"The City of the Sacred Well" by T. A. Willard. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Chichén Itzá ("mouth of the well of the Itza") was one of the great centers of civilization in prehistoric America, serving between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D. as a religious, economic, social, and political capital on the Yucatán Peninsula. Within the ancient city there were many natural wells or cenotes. One, within the ceremonial heart of the city, is an impressive natural feature with vertical limestone walls enclosing a deep pool of jade green water some eighty feet below ground level. This cenote, which gave the city its name, became a sacred shrine of Maya pilgrimage, described by one post-Conquest observer as similar to Jerusalem and Rome. Here, during the city's ascendancy and for centuries after its decline, the peoples of Yucatán consulted their gods and made ritual offerings of precious objects and living victims who were thought to receive prophecies. Although the well was described by Bishop Diego de Landa in the late sixteenth century, its contents were not known until the early 1900s when revealed by the work of Edward H. Thompson. Conducting excavations for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, Thompson recovered almost thirty thousand artifacts, most ceremonially broken and many beautifully preserved by burial in the deep silt at the bottom of the well. The materials were sent to the Peabody Museum, where they remained, unexhibited, for over seventy years. In 1984, for the first time, nearly three hundred objects of gold, jade, copper, pottery, wood, copal, textile, and other materials from the collection were gathered into a traveling interpretive exhibition. No other archaeological exhibition had previously given this glimpse into Maya ritual life because no other collection had objects such as those found in the Sacred Cenote. Moreover, the objects from the Cenote come from throughout Mesoamerica and lower Central America, representing many artistic traditions. The exhibit and this, its accompanying catalog, marked the first time all of the different kinds of offerings have ever been displayed together, and the first time many have been published. Essays by Gordon R. Willey and Linnea H. Wren place the Cenote of Sacrifice and the great Maya city of Chichén Itzá within the larger context of Maya archaeology and history. The catalog entries, written by Clemency Chase Coggins, describe the objects displayed in the traveling exhibition. Some entries are brief descriptive statements; others develop short scholarly themes bearing on the function and interpretation of specific objects. Coggins' introductory essay describes how the objects were collected by Thompson and how the exhibition collection has been studied to reveal the periods of Cenote ritual and the changing practices of offering to the Sacred Cenote.

A simple job turns deadly when Mary Wandwalker, novice detective, is hired to chaperone a young American, Rhiannon, to the Oxford University Summer School on the ancient Celts. Worried by a rhetoric of blood sacrifice, Mary and her operatives, Caroline, and Anna, attend a sacrifice at a sacred well. They discover that those who fail to individuate their gods become possessed by them. For the so-called Reborn Celts, who run the summer school, have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Could their immersion in myth be less a symbol for psychic wholeness and more a clue of their intent to engage in terrorist violence? Who better to penetrate their secret rites than an apparently harmless woman of a certain age? Mary agrees to spy on the Reborn Celts, then learns, to her horror, of Anna’s passionate affair with the chief suspect, Joe Griffith. With Griffith also the object of Rhiannon’s obsession, Mary realizes too late that that these 21st century Celts mean murder. The Reborn Celts draw Mary and her friends into three rites to summon their gods: at an Oxford sacred well, by the Thames on the way to London, and in Celtic London, where bloodshed will restore one of the Thames’ ‘lost rivers.’ Before the fatal night of the summer solstice, Caroline and Anna race to London seeking Mary, who has been kidnapped. Will she end as the crone sacrifice? Or will the three women re-make their detecting family, so re-constituting a pattern of archetypal feminine compassion?

An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression. Declaration of the Four Sacred Things The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves became the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. no one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives. Praise for The Fifth Sacred Thing “This is wisdom wrapped in drama.”—Tom Hayden, California state senator “Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel.”—Locus “Totally captivating . . . a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet.”—Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess “This strong debut fits well against feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.”—Library Journal

Sacred Wells is an in depth study of springs, wells and waters that have been venerated from California to Cornwall, Russia to Australia. Tales of faeries, black hounds, hauntings and miraculous cures are explored. Many of these sites are still locations for religious festivals and ritual, unchanging for hundreds of years. The book is illustrated with photos taken by the author.

The importance of the polis in Homeric literature is most evident in the Iliad, a poem concerned in large measure with the holy city of Troy. Stephen Scully here deepens our understanding of both the poetic and the social significance of the city in Homer through a close analysis of the poem's formulaic language. Drawing on scholarship in literary studies, archaeology, and comparative religion, Scully demonstrates that it is the urban setting of the Iliad, as well as the collision of the individual fates of its characters, which generates its most profound tragic themes.

Between 1920 and 1958 Katherine Anne Porter published more than sixty-five book review, many of which are now largely inaccessible. Although several such pieces have appeared in earlier collections of Porter's nonfiction writings, never have so many of Porter's reviews--nearly fifty--been made available in a single volume. Collectively the review reveal Porter's opinions on topics ranging from the nature of art and the place of the artist in politics and society to feminism and the role of female artists. Particularly evident in the reviews are the critical principles that guided her own work as well as her judgments of the works of other writers. In her introductory essay Darlene Harbour Unrue provides important biographical information on Porter, traces her career as a reviewer, and links critical assumptions in the reviews to the themes and techniques of Porter's fiction. Other scholars as well have regarded Porter's critical reviews as valuable tools both for analyzing the fiction and for constructing a portrait of Porter the artist, primarily because Porter produced so little fiction (three collections of short stories and novellas, Flowering Judas, The Leaning Tower, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and a novel, Ship of Fools). In the preface to the first collection of her nonfiction writings, The Days Before, Porter herself urged readers to look closely at her nonfiction, for there they would discover "the shape, direction, and connective tissue of a continuous, central interest and preoccupation of a lifetime." Most of the reviews--which appeared in such publications as the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Nation, and New Masses--she apparently undertook for financial reasons, but occasionally she would agree to review a friend's latest offering. She published no reviews after the success of her best-selling novel, Ship of Fools. Porter's scope as a reviewer was impressively broad. Because she lived in Mexico City during the revolution, had known Diego Rivera, and had studied "primitive" Mexican art, she was often called on to review books on Mexican art and on the revolution. Porter also reviewed many books by or about women. Her reviews of the Short Novels of Colette and Katharine Anthony's translation of Catherine the Great's memoirs are particularly noteworthy for her comments about women artists and her expression of admiration for women who flout traditional roles. These collected reviews illustrate the evolution of one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century and will interest not only Porter scholars but also anyone who appreciates her fiction.