteller and acclaimed artist Brom. Fresh out of jail and eager to start a new life, Chet Moran and his pregnant wife, Trish, leave town to begin again. But an ancient evil is looming, and what seems like a safe haven may not be all it appears . . . Snared and murdered by a vile, arcane horror, Chet quickly learns that pain and death are not unique to the living. Now the lives and very souls of his wife and unborn child are at stake.To save them, he must journey into the bowels of purgatory in search of a sacred key promised to restore the natural order of life and death. Alone, confused, and damned, Chet steels himself against the unfathomable terrors awaiting him as he descends into death’s stygian blackness. With Lost Gods, Brom’s gritty and visceral writing takes us on a haunting, harrowing journey into the depths of the underworld. Thrust into a realm of madness and chaos, where ancient gods and demons battle over the dead, and where cabals of souls conspire to overthrow their masters, Chet plays a dangerous game, risking eternal damnation to save his family.

From as early as 1420 a few intrepid explorers made their way to Greece and Turkey, to recover - from brambles or burial, lime-kilns or building sites - the precious relics of the Greeks' classical past. The glories of classical Greece are an essential part of our heritage and are echoed every day in the buildings and institutions we see around us. But who were the visitors from afar who first appreciated the riches of the archaeological past of Greece and the Greek lands; who opened up the culture and its ancient remains? In Land of Lost Gods, Richard Stoneman tells the riveting stories of Cyriac of Ancona's quest to record the appearance of the Parthenon; Jacques Spon's quarrel with Guillet de St-Georges about the topography of Athens; the painstaking expeditions of the Society of Dilettanti and the deluded forgeries of the Abbé Fourmont. He also examines in vivid detail the birth struggles of archaeology in the work of Charles Newton and Cnidus at Halicarnassus, J.T. Wood at Ephesus, Charles Fellows in Lycia, Carl Humann at Pergamon and Heinrich Schliemann at Troy. When the archaeologist succeeds the antiquary, the dilettante and the adventurer, the theme of this book draws to a close.

In The Sleeping Army, Freya went to Hel and back. She fought dragons, fled fire and outwitted giants - all to restore eternal youth to the Norse Gods. But now they're back, does anyone care? The Gods' popularity on earth is waning, and without regular worship, their powers are fading fast and their ancient enemies, the Frost Giants, are stirring. So the Gods hatch a plan - they'll come back down to earth, and they'll pursue a very different kind of popularity. They're going to become celebrities. A rollicking, thrilling and hilarious ride, The Lost Gods takes up where the Sleeping Army left off and takes us back to Simon's brilliantly-imagined modern Norse England.

NAMED A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017#1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller! A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world's densest jungle. Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Could the story of mankind be far older than we have previously believed? Using tools as varied as archaeo-astronomy, geology, and computer analysis of ancient myths, Graham Hancock presents a compelling case to suggest that it is. Graham Hancock is featured in Ancient Apocalypse, a Netflix original docuseries. “A fancy piece of historical sleuthing . . . intriguing and entertaining and sturdy enough to give a long pause for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews In Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock embarks on a worldwide quest to put together all the pieces of the vast and fascinating jigsaw of mankind’s hidden past. In ancient monuments as far apart as Egypt’s Great Sphinx, the strange Andean ruins of Tihuanaco, and Mexico’s awe-inspiring Temples of the Sun and Moon, he reveals not only the clear fingerprints of an as-yet-unidentified civilization of remote antiquity, but also startling evidence of its vast sophistication, technological advancement, and evolved scientific knowledge. A record-breaking number one bestseller in Britain, Fingerprints of the Gods contains the makings of an intellectual revolution, a dramatic and irreversible change in the way that we understand our past—and so our future. And Fingerprints of God tells us something more. As we recover the truth about prehistory, and discover the real meaning of ancient myths and monuments, it becomes apparent that a warning has been handed down to us, a warning of terrible cataclysm that afflicts the Earth in great cycles at irregular intervals of time—a cataclysm that may be about to recur. “Readers will hugely enjoy their quest in these pages of inspired storytelling.”—The Times (UK)