Grab your camera and flashlight as you travel into one of the most haunted regions of New York State, the Southern Tier. Learn of a deformed figure that wanders Holland Road in Angola looking for peace; and walk the cursed land in Hinsdale, whose evil energy has reached out to bring ruin to the lives of many. Find out about the fabled Pink House of Wellsville, where a spirit child waits for the candlelight to fade, and the ghostly man and dog who return to haunt the Murderer's Shack. Come along as the author uncovers the truth about hauntings and introduces you to new tales of specters and phantoms from the country hillside. Are you ready for the journey?

In the popular "Little Bit of" series: a fresh, accessible introduction to shamanism--with a global view. Drawing from decades of training in Brazil and the United States, Ana Campos has written a history of shamanism that's both personal and global. She creates a methodology for bringing shamanic wisdom into our daily practices, and explains why it's important to establish a relationship with our helping spirits to heal ourselves and our communities. Through this incisive discussion of shamanism, we can become the vehicle for change our world so desperately needs right now.

Through ritual, we celebrate the significant moments in our lives - the passing of the seasons, birth/death, promotions, business opportunities... We mark them all with ritual so that they serve as a memory of what is and what can be. Small daily rituals - that morning cup of coffee, the table set just so, time spent in the backyard in the evening, or even making out the grocery list - all help us to stay grounded, centered, and on our path. The Tarot is meant for ritual, with its archetypal energy and beautiful imagery. Find here how to "enter" a Tarot card, record impressions, understand specific symbols, manage your dreamtime, utilize meditations and affirmations, and make quality decisions. Through combining ritual tools of empowerment, we strengthen who we are as individuals. What better way to maintain the courage to walk an individual path!

Mithras was recognized as the greatest rival of Christianity, a greater threat even than the religion of Isis. He explores the various forms of this God and investigates the worship.

Is it possible that unusual creatures share the Pacific Northwest with its 10.3 million human occupants? It's true! Oregon and Washington have "misplaced" alien invaders, such as a half-inch flea, a giant spider with a leg span of three inches, and a snakehead fish (made famous of late in four horror movies) that can breathe in water and on land, and grows to be about four feet long. There are sea monsters, from prehistoric times to the present, as well as freshwater phantoms said to infest lakes and rivers. The sky has winged wonders that resemble species long believed to be extinct. These are the stuff of nightmares: thunderbirds described as raptors, resembling eagles or vultures, with a wingspan of eight feet, as well as Bigfoot and other large bipeds. A comprehensive guide to a crypto zoo of the Northwest, this book details the Black Tamanous, a man-eating monster; a kangaroo man; the usual brownies, elves, fairies, gnomes, leprechauns, pixies, wee folk; and many more. You may find this research unsettling, even frightening. One thing is certain...a world of mystery awaits.

'A great storyteller' Madeline Miller, author of Circe In this powerful new collection, Charlotte Higgins foregrounds Greek mythology's most enduring heroines. Here are the myths of Heracles and Theseus, the Trojan war, Thebes and Argos and Athens. They are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures and resourceful witches. In this telling the female characters take centre stage as Athena, Helen, Circe, Penelope and others weave these stories into elaborate imagined tapestries. In Charlotte Higgins's thrilling new interpretation of these ancient stories, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling. With a series of original drawings by Chris Ofili.

Strange Ohio Monsters is the first book-length survey of unknown creatures reported from the Buckeye State throughout recorded history. The list includes hundreds of Bigfoot sightings, serpentine monsters reported from several lakes, encounters with huge birds and winged creatures resembling prehistoric reptiles, meetings with "Mothman," giant snakes and lizards, phantom kangaroos, alien mystery cats resembling tigers and African lions, and apparently thriving populations of creatures deemed officially extinct for generations. Beyond the "normal" range of unidentified creatures, modern witnesses report sightings of humanoid giants and pygmies, child-sized bipedal frogs, and lurking nocturnal predators that mutilate livestock and pets from farm country to the suburbs. Aboriginal tribes were the first to encounter such creatures, but bizarre reports continue in this second decade of the 21st century.

