After teaching and ministering twenty two years as a Christian pastor and evangelist, author Dhungarvn the Grey became disillusioned with the self-righteous membership and church politics. He left the ministry and began searching for the truth. In his re-evaluation of his concept of God and prayer, he reconnected with nature and the idea of nature-based spirituality. His soul stirred with a yearning toward paganism. From Pulpit to Pagan is the story of Dhungarvn the Grey's journey from Christianity to paganism and his quest for truth. Horus, Mithra, Krishna, and Jesus all told their followers, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." The truth about Christianity frees the pagan of the guilt-trips inflicted by well-meaning family members. It frees them from the tendency to credit Christianity, the Bible, and Jesus with more truth than is valid. It frees them from the missionary traps and ignorant attacks by evangelicals. Dhungarvn suspects that many in the pagan community are programmed by their family experience and Christian upbringing; they hold onto the Bible and Jesus out of unconscious fear and guilt. From Pulpit to Pagan details Dhungarvn's struggles, but also provides hope for other pagans to become truly free.

"The Key of Solomon" is the most famous and infamous of the Grimoires ever produced. Yet amazingly only one version of it has ever been published, by S L MacGregor Mathers, over 100 years ago. What Mathers may not have known is that there were much more detailed and complete versions of this grimoire available in many other languages. This is not just a variant of Mathers' text, but a translation of three completely different and beautifully illustrated 1796 French manuscripts of the Key of Solomon. These are the most beautiful and complete manu-scripts of "The Key of Solomon" ever published. Much of the detail omitted from Mathers' edition is given here, providing a complete and workable system of high magic with full details of implements, procedures, and a wide range of talismans. Much material not available to Mathers is also found in this extraordinary book, including planetary prayers, names of angels and demons, and a vast array of pentacles, as well as material on the Olympic Spirits, Planetary Spirits and Intelligences. The commentary by two of the best known scholar-magicians provides much additional material, a full survey of all the extant manuscripts of this famous grimoire and how they relate to each other, as well as the historical influence of the Key of Solomon on the development of magic from the Renaissance until now. The pentacles as drawn by Fyot, the original scribe, are reproduced here, with more than twice as many pentacles as were produced in Mathers' text. "The Key of Solomon" is the most significant magical grimoire ever penned, certainly for the period from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. This present work finally restores "The Key of Solomon" back to its place at the heart of practical Western magic.

Delve into the many aspects of the evolving archetype of Lucifer, from his multifaceted creation to his almost endearing charm on today's world stage. Explore myths and legends of not only Satan, but what Lucifer represents in our culture and the effects it has had over the centuries-from dogmatic repression of pagan beliefs to the fervor during the heights of the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and 1990s. Examine the defense of old Nick by the Romantic writers and Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, as well as literature and film's role in redefining his ever-changing guise. Learn the aspects of his origins and see what has been borrowed from other faiths to shape our mental picture of the being known as The Devil. Suspend preconceived notions and look at the evolution of this mythic persona from his origin up to modern times. Find out if the Devil made you do it...

In 1917 Annie Besant (1847-1933), a white Englishwoman, was elected president of the Indian National Congress, the body which, under the guidance of Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), would later lead India to independence. Besant - in her earlier career an active atheist and a socialist journalist - was from 1907 till her death the president of the Theosophical Society, an international spiritual movement whose headquarters' location in Madras symbolized its belief in India as the world's spiritual heart. This book deals with the contribution of the Theosophical Society to the rise of Indian nationalism and seeks to restore it to its proper place in the history of ideas, both with regard to its spiritual doctrine and the sources on which it drew, as well as its role in giving rise to the New Age movement of the 20th century. The book is the first to show how 19th century Orientalist study dramatically affected the rise of the Theosophical ideology, and specifically demonstrate the impact of the work of the Anglo-German scholar, Friedrich Max Muller (1833-1900) on Mme Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of the Theosophical Society.

New Age and holistic beliefs and practices - sometimes called the "new spirituality" - are widely distributed across modern global society. The fluid and popular nature of new age makes these movements a very challenging field to understand using traditional models of religious analysis. Rather than treating new age as an exotic specimen on the margins of 'proper' religion, "New Age Spirituality" examines these movements as a form of everyday or lived religion. The book brings together an international range of scholars to explore the key issues: insight, healing, divination, meditation, gnosis, extraordinary experiences, and interactions with gods, spirits and superhuman powers. Combining discussion of contemporary beliefs and practices with cutting-edge theoretical analysis, the book repositions new age spirituality at the forefront of the contemporary study of religion.

