Few figures have been more controversial in the history of modern Italy than Luigi Cadorna. When he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, in summer 1914, he was already popular with his fellow countrymen. Since May 1915, he became an untouchable autocrat. Enjoying exceptional powers, he governed the war zone – virtually the whole of Northern Italy – with an iron fist, more and more explicitly defying government and parliament who were, he claimed, a bunch of weak, inept, radical progressives who would lead the country to ruin. He was too much of a monarchist to aspire to dictatorship, as some of his supporters actually proposed. But he sincerely believed Italy needed a strong man in command and did his utmost to achieve his purpose. Only the catastrophe of Caporetto in autumn 1917 eventually toppled him. He was relieved of his command, held to account for his performance, and turned into the scapegoat for all the woes of the Italian war: bloodbaths in the trenches, iron discipline, firing squads galore, the home territory overrun. For several years he vanished from the scene until Mussolini, firmly ensconced as dictator, decided to call him back to the public eye.

Charles Frederick Cox returned home from South Africa on 3 October 1902. That this was months after his own regiment, 3NSWMR was because Cox had been sent to London to participate in Coronation duties for King Edward VII. While there he was both permanently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and made a Companion of the Order of the Bath. Just as he had done upon arrival in South Africa, on his return to Sydney Cox delivered some remarks to reporters waiting dockside. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Cox does not think there will be any more trouble in the Transvaal or Cape Colony’, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, ‘but if more fighting takes place he is ready for more either there or elsewhere.’

At the heart of the bushman-soldier myth was combat. The skills of the bush – riding, shooting, living off the land, the innate intelligence of ‘the colonial’ – were valuable because they could deliver success on the battlefield. The bushmen would ‘be able to meet stratagem by stratagem’, as civilian advocate H. S. Stockdale crowed, and be ‘just as likely to stalk “the Boer” as the Boers to stalk them.’ Like many civilian enthusiasts Stockdale conceived of the Australians as auxiliaries to a British regular force, serving as scouts and skirmishers on the fringes of the battle. Military men were under no such illusions: the Australian contingents would do everything mounted rifles were expected to, from ersatz cavalry work to seizing and holding ground. Both groups, however, shared a confidence in their ideas. ‘As Australians have shown themselves in the fields of sport,’ Stockdale declared, ‘so I feel will they prove themselves on the field of battle.’

Over 15,000 individual Australians served in contingents in South Africa and at least 600 died. While it was quickly overshadowed by the First World War, it was nonetheless an important part of Australia’s military history. Australian soldiers were sent in the belief that they possessed certain qualities that would make them valuable on the battlefield. It was an idea that, in various forms, would continue to surface throughout the first half of the twentieth century. What follows is an analysis that not just dispels this myth but shows what it can tell us about war more generally.

Chapter 3 illustrates the poetics of illness experience by examining clinical conversations during a psychiatric assessment of a patient. Patients’ narratives in clinical contexts are often fragmentary and contradictory, reflecting their ongoing struggle to make sense of inchoate experience and position themselves in ways that elicit care and concern. Metaphors of illness experience open up narrative possibilities, but may be blocked by conflicting agendas or cross-purposes of clinician and patient. In place of an overarching integrative narrative are interruption, miscommunication, and mutual subversion. Focusing on narratives, with close attention to the speakers’ rhetorical aims, can identify situations of tension and misunderstanding, which can be clarified through cognitive and social analysis tracing the models and metaphors used in clinical exchanges to their personal meaning and embodiment and outward into the social world where they function as part of discursive systems that organize institutions and confer power. Close attention to metaphor in lived experience, social interaction, and cultural performance can yield an account of the dynamics of clinical conversations.

Chapter 9 explores the origins of healing authority and its experiential grounding. Sociological accounts of authority usually refer to institutional power. Many elementary systems of medicine connect healers’ own initiatory illness and affliction to their knowledge and power. This connection is explicit in the Greek myth of Asklepios and was taken up by others in terms of the archetype of the wounded-healer. This ethos of the wounded-healer reflects a relational structure present in the dynamics of the clinical encounter. Healers’ relationship to their own wounds not only conveys symbolic power but can evoke specific psychological and interpersonal dynamics that may contribute to the effectiveness of treatment. In this symbolic logic of healing, the healer’s own wounds become sources of wisdom when they are confronted rather than denied. The ways this attitude may be learned and embodied are illustrated by a series of dreams with images of wounding and healing during psychiatric training. This ethos has implications for understanding the epistemic authority of healers, the training of clinicians, and addressing basic issues in intercultural health care.

