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In the Inca Empire, the human body served as a symbol and mediator of cosmic structures and processes through its own structures and processes. The structures of the body with cosmological relevance included the duality of right and left and the integrated unity of the body as a whole, while the processes of the body included reproduction, illness and sensory perception. Inca myths and rituals both expressed and enacted this corporeal and cosmic order. / With the arrival of the Spanish, the Incas were confronted with a radically different image of the body and the cosmos. The clash between the Spanish and Inca orders was experienced by the Incas as a disordering of the human and cosmic bodies. While the Spanish Conquest destroyed the Inca empire and imposed a new culture on its former inhabitants, however, many of the principles which ordered and interrelated the body and the cosmos in Inca cosmology have survived in the Andes to the present day.

This dissertation reexamines the assumption that regards the language of a text to be primarily discursive and propositional, signifying the antecedents to its real world, whether real or hypothetical. It will be argued that such an assumption reduces the meaning of the text to the nexus of its historical relationships. A methodological reconsideration sets out to reconceive the text of I John as a function of language, i.e., a communicative event encapsulating a series of speech acts which constitute the subjectivity of both writer and reader/hearer and which make truth claims about the world and about God though scarcely in propositional form. Important to this re-evaluation is J. L. Austin's fundamental observation that linguistic sequences rather than describing actions, are themselves action where an appropriate circumstance and linguistic convention delimit the potential speech acts possible within the limits of certain speech act circumstances. In addition, Jacques Derrida's significant conclusion that the act of writing is constitutive of the writing subject is linked with Donald Evan's realization of the self-involving character of religious language in which speech acts of the commissive, expressive, representative, and directive types and their implicature play a primary role in making explicit intention and attitude.

Transcendence and transformation have been established as key motifs in apocalypses. The transformation of a seer during a heavenly journey is found commonly in such esoteric apocalypses as I Enoch. No heavenly journey occurs in the works treated here. Rather, symbolic women figures--"ladies" in the classical sense--who are associated with God's City or tower, undergo transformation at key points in the action. The surface structures of Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and The Shepherd of Hermas are traced, and the crucial transformation episode or episodes are located within each structure. Transformation of figures representing God's people suggests the significance of identity within the apocalyptic perspective. Apocalypses allow the world to be viewed from the future or from the heavens (J. J. Collins' "temporal" and "spatial" axes); the genre also invites the reader to change identity (the "identical" axis), and so become someone in tune with divine mystery and revelation.