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Madvillain's Madvillainy is a captivating book penned by the talented Will Hagle. Published in 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic, this book delves into a unique genre that keeps the readers hooked from the first page to the last. The book is a testament to Hagle's prowess as a wordsmith and his ability to weave narratives that are as compelling as they are intriguing. The book was published on March 9, 2023, marking a significant milestone in the literary world. Bloomsbury Academic, the publisher, has a reputation for bringing forth books that challenge the status quo and inspire readers, and Madvillain's Madvillainy is no exception. The book is available in English, making it accessible to a broad spectrum of readers across the globe.

Silent Coup, written by the acclaimed author Matt Kennard, is a riveting book that will captivate your interest from the first page to the last. Published in 2023 by the renowned Bloomsbury Academic, this book is a must-read for anyone who enjoys insightful and thought-provoking literature. Silent Coup is a masterful blend of intrigue and suspense, showcasing Kennard's ability to weave a compelling narrative that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. As part of the broader genre of contemporary literature, this book offers a unique perspective on the complexities of our modern world. In Silent Coup, Kennard challenges us to question our preconceptions and to engage with the world in new and unexpected ways. A testament to Kennard's storytelling prowess, Silent Coup is a book that will leave you pondering long after you've turned the last page. Don't miss out on this exceptional publication from Bloomsbury Academic.

You may not be interested in Russia. But Russia is interested in you.Russia's 2022 attack on Ukraine saw confrontation between Moscow and the West spill over into open conflict once again. But Russia has also been waging a clandestine war against the West for decades. Hostile acts abroad, from poisoning dissidents to shooting down airliners, interfering in elections, spying, hacking and murdering, have long seemed to be the Kremlin's daily business. But what is it all for? Why does Russia consistently behave like this? And what does it achieve?In this book, Keir Giles explains how and why Russia pushes for more power and influence wherever it can reach, far beyond Ukraine - and what it means not just for governments, but for ordinary people. Bringing together stories from the military, politics, diplomacy, espionage, cyber power, organised crime and more, Giles describes how Moscow conducts its campaigns across the globe, and how nobody is too unimportant to be caught up in them. By lifting the lid on the daily struggle going on behind the scenes to protect governments, businesses, societies and people from Russian hostile activity, Russia's War On Everybody shows how Moscow's hostile intentions for the rest of the world are far broader and more ambitious, and the ways it tries to achieve them far more pervasive and damaging, than we realise.

Featuring exclusive interviews with key figures, from Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway to guitarist Bill Steer of Gentlemans Pistols, Carcass, and Napalm Death, this is your guide through the history of death metal.Guitars playing abrasive, discordant riffs, the thunderous double-kick of the drums acting like an accelerated heartbeat, and porcine, guttural vocals pummeling twisted lyrics. Courting controversy from inception to its modern day iteration, death metal presents a number of contradictions: Driven and adventurous musicians compete to make uncomfortable noises; it is crude and far beyond parody and yet consistently popular; and the music is pig-headedly uncommercial despite making a few labels, albeit briefly, wealthy. This book explores the history and methodology of the genre, charting its aims and intentions, its crossovers to the mainstream, successes and failures, and tracks how it developed from the bedrooms of Birmingham and Florida to the near-mainstream, to the murky cult status it enjoys today.

Each of us develops and enacts strategies for living our everyday lives. These may confirm the general tendency towards new forms of connected solitude, in which we work, travel and live alone, yet feel sociable mainly by means of technology. Alternatively, they may help to create flexible communities that are open and inclusive, and therefore resilient and socially sustainable. In Politics of the Everyday, Ezio Manzini discusses examples of social innovation that show how, even in these difficult times, a better kind of society is possible. By bringing autonomy and collaboration together, it is possible to develop new forms of design intelligence, for our own good, for the good of the communities we are part of, and for society as a whole.