Chapter 5 focuses on the narrative shaping of the sense of self and of the process of transforming it in psychotherapy. We can advance our understanding of the sources of rhetorical power of metaphor through some version of the constructs of myth and archetype. Myth stands for the overarching narrative structures of the self and other produced and lent authority by cultural tradition. Archetype stands not for preformed ideas or images, but for the bodily or existentially given in meaning. Metaphor links the narratives of myth and bodily experience through imaginative constructions and enactments that allow movement in sensory-affective quality space. Examples from contemporary psychotherapy illustrate how healing metaphors can transform sense of self and personhood. While this approach is most obviously applicable to psychotherapy and other talking cures, which use language to reconfigure experience, it captures a discursive level of sense-making that is an important part of all forms of symbolic healing, whether during ritual actions, as part of the prior construction of expectations, or in subsequent interpretation of outcomes.

O’Casey was born into a Protestant family and his father worked as a clerk for the Irish Church Missions, an evangelical society that aimed to convert Catholics. This chapter argues that O’Casey radically reimagined Christianity, depicting characters that inadvertently travesty or re-enact Christianity’s meanings. More broadly, however, he treats the love of the divine as parallel to the love of freedom and country; rather than a strict code, such love is a life-affirming source of inspiration akin to art and poetry. O’Casey’s sophisticated understanding of the value of Christianity has little to do with sectarian differences or superstition, but inheres in caring actions, love of life, and a determination to feed the spirit along with the body.

This chapter surveys both the rich tradition of Renaissance botanical literature and some of the critical strategies currently developing around them: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and critical plant studies. It focuses on the co-existence of myth and science in Renaissance botanical texts and the capacity of Renaissance literature to clarify the advantages and drawbacks of bestowing personhood on plants. Renaissance literature reveals the socio-political, intellectual, and aesthetic processes by which plants became hostage to two separate cultures: the scientific and aesthetic. The chapter also argues that a properly historicised view of Renaissance plant writing might in some respects make early modern texts more relevant to the present by reviving pre-Enlightenment worldviews and pre-Industrial notions of ecological enmeshment.

There is an enduring tradition that the first Europeans in the Americas and Hawai’i were perceived as gods, a phenomenon known as “apotheosis” or “the act of turning men into gods.” The tradition is especially strong in relation to two historical figures: the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico and the British navigator Captain James Cook in Hawai’i. It is, however, by no means confined to these two figures. Furthermore, considerable explanatory power is attributed to this divine identification: indigenous peoples apparently submitted before the demonstration of godly power. In the heyday of European imperialism – the nineteenth century and early twentieth century – this tradition was accepted uncritically by western historians. In the wake of decolonization, from the 1950s and 1960s, increasing interest in non-European perspectives on these early encounters caused historians to call this interpretation into question. Three key issues emerge: what evidence is there that such an apotheosis took place? If it did not, how did the tradition arise? And how did native peoples in fact perceive Europeans?

Chapter seven opens with an account of the arrival of Captain James Cook’s expedition at Hawai’i, his association with the native ancestor god, Lono, and his death at the hands of the islanders. It then examines in depth the evidence for Cook’s identification with Lono, and the meaning of the Polynesian concept of mana. The rest of the chapter considers the merits of the two opposing views on how Hawaiians perceived Cook, the “Cook-as-Lono” interpretation, and the “Cook-as-Lono-as-myth” interpretation. It suggests that the “Cook-as-Lono” interpretation may be closer to the realities of Hawaiian ethnography, as long as we bear in mind that Lono, as an akua or “ancestor god” bore little resemblance to the western notion of “God;” and that the binary nature of the discussion (two clashing perspectives) may be a hindrance to appreciating a third interpretation which takes account of both sides. For Hawaiians, there was no inconsistency in seeing Cook as, all at once, a (Hawaiian) god, an ancestor spirit, a sacred high chief, and a man; both human and more-than-human (or human-plus) at the same time.

