The Hunter The Stag And The Mother Of Animals

The ancient landscape of North Asia gave rise to a mythic narrative of birth, death, and transformation that reflected the hardship of life for ancient nomadic hunters and herders. Of the central protagonists, we tend to privilege the hero hunter of the Bronze Age and his re-incarnation as a warrior in the Iron Age. But before him and, in a sense, behind him was a female power, half animal, half human. From her came permission to hunt the animals of the taiga, and by her they were replenished. She was, in other words, the source of the hunter's success. The stag was a latecomer to this tale, a complex symbol of death and transformation embedded in what ultimately became a struggle for priority between animal mother and hero hunter. From this region there are no written texts to illuminate prehistory, and the hundreds of burials across the steppe reveal little relating to myth and belief before the late Bronze Age. What they do tell us is that peoples and cultures came and went, leaving behind huge stone mounds, altars, and standing stones as well as thousands of petroglyphic images. With The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals, Esther Jacobson-Tepfer uses that material to reconstruct the prehistory of myth and belief in ancient North Asia. Her narrative places monuments and imagery within the context of the physical landscape and by considering all three elements as reflections of the archaeology of belief. Within that process, paleoenvironmental forces, economic innovations, and changing social order served as pivots of mythic transformation. With this vividly illustrated study, Jacobson-Tepfer brings together for this first time in any language Russian and Mongolian archaeology with prehistoric representational traditions of South Siberia and Mongolia in order to explore the non-material aspects of these fascinating prehistoric cultures.

The ancient landscape of North Asia gave rise to a mythic narrative of birth, death, and transformation that reflected the hardship of life for ancient nomadic hunters and herders. Of the central protagonists, we tend to privilege the hero hunter of the Bronze Age and his re-incarnation as a warrior in the Iron Age. But before him and, in a sense, behind him was a female power, half animal, half human. From her came permission to hunt the animals of the taiga, and by her they were replenished. She was, in other words, the source of the hunter's success. The stag was a latecomer to this tale, a complex symbol of death and transformation embedded in what ultimately became a struggle for priority between animal mother and hero hunter. From this region there are no written texts to illuminate prehistory, and the hundreds of burials across the steppe reveal little relating to myth and belief before the late Bronze Age. What they do tell us is that peoples and cultures came and went, leaving behind huge stone mounds, altars, and standing stones as well as thousands of petroglyphic images. With The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals, Esther Jacobson-Tepfer uses that material to reconstruct the prehistory of myth and belief in ancient North Asia. Her narrative places monuments and imagery within the context of the physical landscape and by considering all three elements as reflections of the archaeology of belief. Within that process, paleoenvironmental forces, economic innovations, and changing social order served as pivots of mythic transformation. With this vividly illustrated study, Jacobson-Tepfer brings together for this first time in any language Russian and Mongolian archaeology with prehistoric representational traditions of South Siberia and Mongolia in order to explore the non-material aspects of these fascinating prehistoric cultures.

Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene makes connections between the Anthropocene discourse and human-animal studies, thus facilitating further interdisciplinary work on the topic of animals in the Anthropocene.

This edited volume analyzes the belief in supernatural gamekeepers and/or animal masters of wildlife from a cross-cultural perspective. It documents the antiquity and widespread occurrence of the belief in supernatural gamekeepers at the global level. This interdisciplinary volume documents both the antiquity and the widespread geographical distribution of this belief along with surveying the various manifestations of this cosmology by way of studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Some chapters explore the manifestations of this belief as they appear in petroglyphs/pictographs and other forms of material culture. Others focus on the environmental impacts of these beliefs/rituals and prescribed foraging restrictions by analyzing how they affect game harvests. The internationally recognized scholars in this volume assess the efficacy of this particular form of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and investigate if adherence to the belief in animal masters actually causes hunters to refrain from overharvesting wild game and thereby contributes to sustainable hunting practices. This volume is of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists and other social scientists researching traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), indigenous conservation, biodiversity, and sustainability practices, and animal deities.

Since early discoveries of so-called Celtic Art during the 19th century, archaeologists have mused on the origins of this major art tradition, which emerged in Europe around 500 BC. Classical influence has often been cited as the main impetus for this new and distinctive way of decorating, but although Classical and Celtic Art share certain motifs, many of the design principles behind the two styles differ fundamentally. Instead, the idea that Celtic Art shares its essential forms and themes of transformation and animism with Iron Age art from across northern Eurasia has recently gained currency, partly thanks to a move away from the study of motifs in prehistoric art and towards considerations of the contexts in which they appear. This volume explores Iron Age art at different scales and specifically considers the long-distance connections, mutual influences and shared ‘ways of seeing’ that link Celtic Art to other art traditions across northern Eurasia. It brings together 13 papers on varied subjects such as animal and human imagery, technologies of production and the design theory behind Iron Age art, balancing pan-Eurasian scale commentary with regional and site scale studies and detailed analyses of individual objects, as well as introductory and summary papers. This multi-scalar approach allows connections to be made across wide geographical areas, whilst maintaining the detail required to carry out sensitive studies of objects.

"This is a study of an Inner Asian people called the *Taghbach (Ch. Tuoba), who half a century after collapse of the Han state (206 BCE-220 CE) began the process of building a new kind of empire in East Asia. Though addressing larger historiographical issues, the book's main purpose is, within the limits of our sources, to see this people in and of themselves, in a detailed narrative that follows them from the emergence of the khan Liwei in the mid-third century, in the highland frontier between Inner Asia and the Chinese world, and ends almost three hundred years later, with the drowning of the dynasty's last matriarch in the Yellow River. Across the centuries, they repeatedly changed their name, nature and location. What remained relatively consistent, however, was their reliance on cavalry armies, filled with loyal men of Inner Asian origin. When that ended, the dynasty ended as well. Underlying the narrative are two main issues. One is that Northern Wei was the first major example of a kind of empire seen often in East Asian histories, the "conquest dynasties," regimes of Inner Asian origin which would over the centuries repeatedly seize control of territories inhabited for the most part by Chinese to create cultural and ethnically complex state systems. The second is historiographical: that this dynasty was renamed and reimagined to fit into the textual tradition of its Chinese subjects. Being our only primary written sources for the dynasty, these texts are here used with care"--

This book presents an authoritative and comprehensive survey of human practice in relation to other animals, together with a Christian ethical analysis building on the theological account of animals which David Clough developed in On Animals Volume I: Systematic Theology (2012). It argues that a Christian understanding of other animals has radical implications for their treatment by humans, with the human use and abuse of non-human animals for food the most urgent immediate priority. Following an introduction examining the task of theological ethics in relation to non-human animals and the way it relates to other accounts of animal ethics, this book surveys and assess the use humans make of other animals for food, for clothing, for labour, as research subjects, for sport and entertainment, as pets or companions, and human impacts on wild animals. The result is both a state-of-the-art account of what humans are doing to other animals, and a persuasive argument that Christians in particular have strong faith-based reasons to acknowledge the significance of the issues raised and change their practice in response.

The author of the popular Green Witchcraft series presents her personal Book of Shadows, designed for you to use just as she uses it-as a working guide to ritual, spells, and divination. This ready-made, authentic grimoire is based on family tradition and actual magical experience, and is easily adaptable to any tradition of Witchcraft. Grimoire for the Green Witch offers a treasury of magical information—rituals for Esbats and Sabbats, correspondences, circle-casting techniques, sigils, symbols, recitations, spells, teas, oils, baths, and divinations. Every aspect of Craft practice is addressed, from the purely magical to the personally spiritual. It is a distillation of Green practice, with room for growth and new inspiration. 2004 COVR Award First Runner Up