Una meditación poderosa en la que William Ospina entrelaza historia, belleza y memoria para iluminar las preguntas esenciales de nuestro presente.Somos a la vez biología y lenguaje, naturaleza y cultura, huellas de la historia en la arcilla y pupilas que buscan las estrellas. Estos textos procuran pensar, pero no se limitan a hacerlo. No esquivan el sueño, la especulacion, el delirio, mas de una vez quisieran ser relatos y ser poemas. Espero que en todos este, mas visible o mas tacito, el anhelo del mito. La sed de esa nueva mitologia, rica en sensualidad y belleza, responsable y cordial, que es en todo el planeta el unico camino posible para acceder al futuro. Y para merecerlo.Advierto que muchos ensayos de este libro nacieron de reflexiones inmediatas sobre la actualidad: ojala hayan escapado de las trampas del presente, de las supersticiones del progreso, de las vanidades de la informacion.William Ospina
Myth, Ritual and Religion (Vols. I & II) is Andrew Langs farranging inquiry into the origins and transformations of sacred narrative. Marrying classical learning to the new comparative anthropology, he tests the "solar myth" and evolutionary schools against folktale corpora, travelers reports, and ritual practice from Australia and the Americas to Greece and Scandinavia. Urbane, precise, and wry, his style combines scrupulous citation with close motif analysis and attention to totemism, taboo, and early "high gods." A Scottish classicist, folklorist, and journalist, Lang studied at St Andrews and Oxford and popularized ballads and fairy tales while engaging London learned societies. His distaste for armchair philology and his respect for ethnographic evidence inform his revisions: that moralized supreme beings may precede priesthoods and that myth resists reduction to a single physical allegory. Scholars and students of religion, folklore, and classical reception will find these volumes indispensable: a methodological primer and an encyclopedic archive in one. Read it to see Victorian debate at its sharpest, to sharpen your own comparative practice, and to encounter sacred stories with humane skepticism and durable curiosity.Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the authors voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readabledistilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.