n these lectures, Steiner focuses on the vital task of developing the proper orientation toward a free spiritual life. With great compassion and understanding, he offers telling examples of how humanity must walk a conscious middle way between the two tempting powers of Lucifer and Ahriman. He describes the incarnation of Lucifer in the third millennium before the Christ event, out of which flowed not just the wisdom of paganism, but also the conscious intellect we enjoy today. Ahriman, on the other hand, is shown approaching human beings through such phenomena as materialism, nationalism, and literalism, all in preparation for his incarnation in the third millennium. Keep in mind, however, that these two powers do not work separately; rather, they are working increasingly together. Our task as human beings is to hold them in balance, continually permeating one with the other. Steiner tells us that "Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance, and it is we who must hold the beam in equipoise. How can we train ourselves to do this? By permeating what takes ahrimanic form within us with a strongly luciferic element." To accomplish this task we need a new, more conscious inner life.

Boston after dark is the town that scared and repulsed even Edgar Allan Poe, inspired H.P. Lovecraft, and brought the hunting of witches and murder of hapless innocents to American shores. Come to the Boston Common and walk over a thousand bodies of the long-dead. Take in some theater and be sure to excuse yourself when passing by the seat that only seems empty. Head out to the swampy suburbs, dance with the Will o' the Wisps and hike along the lost paths of Dogtown, where witches once extracted tolls on passersby. Welcome to Boston's eerie environs, and watch out for stranglers.

How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the "subtle body," positing some sort of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. Simon Cox traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years. This study is an intellectual history of the subtle body concept from its origins in late antiquity through the Renaissance into the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. It begins with a prehistory of the idea, rooted as it is in third-century Neoplatonism. It then proceeds to the signifier "subtle body" in its earliest English uses amongst the Cambridge Platonists. After that, it looks forward to those Orientalist fathers of Indology, who, in their earliest translations of Sanskrit philosophy relied heavily on the Cambridge Platonist lexicon, and thereby brought Indian philosophy into what had hitherto been a distinctly platonic discourse. At this point, the story takes a little reflexive stroll into the source of the author's own interest in this strange concept, looking at Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical import, expression, and popularization of the concept. Cox then zeroes in on Aleister Crowley, focusing on the subtle body in fin de siecle occultism. Finally, he turns to Carl Jung, his colleague Frederic Spiegelberg, and the popularization of the idea of the subtle body in the Euro-American counterculture. This book is for anyone interested in yogic, somatic, or energetic practices, and will be very useful to scholars and area specialists who rely on this term in dealing with Hindu, Daoist, and Buddhist texts.

Iris, the Goddess of the Rainbow, is an often-overlooked goddess in Greek mythology. As a messenger, she offers us the words and wisdom of the gods, traveling between worlds to tell us what we need to know. In Pagan Portals - Iris Goddess of the Rainbow and Messenger of the Godds, we will explore the mysterious Iris, following the colors of her magick to inspire our lives.

Historians of the early modern witch-hunt often begin histories of their field with the theories propounded by Margaret Murray and Montague Summers in the 1920s. They overlook the lasting impact of nineteenth-century scholarship, in particular the contributions by two American historians, Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) and George Lincoln Burr (1857-1938). Study of their work and scholarly personae contributes to our understanding of the deeply embedded popular understanding of the witch-hunt as representing an irrational past in opposition to an enlightened present. Yet the men's relationship with each other, and with witchcraft sceptics - the heroes of their studies - also demonstrates how their writings were part of a larger war against 'unreason'. This Element thus lays bare the ways scholarly masculinity helped shape witchcraft historiography, a field of study often seen as dominated by feminist scholarship. Such meditation on past practice may foster reflection on contemporary models of history writing.

The strix was a persistent feature of the folklore of the Roman world and subsequently that of the Latin West and the Greek East. She was a woman that flew by night, either in an owl-like form or in the form of a projected soul, in order to penetrate homes by surreptitious means and thereby devour, blight or steal the new-born babies within them. The motif-set of the ideal narrative of a strix attack - the 'strix-paradigm' - is reconstructed from Ovid, Petronius, John Damascene and other sources, and the paradigm's impact is traced upon the typically gruesome representation of witches in Latin literature. The concept of the strix is contextualised against the longue-duree notion of the child-killing demon, which is found already in the ancient Near East, and shown to retain a currency still as informing the projection of the vampire in Victorian fiction.