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Mann, Heinrich

(Encyclopedia)Mann, Heinrich hīnˈrĭkh män [key], 1871–1950, German novelist; older brother of Thomas Mann. He was a prolific author; themes of social criticism dominate his works. The Poor (1917, tr. 1917) an...

Rand, Ayn

(Encyclopedia)Rand, Ayn īn [key], 1905–82, American writer, b. St. Petersburg, Russia, as Alissa Rosenbaum. She came to the United States in 1926, became a citizen five years later, and worked for many years as ...

Tanizaki, Junichiro

(Encyclopedia)Tanizaki, Junichiro jo͝onēˈchērō tänēˈzäkē [key], 1886–1965, Japanese writer. A witness to the devastating Tokyo earthquake of 1923, he moved to the Kansai region (the greater Kyoto-Osaka ...

Thugs

(Encyclopedia)Thugs thŭgz [key], former Indian religious sect of murderers and robbers, also called Phansigars [stranglers]. Membership was primarily hereditary and included both Hindus and Muslims, but all were d...

Shekinah

(Encyclopedia)Shekinah shēkīˈnə [key] [Heb.,=dwelling, presence], in Judaism, term used in the Targum (Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible) and elsewhere to indicate the manifestation of the presence of God...

Shiva

(Encyclopedia)Shiva or Siva shēˈvə [key], one of the greatest gods of Hinduism, also called Mahadeva. The “horned god” and phallic worship of the Indus valley civilization may have been a prototype of Shiva ...

Ramakrishna

(Encyclopedia)Ramakrishna or Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa shrē räˌməkrĭshˈnə pəräˌməhänˈsä [key], 1836–86, Hindu mystic. He was born of a poor Brahman family in Bengal, and his given name was Gadadha...

Sedna

(Encyclopedia)Sedna, in astronomy, the most distant known large object in the solar system. With a highly eccentric elliptical orbit that ranges from an estimated 76 AU to 937 AU, Sedna also has an extremely long o...

mantle

(Encyclopedia)mantle, portion of the earth's interior lying beneath the crust and above the core. No direct observation of the mantle, or its upper boundary, has been made; its boundaries have been determined solel...

Graves, Robert Ranke

(Encyclopedia)Graves, Robert Ranke, 1895–1985, English poet, novelist, and critic; son of Alfred Percival Graves. He established his reputation with Good-bye to All That (1929), an outspoken book on his war exper...