The first A-to-Z listing of extraordinary, supernatural, paranormal, and Fortean/inexplicable phenomena on the American Great Lakes. These five majestic freshwater seasLakes Superior, Huron, Erie, Michigan and Ontariohave hosted a treasure-trove of fantastic sailors' tales, mysteries, and legends. Here abide the long-standing rumors, myths and lore about mermaids, ghost ships, lake monsters, UFOs, USOs, vortices and triangles, Flying Dutchmen, wendigos, spook lights, haunted lighthouses, headless apparitions, melancholy mist-maidens, curses, talismans, thunderbirds, and sorcerers. Presented for the traveler, folklorist, ghost-buster, skeptic, cryptozoologist, or the just plain curious.

The Crystal Bible, will help you to identify exactly the right crystal for your needs, whether for healing of 1mind, body, psyche or spirit, and will point you to useful stones for improving vitality and well-being, and for balancing the chakras. Listing over 1,200 ?symptoms?, it is a practical first-aid guide based on sound crystal healing principles that have been practised for millennia. Crystals are a gentle, non-invasive system of holistic healing with no side effects. Suitable for children and animals, crystals can also benefit the environment and your home.

This treasury of more than 350 poems, prayers, hymns, blessings, and dramatic readings provides beautiful, powerful pieces that you can use to mark holidays, milestones, and the passing of the seasons. Discover prayers to Janus from Horace and Ovid, a traditional Scottish blessing for Imbolc, an invocation to Pan by poet Helen Bantock, a salutation to the sun by Aleister Crowley, a pharoah's hymn to Isis, a song for Lammas by Gwydion Pendderwen, and many, many more. In addition to readings and blessings for Pagan holidays and other special days throughout the year, you will also discover prayers for weddings and funerals and to coincide with phases of the moon. Author Barbara Nolan includes brief historical or biographical details to contextualize each piece as well as descriptions of various holidays and festivals to help you integrate these readings into your practice. A Year of Pagan Prayer demonstrates that the literary worship of Pagan deities was never fully lost in the West. This bounteous collection draws from the creative and spiritual legacy of Italian Renaissance poets, ancient Sumerian priestesses, twentieth-century Pagans, French Romantics, Greek playwrights, nineteenth-century British occultists, and Egyptian hymnists, making it a must-have sourcebook for anyone who yearns to embody the eloquent expressions of our Pagan past.

Most scholars of Judaism take the term "Jewish mysticism" for granted, and do not engage in a critical discussion of the essentialist perceptions that underlie it. Mystifying Kabbalah studies the evolution of the concept of Jewish mysticism. It examines the major developments in the academic study of Jewish mysticism and its impact on modern Kabbalistic movements in the contexts of Jewish nationalism and New Age spirituality. Boaz Huss argues that Jewish mysticism is a modern discursive construct and that the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as forms of mysticism, which appeared for the first time in the nineteenth century and has become prevalent since the early twentieth, shaped the way in which Kabbalah and Hasidism are perceived and studied today. The notion of Jewish mysticism was established when western scholars accepted the modern idea that mysticism is a universal religious phenomenon of a direct experience of a divine or transcendent reality and applied it to Kabbalah and Hasidism. "Jewish mysticism" gradually became the defining category in the modern academic research of these topics. This book clarifies the historical, cultural, and political contexts that led to the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish mysticism, exposing the underlying ideological and theological presuppositions and revealing the impact of this "mystification" on contemporary forms of Kabbalah and Hasidism.

The occult art of magical writing begins in pre-history with the creation of the two elemental signs called the dot or egg and the line, serpent or sperm. These two signs are the mother and father of all other signs, symbols and letters that have come into being. The meaning and form of the two signs have been symbolically refined over the millennia by magicians. In the form of magic letters they are signatures, literal and abstract, of the Universal forces of Creation, from whence all knowledge originates. Concisely written and richly illustrated this is the most accessible and informative book on the occult history and graphic origins of the signs, symbols, scripts and ciphers of Western Occultism.

The source of primal wisdom and vital energy lies in ones center, not in ones head. The Chinese call this center Dan-Tien of Tan-Tien meaning "the best place in the body". The Japanese speak of "Hara", or the "belly brain". In "Dan-Tien -- Your Secret Energy Center", Markert teaches us how to develop this center in order to experience good health and a happy lifestyle.

