Archaic Books
Showing 1-50 of 152
The Odyssey (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as archaic)
avg rating 3.84 — 1,223,221 ratings — published -700
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as archaic)
avg rating 3.76 — 121,589 ratings — published -1800
The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as archaic)
avg rating 4.00 — 71,608 ratings — published -450
Candide (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as archaic)
avg rating 3.76 — 306,402 ratings — published 1759
The Aeneid (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 2 times as archaic)
avg rating 3.88 — 146,224 ratings — published -19
The Iliad (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as archaic)
avg rating 3.93 — 522,466 ratings — published -800
Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration: 1788 / Life and Adventures (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.40 — 10 ratings — published 2000
Dispute Between a Man and His Ba (Unknown Binding)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.87 — 101 ratings — published -1900
New Science (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.01 — 952 ratings — published 1725
Juliette (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.67 — 5,140 ratings — published 1797
The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn: An English Translation of EPISTLE 22 (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.19 — 47 ratings — published 2012
Oration on the Dignity of Man (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.70 — 1,336 ratings — published 1486
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.15 — 233,340 ratings — published 1985
Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.78 — 3,045 ratings — published 1776
Confessions (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.00 — 76,455 ratings — published 400
Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.18 — 190,839 ratings — published 2019
The Fall of the Roman Republic (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.11 — 4,209 ratings — published 100
Peter Oliver's Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.69 — 54 ratings — published 1961
The Mad Crew: A Ranter Anthology (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.67 — 3 ratings — published
The Waste Books (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.16 — 880 ratings — published 1799
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.23 — 535 ratings — published 1986
Homeric Hymns (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.06 — 6,742 ratings — published -699
Truth of the Heart: An Anthology of George Fox (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.25 — 16 ratings — published 2007
The Journal of George Fox (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.89 — 182 ratings — published 1924
Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.07 — 2,078 ratings — published 2000
George Fox - An Autobiography (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.81 — 27 ratings — published 2006
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Collected Works of Northrop Frye)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.34 — 775 ratings — published 1947
All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates Pretending to Lay Claim to the Pure & Holy Christian Religion; Of What Congregation So Ever; But Especially in Their Ministers (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.20 — 5 ratings — published
The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.12 — 539 ratings — published 2017
Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories: Newly Recorded Stories from the Aboriginal Elders of Central Australia (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.40 — 5 ratings — published 1998
The Decameron (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.88 — 44,212 ratings — published 1349
Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.95 — 215 ratings — published 2017
Ramayana (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.19 — 5,379 ratings — published -400
Mahabharata (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.32 — 12,302 ratings — published 300
Essays of Joseph Addison (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.84 — 19 ratings — published
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.65 — 16,418 ratings — published 1532
Pride and Prejudice (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.30 — 4,917,001 ratings — published 1813
Carmilla (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.86 — 214,616 ratings — published 1872
Sri Guru Granth Sahib (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.44 — 296 ratings — published 1708
Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.40 — 911 ratings — published 2022
On the Genealogy of Morals (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.12 — 36,976 ratings — published 1887
Death of a Salesman (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.59 — 263,409 ratings — published 1949
The Complete Writings of St. Francis of Assisi (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.17 — 72 ratings — published 1220
The Frogs (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.78 — 9,549 ratings — published -405
God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 3.84 — 417 ratings — published 1970
Images in the Margins (Medieval Imagination)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.06 — 67 ratings — published 2009
Machiavellian Democracy (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as archaic)
avg rating 4.18 — 45 ratings — published 2011
“My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without.
Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.
[…] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.”
― Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre
Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.
[…] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.”
― Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre
“A primitive education can only create primitive generations! An outdated mentality will produce merely an outdated minds! The door of the future is closed for such archaic residuals from the pre-modern time of social evolution!”
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