This is an original and important study of the significance of witchcraft in English public life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this lively account, Ian Bostridge explores contemporary beliefs about witchcraft and shows how it remained a serious concern across the spectrum of political opinion. He concludes that its gradual descent into polite ridicule had as much to do with political developments as with the birth of reason.

In the book Medium7, Canadian researcher and author Donna Smith-Moncrieffe shares insight from her journey to find truth about the nature of existence. Smith-Moncrieffe provides engaging cases studies and uses rigorous scientific methods to determine the existence of an afterlife and the extent to which mediums can accurately predict the future. Through extensive interviews with ten gifted mediums and their clients, Smith-Moncrieffe reveals an in-depth look into how mediums interact with the spirit world and communicate with the deceased, how thoughts create reality, and how reincarnation impacts mankind's existence.

She also inspires others to embark on their own personal journeys of discovery to learn more about the purpose of life and become more confident about the final destination.

Medium7 shares a range of ground-breaking studies involving mediums, near death experiences, and past life regression therapy to provide knowledge, courage, and hope for anyone interested in understanding more about the true nature of our universe and mankind's existence--now and for eternity.

There are far fewer publications on the ethnology of Micronesia than for any other region in the Pacific. This dearth is especially seen in the traditional religion, folklore, and iconography of the area. Haynes and Wuerch have located 1,193 relevant titles. For the first time, these mostly scarce or unpublished materials are now accessible in this essential research tool. The focus is on tradition, which became modified after contact with the West--the adaptation and persistence of these traditions are included in this bibliography.

Traditional Micronesian iconography is largely religious in nature, as is the case with most tribal or preliterate societies. There is also a large corpus of Micronesian myths, legends, beliefs, and practices that may not fit the Western concept of religion, but would be classified under folklore. That distinction cannot be consistently made in Micronesian cultures, nor in most other preliterate, thus prehistoric, societies. The overlap of religion and folklore is pervasive, so the scope of subjects included is broad. The subject matter encompasses magic, sorcery, ritual, cosmology, mythology, iconography, iconology, oral traditions, songs, chants, dance, music, traditional medicine, and many activities of daily life. Only those works that directly treat these subjects in the context of religion or folklore are included in this volume.

"This is a useful collection of material on witchcraft."
--" Journal of World History"

"This is undoubtedly one of the best reference works ever published on witchcraft. Breslaw, fresh from her well-received revisionist history "Tituba: Reluctant Witch of Salem," brings together work by some of the best-known scholars of the field, including Elizabeth Reis, Carol Karlsen, John Demos, Paul Boyer, Stephen Nissenbaum and David Hall. She organizes primary sources (including the 1486 manifesto "Why Women Are Chiefly Addicted to Superstitions") and insightful secondary essays around topics of European, Native American and African witchcraft. The anthology is to be applauded for its commitment to representing cultural variance--showing how, for example, indigenous American magical traditions differed greatly from tribe to tribe. Breslaw's awareness of diverse cultural contexts highlights the multiple functions that witchcraft and anti-witchcraft served in individual communities."
--Publishers Weekly

.,."covers a tremendous amount of spatial and temporal ground."--"Maryland Historical Magazine"

This unique anthology is the first to provide a multicultural perspective on witchcraft from the 15th to 18th century. Featuring primary documents as well as scholarly interpretations," Witches of the Atlantic World" builds upon information regarding both Christian and non-Christian beliefs about possession and the demonic. Elaine G. Breslaw draws on Native American, African, South American, and African-American sources, as well as the European and New England heritage, to illuminate the ways in which witchcraft in early America was an attempt to understand and control evil andmisfortune in the New World.

Organized into sections on folklore and magic, diabolical possession, Christian perspectives, and the question of gender, the volume includes selections by Cotton Mather, Matthew Hopkins, and Samuel Willard, among others; Salem trial testimonies; and commentary by a host of distinguished scholars.

Together the materials demonstrate how the Protestant and Catholic traditions shaped American concepts, and how multicultural aspects played a key role in the Salem experience. Witches of the Atlantic World sheds new light on one of the most perplexing aspects of American history and provides important background for the continued scholarly and popular interest in witches and witchcraft today.

Why did Life Magazine dub her "the most hated woman in America"? Did she unravel the moral fiber of America or defend the Constitution? They found her heaped in a shallow grave, sawed up, and burned. Thus ended Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the articulate "atheist bitch" whose 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case ended school prayer. Her Christian-baiting lawsuits spanned three more decades; she was on TV all over the country, foul-mouthed, witty, and passionate, launching today's culture wars over same-sex marriage and faith-based initiatives. She was a man-hater who loved sex, a bully whose heart broke for the downtrodden. She was accused of schizophrenia, alcoholism, and embezzlement, but never cowardice or sloth. She was an ideologue who spewed toxic rage even at the followers who made her a millionaire. She was a doting mother who accosted people to ask them to be sexual partners for her lonely children, and whose cannibalistic love led her children to their grave. She thrived on her fame, but just as the curtain of obscurity began to lower, the family vanished in one of the strangest of America's true crimes. This is the real story of "the most hated woman in America," by the only author to interview the killer and those close to him and to witness the family's secret burial in Austin, Texas. From the First Chapter The sky was gray and drizzling, but it had stopped at the funeral home by quarter to nine. Billy Murray hadn't spoken to his three family members for more than twenty years, but he wanted to give them a decent burial. Bill was an ordained minister, but he didn't pray over the charred, sawed-up remains. "Baptists don't pray for the dead," he said. "They either accept Christ before they died or they didn't." He had his mother cremated in accordance with her oft-expressed wish. Her urn sat at the head of the burial vault, as was appropriate, for she had ruled the other two with an iron hand. She was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 76, founder of American Atheists, and the Most Hated Woman in America-a sobriquet she relished. The other two were his half-brother, Jon Garth Murray, 40, and his daughter, Robin Murray-O'Hair, 30. It had taken five years to find them and bring them to the cemetery for the service, which was kept secret from the public. It was their second burial. Jerry Carruth, the prosecutor who had searched for the family for nearly four years, had watched them being excavated from their shallow mass grave on a South Texas ranch some months before. He was watching the shoveling, looking for the hip replacement joint Madalyn had gotten in 1988. When they found that, he'd know he'd found Madalyn. "There it was," he said, "shining in the sun like a trailer hitch."

