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.

This project is an attempt to bring together the many fragments of history concerning the Yoruba religious community and their rise to prominence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries.

Tony Swain has prepared a comprehensive bibliographical survey of all substantial publications on Aboriginal religions appearing between 1798 and early 1990. The volume opens with a three-chapter narrative section which provides the historic and analytic contexts for the cataloguing that follows. The 1,076 entries are critically annotated and classified by geography and theme. More specific investigation of selected topics can be pursued through the four indexes which, besides offering an alphabetical listing of all titles and authors, provide access by "tribes and places" and general subjects. The three narrative chapters explore the history of the study of Aboriginal religions, the emergence of key themes in investigating these traditions, and the unique features of the regions which provide the primary classification for the bibliography that follows. Chapter one shows how a succession of theories, conceptions, and blatant prejudices have molded the way writers approached the traditions of the Aborigines. Chapter two examines those themes scholars have felt useful in analyzing Aboriginal religions, placing their emergence in historical perspective and discussing their usefulness as conceptual tools. Finally, the third chapter highlights the unique features of the ten regions used as the primary categories of classification, describing possible historical forces which have shaped their particular forms. This first bibliography of Australian Aboriginal religions is an essential acquisition for all serious academic libraries.

Animism' is now an important term for describing ways in which some people understand and engage respectfully with the larger-than-human world. Its central theme is our relationship with our other-than-human neighbours, such as animals, plants, rocks, and kettles, rooted in the understanding that the term 'person' includes more than humans. Graham Harvey explores the animist cultures of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians and eco-Pagans, introducing their diversity and considering the linguistic, performative, ecological and activist implications of these different animisms.

First published in 1906, these four lectures were originally delivered in the Vacation Term for Biblical Study at Cambridge. Evidence is derived from the native tribes of Australia in particular, whom Jevons compares for his discussion. The first lecture considers whether religion has evolved from, or was preceded by a pre-religion, or non-religious, stage of humankind. The following lectures discuss the science of religion and the theory of Evolution, and the relationship between the evolution of religion and the philosophy of religion. This is a fascinating text that will be of particular value to students interested in the history and development of religion in general.

Between the years of 1898 and 1926, Edward Westermarck spent a total of seven years in Morocco, visiting towns and tribes in different parts of the country, meeting local people and learning about their language and culture; his findings are noted in this two-volume set, first published in 1926. The first volume contains extensive reference material, including Westermarck's system of transliteration and a comprehensive list of the tribes and districts mentioned in the text. The chapters in this, the second volume, explore such areas as the rites and beliefs connected with the Islamic calendar, agriculture, and childbirth. This title will fascinate any student or researcher of anthropology with an interest in the history of ritual, culture and religion in Morocco.

African cults and religions enrich all aspects of Cuba's social, cultural and everyday life, and encompass all ethnic and social groups. Politics, art, and civil events such as weddings, funerals, festivals and carnivals all possess distinctly Afro-Cuban characteristics. Miguel Barnet provides a concise guide to the various traditions and branches of Afro-Cuban religions. He distinguishes between the two most important cult forms - the Regla de Ocha (Santeria), which promotes worship of the Oshira (gods), and the traditional oracles that originated in the old Yoruba city of lle-lfe', which promote a more animistic worldview. Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves had to recreate their old traditions in their new Caribbean context. As their African heritage collided with Catholicism and with Native American and European traditions, certain African gods and traditions became more prominent while others lost their significance in the new Afro-Cuban culture. This book, the first systematic overview of the syncretization of the gods of African origin with Catholic saints, introduces the reader to a little-known side of Cuban culture.

African religions, as well as those religions that derive much of their cosmology, beliefs, and rituals from African religions, are becoming more international in scope and appeal. Yet they continue to be viewed either as indiscriminately adaptable or as static traditions. Neither view suggests much spiritual or psychological value outside their original milieu when compared with the so-called world religions.

The chapters in this volume focus on African and African-derived religions, and challenge many of these positions. They examine how these religions display themselves in the contemporary world, particularly in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. These religions' continued dynamism and their relationship with other religious traditions, especially through the process of syncretism, are also explored. This multidisciplinary collection makes a major contribution not only to a better understanding of African and African-derived religions, but it also contributes to the wider and ongoing debate on syncretism that continues to engage those in anthropology, history, and sociology of religion.

Carlos Castaneda takes the reader into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is "natural" and "logical."In 1961, a young anthropologist subjected himself to an extraordinary apprenticeship with Yaqui Indian spiritual leader don Juan Matus to bring back a fascinating glimpse of a Yaqui Indian's world of "non-ordinary reality" and the difficult and dangerous road a man must travel to become "a man of knowledge." Yet on the bring of that world, challenging to all that we believe, he drew back. Then in 1968, Carlos Castaneda returned to Mexico, to don Juan and his hallucinogenic drugs, and to a world of experience no man from our Western civilization had ever entered before.

The Djanggawul religious cult is the focus for this study because it is more important to the Aborigines themselves than other religious cults in the north-eastern region of Arnhem land. The book includes chapters on the following: * Significance of the Djanggawul * The Djanggawul Myth and Content of the Myth * The Djanggawul Songs * The Djanggawul Song Cycle: Parts 1 The book includes an extensive glossary and index. First published in 1952.

