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The metamorphoses of a divine hypostasis in Egypt In the Greco-roman period, the Bull, the sacred animal of the god Montu from at least the Middle Kingdom onwards, had at his disposal in Medamud a « house » — a chapel south of the great temple — and a « place » at the rear of the same temple. The embodiment of the god in a living bull is not, however, attested before the end of the XXXth dynasty in the Bucheum of Armant. The temple of Medamud, moreover, was the scene of oracles pronounced by the Bull. He was such a popular entity in the Theban region — representations, oaths — that an anthropomorphic oracular statue of him was soon promoted by the local theologians to the position of a god, beside Montu, of whom he was, in fact, the hypostasis.

The labyrinth ritual in death ideology in Corsica. The labyrinth ritual which takes place on Holy Friday in certain Corsican villages is analyzed from a historical and cultural viewpoint. An examination of the characteristic elements of the symbolical horizon which provides the background to the "Granitula" enables the author to link the spiral-shaped procession to a funerary, agrarian and regalian type of ancient cultural body. The Easter rite then acquires a precise meaning in the light of the ideological references which link the institution of divine kingship, specific rituals of death and rebirth and agrarian symbolism in the Mediterranean religiosity in Antiquity.

On Greek alterity, its degrees and states. In La mort dans les yeux, Jean-Pierre Vernant analyzes Greek alterity in its purest state, i.e. in a mythical and mythico-religious plane. He distinguishes between and opposes Artemis (a courotrophic goddess of the « margins » of civilization) and Gorgon, a formidable monster, an image of death. The analysis can be linked with other examples, especially two examples taken from the social history of Greece : the Spartans at war, a terrifying image like that of the Gorgon and the portrait of Cleon in Aristophanes, a mask of death.