Take a spooky and often humorous trip into Tennessee's bloody and violent haunted history, from Civil War skirmishes to entertainment-industry tragedies. Through tales of spectral encounters, meet the Bell Witch (the only ghost to kill a living human being), Old Green Eyes (a mysterious demon in the woods), "Bob" (a nuisance Rebel soldier), and Little Timmy (an attention-seeking shadow). The book features over 60 photos and illustrations that bring more than 25 stories to life under the care of one of the horror genre's busiest entertainers. Jump into the creepy atmosphere that surrounds Tennessee, one of the most haunted locations in the United States.

The Rosicrucian Trilogy features modern translations of Fama Fraternitatis(1614), Confessio Fraternitatis (1615), and The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (1616) with 30 original illustrations by Hans Wildermann.

Four hundred years ago, the publication of these 3 anonymous documents launched the Rosicrucian movement. The story of Christian Rosenkreuz and his secretive order, as told in the Fama Fraternitatis, had political repercussions that continue to this day, while The Chemical Wedding is a landmark in European fantasy fiction. This present book offers the 3 founding documents in reliable, readable, modern English. Fully annotated and with modern introductions, these new translations explain the historical context, shed light on the beginnings of the Rosicrucian Order, and bring this fascinating material to a wider readership.

The roots of European witchcraft and magic lie in Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern cultures and in the Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic traditions of the Continent. For two millennia, European folklore and ritual have been imbued with the belief in the supernatural, yielding a rich trove of histories and images. A series that combines traditional approaches of political, legal, and social historians with critical syntheses of cultural anthropology, historical psychology, and gender studies, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe provides a modern, scholarly survey of the supernatural beliefs of Europeans from ancient times to the present day. Each of the six volumes in the series contains the work of distinguished scholars chosen for their expertise in a particular era or region. Witchcraft today continues to play a role in European societies and imaginations. This concluding volume includes a major new history of the origins and development of English "Wicca" and an account of the circumstances in which the term 'Satanist' has been used to label individuals or groups. The widespread prevalence of such phenomena proves the contemporary reality of beliefs in witchcraft and its threats. Other volumes in the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Biblical and Pagan Societies The Middle Ages The Period of the Witch Trials

Ghosts are everywhere in Georgia! Learn about the Hampton Lillibridge House in Savannah, where four exorcisms have been attempted to get rid of an evil male spirit. Glimpse the ghostly girl who appears at Masquerade nightclub in Atlanta to warn of impending disaster. Visit the Sam Walker House in Milledgeville, where "The Meanest Man in Georgia" relives the horror of his son's death each night. Come along on a paranormal investigation at an abandoned mill in Whitesburg. Meet the phantom inmates in the basement jail of Dahlonega's Corkscrew CafA (c), and step into a Civil War-era operating room at the Kennesaw House in Marietta. These stories come from homeowners, paranormal investigators, tour guides, and even people who have ghosts for coworkers. Are you brave enough to join them?

This title follows the themes in the writings of Kenneth Grant, H.P. Lovecraft and the Necronomicon, uncovering further meanings of the concepts of the famous writers of the Left Hand Path. It is for Thelemites, as well as lovers of the Lovecraft Mythos in all its forms and for those who find the rituals of classical ceremonial magic inadequate for the New Aeon.

The daughters of Danu has been written to encourage people regardless of where they are on their chosen path, to excite and encourage the reader to deepen their knowledge by inwardly asking themselves such questions as; Who are these magical characters, and what do they represent? Most of the ancient teaching methods were done through metaphor, symbolism and even parable, why? Because they work. For any beginner starting out on a Pagan learning curve, the Pagan scene can be very confusing and even disheartening. The key is is that once you know what questions to ask, the answers will be all that much easier to find, and this book will give the reader the incentive to unearth those questions. On the other hand, for the established Pagan, this book will be a joy to read and the roller coaster ride of an adventure that will resonate with what they have already learned. Regardless of who you are, how old or young, there will be something within this story that will inspire your spirit and lift your heart.