This essay explores themes in monk–underworld stories from the early medieval to Song periods, shedding light on evolving monastic–lay relations. These tales typically follow an individual who visits the afterlife and returns to share the...
Myths provide hagiographic and iconographic accounts of the gods, which shape rituals that are performed in cults associated with these gods. In the realization of iconographies and ritualization of narratives in myths, material objects play an activ...
The interrelationship of natural and cultural history in Don DeLillo’s Underworld presents an ecology of mimesis. If, as Timothy Morton argues, ecological thought can be understood as a “mesh of interconnection,” DeLillo’s novel studies the interpret...
During the mid-to-late Qing Dynasty, the folk-belief text Yuli constructed a systematic “underworld legal code” via its image–text system, distinct from traditional religious karma and religious law. This study focuses on Yuli&rsquo...
Axial spondyloarthritis (axial-SpA) is a multifactorial disease characterized by inflammation in sacroiliac joints and spine, bone reabsorption, and aberrant bone deposition, which may lead to ankylosis. Disease pathogenesis depends on genetic, immun...
The paper takes its departure point from a seemingly innocuous idiom that common English parlance uses to describe a person who has lost possession of their rational mind: “not all there.” Interrogating the locality that this deictic &ldq...
Shostakovich’s direct quotation from the Odessan street song “Bagels, Buy My Bagels!” (Bubliki, kupite bubliki!) in his Second Cello Concerto Op. 126 (1966) featured an unusual style, even in relation to some of his other compositio...
With an increasing pervasiveness, prevalence and severity of cybercrimes, various metrics, measures and statistics have been developed and used to measure various aspects of this phenomenon. Cybercrime-related data, metrics, and information, however,...
Oxus “Scarface”, a small statuette from the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex culture (Middle Bronze Age of Central Asia) preserved at the Metropolitan Museum (New York), wears a meteoritic iron headband like a comparable spec...
This paper investigates a vision of the underground environment associated with an aesthetic discipline. Its fundamental notion is sublimity, which was a phenomenon that involved a number of artworks engaged with changing the perception of the underg...
The idea of hell entails a type of extramundane retribution, and such extramundane retribution is useful as a deterrent to antisocial behaviour. This functionalist view of extramundane retribution was, in fact, explicitly countenanced during pre-impe...
The spread of the alphabet in Italy occurred between the 7th and the 6th centuries BC, resulting in the appearance of texts written in so many different languages and in such limited territorial space that one can hardly observe another similar event...
Bats are depicted in various types of media in Central and South America. The Moche of northern Peru portrayed bats in many figurative ceramic vessels in association with themes of sacrifice, elite status and agricultural fertility. Osseous remains o...
The Buddhist ideas and practices of hell were bureaucratized in medieval China. The cult of Dizang and the Ten Kings of Hell was popular from the late Tang Dynasty onward. However, the concept of the Three Kings of Hell (King Yama 閻羅...
This study examines the intersection of race, class, and gang violence in Singapore, with a particular focus on the structural dynamics linking racial minorities, street gangs, and institutionalized Chinese secret societies—the archetype of org...
Peking opera The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan reinterprets Shakespeare’s Hamlet by integrating supernatural elements and traditional rituals from Chinese folk religion. The religious transformation is revealed through the reworking of lines, incorp...
Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is a key player in inflammation and the main factor for the induction of acute phase protein biosynthesis. Further to its central role in many aspects of the immune system, IL-6 regulates a variety of homeostatic processes. To in...
In the urban centers of Türkiye, where cultural changes are more widespread and effective, wedding processional is replaced by the solemnization of the marriage at indoor weddings, and the Kūdegū (old Turkic language; refers to bridegr...
Strong epigenetic pan-cancer biomarkers are required to meet several current, urgent clinical needs and to further improve the present chemotherapeutic standard. We have concentrated on the investigation of epigenetic alteration of the hTERT gene, wh...
In separate traditions in the HB, the Rephaim are presented either as a living group of gigantic warriors or as shadowy figures of the underworld of Sheol. They are referred to as the rp’um in earlier Amorite Ugaritic texts, in which their role...
This article reads Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1, 1867) as the Bildungsroman of a congenital criminal: its eponymous character, Capital. Following Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Marx detects and d...
Rock imagery in the Puebloan region of the American Southwest often combines elements from different animal, human, plant, and natural sources. Blended elements may depict or refer to other-wordly states of existence or to creation narratives. Beings...
Ancient Egyptians had a complex religion, which was active for longer than the time that has passed since Cleopatra until our days. One amazing belief was to be buried with funerary statuettes to help the deceased carry out his/her tasks in the under...