During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on "the boy" and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear. But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest. Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities - never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him. This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.

Penny had been channeling Mother Mary for 20 years and written three books with her. In 2014 Mother Mary came to Penny again and asked her to bring through her teachings on sacred relationships to be included in another book. "The teachings passed down through the priestess trainings in the Great Pyramid are being brought forth but there is a critical element that is missing - the connection with the heart and the upper chakras. In order to have a full integration of mind, body, and spirit, it is necessary to integrate not only the masculine and feminine, but to realize the full expression of these qualities in our divine blueprint. This requires healing of the wounds in the lower chakras that can be accomplished with conscious sexual union and appropriate energy practices, but it also requires an engagement of the Loving energy of the heart through the full expression of unconditional Love. It is through this door that access to the higher chakras is integrated into form Penny did not currently have a beloved in her life, but Mother Mary said he was coming to "rekindle fires left smoldering in previous lifetimes." Cool!she thought and she agreed. He showed up as promised and thus began an extraordinary adventure in the exploration of Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Union of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine. Penny shares in intimate detail the ups and downs of how they incorporated her teachings into their lives in creating a new paradigm of loving experience. This is their story...

The title of this volume, Sacred Marriages, consciously plays with the traditional concept of sacred marriage, but the plural form, “sacred marriages,” gives the reader an idea that something more is at stake here than a monomaniacal idea of manifestations deriving from a single prototype. Following the guidelines of one of the contributors, Ruben Zimmermann, the editors tentatively define “sacred marriage” as a “real or symbolic union of two complementary entities, imagined as gendered, in a religious context.” “Sacred marriages” (plural), then, refers to various expressions of this kind of union in different cultures that seek to overcome, to cite Zimmermann again, “the great dualism of human and cosmic existence.” The subtitle indicates that the contributors are primarily interested in different aspects of the divine-human sexual metaphor—that is, the imagining and reenactment of a gendered relationship between the human and divine worlds. This metaphor, which is essentially about relationship rather than sexual acts, can find textual, ritual, mythical, and social expressions in different times and places. Indeed, the sacred marriage ritual itself should be considered not a manifestation of the “sacralized power of sexuality experienced in sexual intercourse” but one way of objectifying the divine-human sexual metaphor.

Reiner d'Ivry, a knight's son in the north of England is an oblate, committed for life to the Benedictine priory of Wrenthorpe at the age of seven. Reiner learns that his dispossession is bound up with a long-rumored curse on the house of d'Ivry, incurred by his father while he was a knight of the Crusade, and grows up embittered and vengeful. Reiner returns home after eleven years to an unsettling encounter with his sister Drusiana, now his father's only heir, whom he has long despised for all she has gained in his place. As this reunion between the brother and sister turns into a war of wills, an unforeseen threat gathers against them both. It will lead Reiner to the mysterious texts on alchemy brought back from the Crusade, now in his sister's possession, and toward an unimaginable fate.

The evolution of the Gilgamesh epic" (1982) / Jeffrey H. Tigay -- From "Gilgamesh in literature and art: the second and first millennia" (1987) / Wilfred G. Lambert -- From "Gilgamesh: sex, love and the ascent of knowledge" (1987) / Benjamin Foster -- "Images of women in the Gilgamesh epic" (1990) / Rivkah Harris -- "The marginalization of the goddesses" (1992) / Tikva Frymer-Kensky -- "Mourning the death of a friend: some assyriological notes" (1993) / Tzvi Abusch -- "Liminality, altered states, and the Gilgamesh epic" (1996) / Sara Mandell -- "Origins: new light on eschatology in Gilgamesh's mortuary journey" (1996) / Raymond J. Clark -- From "a Babylonian in Batavia: Mesopotamian literature and lore in The sunlight dialogues" (1982) / Greg Morris -- "Charles Olson and the poetic uses of Mesopotamian scholarship" / John Maier -- From "'Or also a godly singer, ' Akkadian and early Greek literature" (1984) / Walter Burkert -- From "Gilgamesh and Genesis" (1987) / David Damrosch -- "Praise for death" (1990) / Donald Hall -- From "Gilgamesh in the Arabian nights" (1991) / Stephanie Dalley -- "Ovid's Blanda voluptas and the humanization of Enkidu" (1991) / William L. Moran -- From "the Yahwist's primeval myth" (1992) / Bernard F. Batto -- "Gilgamesh and Philip Roth's Gil Gamesh" (1996) / Marianthe Colakis -- From "The epic of Gilgamesh" (1982) / J. Tracy Luke and Paul W. Pruyser -- From "Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid: the myth of male friendship" (1987) / Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow -- "Gilgamesh and other epics" (1990) / Albert B. Lord -- From "Reaching for abroad: departures" (1991) / Eric J. Leed -- From "Introduction" to he who saw everything (1991) / Robert Temple -- "The oral aesthetic and the bicameral mind" (1991) / Carl Lindahl -- From "Point of view in anthropological discourse: the ethnographer as Gilgamesh" (1991) / Miles Richardson -- From "The wild man: the epic of Gilgamesh" (1992) / Thomas Van Nortwick.

In The Quest Mircea Eliade stresses the cultural function that a study of the history of religions can play in a secularized society. He writes for the intelligent general reader in the hope that what he calls a new humanism "will be engendered by a confrontation of modern Western man with unknown or less familiar worlds of meaning." "Each of these essays contains insights which will be fruitful and challenging for professional students of religion, but at the same time they all retain the kind of cultural relevance and clarity of style which makes them accessible to anyone seriously concerned with man and his religious possibilities."—Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religious Education

Preliminary material /G. W. Ahlström -- Chapter One: Word Studies /G. W. Ahlström -- Chapter Two: Covenant Phraseology /G. W. Ahlström -- Chapter Three: Cult Terms and Cult Practices /G. W. Ahlström -- Chapter Four: The Day of Yahweh /G. W. Ahlström -- Chapter Five: Hammōreh liṣdāqāh* /G. W. Ahlström -- Chapter Six: The Time of the Book /G. W. Ahlström -- Chapter Seven: Composition /G. W. Ahlström -- Index of Passages /G. W. Ahlström -- Index of Authors /G. W. Ahlström.