Ripinsky-Naxon explores the core and essence of shamanism by looking at its ritual, mythology, symbolism, and the dynamics of its cultural process. In dealing with the basic elements of shamanism, the author discusses the shamanistic experience and enlightenment, the inner personal crisis, and the many aspects entailed in the role of the shaman.

This study reconsiders Wyndham Lewis's adversarial role in the modernist movement through a close reading of his prodigious satire of 1920s cultural politics. It presents a new interpretation of The Apes of God as a Menippean satire, with attention to its style, characterization, allegory, and historiography, and to Lewis's polemics of the period. Previous studies have emphasised Lewis's external method of visual narration and the personal attacks on the London art world. This one also treats the rhetorical and parodic elements in his mechanistic caricatures of literary impressionism and its proponents, besides the theory of participation and the player behind his schizoid image of the modern subject. The study reinterprets the apprenticeship plot as a carnivalesque discrowning based on the primitive themes of the shaman and the scapegoat. It explores the ways in which the discursive broadcasts - on the social exploitation of a subjectivist aesthetic, publicity as imposture, cultural levelling - are dramatized in the sado-masochistic bond between impresario and naif and in the contradiction of carnival institutionalized. Lewis is shown using his rivals' mythic method to implicate the avant-garde itself in nascent mass culture. The study includes an analysis of the scandal surrounding Lewis's private edition of The Apes and the defence of non-moral satire presented in his subsequent pamphlet Satire and Fiction. Drawing upon unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, it demonstrates how Lewis's own devious publicity campaign re-enacted the crux of the novel and epitomized his conflicts with his contemporaries.

The volume focuses on the various representations of the Beyond in later Antiquity, a period of intense interaction and competition between various religious traditions and ideals of education. The concepts and images clustering around the Beyond form a crucial focal point for understanding the dynamics of religion and education in later Antiquity. Although Christianity gradually supersedes the pagan traditions, the literary representations of the Beyond derived from classical literature and transmitted through the texts read at school show a remarkable persistence: they influence Christian late antique writers and are still alive in medieval literature of the East and West. A specifically Christian Beyond develops only gradually, and coexists subsequently with pagan ideas, which in turn vary according to the respective literary and philosophical contexts. Thus, the various conceptualisations of the great existential unknown, serves here as a point of reference for mirroring the changes and continuities in Imperial and Late Antique religion, education, and culture, and opening up further perspectives into the Medieval world.

ZAGREUS—Dark, depraved, cursed. In every way the Prince of Darkness. Until he found her. She was his salvation. His sanity. His strength. The only constant in his immortal life. Even when fate ripped her from his arms, he always found her again. But five hundred years has passed since her last death, and with no sign and no guarantee she'll be sent back, the darkness inside him is swirling out of control. Then fate drops a female in his path. One with violet eyes he's sure he's looked into millions of times across multiple lives. Talisa may be the daughter of the Eternal Guardians' leader, but Zagreus is convinced she's the missing half of his tattered soul. He doesn't care that she doesn't remember him. He'll never let her deny that wicked-hot connection still sizzling between them. This time, Zagreus is willing to risk everything—his present, his future, his destiny, even war—to keep her. Because this time, even if he has to hold her as his prisoner for all eternity, he won't lose her again. Books in the Eternal Guardians Series: MARKED - Book 1 ENTWINED - Book 2 TEMPTED - Book 3 ENRAPTURED - Book 4 ENSLAVED - Book 5 BOUND - Book 6 TWISTED - Book 7 RAVAGED - Novella AWAKENED - Book 8 UNCHAINED - Novella HUNTED - Novella ENSNARED - Novella WICKED - Book 9 **All the books in the Eternal Guardians series can be read as stand-alone titles.**