Chapter 3 examines mythical, historical, and scientific facts. It offers a brief history of East Asian international relations, paying particular attention to the Chinese World Order, the Khmer Empire, and post-colonial Filipino historiography as samples for how to theorize histories from an IR perspective. The chapter discusses war and peace as well as political economy, the subject matters important for East Asian history and IR theory. It also offers a section on impacts and lessons of history, illustrating how history contributes to background knowledge, historiography and belief systems, foreign policy analysis, and IR theory. A better understanding of East Asian history allows us to contextualize contemporary issues without which we may not be able to put together a puzzle. Historical experiences inform our belief system, into which people typically fit new events or factors as explanation. History is evolutionary by nature, whether we frame it that way explicitly or not.

The subject of Chapter 2 is the tradition of the apotheosis in Mesoamerica, principally Central Mexico. The chapter opens with the context of indigenous political and social organization, and a summary of Spanish penetration of Mexico from 1519. There follows a fictive reconstruction of dialogue between the Aztec ruler Moctezuma and his counsellors in order to offer one plausible, source-based scenario for how the ruling elite might have interpreted the advent of the Spaniards on the basis of rational, pragmatic considerations. The chapter then analyzes the response of Moctezuma and the Mexica, outlines the lack of evidence for an apotheosis in the Spanish and native chroniclers, and examines the significance of Nahuatl terminology, in particular the concept of teotl, which was the word often translated as “god.” The Quetzalcoatl myth (the notion of the identification of Cortés with the god Quetzalcoatl) is presented as a post-conquest construct, devised retrospectively to make sense of the momentous events. The tradition of pre-conquest omens is discussed. No evidence is found that the emperor Moctezuma treated Cortés as a god at their meetings.

Chapter three is dedicated to the tradition of the apotheosis in the Andes. It opens with the context of the Inca Empire and the civil war between Atahualpa and Huascar, and a summary of Spanish penetration from 1532. There follows a fictive reconstruction of dialogue between the Inca ruler Atahualpa and his counsellors. The chapter then analyzes the Andean identification of the Spaniards with the god Viracocha, and considers evidence that there are no references at all to the Spaniards as gods, or as associated with Viracocha, from the period of first contact with Andean peoples. There follows discussion of misunderstanding about Viracocha as a creator god. The chapter moves on to analyze two key concepts of Andean thought, camac (“life force”), and huaca/wak’a (“being with transcendent power”) and explores how Andeans used the history of huacas to interpret the Spanish invasion. To call the Spaniards Viracochas did not mean that they were gods in the European sense; rather, it was a way of linking them to the Andean past and the Andean worldview.

This chapter provides a short history of folklore collection and an overview of the genres privileged by Russian folklorists. In the early 1800s, folklorists began writing down, editing, and publishing creative oral performance, primarily that of peasants, because it was thought that these performances reflected ancient traditions that had been passed down for centuries. In the course of transforming oral culture into print collections, genres were identified and codified. The epic (bylina) and the fairytale (skazka) were among the genres most prioritised. Their particular formal features served to anchor a diverse genre system that included historical songs, religious verses, legends, and mythological stories. The chapter identifies characteristic events and stock characters, as well as features of style, structure, and performance typical of these genres of narrative folklore. It concludes by commenting on the reciprocal relationship between folklore and literature.

Examination of the foundation traditions of Magnesia on the Maeander, an Aeolian polis of western Anatolia, and the various Aeolian mythic traditions attached to this city located within Caria.

Focusing on Menippus’ description of his celestial journey and the great cosmic distances he has travelled, I argue that Icaromenippus is a playful point of reception for mathematical astronomy. Through his acerbic satire, Lucian intervenes in the traditions of cosmology and astronomy to expose how the authority of the most technical of scientific hypotheses can be every bit as precarious as the assertions of philosophy, historiography, or even fiction itself. Provocatively, he draws mathematical astronomy – the work of practitioners such as Archimedes and Aristarchus – into the realm of discourse analysis and pits the authority of science against myth. Icaromenippus therefore warrants a place alongside Plutarch’s On the Face of the Moon and the Aetna poem, other works of the imperial era that explore scientific and mythical explanations in differing ways, and Apuleius’ Apology, which examines the relationship between science and magic. More particularly, Icaromenippus reveals how astronomy could ignite the literary imagination, and how literary works can, in turn, enrich our understanding of scientific thought, inviting us to think about scientific method and communication, the scientific viewpoint, and the role of the body in the domain of perhaps the most incorporeal of the natural sciences, astronomy itself.