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Chapter 2 turns to nympholepsy understood as possession and looks at “real-life” nympholepts. It includes a survey of the archaeological evidence from caves and sanctuaries, including inscriptions and reliefs, built for the nymphs by ancient nympholêptoi. The word nympholêptos appears in an inscription found in a cave at Vari in Attica, which provides us with an example of a sanctuary established by a nympholept, Archedemos, in the fifth-century BC. The cave commemorates Archedemos’s encounter with the nymph through inscriptions and statues, including a portrait of the nympholept that shows him building the sanctuary that becomes the focus of his life. Pantalkes, a younger contemporary of Archedemos, built a comparable shrine in a cave at Pharsalos in Thessaly, which becomes a site of pilgrimage. We find another nympholept at Kafizin in Cyprus in a cave where there was cultic activity from 225 to 218 bce. These sanctuaries highlight the personal and transformative nature of the bond between men and nymphs and the ways in which religious experience engender poetic and artistic representations that come to be significant for the community.

We tend to associate wonder with the extension of the senses and the explosion of curiosity characteristic of the Scientific Revolution. This intellectual energy and optimism was connected to the relentless drive to experiment typical of the Early-Modern Period. The emergence, dissemination, and rapid diversification of a stunning range of optical instruments—especially during the seventeenth-and eighteenth-centuries-- revealed an immense and silent universe above as well as an animated ground-level panorama whose organic action-art was fleetingly captured, if not accounted for, through equally remarkable technology. This essay turns to a raw, less apparent phenomenon. It recounts the personal experience of descending into an abandoned Colorado gold mine at dusk. This sensation of a darker wonder also occurs in sunless caves, caverns, grottoes, karsts. Such experiences of saturated blackness are often accompanied by hallucinatory visions, stimulated by our literally -embedded primal consciousness confronting an inscrutable self-organizing matter.

This chapter discusses the largest reclining Buddha statue ever attempted, housed in a cave temple located near the southernmost tip of Mogao Caves outside Dunhuang. Known by today's numbering system as Cave 148, the structure was built literally to contain an eighteen-meter-long sculpture in an elongated, box-like interior with barrel-vault ceiling. In addition to Cave 148 of the Li family from the eighth century, a previous generation of the same clan also commissioned Cave 332 in 698. Both of the sculptures were built at critical moments in Dunhuang's history as a local response in support of Empress Wu's reign in the capital. Unlike any cave with a Buddhist pantheon so prominently displayed in the west niche as in Cave 45, both Caves 332 and 148 do not allow their viewers to see the colossal statue from the front of the cave.

This chapter introduces two important questions for the study. It looks at the possible relationships between Neolithic cave burial and other Neolithic burial practices. It then introduces the important idea that caves and other natural places had agency and were actively incorporated into funerary rites. The chapter also introduces the data set used in the book, 48 cave sites in Britain with Neolithic radiocarbon dates on human remains. The chapter concludes by reviewing problems in interpreting this data and introduces the theoretical themes discussed in the following chapters: temporality; object agency and funerary ritual.

In this chapter it is suggested that limestone landscapes can be seen as a connecting theme in parts of the European Neolithic. The evidence for cave burial at the beginning of the Neolithic is reviewed. Cave burial was relatively late in the local sequence in Greece and the Balkans. By contrast, in Italy, southern France and Spain single grave cave burial occurs from the beginning of the period. In these regions there is also a later Neolithic collective burial practice in caves. There is a large concentration of Late Neolithic collective burials in Belgium. Therefore, Early Neolithic cave burial was primarily a western Mediterranean phenomenon. Later Neolithic cave burial throughout Europe may have been connected with providing a fixed point in a seasonal round for mobile populations. There was an apparent upsurge in cave burial throughout the limestone regions of Europe around 4000 BC.

This concluding chapter starts by restating the importance of the intermediary period as a key to understanding funerary practice. The agency of bodies, objects and caves are central to how we understand this intermediary period. The temporality of the intermediary period is shown to be constituted by physical indices of change. This is explored by contrasting the temporality of secondary burial rites with the temporality of successive inhumation in both caves and cairns. The agency of caves is examined through studies of cave orientation and of the way that tufa and pre-existing middens act as both indices and agents of change in burials. The chapter concludes by integrating many of these approaches in two case studies of relational landscapes of Neolithic cave burial in South Wales and North Yorkshire. It is concluded that the material narratives of change around cave burial in the Neolithic led to the development of a specific rite of cave burial after around 3300 BC.

As a symbol of opaque darkness, the mysterious subterranean caves of Elephanta haunted the imagination of writers and painters ranging from John Ruskin to Flaubert and were notably memorialised in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. This chapter examines the recruitment of optical devices like the camera obscura and the magic lantern, aimed at solving the caves’ mysteries, suggesting that these instead exaggerated the ghostly character of the caves, undermining the claims of a rational vision in apprehending their complex iconography and architecture, going on to feed a fantastical visual archive of the caves (and, by extension, the Indian landscape) in German cinema of the early twentieth century.

