"Untying the Knot collects eighteen previously unpublished essays on the riddle--a genre of discourse found in virtually every human culture. Hasan-Rokem and Shulman have drawn these essays from a variety of cultural perspectives and disciplines; linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, and religion and literature scholars consider riddling practices in Hebrew, Finnish, Indian languages, Chinese, and classical Greek. The authors seek to understand the peculiar expressive power of the riddle, and the cultural logic of its particular uses; they scrutinize the riddle's logical structure and linguistic strategies, as well as its affinity to neighboring genres such as enigmas, puzzles, oracular prophecy, proverbs, and dreams. In this way, they begin to answer how riddles relate to the conceptual structures of a particular culture, and how they come to represent a culture's cosmology or cognitive map of the world. More importantly, these essays reveal the human need for symbolic ordering--riddles being one such form of cultural ritual." --

This volume presents a comparative perspective on the way dreams are reported, perceived, and interpreted in vastly different cultural milieux. In contrast to Freud's claim that all dreams share a universal language of symbols, the authors of the essays collected in this book seek to explore the unique dream-languages of distinct civilizations. Sixteen previously unpublished works by such distinguished scholars as Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, Moshe Idel, Christiano Grottanelli, and Jean-Claude Schmitt examine the literature of dreams from China, India, Meso-America, Greek and Roman antiquity, early Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Kabbala, Islam, medieval and early-modern Europe, and nineteenth-century Vienna. Taken together, they constitute an important first step toward a new understanding of the ways in which different cultures experience and conceptualize the world of dreams. --

This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilizations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the "self" is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilization to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Christian Europe.