Is the West prepared for a world where power is shared with China? A world in which China asserts the same level of global leadership that the USA currently assumes? And can we learn to embrace Chinese political culture, as China learned to embrace ours?Here, one of the world's leading voices on China, Kerry Brown, takes us past the tired cliches and inside the Chinese leadership - as they lay out a roadmap for working in a world in which China shares dominance with the West.From how, and why, China as a dominant superpower has been inevitable for many years, to how the attempts to fight the old battles are over, Brown digs deeper into the problematic nature of China's current situation - its treatment of dissent, of Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and the severe limitations on its management of relations with other cultures and values. These issues impact the way the West sees China, China sees the West, and how both see themselves.There are obstacles to the West accepting a more prominent place for China in the world - but just because this will be a difficult process does not mean that it should not happen. As Kerry Brown writes: history is indeed ending, but not how the West thought it would.

'[A] lively journey through the evolution of footwear' - The i'Handsomely illustrated and meticulously assembled' - Shahidha Bari, author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes'An exuberant romp through footwear evolution ... a cornucopia of footwear delights' - Flora McLean, Royal College of Art, UK'A memorable walk through a story of innovation, fashion, invention and eroticism' - Giorgio Riello, European University Institute, Italy'An elegantly updated and illustrated edition of an invaluable reference book' - Alicia Kerfoot, The College at Brockport, SUNY, USAFrom chopines to stilettos, Louis XIV to Louboutin, Shoes: An Illustrated History is the definitive guide to footwear. This revised, updated edition expands the classic work to include new content on environmental and sustainability issues, and increased coverage of more diverse, inclusive and contemporary designers - such as Rupert Sanderson, Sophia Webster, Nicolas Kirkwood, Charlotte Olympia, Amina Muaddi, Noritaka Tatehana.Shoes have always been more than just a practical necessity. They reveal the culture of the times in which they were worn - the sexual morals, the social power play, as well as the endless shifting of fashion. Rebecca Shawcross takes the reader on a fascinating journey - packed with social and historical detail - of making and wearing, of the spectacular and the everyday, of conforming and rebelling.Lavishly illustrated with a dazzling array of shoes from all over the world and now including a new closing chapter covering the latest developments in design and technology, the influence of social media and celebrity endorsement, this revision consolidates the book's position as the leading reference work and overview of this ultimate object of desire, from antiquity to the present.

Often hailed as the 'best' James Bond film, From Russia With Love (1963) is celebrated for its direction by Terence Young, memorable performances from Sean Connery in his second outing as 007, Pedro Armendáriz as Kerim, Lotte Lenya as the lesbian villain Colonel Rosa Klebb, and Robert Shaw as Red Grant, the sexually ambiguous SPECTRE assassin. And regardless of its place within the longest-running continuous film series in cinema history, it is also an outstanding example of the British spy thriller in its own right.Llewella Chapman's study of the iconic film pinpoints its place within the James Bond film franchise, and its significant cultural value to critics and fans as well as this film's important place within British cinema history more widely. Drawing on a broad range of archival sources, Chapman traces the film's development and production history, including its adaptation from Ian Fleming's source novel, as well as its reception and lasting impact. Chapman also considers the film's portrayal of gender politics, with its queer villains counterpoised with the heterosexual couple Bond and his Russian counterpart Tatiana Romanova, the context of Cold War politics, and the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).

This book provides a penetrating look into Franklin D. Roosevelt's strategy to bait Adolf Hitler into declaring war on America in order to defeat Germany militarily, thus preventing the Nazis from developing the atomic bomb. In late 1939, President Roosevelt learned that Hitler was attempting to develop an atomic bomb to use against the United States. The president responded by directing his own scientific community to develop an atomic bomb and began making plans to go to war with Germany. However, he was hampered by public opinion, with 80 percent of the American people against U.S. involvement in another ground war in Europe. Roosevelt seized an opportunity in 1940, when Japan and Nazi Germany formed a military alliance. To bait Germany into war, FDR shut down Japan's war-making economy, prompting Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor. A few days later, Hitler declared war on America. Using declassified documents, this book shows how Pearl Harbor was not about Japan; it was about the United States going to war with Germany. It reveals how the U.S. Navy's intelligence gathering system could break virtually any Japanese naval code, but Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was kept in the dark about the impending Pearl Harbor attack by his own government.