This chapter describes Hyecho’s visit to Śrāvastī, the site of the Buddha’s most famous miracle in which he defeated six non-Buddhist teachers by rising in the air and emitting fire and water from his body. This chapter tells that story and goes on consider the categories of miracles and magical powers in Buddhism. The chapter includes two artworks, an ancient Indian carving showing a king visiting the Buddha, who is represented by a large wheel, and a fragment of a wall mural from Kizil in what is today the Uighur Autonomous Region of China.

Three more substantive challenges that the quantum Bayesian faces are presented: 1) Can a sensible ontology be found for the approach? 2) Can requisite sense of quantum explanations be made? and 3) Are subjective probabilities in quantum theory really adequate? The first question is answered positively: a suitable ontological picture is provided by making use of components of Nancy Cartwright’s philosophy of science, with its emphasis on the causal powers of objects. The second two questions are shown to be more problematic, however: quantum Bayesianism would rob quantum theory of explanatory power which it nonetheless seems to possess; and trouble arises for subjective probabilities in two ways. First, quantum Bayesianism is committed to an objectionable class of statements – quantum analogues of Moore’s Paradoxes; second, it renders mysterious how the means of enquiry about the world could deliver the intended ends: coping better with the world.

The Quantum Bayesian view of Caves, Fuchs and Schack is presented, this being a view according to which quantum state assignments are purely personal and subjective, just as probability assignments are for subjective Bayesians. It is noted that the rationale for the approach derives from an interesting conjunction of a general realism about physics, combined with anti-realism about much of the structure of quantum mechanics. More detail of the position is then provided and the important question of how the approach handles the shifty divide between system and apparatus explained. Finally, the view is defended from three common objections: that it is tacitly solipsistic; that it is overly instrumentalist; and last, that it cannot adequately deal with the data that would be experimentally available in a Wigner’s Friend scenario.

This chapter contrasts Buddhism's prohibition of violence with Bhuddist monks' participation in war. Binding the clergy and laity alike, the first of the Five Buddhist Precepts forbids killing a living being (bu sha sheng). The prohibition applies to all sentient beings, humans as well as animals. The religion's objection to war is translated into its monastic code that forbids monks to carry arms or join an army. Monks are also not allowed to fight themselves, nor to incite others to fight. Despite these rules, monks took an active role in fighting along China's northwestern borders, as revealed by the late Tang manuscripts, which were discovered at the famed Dunhuang Caves in Gansu. Their military service was associated with the dynasty's Buddhist policies.

Sterkfontein Caves, near Pretoria, South Africa, are part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. The caves have yielded hundreds of hominin fossils recovered over a period spanning more than a century. Exploration of the deposits has occurred in three phases. In the first phase from 1895–1935, fossils of various animals were recovered unsystematically by limestone miners, who noted fossiliferous breccias. The second phase, from 1936–1966, involved teams led by Robert Broom and John Robinson. Broom and Robinson’s excavations recovered many hominin fossils from Members 4 and 5, stone artifacts, and initial mapping of the Sterkfontein deposits. The third phase, 1966 until the present, included excavations led by Philip Tobias, Alun Hughes, Tim Partridge, Ron Clarke, Kathy Kuman, and Dominic Stratford. During this phase, the six members of the Sterkfontein deposits were recognized and characterized, and additional fossils of hominins and other fauna, as well as stone artifacts were recovered. Importantly, extensive analysis of fauna and paleonvironments was conducted. Hominin fossils were also recovered from Member 2. Considerable geochronological work has been done to characterize the complex stratigraphy and dating of these deposits. This chapter reviews the history of fieldwork at Sterkfontein.

The thrilling biblical saga of Sodom and Gomorrah leaves a deep impression on the spirit of its readers, especially the young. Basic ethical concepts such as right and wrong were dramatically portrayed by that simple and cruel, yet humane, story. Memories of even more ancient disastrous geological events apparently were interwoven into the saga. A geologist cannot remain indifferent when investigating the Dead Sea region and observing stratigraphical and structural evidence of past and continuing similar events. Forceful dynamics indicated by vertically tilted beds of rocksalt layers that have penetrated upward through the ground and by later processes that have shaped some beds into pillars trigger association with the ancient story. Such features are abundant and clearly recognizable along the foot of the diapiric structure of Mount Sedom (Arabic Jebel Usdum). A gas blowout during the drilling of a water well near the Amazyahu fault in 1957 only by good luck failed to produce a gush of fire and smoke. Such an event could have happened in ancient times as a natural result of faulting. Knowledge of the regional geological background permits translation of the biblical descriptions into scientific terms, which suggests that the sagas of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho described real events that occurred during ancient times before much was known about geology. Thirty-five years of the authors' professional experience in the Dead Sea region encompasses many geological aspects of the basin: deep and shallow stratigraphy, structural history, seismology, sedimentological processes, and the physical and chemical properties of the water. Archaeological studies in the region are reviewed. Although most of these studies are applicable to exploration for oil and gas or extraction of salts from brines, their results illuminate the role of changing paleogeography and paleolimnology on human environments. Climate changes and lake-level fluctuations have occurred since Mid-Pleistocene, especially during the past 50,000 years. Studies of sediments from shallow core holes delimit coastal areas that when exposed by drops in the level of the Dead Sea, quickly developed soils that could be used for agriculture.