NEW!
ORPHIC
HYMNS GRIMOIRE
and
MYSTAI:
DANCING OUT THE MYSTERIES OF DIONYSOS
ORPHIC HYMNS GRIMOIRE
by Sara Leanne Mastros
Mastros Publishing
Hardcover With Color Illustrations
$79.95
Black & White Paperback $39.95
Orpheus, the famed oracle-orator hero
of Greece, began to teach a new religion at the dawn of the Archaic
Age. Deeply rooted in ancient paganism and mystery traditions,
Orphism taught a doctrine of peace-seeking, reincarnation, universal
brotherhood, and ecstatic liberation. The followers, like their
leader, worshiped their gods with poetry and song. Eighty-eight of
these ancient hymns have survived to the present day, and are called
The Orphic Hymns. They've been translated into English many times,
most familiarly by the Neo-Classicist Thomas Taylor in 1792.
Sara Mastros’s stunning new
translations render them in modern English in rhymed couplets
suitable for both oration and singing. Orphic Hymns Grimoire is a
guide to building devotional relationships with the Greek gods.
Designed for the working magician and practicing pagan, this book
highlights the hymns as part of a living tradition of western
mysticism, magic, and art. In addition to the translations, the book
includes notes and commentary, as well as illustrations, rituals, and
translation notes. The paperback edition has black and white
“coloring book” style illustrations, while those in the hardback
are in full color.
**
Dancing Out The Mysteries of
Dionysos
by Peter Mark Adams
Publisher: Scarlet Imprint
4vo (210 × 290 mm, Landscape), 192 pp
38 Images Including Full Colour
Photographs of The Restored Frescoes
Standard Hardback Edition, with color
illustrations
Limited to 900 copies; bound in purple
cloth, blind debossed and stamped in gold, textured Pompeiian red
endpapers.
List Price: $102.00
Bibliothèque Rouge Edition, Full Colour, Paperback
Premium Paperback, 170gsm Paper
List Price: $59.50
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
The Dionysian themed frescos of
Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries constitute the single most
important theurgical narrative to have survived in the Western
esoteric tradition. No other practitioner account of the ritual
process for conducting a mystery rite has survived down to today. The
frescoes’ vivid and allusive imagery illuminates both the ritual
activity of the participants as well as its esoteric import.
The frescoes, created in the most
private rooms of the extensive Roman villa, were never meant to be
seen by anyone other than the members of the all-female Bakkhic
thiasos who conducted their most secret rites within them. Buried and
preserved for posterity by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, these
stunning proto-Renaissance images guide the viewer through the
consecutive stages of a theurgic rite of initiation into the
mysteries of Dionysos.
Arising from within the unique
interface between Greek and Roman culture in Southern Italy, the
frescoes attest to the survival of an unbroken initiatic tradition of
Bakkhic mystery rites on the Italian peninsula stretching back to the
fifth century BCE.
The recent restoration of the frescoes
has provided a fresh opportunity to elucidate the ritual processes
hidden in plain sight. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Peter
Mark Adams draws on current scholarship on dithyrambic performance;
the ritual dress of Greco-Roman priestesses; classical philology and
the comparative ethnography of rites of higher initiation. With the
same attention to detail which he demonstrated in The Game of Saturn,
Adams reveals the stages of initiation encoded and accomplished in
dance, gesture, ordeal and sign.
Adams interprets the frescoes through
the distinct performative lens of the ritualist, throwing light, for
the first time, on the significance of the ritual vocabulary and the
phenomenology of ritual participation. We are pulled into the dance
ourselves, and emerge transfigured by the experience.
The Dionysian themed frescos of
Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries constitute the single most
important theurgical narrative to have survived in the Western
esoteric tradition. No other practitioner account of the ritual
process for conducting a mystery rite has survived down to today. The
frescoes’ vivid and allusive imagery illuminates both the ritual
activity of the participants as well as its esoteric import.
The frescoes, created in the most
private rooms of the extensive Roman villa, were never meant to be
seen by anyone other than the members of the all-female Bakkhic
thiasos who conducted their most secret rites within them. Buried and
preserved for posterity by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, these
stunning proto-Renaissance images guide the viewer through the
consecutive stages of a theurgic rite of initiation into the
mysteries of Dionysos.
Arising from within the unique
interface between Greek and Roman culture in Southern Italy, the
frescoes attest to the survival of an unbroken initiatic tradition of
Bakkhic mystery rites on the Italian peninsula stretching back to the
fifth century BCE.
The recent restoration of the frescoes
has provided a fresh opportunity to elucidate the ritual processes
hidden in plain sight. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Peter
Mark Adams draws on current scholarship on dithyrambic performance;
the ritual dress of Greco-Roman priestesses; classical philology and
the comparative ethnography of rites of higher initiation. With the
same attention to detail which he demonstrated in The Game of Saturn,
Adams reveals the stages of initiation encoded and accomplished in
dance, gesture, ordeal and sign.
Adams interprets the frescoes through
the distinct performative lens of the ritualist, throwing light, for
the first time, on the significance of the ritual vocabulary and the
phenomenology of ritual participation. We are pulled into the dance
ourselves, and emerge transfigured by the experience.
CONTENTS:
Introduction
I · The Performative Nexus of the
Mysteries
Dionysos
Orphism
The mysteries i: Myesis
The cultures of dance i: The Korybantic
dance
The mysteries ii: Telete
The cultures of dance ii: The circular
chorus
The mysteries iii: Epoptai
The cultures of dance iii: The chorus
of the stars
The deixis of sacred choral dance
II · The Mysteries in their Campanian
Social Milieu
Dionysos in Campania
Dionysian thiasoi and lineage holders
III · Reading the Frescoes’ Implicit
Narratives
The Villa of the Mysteries
The rooms and their frescoes
Designing an esoteric narrative
Modes of visuality
Imagistic modes of religion and the
theatre of memory
Heterotopias and the interstices of
initiatory space
Chronotopic inversion
The frescoes’ exotopic female gaze
IV · The Initiatory Drama of the
Mysteries
Reading the frescoes
The north wall
i · Family group of itinerant
initiatrix
ii · Ritual of purification
iii · The rural idyll
iv · The ‘alarmed woman’
The east wall
i · The Korybantic scene
ii · The epiphany of the gods
On the epiphanies of gods
Monosandalos
Ariadne as protomystēs
Ariadne’s thread
iii · The initiatory crux
The south wall
i · Of this men shall know nothing
The role of entheogens in Bakkhic
ritual
ii · The dance of the bakkhe
iii · The robing of the bride
The West Wall
The Domina
Glossary
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