Develops a new psychoanalytic theory of genius, a concept that is often invoked and pervasive in popular culture but which is rarely scrutinized in depth. In the absence of this scrutiny, genius has come to be understood as exceptional talent or intelligence-an elitist notion. Genius After Psychoanalysis intervenes in this debate by offering a new account of genius. Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, K. Daniel Cho argues that genius is not exceptional talent or intelligence but is related to and illuminated by the psychological concept of sublimation, where the unpleasures that arise when our intellectual products fail become themselves pleasurable. Beginning with a close examination of Freud's work on Leonardo da Vinci, Cho analyzes film, art, our relationship to nature, politics, group psychology, love, and philosophy to demonstrate that genius, far from an elitist notion, is universally available through a different approach to ideas of imperfection, disappointment, and failure. Genius After Psychoanalysis is a bold new intervention on a culturally central but understudied topic.

Saturday Night Fever is simultaneously one the biggest-selling albums of all time and one of the most reviled. How can a record create such a polarizing reaction? Australian writer Clinton Walker attempts to answer that question and finds that, among other things, a certain seemingly unlikely Australianness is part of the reason. Fever was a supernova for disco, for the Bee Gees, for the domineering Robert Stigwood, producer of the film and is its true auteur, and for the entire record business. This book traces all the interdependent convolutions that fed into the film and its music - not least the Australian roots that Stigwood and Gibb brothers shared, which gave them an Otherness and almost gormless, shape-shifting self-determination - and it finds that sometimes great art can be made by a committee ... that sometimes, five songs are enough to change the world.

After the 1881 declaration of press freedom, France enjoyed a golden age of print, arguably up until the 1950s. This book shines a much-needed light on one of the key elements of France's new literary age: that being the production of 'pornography' of all kinds. H.G. Cocks reveals how publishers and writers, both mainstream and clandestine, tried to cash in on the vogue for erotic literature which surfaced at the time. Though the vast majority of what was produced was no more than risqué or saucy, Cocks shows that this was seen as far more dangerous than frank sexual imagery, as it was mostly legal and within the range of the ordinary reader. Pornographers, Hacks, and Blackmailers in Interwar France reflects on how, as a result of this gold rush for what one writer called the 'faux obscene', a great deal of writing, journalism, and quite a few literary and even political careers were supported by the writing of 'pornography'. For some, this new wave of indecent literature seemed to be sapping the morale of the Republic, while for others it was simply part of the creative literary and journalistic ferment of the period. In that sense, Cocks convincingly argues, the pornographic became part of the curious mixture of cultural energy and malaise that enveloped the struggling French democracy.

Human species supremacy is one of the most persistent fictions at work in the field of modern British imperial history today. This open access collection challenges that assumption, and investigates what histories of empire look like if reimagined as the effect of biocultural, chemical and cultural processes, rather than the result of effects by humans that have been visited upon cultural landscapes, fauna and biomes. In understanding the boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds as porous and open to mutual transformation, and foregrounding interspecies interactions, Biocultural Empire seeks to understand the conditions of imperial power, experience and knowledge as a remix of 'nature' and 'culture'. Bringing empire's 'biocultural histories' to the fore, it asks imperial historians to reckon with an interpretative framework which refuses the sovereignty and boundedness of the imperial subject by seeing it as inseparable from its social and ecological formations. Through this biocultural framework this collection highlights how relentlessly the human species bias of western liberal thought persists at the heart of imperial projects and their histories, and offers a new anti-colonial method that represents a significant intervention in the field of British imperial history. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Illinois, USA and University of British Columbia, Canada.

This book explores debates about East India Company colonialism that took place on the lecture circuits of Britain, in the meeting houses of Calcutta, and at the Mughal court in Delhi in the late 1830s and 1840s. In the decades that followed the Emancipation Act (1833) British abolitionists and colonial philanthropists turned their attention to conditions across the empire, sometimes collaborating with colonised groups to challenge the impositions and iniquities of British colonial rule and sometimes prescribing their own vision of how an imperial relationship should look. This book uses the travels, experiences, and activism of anti-slavery lecturer and East India reformer George Thompson as a starting point for a wider exploration and reassessment of the ways in which Company rule in India was challenged in the decades before the Indian Uprising of 1857. An important organiser in the campaign for East India reform as the main spokesperson for the Aborigines Protection Society and a champion of the causes of Indian rulers such as Pratap Singh and Bahadur Shah Zafar, Thompson was also a flawed character. As a paid agent, he was remunerated for his activism and accusations of pecuniary self-interest were never far away. His story therefore offers important insights into the limitations of early anti-colonial sentiment, and the problems of cosmopolitan collaboration in colonial contexts. By exploring early Victorian debates about India's commercial potential, role in the imperial labour market, and place within an increasingly interconnected post-emancipation empire, the book seeks to contextualise evolving ideas regarding Britain's humanitarian responsibilities towards her 'fellow subjects in the East', and how these connected with, and were superseded by, nascent forms of Indian anti-colonialism, political protest, and civic activism.

