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  Ancient Egypt - Light Of The...

  Gerald Massey

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  No one ever understood the mythology and Ritual of Ancient Egypt so well as Gerald Massey since the time of the Ancient Philosophers of Egypt. This book is one of the best when it comes down to Egyptian mythology, occultism and interpretation. It's a standard work no one wants to miss. 
  Contents: 
  Sign-Language And Mythology As Primitive Modes Of Representation. 
  Totemism, Tattoo And Fetishism As Forms Of Sign-Language 
  Elemental And Ancestral Spirits, Or The Gods And The Glorified. 
  Egyptian Book Of The Dead And The Mysteries Of Amenta 
  The Sign-Language Of Astronomical Mythology 
  Egyptian Wisdom. 
  The Drowning Of The Dragon 
  The Sign-Language Of Astronomical Mythology (Part II) 
  Horus Of The Double Horizon. 
  The Making Of Amenta 
  The Irish Amenta 
  The Upper Mount Of Glory. 
  Egyptian Wisdom And The Hebrew Genesis 
  The Egyptian Wisdom In Other Jewish Writings

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  A Quest for the Hidden Lands -...

  Norma Levine

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  My budding career as a literary scholar was suddenly hijacked by a singular seemingly random event. It was 1976 when I tiptoed into a tiny Buddhist shrine room in a farmhouse nestled into the Black Mountains of Wales and there beheld a Tibetan master, the 16th Karmapa, sitting on a throne performing a ceremony known as The Black Hat. My mind came to an immediate stop, suspended. It felt familiar, like the secret garden of childhood.I can still remember every detail like it was yesterday:Karmapa occupies the throne completely. He has a spiritual dignity that makes it his rightful seat, just as the lion proclaims his natural dominion. The force of his presence alone brings a hushed silence to the room. It feels like it has expanded into a cathedral. Two monks blow long Tibetan horns in a haunting wail so loud and long it startles thought patterns, blowing them away like clouds. The Karmapa slowly opens the Black Hat-box, takes the black silk crown in his hand, and puts it on his head holding it down with one hand. With the other hand he fingers a crystal rosary moving it deftly, twirling the beads around three times. The horns continue while he gazes with eyes that seem to dissolve the fiction of time and the boundaries of space. Time is standing still.That glimpse into enlightened mind became embedded like a seed and grew into a quest over the next decades to find the key places on our planet called the Hidden Lands.The legend came alive while I was living in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas. I met Tibetans who had been to the supreme Hidden Land of Pemako while escaping from the Chinese invasion of Tibet. They made it sound like the ‘promised land’ with streams flowing with milky water. There were certain plants that could induce enlightenment.Why did it take decades to get there? What made the right ingredients emerge to penetrate this sacred sanctuary?  And the big question: Who hid it and why?

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  An Open Door - New Travel...

  Steven Lovatt

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  'If the mountains secluded Wales from England, the long coastline was like an open door to the world at large.' – Jan Morris
  The history of Wales as a destination and confection of English Romantic writers is well-known, but this book reverses the process, turning a Welsh gaze on the rest of the world.
  This shift is timely: the severing of Britain from the European Union asks questions of Wales about its relationship to its own past, to the British state, to Europe and beyond, while the present political, public health and environmental crises mean that travel writing can and should never again be the comfortably escapist genre that it was. Our modern anxieties over identity are registered here in writing that questions in a personal, visceral way the meaning of belonging and homecoming, and reflects a search for stability and solace as much as a desire for adventure. Here are lyrical stories refracted through kaleidoscopes of family and world history, alongside accounts of forced displacement and the tenacious love that exists between people and places. Yet these pieces also show the enduring value and joy of travel itself. As Eluned Gramich expresses it 'It's one of the pleasures of travel to submit yourself to other people, let yourself be guided and taught'.
  Taken together, the stories of An Open Door extend Jan Morris' legacy into a turbulent present and even more uncertain future. Whether seen from Llŷn or the Somali desert, we still take turns to look out at the same stars, and it might be this recognition, above all, that encourages us to hold the door open for as long as we can.
  Featuring contributions from Eluned Gramich, Grace Quantock, Faisal Ali, Sophie Buchaillard, Giancarlo Gemin, Siân Melangell Dafydd, Mary-Ann Constantine, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Neil Gower, Julie Brominicks and Electra Rhodes.

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  Against a Peacock Sky - Two...

  Monica Connell

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  For two years in the early 1980s, Monica Connell lived as a paying guest of Kalchu and Chola in the Nepalese village of Talphi. Gradually she was accepted as a member of the family, sharing its joys and sorrows as well as taking part in its various tasks, from mud plastering the house to rice planting in the terraced fields. The village, in the Jumla region of western Nepal, was ten days' walk from the nearest road, and its only contact with the outside world was through trading expeditions: north to Tibet for salt, and south to the Indian border for cotton and metalware. Connell vividly shares her experience of this remote way of life, and describes the dramas of village life with empathy and a sense of wonder- a boar hunt in winter, the wedding of a young neighbour and the magic of the full moon festival, when the gods descend to dance amongst the villagers.

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  Blue Thirst - Tales of Life Abroad

  Lawrence Durrell

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  A pair of lectures from one of the twentieth century’s most mesmerizing speakersLawrence Durrell was in his early twenties when, tired of the stiffness of London life, he took his family to live in Corfu. Interwar Greece, whose hard beds and mosquito swarms Durrell documented so tenderly in Prospero’s Cell, was no more. In the first of this pair of lectures, given during a 1970s visit to California, Durrell recalls those days, talking of family, poetry, and the joy of the islands as no other writer can. When war came to the Mediterranean, Durrell was swept into diplomatic service, an adventure he recounts in his second lecture. Though a diplomat of the modern world, he served under men whose experience stretched back to the days before the telephone, when solutions for crises had to be devised by the ambassador, and not phoned in from London. These two lectures on long-vanished worlds are an elegant demonstration of the evocative power of Durrell’s unmatched storytelling.

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  Blood on the Wave - Scottish Sea...

  John Sadler

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  A history of combat in Scottish waters—from the Iron Age to the Cold War—and the changes in the technology and tactics of naval warfare.   Scotland’s long coastline runs from the waters of Galloway and the Solway, through the Irish Sea to the long sea lochs and myriad islands of the Celtic west, around grim Cape Wrath, the coast of Caithness, Pentland Firth and the Orkneys, eastward down to the Moray Firth, the eastern seaboard, to the Forth and the sentinel of the Bass Rock. It is an ancient strand redolent with history. Sea battles have been fought in its lee from the time of Agricola to the Atlantic convoys.   In Blood on the Wave, John Sadler embarks on a pilgrimage around Scotland’s rugged and stunning coastline, to explore the fascinating history that has occurred in its waters. Beautifully illustrated throughout with photographs and line drawings, the narrative also describes developments in ship building technique and design, developments in naval gunnery with a look at coastal defenses. From the long-oared Norse galleys that swept down through the isles and the sea lochs to Somerled’s birlinns and nyvaigs contesting with those of Godred of Man in a moonlit clash of spears, many of the fiercest battles in Scottish history have been fought at sea.   Examining an array of skirmishes from the Wars of Independence to the Napoleonic Wars, the scuttling of the Imperial German Navy at Scapa Flow to the lurking threat of Second World War U-boats and nuclear submarines hunting for Soviet spy ships, John Sadler has created a brilliant, insightful and unique portrait of the Scottish war at sea.

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