It was said in the beginning, in a garden called Eden, that woman was created at the same time as man, and not from his rib. Lilith, the first female, created equal to stand as a partner. But she proved to be a person so troublesome that she vanishes from her rightful place in civilization's mythological legends in place of Eve, the first wife. With her younger sister Eve's story heralding the future of all womankind, Lilith and her story stands alone as a testament to the Sacred Feminine and man's fear of the mysteries that lie within her. The First Sisters: Lilith and Eve is a gateway to a provocative awakening.

Although we live in a technologically advanced society, superstition is as widespread as it has ever been. Far from limited to athletes and actors, superstitious beliefs are common among people of all occupations and every educational and income level. Here, Stuart Vyse investigates our proclivity towards these irrational beliefs. Superstitions, he writes, are the natural result of several well-understood psychological processes, including our human sensitivity to coincidence, a penchant for developing rituals to fill time (to battle nerves, impatience, or both), our efforts to cope with uncertainty, the need for control, and more. Vyse examines current behavioral research to demonstrate how complex and paradoxical human behavior can be understood through scientific investigation, while he addresses the personality features associated with superstition and the roles of superstitious beliefs in actions. Although superstition is a normal part of human culture, Vyse argues that we must provide alternative methods of coping with life's uncertainties by teaching decision analysis, promoting science education, and challenging ourselves to critically evaluate the sources of our beliefs.

Manitous are mysteries and spirits - the essences - that infuse and safeguard plants and animals, including humans, in all aspects of life. The tales of the manitous are simple in narration and complex in spirit, rich with incident and detail, and attempt to explain the mysterious ways of the natural world. Here are wily tricksters, timorous tree spirits, wise grandmothers, seductive maidens, and the ever-hungry evil manitous, fearsome giants known as Weendigoes. Here is a half-man, half-manitou legend of Ojibway lore who represents the wonders and shortcomings of all humankind and who becomes a hero by masquerading as one; a powerful warrior who is riled and routed by a younger sibling with a fight for dancing and disguises; a man who seems obsessed with the trivial but learns to understand the spiritual; and The Prophecy - which is told but disbelieved - telling of the changes in the native world to come. By turns comic, erotic, dramatic, and tragic, these engrossing stories - most of which have never before been recorded - provide a window into an ancient culture, and hold great meaning for modern readers.

Radiant Circles is an examination of both Ecospirituality and the Church of all Worlds, a specific NeoPagan organisation inspired by a science fiction novel and founded by Oberon Zell, a practicing Wizard. The book ranges widely in its historical, cultural and theological exploration of the Church and discusses its role and place as both as a unique Neo-Pagan and futurist New Religious Movement.

Poverty and superstition go hand in hand, When you have nothing, you cling to whatever gives you hope. Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictions. Her home was happy and creative but it was marked by debt, by her father's alcoholism and her mother's agoraphobia. When her father died at the hands of a local teenage gang on the streets of their Midlands council estate, superstition gave way to a deeper and more dysfunctional reliance on the born-again Christian church to which Tracy and her family belonged. In the chaos of loss, the paranormal became paranoia. In a bid to find definitive answers, Tracy followed one belief system after another until, accidentally, she stumbled across a book by scientist Carl Sagan. It opened the door to scientific thinking. Ultimately, it taught her to think for herself. And it was only when she applied the tools of critical thinking to this exploration of her past that she uncovered a very different kind of story. Learning to Think is a memoir about belief. It's about poverty, religion and superstition, grief and healing. But most of all, it's about the liberating power of a scientific view of the world.

Naming the God is a companion volume to the landmark anthology Naming the Goddess. It presents a series of critical essays discussing many of the aspects of male deity and offers a spiritual gazetteer of over fifty gods.

In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent-as a way to reclaim the material world as something real, something solid. His theology understood the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants-from gods to humans to insects down to the merest rock-as part of the unfolding of a single conscious reality, Siva. This conscious singularity-the word "god" here does not quite do it justice-with its capacity to choose and will, pervades all through, top to bottom; as Abhinavagupta writes, "even down to a worm - when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in the heart." His panentheism proposed an answer to a familiar conundrum, one we still grapple with today: Consciousness is so unlike matter. How does consciousness actually connect to the materiality of our world? To put this in more familar twenty-first-century terms, how does mind connect to body? These questions drive Loriliai Biernacki's The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and New Materialism. Biernacki draws on Abhinavagupta's thought-and particularly his yet-untranslated, philosophical magnum opus, the Isvara Pratyabhijna Vivrti Vimarsini-to think through contemporary issues such as the looming prospect of machine AI, ideas about information, and our ecological crises. She argues that Abhinavagupta's panentheism can help us understand our current world and can contribute to a New Materialist re-envisioning of the relationship that humans have with matter.

Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings is embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself. Moving from Wax to Film, the book discusses key questions of imagination and cognition, and probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception; it uncovers a host of spirit forms - angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies - that are still actively present in contemporary culture. It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing idea about the self. Phantasmagoria also tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces. As the story unfolds, the book features many eminent scientists and philosophers who applied their considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance seances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. Phantasmagoria shows how this often surprising story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in psychology and physics, and continues to influence contemporary experience.