This open access book explores the changing representation of sunbed providers and consumers in Britain by analysing the role of the media, medical experts, and socio-political transformations during the 1970s-90s. Seeking to contextualise our cultural conceptualisation of sunbeds, this volume takes readers through the origins of tanning culture, examining the impact of beauty entrepreneurs and the integration of sunbed facilities into health and fitness venues during the tanning boom of the 1970s. Fabiola Creed utilises a variety of primary source material, including print media, film, medical journals, and trade directories and catalogues, to demonstrate the sunbed's initial association with wellness and luxury lifestyles, and entrance into mainstream use towards the late 1980s. Highlighting how the sunbed is an important case study for the increase in the use of broadcast media as a communicator of public health messages, Creed analyses how commentary on sunbeds spread quickly from local to national media, with medical experts replacing industry representatives as leaders of the conversations around sunbed safety. This shift in media conversations triggered an increase in research and Health Education Authority campaigning, and subsequent characterisation of the industry as medically and financially exploitative. Ultimately, The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed demonstrates how popular culture reciprocally influenced and shaped public health research and scientific discussions during the period, and how this influenced, and was influenced by, the socio-cultural climate of Thatcher-era Britain. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Through the analysis of 10 oral witness testimonies of local residents and a previously undocumented letter correspondence between a Jewish Holocaust survivor and her gentile friend, The Jewish Purging of a Small German Town provides new insights into how the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people unfolded in small towns and communities around Germany. Incorporating her own personal reflections on growing up in Salmünster, Maria R. Boes uncovers the truth about the Jewish residents who lived there and what happened to them after the Nazis came to power in 1933 - a story which has been silenced and suppressed. Boes charts the town's unsettling trajectory from aharmonious pre-Nazi local community to an environment where, after initial protracted local resistance, Jewish persecution escalated from the boycotting of stores to physical, fiscal and emotional acts against Jewish residents. The book reveals how this culminated in Jewish residents being purged from the town by 1937 without any paramilitary intervention or outside physical force, prior to the 1938 Kristallnacht and long before similar ousters occurred in big cities throughout the country. It also shows how Salmünster, like other neighbouring towns, continued to deny the rightful historical belonging of its Jewish residents long after the war was over and the Nazis had been defeated. This microhistory is an illuminating study of the momentous spectre of Germany's small towns being at the forefront of successfully fulfilling Nazi aims to remove Jewish residents - driving them out of their homes with the ultimate goal of driving them out of existence.

Medievalists have denied the historical existence of King Arthur for over 50 years. Arthur and the Languages of Britain demonstrates how linguistic evidence can be employed to see if the earliest historical records that mention Arthur are reliable. The book begins with an analysis of the evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasions and the response of the Britons, and introduces the main methodological approaches employed in the linguistic analysis of historical records. It then provides evidence for Arthur as a Cumbric-speaker active in the region about Hadrian's Wall, before assessing the linguistic evidence which supports the validity of the references to Arthur in the Welsh Annals and the Historia Brittonum. Bernard Mees reflects on how Arthur is recorded as having taken part in the Battle of Mount Badon, a site that has never been located, and dying at Camlann, now Castlesteads on Hadrian's Wall. He uses linguistic analysis of the evidence recorded for the existence of Arthur to support the historical reliability of these records. Mees concludes with a summary of how Geoffrey of Monmouth created pseudo-historical stories from the references to Arthur in these early sources, turning Ambrosius Aurelianus into Merlin and Mordred into King Arthur's nephew and the lover of his queen Guinevere.