This book offers a theological, and more specifically ecclesiological, response to the philosophical problem of divine hiddenness. It engages with philosopher J.L. Schellenberg's argument on hiddenness and sets out a theologically rich and fresh response, drawing on the ecclesiological thought of Gregory of Nyssa. With careful attention to Gregory's work, the book shows how certain ecclesiological problems and themes are critical to the hiddenness argument. It looks to the gathered church (the church as the body of Christ) and the scattered church (the church as the image of God) for relevance to the hiddenness problem. The volume will be of interest to scholars of theology and philosophy, particularly analytic theologians and philosophers of religion.

This book considers how the non-religious self is performed publicly online, and how digital culture and technology shapes this process. Building on a YouTube case study with women vloggers, it presents unique empirical data on non-organized atheism in the United States. Lundmark suggests that the atheist self as performed online exists in tension between a perception of atheism as sinful and amoral in relation to hegemonical Christianity in the U.S., and the hyperrational, male-centered discourse that has characterized the atheist movement. She argues that women atheist vloggers co-effect third spaces of emotive resonance that enable a precarious counterpublicness of performing atheist visibility. The volume offers a valuable contribution to the discussion of how the public, the private, and areas in-between are understood within digital religion, and opens up new space for engaging with the increased visibility of atheist identity in a mediatized society.

• This volume provides a combination of the major schools of thought on the Salem witch trials and incorporates the current scholarship on the subject. Events are presented in a narrative format that delivers the drama of the trials and leaves instructors free to explore specific topics of their choosing in greater depth. An analysis of key issues is provided at the end of each chapter. • The third edition has been significantly updated to include an expanded section on the European origins of witch hunts and an update and expand epilogue which discusses the witch hunts – real and imagined, historical and cultural – since 1692. Allowing students new to the phenomenon of the witch-hunts and trials to better understand their origins and impact upon the national psyche. • The bibliography has been substantially updated, an extensive list of internet resources, sources of primary documents, documentaries, movies, artwork, and resources to assist lecturers with using this book in their classrooms and students to further their studies.

This volume is a collection based on the contributions to witchcraft studies of Willem de Blecourt, to whom it is dedicated, and who provides the opening chapter, setting out a methodological and conceptual agenda for the study of cultures of witchcraft (broadly defined) in Europe since the Middle Ages. It includes contributions from historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and folklorists who have collaborated closely with De Blecourt. Essays pick up some or all of the themes and approaches he pioneered, and apply them to cases which range in time and space across all the main regions of Europe since the thirteenth century until the present day. While some draw heavily on texts, others on archival sources, and others on field research, they all share a commitment to reconstructing the meaning and lived experience of witchcraft (and its related phenomena) to Europeans at all levels, respecting the many varieties and ambiguities in such meanings and experiences and resisting attempts to reduce them to master narratives or simple causal models. The chapter 'News from the Invisible World: The Publishing History of Tales of the Supernatural c.1660-1832' is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This volume argues that ancient Greek girls and early Christian virgins and their families made use of rhetorically similar traditions of marriage to an otherworldly bridegroom in order to handle the problem of a girl's denied or disrupted transition into adulthood. In both ancient Greece and early Christian Rome, the standard female transition into adulthood was marked by marriage, sex, and childbirth. When problems arose just before or during this transition, the transitional girl's status within society became insecure. Walker presents a case for how and why the dead Greek virgin girl, depicted in Archaic through Hellenistic sources, in both texts and inscriptions, as a bride of Hades, and the life-long female Christian virgin or celibate ascetic, dubbed the bride of Christ around the third century CE, provide a fruitful point of comparison as particular examples of strategies used to neutralize the tension of disrupted female transition into adulthood. Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ offers a fascinating comparative study that will be of interest to anyone working on virginity and womanhood in the ancient world.

The first comprehensive history of magical treasure hunting from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, revealing a magical universe of treasure spirits, and wizards who tried to deal with them. Combining history and anthropology, this study sees treasure hunting as an expression of shifting economic mentalities and changing ideas about history.

This book explores the relationships between ancient witchcraft and its modern incarnation, and by doing so fills an important gap in the historiography. It is often noted that stories of witchcraft circulated in Greek and Latin classical texts, and that treatises dealing with witch-beliefs referenced them. Still, the role of humanistic culture and classical revival in the developing of the witch-hunts has not yet been fully researched. Marina Montesano examines Greek and Latin literature, revealing how particular features of ancient striges were carried into the Late Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and into the fifteenth century, when early Italian trials recall the myth of the strix common in ancient Latin sources and in popular memory. The final chapter also serves as a conclusion, to show how in Renaissance Italy and beyond, classical accounts of witchcraft ceased to be just stories, as they had formerly been, and were instead used to attest to the reality of witches' powers.

