Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults
Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate "monks" awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such perplexing events, many have seen those who join cults as needy, lost souls, unable to think for themselves. This book, a compelling look at the cult phenomenon written for a wide audience, dispels such simple formulations by explaining how normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives-and sometimes their very lives-to groups and beliefs that appear bizarre and irrational.
Secret Societies: Gardiner's Forbidden Knowledge : Revelations About the Freemasons, Templars, Illuminati, Nazis, and the Serpent Cults
Yet again, in Secret Societies, Gardiner finds himself on a journey across the world to uncover the ancient secrets of the world's most powerful men. In one dramatic episode he finds himself driven out of Berlin in a black Mercedes by a secret organization that was believed to have disappeared after the second World War and eventually arrives in a modern Nazi watering hole. Gardiner, however, survives this incredible journey and brings us the secrets of the Order held sacred for so long.
With the same user-friendly, quirky, and perceptive approach that made Innumeracy
a bestseller, John Allen Paulos travels though the pages of the daily
newspaper showing how math and numbers are a key element in many of the
articles we read every day. From the Senate, SATs, and sex, to crime,
celebrities, and cults, he takes stories that may not seem to involve
mathematics at all and demonstrates how a lack of mathematical
knowledge can hinder our understanding of them.
Using
archaeological, epigraphic, and literary sources; and incorporating
current scholarly theories this volume will serve as an excellent
companion to any introduction to Greek mythology, showing a side of the
Greek gods to which most students are rarely exposed.
Detailed
enough to be used as a quick reference tool or text, and providing a
readable account focusing on the oldest, most widespread, and most
interesting religious practices of the ancient Greek world in the
Archaic and Classical periods, Ancient Greek Cults surveys ancient Greek religion through the cults of its gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines.
Jennifer
Larson conveniently summarizes a vast amount of material in many
languages, normally inaccessible to undergrad students, and explores,
in detail, the variety of cults celebrated by the Greeks, how these
cults differed geographically, and how each deity was conceptualized in
local cult titles and rituals.
Including an introductory chapter
on sources and methods, and suggestions for further reading this book
will allow readers to gain a fresh perspective on Greek religion. (Amazon.com)
Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."
Pandora has intellectual thirst as well as blood lust, and she conveys the high old time Rice obviously had imbibing historical lore. "It is fun to read these mad Gnostics!" exults Pandora in the early Christian era. It is also fun to read this mad Pandora. Anne Rice hasn't been this fun to read in years.
