I’ve got a similar reference shelf, and it includes Anton LaVey’s “Satanic Bible” and also a cheap, knock-off, pseudo “Necronomicon.” Both are there mostly for grins.
The real advantage to the Qur’an is that it’s physically small, so won’t take up a lot of space, and is, also, quite readable.
What did you choose for your Wiccan texts? Is there a good general-purpose “first place to look” Wiccan book?
Oh, also: Theogony of Hesiod, Metamorphoses of Ovid, and the Iliad and Odyssey. Get some Greco-Roman classics in there. In addition to being educational, they’re mighty fun reading!
Well, not all ‘religious’ per se, but I’d suggest
The Analects of Confucious
A Book of Five Rings (Miyamoto Musashi)
Bushido, the Soul of Japan
The Art of War (Sun Tzu)
The Mahabharata – of which the Bhagavad Gita is a small part.
The Enuma Elish
Metamorphoses (Ovid)
A friend of mine gave some other friends of mine a CD ROM which includes the major and minor texts of all the world’s religions. I’m very envious. I’ll try to contact him to find out the name of the product and where to find it.
Is there a Zoroastrian scripture?
I see a definite lack of African or Pacific Islander cosmology here.
And Norse mythology is notably lacking, even though we name our weekdays after those dieties.
You might also find the Dogon tribe mythology interesting. It includes an ancient belief that Sirius is a binary star system with a habitable planet – long before anyone knew stars could be binary.
–G
Won’t you save me
Don’t you blame me
[COLOR=Black]I got the fear that I’m gonna turn to dust
.[/COLOR] --Def Leppard
. Turn to Dust
. Slang
The Socino editions of the Zohar & the Talmud & the Neusner translation of the Talmud are quite affordable & available.
Recommended-
Everett Fox’ The Five Books of Moses is an almost essential supplement to the JPS Tanach, the best edition of which is the Jewish Study Bible from Oxford Press.
Jay P. Green’s Interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English Bible.
The NRSV Study Bible which includes ALL the Deuter-canonical books of the Catholic & Orthodox Bibles.
Just to clarify, the Talmud isn’t “the five books of Moses plus commentary” - it’s a self-contained work of literature. It refers to Torah and the rest of the Tanakh as prooftexts, but it doesn’t contain the full five books anywhere (actually, it might, in the sum of all the little pieces strewn throughout it, but certainly not all strung together).
I’d also recommend against getting a full Talmud, for two reasons: first, it’s insanely expensive, and second, the Jewish groups with the resources to put out full English translations tend to have agendas (cough cough Artscroll) and often obscure the meaning of the text with misleading translations and inaccurate or misleading commentary. In my experience Jews who study Talmud study Talmud in Hebrew and Aramaic, or as part of study groups and/or with rabbis that put out their own homemade English translations to help students that don’t have the necessary language skills. I have never heard of anyone studying in English (or another local language) only.
That said, for your purposes (that is, I’m assuming you’re not going to run off to a yeshiva) there are several mini-Talmud translations that are perfectly lovely and give a good and comprehensive sense of the literature; for example, Norman Solomon’s “The Talmud: A Selection” is well-edited and has a good introduction.
Getting hold of it won’t be difficult at all. It is sold in bookstores (as are full English translations and full Hebrew/Aramaic copies).
Decent article here on "The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Basically, the timeline doesn’t support the claim; the Dogon could easily have learned about Sirius B from visitors (from earth, that is.)
