Traces the concept of kosmos as order, arrangement, and ornament in ancient philosophy, literature, and aesthetics.

Recreates the ancient Egyptian sacred path of spiritual unfolding.

The Antikythera Mechanism, now 82 small fragments of corroded bronze, was an ancient Greek machine simulating the cosmos as the Greeks understood it. Reflecting the most recent researches, A Portable Cosmos presents it as a gateway to Greek astronomy and technology and their place in Greco-Roman society and thought.

The ancient Near Eastern mode of thought is not at all intuitive to us moderns, but our understanding of ancient perspectives can only approach accuracy when we begin to penetrate ancient texts on their own terms rather than imposing our own world view. In this task, we are aided by the ever-growing corpus of literature that is being recovered and analyzed. After an introduction that presents some of the history of comparative studies and how it has been applied to the study of ancient texts in general and cosmology in particular, Walton focuses in the first half of this book on the ancient Near Eastern texts that inform our understanding about ancient ways of thinking about cosmology. Of primary interest are the texts that can help us discern the parameters of ancient perspectives on cosmic ontology—that is, how the writers perceived origins. Texts from across the ancient Near East are presented, including primarily Egyptian, Sumerian, and Akkadian texts, but occasionally also Ugaritic and Hittite, as appropriate. Walton’s intention, first of all, is to understand the texts but also to demonstrate that a functional ontology pervaded the cognitive environment of the ancient Near East. This functional ontology involves more than just the idea that ordering the cosmos was the focus of the cosmological texts. He posits that, in the ancient world, bringing about order and functionality was the very essence of creative activity. He also pays close attention to the ancient ideology of temples to show the close connection between temples and the functioning cosmos. The second half of the book is devoted to a fresh analysis of Genesis 1:1–2:4. Walton offers studies of significant Hebrew terms and seeks to show that the Israelite texts evidence a functional ontology and a cosmology that is constructed with temple ideology in mind, as in the rest of the ancient Near East. He contends that Genesis 1 never was an account of material origins but that, as in the rest of the ancient world, the focus of “creation texts” was to order the cosmos by initiating functions for the components of the cosmos. He further contends that the cosmology of Genesis 1 is founded on the premise that the cosmos should be understood in temple terms. All of this is intended to demonstrate that, when we read Genesis 1 as the ancient document it is, rather than trying to read it in light of our own world view, the text comes to life in ways that help recover the energy it had in its original context. At the same time, it provides a new perspective on Genesis 1 in relation to what have long been controversial issues. Far from being a borrowed text, Genesis 1 offers a unique theology, even while it speaks from the platform of its contemporaneous cognitive environment.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.

On the Heavens (Greek: Περὶ οὐρανοῦ, Latin: De Caelo or De Caelo et Mundo) is Aristotle’s chief cosmological treatise: written in 350 BC it contains his astronomical theory and his ideas on the concrete workings of the terrestrial world. It should not be confused with the spurious work On the Universe (De mundo, also known as On the Cosmos).

As part of the preparation for 2012--when the universe will present vast changes for humanity--this examination communicates the knowledge of wise ancients. There are 48 keys and two cosmic keys that open up the various energies of the universe. The information in this book will enable readers to expand their consciousness by using these keys to unlock the secrets of other realms, such as the animal and natural kingdoms, the elementals, different archangels and other angelic beings, cosmic masters, and wisdom centers. An exploration of spiritual laws, this is a fascinating and important look at energies that manifest as sound resonances and what humanity can do to access them.

Hadot shows how the schools, trends, and ideas of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy strove to transform the individual's mode of perceiving and being in the world. For the ancients, philosophical theory and the philosophical way of life were inseparably linked. Hadot asks us to consider whether and how this connection might be reestablished today.

The treatise De mundo offers a cosmology in the Peripatetic tradition which subordinates what happens in the cosmos to the might of an omnipotent god. Thus the work is paradigmatic for the philosophical and religious concepts of the early imperial age, which offer points of contact with nascent Christianity.

The philosophers of Ancient Greece lived in a time when the gods were worshipped and the myths about them very much alive. They were generally regarded as accurate and there was no scientific evidence at hand to dismiss them. So, were they believed? This book explores to what extent the Greeks were able to question their own mythology. This is done by examining the cosmology of their philosophers and what roles they allowed therein for the gods - as much as possible according to their own words. To the philosophers, the quest to understand the world was neither made redundant by the mythology nor completely independent of it. If they were able to express doubts regarding the gods as well as the myths about them, and many of them certainly were, then their contemporaries must have been able to grasp the same. The Greeks were devoted to their mythology, but not all of them blindly so. Stefan Stenudd is a Swedish author and historian of ideas, who specializes on studies of the patterns of thought in creation myths.