Winner of the Bloomsbury and World History Association Diversity in World History First Monograph Prize Exploring the history of prostitution in Cape Town from 1868 to 1957, this book charts the transformation of the sex trade from societal and legal toleration to criminalization and abolition. Showing how this transformation to Cape Town's commercial sex industry did not solely occur in a vacuum, but also affected the Western Cape and southern Africa, Gonzalez-Stout shows how regional, international and imperial forces shaped the sex economy in a region undergoing colonization, warfare, racial stratification, urbanization and apartheid. Illuminating socially constructed ideas on morality that shaped the sex trade in Cape Town, this book shows how the selling of sex proved to be a vigorous economic force that remained tethered to racial and gender norms that defined moral boundaries. Feared and watched by government officials, women's organization, moral reformers, medical professionals, law enforcement and concerned citizens, it was also a commodified and contentious arena. Arguing that sexual anxieties were ultimately racial anxieties, Prostitution and Carnal Vigilance in Cape Town shows how this transformation was sustained by white supremacy and nationalism against a backdrop of wider exclusionary and segregationist measures, while marginalized sex workers continued to demonstrate resistance and agency in the face of moral policing and increasing surveillance.

This book studies British cultural engagement with Napoleon Bonaparte from his 1815 surrender and time in British custody, until the return of his remains to France in 1840. Adopting a chronological approach, James Gregory studies the British use of Bonaparte in various spheres - covering political, dramatic, literary, and visual culture, and popular entertainment over a 25-year period. Gregory acknowledges not only canonical literary treatments, but also appearances of the figure in novels, anecdotes, travelling shows, and private collections - in order to analyse contemporary fascination with Napoleon. Centring on key themes such as responses to Napoleon's presence on British territory, and later reactions to his death, Gregory also takes into account the influence of factors such as geography and gender, in order to craft a comprehensive picture of cultural engagement with Napoleon in the period 1815-40. Covering factors including the role of commemoration, the impact of Peterloo and Queen Catherine's death, and the rise of Romanticism, this book demonstrates how truly pervasive the myth of Napoleon became in 19th-century Britain.

This book studies the historiography of smoking in modern Britain, with a focus on the social, cultural, and emotional aspects of the practice. Centring on four specific moments in modern British history; the turn of the 20th century, the Second World War, the 1980s, and the mid-2000s, An Atmospheric History of Smoking not only traces the history of tobacco use, but explores the cultural significance of - and attitudes toward - smoking. Markovic combines oral histories with archival research and artefact analysis, in order to evoke the unique social atmospheres surrounding smoking at each of these key periods within British history. By analysing factors such as the encouragement of the practice as part of Home Front 'mood management' during the Second World War, or the impact of smoking on 1980s workplace relations, this book highlights how the role of smoking in public spheres has undergone significant change throughout the 20th century. Constructing the 2007 UK ban on smoking in public places as a turning point for the practice in the British cultural imagination, Markovic examines how smoking has both been deemed 'out of place', and yet still persists today.

This volume examines the interplay between emotions and archives from the 18th to the 21st century. Exploring how feelings have affected the ways in which the past is preserved, remembered, controlled and experienced by various peoples and societies, and how such dynamics unfold in the present, it investigates both how people's emotions affect archives as an environment, and how emotions themselves influence our interaction with historical records. Bringing together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners working in public, private, traditional and digital archives around the world, it offers a novel cross-section of ways in which emotions are understood and defined, and of the function they perform across time and space. Building on current discussions around emotions, affect and trauma-informed practices in archival studies, chapters in this collection adopt a broad spectrum of methodologies from oral interviews to discourse analysis and auto-ethnography. Sketching the ways in which emotions and archives affect one another, this book uncovers the emotional dynamics that govern individual and collective relationships in both past and present.