Drawing on ethnographic inquiry and the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, this volume explores people's reluctance to pursue religion. The contributors capture the experiences of godless people and examine their perspectives on the role of religion in their personal and public lives. In doing so, the volume contributes to a critical understanding of the processes of disengagement from religion and reveals the challenges and paradoxes that godless people face.

In this pathbreaking study, the historical relationship between nineteenth-century spiritualism and twentieth-century surrealism is the basis for a general examination of conflicting movements in literature, art, philosophy, science, and other areas of social life. Because spiritualism delved into the world beyond humanity and surrealism was founded on the world within, the two provide a provocative frame for examining the struggles within modern culture. Cottom argues that we must conceive of interpretation in terms of urgency, desire, fierce contention, and impromptu deviation if we want to understand how things come to bear meaning for us. He demonstrates that even when Victorians holding seances and surrealists composing manifestoes were most foolish, they had much that was valuable to say about the life (and death) of reason.

There has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of the US population that is not religious. However, there is, to date, very little research on the social movement that is organizing to serve the needs of and advocate for the nonreligious in the US. This is a book about the rise and structure of organized secularism in the United States. By organized secularism we mean the efforts of nonreligious individuals to build institutions, networks, and ultimately a movement that serves their interests in a predominantly religious society. Researchers from various fields address questions such as: What secularist organizations exist? Who are the members of these organizations? What kinds of organizations do they create? What functions do these organizations provide for their members? How do the secularist organizations of today compare to those of the past? And what is their likely impact on the future of secularism? For anyone trying to understand the rise of the nonreligious in the US, this book will provide valuable insights into organized efforts to normalize their worldview and advocate for their equal treatment in society.

The second of two volumes on the relationship between popular religion and the self-help tradition in American culture, this book continues chronologically where the first left off. As with the first volume, this work focuses on the intersection of American history and popular religion and is intended as an introductory interpretive guide to major self-help figures and movements with origins in popular religious movements. This volume spans from Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the history of Christian Science, with discussions of Mary Baker Patterson, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy, through Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. Peale and Schuller, with the exception of Evangelist Billy Graham, constitute the public face of mainstream American Protestantism and bring this two-volume study to its conclusion in the second half of the 20th century.

This reference will serve as a valuable research tool for American religion and popular culture scholars. Together with the first volume, "Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture," these two meticulously researched volumes clearly define and present the broad scope of the self-help tradition as it pervades American culture and as it developed and was influenced by popular religion. An extensive bibliography is included.

The Rhetoric of Religious Cults takes as its departure point the notion that 'cults' have a distinctive language and way of recruiting members. First outlining a rhetorical framework, which encompasses contemporary discourse analysis, the persuasive texts of three movements - Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and Children of God - are analysed in detail and their discourse compared with other kinds of recruitment literature. Cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself.

This is the first investigation of the history of Russian Freemasonry, based on the premise that the facts of the Russian Enlightenment preclude application of the interpretative framework commonly used for the history of western thought. Coverage includes the development of early Russian masonry, the formation of the Novikov circle in Moscow, the programme of Rosicrucianism and its Russian variant and, finally, the clash between the Rosicrucians and the State.

The New Atheists' claim that religion always leads to fanaticism is baseless. State-backed religion results in tyranny. Sacred humanists work to implement their highest values that will improve this world; separation of church and state, eliminating denigration of nonbelievers, assuring just governance, and preventing human trafficking.

The Book of Black Magic is Arthur Edward Waite's magnum opus of occult lore; this edition contains the author's original icons, symbols, seals and drawings. This supreme guide to occultist history, lore, magick, and ceremony is split into two parts: The first is entitled ""The Literature of Ceremonial Magic."" Here, Waite examines the ritualistic traditions which surrounding the occult movement for centuries. He notes various texts, and how these had a bearing upon the practice of the occult and of magical ceremony. The second part, ""The Complete Grimoire,"" concerns how those who practice black magic and occult ritual become versed in the craft. The stringent physical and mental requirements, and the need to practice a spiritual attunement and inner ablution, is detailed. Astronomical knowledge of the planets and their movements is a necessity, as is possession of a variety of instruments, plus a deep knowledge of the various symbols and scripts used in occultism.