Pierri clearly links modern psychoanalytic practice with Freud's interests in the occult using primary sources, some of which have never before been published in English. Assesses the origins of key psychoanalytic ideas.

Using a wide range of unexplored archival material, this book examines the 'spectral' influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on women's writing, analysing the ways in which modern writers have both subverted and mimicked nineteenth century sources in their evocation of the seance.

Whilst accounting for the present-day popularity and relevance of Alan Watts' contributions to psychology, religion, arts, and humanities, this interdisciplinary collection grapples with the ongoing criticisms which surround Watts' life and work. Offering rich examination of as yet underexplored aspects of Watts' influence in 1960s counterculture, this volume offers unique application of Watts' thinking to contemporary issues and critically engages with controversies surrounding the commodification of Watts' ideas, his alleged misreading of Biblical texts, and his apparent distortion of Asian religions and spirituality. Featuring a broad range of international contributors and bringing Watts' ideas squarely into the contemporary context, the text provides a comprehensive, yet nuanced exploration of Watts' thinking on psychotherapy, Buddhism, language, music, and sexuality. This text will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of psychotherapy, phenomenology, and the philosophy of psychology more broadly. Those interested in Jungian psychotherapy, spirituality, and the self and social identity will also enjoy this volume.

Eric Bain-Selbo argues that the study of religion—from philosophers to psychologists, and historians of religion to sociologists—has separated out the “ends” or goals of religion and thus created the conditions by which institutional religion is increasingly irrelevant in contemporary Western culture. There is ample evidence that institutional religion is in trouble, and little evidence that it will strengthen in the future, giving some reason to believe that we are in the process of seeing the end of religion. At the same time, various cultural practices have met in the past and continue to meet today certain fundamental human needs—needs that we might identify as religious that now are being fulfilled through what Bain-Selbo calls the “religion of culture.” The End(s) of Religion traces the way that the very study of religion has led to institutional religion being viewed as just one human institution that can address our particular “religious” needs rather than the sole institution to do so. In turn, ultimately we can begin to see how other institutions or forms of culture can function to serve these same needs or “ends.”

Design and Spirituality examines the philosophical context of our current situation and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of moderation and sufficiency. It covers a wide range of topics broadly related to the main theme, including material culture and spiritual teachings; sustainability and the spiritual perspective; traditional and indigenous knowledge; technology and spirituality; notions of meaningful design; and the deeper, symbolic significance of (some) material things. The author is a leading thinker in the field and he presents his arguments in a manner that invites the reader to reflect and to think about where we are going, why we are going there and what really matters.

This is a Comprehensive Survey of the Bhakti Movement as it sprang in South India to spread across the subcontinent in independent and multifarious manifestations yet marked with amazing commonalities. Spanning a period of 11 centuries starting from the 6th CE, the movement encompassed in its sweep a vast range of dimensions; Social, political, economic, religious, cultural, linguistic, ethical and philosophical. Among the multifarious movements which contributed to the formation of India and its Culture, the Bhakti was undoubtedly the most pervasive and persistent, says the author. Besides its sweep and depth, what proved most remarkable about the movement was that it arose almost everywhere from the masses who belonged to the lowest class and castes. Though spirituality was its leitmotif, Bhakti proved to be a stirring song of the subaltern in their varied expressions of resistance and revolt. A seemingly conservative phenomenon became a potent weapon against entrenched hierarchies of orthodoxy and oppression, in a wonderful dialectical expression. This qualifies Bhakti movement to be reckoned on a par with European renaissance as it marked a massive upsurge in the societal value system to directly impact a range of fields like arts, politics, culture or religion. Even as he takes note of the elements of reactionary revivalism that also marked the Bhakti movement, the author convincingly argues that those of renaissance and progress far outweighed the former.

This book focuses on genealogies of religious authority in South Asia, examining the figure of the guru in narrative texts, polemical tracts, hagiographies, histories, in contemporary devotional communities, New Age spiritual movements and global guru organizations. Experts in the field present reflections on historically specific contexts in which a guru comes into being, becomes part of a community, is venerated, challenged or repudiated, generates a new canon, remains unique with no clear succession or establishes a succession in which charisma is routinized. The guru emerges and is sustained and routinized from the nexus of guruship, narratives, performances and community. The contributors to the book examine this nexus at specific historical moments with all their elements of change and contingency. The book will be of interest to scholars in the field of South Asian studies, the study of religions and cultural studies.