This book sets out to search for the Second World - the (post)socialist context - in dance studies and examines the way it appears and reappears in today's globalized world. It traces hidden and invisibilized legacies over the span of one century, probing questions that can make viewers, artists, and scholars uncomfortable regarding dance histories, memories, circulations and production modes in and around the (post)socialist world. Our understanding of 'dance' is broad and inclusive. The contributions delve into a variety of dance practices (folk, traditional, ballet, modern, contemporary), modes of dance production (institutionalization processes, festival-making and market logics), and dance circulations (between centres and peripheries, between different genres and styles). The main focus is Eastern Europe (including Russia) but the book also addresses Cuba and China. The hope is for theoretical developments engendered by this focus on the Second World to be useful when applied to regions outside the book's scope. Its chapters span a range of lesser-known historical examples from the arts of Yugoslav regions (Magazinovic, Davico and The Legend of Ohrid) to Cuban postrevolutionary artists (Burdsall) and Mongolian Wulmanuqi troupes. The book's historical examples make the reader aware, too, of the (post)socialist bodies' influence in today's dance, including in contemporary dance scenes.The (post)socialist context promises to be a prosperous laboratory to explore uncomfortable questions of legitimacy. Whose choreographic work is staged as a 'quality' dance production? Which dance practices are worthy of scholarly study? Which practices are 'valuable enough' for decent archiving and institutionalization? What are the limits of dance studies' understanding of what dance is (and what it should be)? In view of reclaiming the Second World through dance, this book thus probes questions that should be asked today but are not easy to answer. We set out to explore questions that dance practitioners, facilitators, critics, and researchers, including ourselves, are often not at ease with either. In raising and discussing these, we intend to restore the role and meaning of dance and to offer necessary utopias for those living in a world torn by multiple crises. Through seeking to answer these questions, the cracks of dance history begin to be sealed, and neglected dance practices are written back into history, provided with the academic recognition that they deserve.

In barely three generations the Spanish diet has changed beyond recognition. The traditional concerns around nutritional health and scarcity have been mostly left behind, but they have given way to new problems linked to excess. In this book Fernando Collantes shows how the dairy industry has been central to this societal shift. From widespread calcium deficiency in the 1950s to the more recent, and controversial, turn to highly processed foods, it provides a recent history of diet change in Spain. Probing the reasons behind why this shift has occurred, and how, it shows that when it comes to food society, politics, economics and the law are intrinsically linked. Taking the reader beyond the world of food, Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change combines qualitative and quantitative methods to position diet change within the broader debate on consumer society and 'the good life'. Contrasting two models of food consumption, it shows that unless public policy takes the challenge of affluence seriously, the food system can become an obstacle to a better society.

Exploring the phenomenon of Femslash fanfiction (fan narratives that bring together heterosexual female characters from mainstream media and fiction), this book analyses fan-authored works as forms of literature worthy of studying at length. It examines the decolonial, feminist and queer fan works produced in response to white supremacist, heteronormative, queerbaiting mainstream fantasy. Focusing on 'Swan Queen' fanfictions, a romantic pairing of colour between characters Emma Swan and Regina Mills from ABC's hit show Once Upon a Time, Alice Kelly redresses the widespread academic neglect of queer female fandoms and responds to urgent calls to diversify fan and fantasy scholarship. With reference to complex theoretical subjects such as ethnography, sociology, psychology and decolonial, queer, film and media studies, the book also delves into the alternative timescales on which queer female and genderqueer fan authorship runs; offers intriguing insights into fanfiction narrative structures; and tackles the issues of broader fandom representation and contextualization. Making the case that fan texts deserve attention in the academy, Kelly shows how some of the most prolific fan works have the ability to enact colour reparation and a reclamation of memory, fantasy, romance, maternity, childhood, and magic. These fictions serve fan communities as a whole through intersectional challenges to the power dynamics of the source text and within the fandom itself and, as the book demonstrates, offer attendant validation to fantasy fans who have been repeatedly told that the genre is not for them.

Renowned scholars discuss the past, present, and future of the study of religion in both antiquity and modernity, celebrating the contributions of Panayotis Pachis to the field. An advocate of the historical and scientific study of the religions of past and present, Panayotis Pachis has dedicated his celebrated career at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to the study of various aspects of ancient religions. These range from the importance of agriculture and religion in ancient Greece, the Mystery Cults, the centrality of initiatory rituals and rites of passage, to the promotion of a modern, scientific study of religion that extends from the comparative and historical method to the cognitive study of religion. The contents of this book reflect Pachis' conviction that the study of religious ideas and practices should be focused on three pillars: the study of history, the formulation and application of theoretical frameworks, and the utilization of traditional as well as innovative methodological tools.