A Supernatural War reveals the surprising stories of extraordinary people in a world caught up with the promise of occult powers. It was a commonly expressed view during the First World War that the conflict had seen a major revival of 'superstitious' beliefs and practices. Churches expressed concerns about the wearing of talismans and amulets, the international press paid considerable interest to the pronouncements of astrologers and prophets, and the authorities in several countries periodically clamped down on fortune tellers and mediums due to concerns over their effect on public morale. Out on the battlefields, soldiers of all nations sought to protect themselves through magical and religious rituals, and, on the home front, people sought out psychics and occult practitioners for news of the fate of their distant loved ones or communication with their spirits. Even away from concerns about the war, suspected witches continued to be abused and people continued to resort to magic and magical practitioners for personal protection, love, and success. Uncovering and examining beliefs, practices, and contemporary opinions regarding the role of the supernatural in the war years, Owen Davies explores the broader issues regarding early twentieth-century society in the West, the psychology of the supernatural during wartime, and the extent to which the war cast a spotlight on the widespread continuation of popular belief in magic.

Every witch needs a book of spells. Bring the power of magic into your everyday with these fun and easy-to-use spells, charms, potions and more. Using common household ingredients, The Good Spell Book provides answers to the problems we all face in our day-to-day lives; from winning a job to attracting the one you love - it will give you all the guidance you need. Whether you're a complete beginner, advanced spell caster, or simply curious, these are the spells that will increase your self-worth, and empower you to lead a healthier, happier and more fulfilled life.

Using archaeology, archaeo-mythology and mitochondrial DNA we can chart the mass migrations of people throughout the ancient world and follow the footsteps of the beliefs of Old Europe. But if the concept of the Old Goddess is at odds with current popular thinking, how will we feel if we discover that the Great Mother of contemporary Paganism bears no similarity to the primal Great Goddess of the Old European world? Is there a `magico-spiritual' gene that could be traced back to those distant ancestors who actually worshipped the forebears of the various deities to whom we claim allegiance today? Are there time-honoured things about us all as individuals that are bred deep in the bone? Are we what our roots (our DNA) claim us to be? Perhaps, even though we are now scattered all over the globe, we cannot escape those ancient racial memories of where we originally came from.

Just as we speak of "dead" languages, we say that religions "die out." Yet sometimes, people try to revive them, today more than ever. New Antiquities addresses this phenomenon through critical examination of how individuals and groups appeal to, reconceptualize, and reinvent the religious world of the ancient Mediterranean as they attempt to legitimize developments in contemporary religious culture and associated activity. Drawing from the disciplines of religious studies, archaeology, history, philology, and anthropology, New Antiquities explores a diversity of cultic and geographic milieus, ranging from Goddess Spirituality to Neo-Gnosticism, from rural Oregon to the former Yugoslavia. As a survey of the reception of ancient religious works, figures, and ideas in later twentieth-century and contemporary alternative religious practice, New Antiquities will interest classicists, Egyptologists, and historians of religion of many stripes, particularly those focused on modern Theosophy, Gnosticism, Neopaganism, New Religious Movements, Magick, and Occulture. The book is written in a lively and engaging style that will appeal to professional scholars and advanced undergraduates as well as lay scholars.

Apostolizitat und Einheit sind zentrale Themen der OEkumene. Epheserbrief-Textanalyse und grundliche Untersuchung des Zustandes der damaligen Kirche versuchen Integrationsfahigkeit in der gespalteten Kirche zu finden. Geschichte, Entwicklung und heutige Situation der Thomaschristenheit werden selbstkritisch dargestellt. Der Beitrag des Vatikanum II gilt als Chance und Wendepunkt fur die Orientalischen Kirchen und lasst Perspektiven fur eine moegliche Zukunft erkennen.

Dr. Francis Israel Regardie was one of the most important figures in the 20th centure development of the Western Mystery Tradition. From the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, the Bhagavad-Gita, Buddhism, and yoga he came to study with Crowley and became his secretary.

An introduction to the Aos Sidhe, the People of the fairy mounds, and to Irish fairy beliefs, this book takes readers on a journey to understand the place that fairies have had in Ireland across the millennia and into today. These beings can be found playing roles both significant and subtle in folk belief and their stories are part of the land itself, making them an intrinsic aspect of Ireland. And yet for those who haven't grown up with these beliefs there can be many misunderstandings and confusion surrounding who they are, and what they can do. /Pagan Portals - Aos Sidhe/ will help people new to the subject, as well as those with a wider knowledge, to understand the range and depth of the folk beliefs. Covering everything from myth and folklore to modern anecdotes and specific types of Irish fairies, this book provides a solid understanding of what can be a difficult subject.

The Otherworld is ready for you, but are you ready for the Otherworld? What would you tell your own less-experienced self about magic if you could go back in time and make a better start? That is the question this book seeks to address. What might you need to slough off, how far might you need to walk from the comfortable and familiar to truly embrace a magical life? Covering a period of thirteen moons, Standing and Not Falling is a workbook that allows the reader to clear the way before embarking, or to conduct a spiritual detox on themselves before stepping up their practice, or engaging a new beginning. Suitable for practitioners of any type of sorcerous activity from witchcraft to ceremonial magic and beyond. This book takes steady, direct aim at the main causes of disfunction and difficulty that arise for practitioners of the art magical, both individually and in relation to others, and at times also at the key maladies of our age.