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Sexuality and spirituality are inextricably linked in the mythology and texts of ancient India. At the heart of this culture’s teachings are sensuous stories of the gods making love that demonstrate the power and purpose of human passion. On Erotic Spirituality and the Kamasutra, Wendy Doniger guides us through India’s seductive tales and hidden insights into the art of living and lovemaking. Drawing on amorous myths as well as the world’s oldest text of erotic love—the Kamasutra—this scholar of Sanskrit and Hindu mythology reveals: rituals to prepare yourself and your bedroom for the delights of erotic love; the language of attraction—recognizing the unspoken signals from a suitor; how the tension of "sexual battle" enhances pleasure, and much more. Here for the first time on audio, a full-length course on spirituality’s embrace of sexual pleasure.

An expert on Sanskrit and Hindu mythology presents the first audio version of the popular Hindu text on cultivating the art of pleasure, touching upon such topics as the secret language of unspoken attraction, the possibility of keeping the fires of passion burning year after year, and how to tell if a lover is cheating.

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Product Description: Wendy Doniger's foundational study is both modern in its engagement with a diverse range of religions and refreshingly classic in its transhistorical, cross-cultural approach. By responsibly analyzing patterns and themes across context, Doniger reinvigorates the comparative reading of religion, tapping into a wealth of narrative traditions, from the instructive tales of Judaism and Christianity to the moral lessons of the Bhagavad Gita...read more

Covers such topics as religious movements and concepts, historical figures, religious places, and divinities and supernatural characters

Product Description: Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled, who double themselves, who are seduced by gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided. In Splitting the Difference, the renowned scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India, with occasional recourse to more recent "double features" from Dr...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

"This is an extraordinary book, which could have been written by no one but Tatyana Elizarenkova. It is extraordinary because it combines two disciplines that no one else would dream of combining, or be able to combine: the modern, trendy, obscure discipline of semiotics, and the ancient, dusty, arcane discipline of Vedic philology. It is even more extraordinary because it combines them in such a way that they become mutually illuminating, that the obscurity of the one is not compounded by the arcanity of the other but, on the contrary, clarified by it." -- From the Foreword by Wendy Doniger Elizarenkova, perhaps the greatest living scholar of the Rand certainly its greatest linguist, explains here the relationships between a very complicated grammatical system and the peculiarities of style of the archaic religious poetry. The laudatory hymn is treated as an act of verbal communication between the poet Rand the deity, with the hymn itself transmitting certain information from man to god. From this viewpoint, the hymn is used as a means to maintain a circular exchange of gifts between the Rand their gods. Many peculiarities of the functioning of the grammatical system of the Rare interpreted in connection with the model of the universe of the Vedic Aryan. For example, the concept of time as a circular process bears closely on the use of the verbal grammatical categories of tense and mood; the personification of some abstract forces can explain some irregularities in the functioning of the nominal category of gender; and the idea of magical power attributed to the Sacred Speech in general, and to the name of a god in particular, underlies the magical grammar of this religious poetry.

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