This study explores the psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. In practice, participants recall rituals to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation to enhance their recollection. Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson assert that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain much about the systems. Reviewing a wide range of evidence, they explain religions' evolution.

This book examines the ways in which two distinct biblical conceptions of impurity - 'ritual' and 'moral' - were interpreted in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature, and the New Testament. In examining the evolution of ancient Jewish attitudes towards sin and defilement, Klawans sheds light on a fascinating but previously neglected topic.

Journey into the world of Ayahuasca and healing. A mysterious and powerful plant medicine with curative powers that is drunk as a tea during a sacred ceremony, Ayahuasca has been known to change people's lives dramatically. But what was once a healing experience practiced only by Indigenous South Americans - and sought out by the adventurous few - has, in the past fifty years, become increasingly popular around the world. Hachumak, a Peruvian medicine man, has been practicing traditional healing arts in his country for more than twenty years. His unique approach is based on ritualistic simplicity and highlights the essence of the Art, which includes the borrowed forces from Nature. In this remarkable book, he shares his knowledge and experiences to broaden our understanding of this powerful medicine and protect it from misuse and exploitation. Whether you are among the uninitiated and curious, or a seasoned journeyer, you will gain a deeper understanding of what shamanism is and how and why it works, as well as its possibilities and limitations. Hachumak reveals his own path to becoming a shaman and explains how a well-crafted Ayahuasca ceremony unfolds when run by an experienced curandero. He describes in detail what to expect - both physically and psychologically - while under the guidance of the sacred plants. With Hachumak as our experienced and trusted guide, Journeying Through the Invisible offers a new and healing way of seeing ourselves and the world around us.

In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.

This book argues that religion can and must be reconciled with science. Combining adaptive and cognitive approaches, it is a comprehensive analysis of religion's evolutionary significance, and its inextricable interdependence with language. It is also a detailed study of religion's main component, ritual, which constructs the conceptions that we take to be religious and therefore central in the making of humanity's adaptation. The text amounts to a manual for effective ritual, illustrated by examples drawn from a range of disciplines.

In this in-depth exploration of the symbols found in Navaho legend and ritual, Gladys Reichard discusses the attitude of the tribe members toward their place in the universe, their obligation toward humankind and their gods, and their conception of the supernatural, as well as how the Navaho achieve a harmony within their world through symbolic ceremonial practice.

Originally published in 1990.

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