This historical ethnography from Central Sudan explores the century-old intertwining of zar , spirit possession, with past lives of ex-slaves and shows that, despite very different social and cultural contexts, zar has continued to be shaped by the experience of slavery.

In its most general sense, the term "Spiritual but Not Religious" denotes those who, on the one hand, are disillusioned with traditional institutional religion and, on the other hand, feel that those same traditions contain deep wisdom about the human condition. This edited collection speaks to what national surveys agree is a growing social phenomenon referred to as the "Spiritual but Not Religious Movement" (SBNRM). Each essay of the volume engages the past, present and future(s) of the SBNRM. Their collective contribution is analytic, descriptive, and prescriptive, taking stock of not only the various analyses of the SBNRM to date but also the establishment of a new ground upon which the continued academic discussion can take place. This volume is a watershed in the growing academic and public interest in the SBNRM. As such, it will vital reading for any academic involved in Religious Studies, Spirituality and Sociology.

The author presents with this intellectual biography of the Lutheran alchemist Count Michael Maier an academic study of western esotericism in general and to the study of alchemy and rosicrucianism in particular. The author charts the development of Maier's Hermetic worldview in the context of his service at the courts of Emperor Rudolf II and Moritz of Hessen-Kassel. The problem of the nature of early Rosicrucianism is addressed in detail with reference to Maier's role in the promotion of this "serious jest" in the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The work is set in the context of ongoing debates concerning the nature of early modern alchemy and its role in the history of Western esotericism.

"The subject of this book is those who have placed themselves 'against the faith', in other words, those who have opposed the prevailing religious faith of their time. Such opponents adopt this position for a wide variety of reasons and in many different ways. They are sometimes fiery activists hammering against leaders and leading ideas and at other times are quiet, contemplative skeptics questioning all knowledge and all orthodoxy. They can be immersed in the politics of their time, like Bradlaugh or Thomas Paine. They can be poets like Heine and Shelley, historians like Gibbon, playwrights like Buchner, or novelists like George Eliot and Mark Twain. They may be scientists like Huxley, or philosophers like J.S. Mill. They may be most at home on the public platform, like Ingersoll, or in the study like Pierre Bayle. They can be relaxed men of the world like Hume or temperamental outsiders like d'Holbach. They may lead quiet and little known lives like the freethinker Collins or the clergyman Meslier, or they may be outstanding polymaths of their age, like Voltaire or Bertrand Russell.
This book covers deists, skeptics and atheists. Without attempting to be comprehensive, I have tried to show that there is a spectrum between the three. There has often been close contact between deists, who gently criticize the Christian faith, skeptics who questions all knowledge, and atheists, who detach themselves from any belief in God. Occasionally individuals have held all these positions at different periods of their lives. Furthermore the distinction sometimes made between the respectable philosophic skeptic and the disreputable agitating atheist is not clear-cut: philosophers sometimes agitate and frequently rub shoulders with activists, and reformers and campaigners often think quite deeply.
Since this book in the main covers Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the faith opposed is Christianity. A history of opponents to Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism would provide fascinating parallels, but that book has yet to be written. It is a mistake - and one to which opponents are particularly prone - to imagine the 'faith' as a monolithic entity, rather than an accumulation of various traditions. There can therefore be opposition to the faith from within as well as without and heresy and heterodoxy have sometimes been not far apart."

This book explains in detail the most ancient of all spiritual paths called, The Way of the Medicine Wheel. It describes every aspect of the powerful sacred ceremony performed to construct a medicine wheel, and how it can be used to merge the physical and spiritual realms together in our daily lives. The nineteen Teaching Sessions presented in this book also explain the specifi c steps involved in conducting many ancient ceremonies that, collectively, can create a personal lifestyle that produces peace, harmony, and balance within the Sacred Circle of Life. The words to the songs associated with those ceremonies are printed in the Appendix. In addition, detailed information is given about some of the major Native American prophecies concerning the coming Earth Changes-what most Native Americans call "The Time of Great Cleansing". The reader will also learn how this ancient sacred path can help people properly prepare themselves for the devastating Earth Changes which are about to engulf us as we rapidly approach the near horizon of time.

'A groundbreaking work . . . Federici has become a crucial figure for . . . a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood. 'Rewarding . . . allows us to better understand the intimate relationship between modern patriarchy, the rise of the nation state and the transition from feudalism to capitalism' Guardian

This book proposes that the drive for religiosity and experiences of the sacred are far from lost in contemporary western societies. The contributors' objective is to explore the myriad of ways late modern shamanism is becoming more vital and personally significant to people, communities, and economies in Nordic countries.