Spirit: Did you mean...?

Burial in ancient Mesopotamia was the practice of interring a corpse in a grave or tomb while observing certain rites, primarily to ensure the passage of the soul of the deceased to...

Mondamin (also given as Mon-Daw-Min, The Gift of Corn, and The Origin of Corn) is a tale from the Ojibwe Nation on how the people received corn from the Great Spirit through the vision quest of the young man, Wunzh, and his acts of...

Ghost stories were the earliest form of literature in ancient China. They were almost certainly part of a very old oral tradition before writing developed during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE) and they continue to be...

A text known as The Lay of the Harper, dating from the Middle Kingdom (2040-1782 BCE) encourages its audience to make the most of the time because death is a certainty: Make a holiday! And do not tire of playing! For no...

Montesquieu (1689-1757) was a French philosopher whose ideas in works like The Spirit of the Laws helped launch the Enlightenment movement in Europe. His ideas on the separation of powers, that is, between the executive, legislative...

To the ancient Romans, everything was imbued with a divine spirit (numen, plural: numina) which gave it life. Even supposedly inanimate objects like rocks and trees possessed a numen, a belief which no...

Corn (maize) was central to the lives of Native Americans across North, Central, and South America. Maize was introduced to North America from Mesoamerica c. 700/900 CE and transformed the lives of the indigenous peoples...

Taoism (also known as Daoism) is a Chinese philosophy attributed to Lao Tzu (c. 500 BCE) which developed from the folk religion of the people primarily in the rural areas of China and became the official religion of the country under...

The Seven Sacred Rites of the Lakota Sioux (Seven Sacred Rites of the Lakota Oyate) are the spiritual observances of the Native American Sioux nation that maintain their relationship with the Great Mystery/Great...

The term 'mythology' comes from the Greek mythos (story-of-the-people) and logos (word or speech), meaning the spoken story of a people. Every civilization of the ancient world developed a...