While there are five important festschriften on Toyin Falola and his work, this book fulfills the need for a single-authored volume that can be useful as a textbook. I develop clearly articulated rubrics and overarching concepts as the foundational basis for analyzing Falola's work.

Mambu is the name of a native of New Guinea who led what has become known as a 'Cargo' cult. These cults, common in Melanesia, are partly religious, political and economic in nature. Participants in the cult engage in exotic rites, the purpose of which is to gain possession of European manufactured goods, such as knives, medicines, razor blades, tinned foods etc.
The volume discusses why these cults occur and examines a way of life of a New Guinea people and their reactions to European penetration and achievement.
First published in 1960.

This book describes how anthropologists in the twentieth century went about documenting the religions of those independent peoples who still lived beyond the frontiers of the global economy and the world religions. It begins by examining the enormous popularity of the newly invented field of anthropology in the nineteenth century as a site of multiple intellectual developments. Its climax was Frazer's Golden Bough, which is a pillar of modernity second only to Darwin's Origin of Species. But its notion of religion was entirely speculative. When anthropologists went to see for themselves, they encountered formidable obstacles. How to access a people's most profound understandings of the world and everything in it? Holding fast to the premise that ethnographers have no special powers of seeing inside other people's brains, this book teaches students to proceed slowly, a step at a time, watching how people perform rituals great and small, asking questions that seem stupid to their hosts, and struggling to translate abstract terms in unrecorded languages. Using a handful of examples from different continents, the book shows the potential of an anthropological approach to religion.

First published in 1981. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Walter E. A. van Beek draws on over four decades of extensive fieldwork to offer an in-depth study of the religion of the Kapsiki/Higi, who live in the Mandara Mountains on the border between North Cameroon and Northeast Nigeria. Concentrating on ritual as the core of traditional religion, van Beek shows how Kapsiki/Higi practices have endured through the long and turbulent history of the region. Kapsiki rituals reveal a focus on two fundamental concepts: dwelling and belonging. Van Beek examines their sacrificial practices, through which the Kapsiki show a complex and pervasive connection with the Mandara Mountains, as well as the character of their relationships among themselves and with outsiders. Van Beek also explores their rituals of belonging, rites of passage which take place from birth through initiation and marriage - and even death, with the tradition of the ''dancing dead,'' when a fully decorated corpse on the shoulders of a smith ''dances'' with his mourning kinsmen. The Dancing Dead is the result of the author's lifelong study of the Kapsiki/Higi. It gives a unique description of the rituals in an African traditional religion based not upon ancestors, but on a completely relational thought system, where in the end all rituals are integrated into one major cycle.

This book offers a comprehensive view of the legal, political, and ethical challenges related to the global regulation of ayahuasca, bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars. Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew containing DMT, which is a Schedule I substance under the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and the legality of its ritual use has been interpreted differently throughout the world. The chapters in this volume reflect on the complex implications of the international expansion of ayahuasca, from health, spirituality, and human rights impacts on individuals, to legal and policy impacts on national governments. While freedom of religion is generally protected, this protection depends on the recognition of a religion's legitimacy, and whether particular practices may be deemed a threat to public health, safety or morality. Through acomparative analysis of different contexts in North America, South America and Europe in which ayahuasca is consumed, the book investigates the conceptual, philosophical, and legal distinctions among the fields of shamanism, religion, and medicine. It will be particularly relevant to scholars with an interest in Indigenous religion and in religion and law.

This book draws on ethnographic studies in Southeast Asia to provide new insights into human-environmental relationships and ecologies, together with a set of theoretical innovations. Contextualizing ecologies in this region as pluralizing or hegemonic, conflictive or cooperative, the case studies in these chapters bring into dialogue ontological approaches, the issue of distinct worldviews and concepts of nature on the one hand and political ecology and power relations on the other. They discuss plural ecologies in diverse settings, reaching from urban Vietnam to the Javanese coast and the dense forests of the Southeast Asian highlands. Southeast Asia is one of the most biodiverse and culturally diverse regions in the world. Thus, what occurs in this region is vitally important to the future of Earth. Documenting the plurality and dynamics of ecologies in Southeast Asia, this book provides prime examples for the potentials of alternative human-environmental relationships and sustainable development. It will be of interest to academics studying political ecology, environmental anthropology, sustainability sciences, political sciences, development studies, human geography, human ecology, Southeast Asian studies, and Asian studies.

This book formulates a new pedagogy of death with regard to Northeast India and shows how this pedagogy offers an understanding of alternative knowledge systems and epistemes. In documenting a range of customs and practices pertaining to death, dying and the afterlife among the diverse ethnic communities of Northeast India, the book offers new soteriological, epistemological, sociological and phenomenological perspectives on death. Through an examination of these eschatological practices and their anthropological, theological and cultural moorings, the book aims to reach an understanding of notions of indigeneity with regard to Northeast India. The contributors to this book draw upon a range of subjects— from songs, literary texts, monuments, relics and funerary objects to biographies to folktales to stories of spirit possessions and supernatural encounters. It collates the research of scholars primarily from Northeast India, but also from Eastern India and offers an interdisciplinary analysis of these various belief systems and practices. This book will of interest to those researchers and scholars interested in South Asia in general and Northeast India in particular, and also to those interested in the social anthropology of religion, cultural studies, indigenous studies, folklore studies and Himalayan studies.