Eliphas Levi, born Alphonse Louis Constant, (1810-75) was instrumental in the revival of Western occultism in the nineteenth century, and published several influential books on magic that are also reissued in this series. This posthumous publication (1896) is a translation by William Wynn Westcott, co-founder of the 'Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn', of an unpublished French manuscript by Levi, then owned by the spiritualist Edward Maitland. It includes eight of the author's drawings. Each short chapter outlines the meaning of one of the twenty-two tarot trumps and is followed by a brief editor's note describing the card's iconography and summarising interpretations (sometimes deliberately misleading) given in Levi's earlier publications. The book ends with Kabbalistic prayers and rituals, praise of Jesus Christ as the great initiate, and a surprising assertion that Christianity has superseded ancient magic, revealing the life-long tension between Catholicism and magic in Levi's personality and thought.

The nineteenth-century writer and Masonic scholar Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie (1833 86) studied occultism with Frederick Hockley, and met the famous French occultist Eliphas Levi in 1861. He was also involved in the foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This extensive encyclopaedia, first published in 1877, is considered to be a classic Masonic reference work. It includes detailed information on the symbols, rites, legends, terms, people and places associated with Freemasonry. Some of the symbols are illustrated and lists of rankings are given, including a 'traditional' list of Grand Masters of England that includes Sts Swithin and Dunstan, Alfred the Great, Sir Christopher Wren (twice) and Charles II. Mackenzie aims in his entries to be critical when relevant: as he says in the Preface, freemasonry has 'received a willing tribute' in his book, but he hints at difficulties encountered in publishing material about a famously secretive society.

For many centuries, Hindus have taken it for granted that the religious images they place in temples and home shrines for purposes of worship are alive. Hindu priests bring them to life through a complex ritual "establishment" that invokes the god or goddess into material support. Priests and devotees then maintain the enlivened image as a divine person through ongoing liturgical activity: they must awaken it in the morning, bathe it, dress it, feed it, entertain it, praise it, and eventually put it to bed at night. In this linked series of case studies of Hindu religious objects, Richard Davis argues that in some sense these believers are correct: through ongoing interactions with humans, religious objects are brought to life.

Davis draws largely on reader-response literary theory and anthropological approaches to the study of objects in society in order to trace the biographies of Indian religious images over many centuries. He shows that Hindu priests and worshipers are not the only ones to enliven images. Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic "idols," as "devils," as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images' makers or original worshipers.

The history and underlying ideology of pilgrimage examined, from prehistory to the middle ages. The enduring importance of pilgrimage as an expression of human longing is explored in this volume through three major themes: the antiquity of pilgrimage in what became the Christian world; the mechanisms of Christian pilgrimage(particularly in relation to the practicalities of the journey and the workings of the shrine); and the fluidity and adaptability of pilgrimage ideology. In their examination of pilgrimage as part of western culture from neolithictimes onwards, the authors make use of a range of approaches, often combining evidence from a number of sources, including anthropology, archaeology, history, folklore, margin illustrations and wall paintings; they suggest that it is the fluidity of pilgrimage ideology, combined with an adherence to supposedly traditional physical observances, which has succeeded in maintaining its relevance and retaining its identity. They also look at the ways in whichpilgrimage spilled into, or rather was part of, secular life in the middle ages. Dr JENNIE STOPFORD teaches in the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York. Contributors: RICHARD BRADLEY, E.D. HUNT, JULIEANN SMITH, SIMON BARTON, WENDY R. CHILDS, BEN NILSON, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, DEBRA J. BIRCH, SIMON COLEMAN, JOHN ELSNER, A. M. KOLDEWEIJ.

Originally published in 1923, this edition of The Travels of Fa-hsien was translated into English by H. A. Giles (1845-1935), a scholar of Chinese language and culture who helped popularize the Wade-Giles system for the Romanization of the Chinese languages. The Travels relates the story of Fa-hsien's journey from Central China across the Gobi Desert, over the Hindu Kush, and through India down to the mouth of the Hoogly, where he took a ship and returned to China by sea, bringing with him the books of the Buddhist Canon and images of Buddhist deities. This is a fascinating text that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Buddhism and Chinese literature.

The British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton (1821-90) was a colourful and often controversial character. A talented linguist and keen ethnologist, he worked in India during the 1840s as an interpreter and intelligence officer for General Sir Charles Napier, and published several books about his experiences in 1851-2. He first gained celebrity, however, for his adventurous 1853 trip to Mecca, under the disguise of a pilgrim, which is described in this lively three-volume publication (1855-6). Few Europeans had ever visited the Muslim holy places; one of them was John Lewis Burckhardt, whose 1829 account is also reissued in this series. Volume 3 of Burton's book vividly describes the pilgrims' journey from Medina to Mecca, with catering including coffee, rice and 'occasionally ... tough mutton and indigestible goat', crowded camp-sites and all-night prayers and singing. Finally he arrives at the Kaabah and witnesses the culminating ceremonies of the hajj.

The British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton (1821 90) was a colourful and often controversial character. A talented linguist and keen ethnologist, he worked in India during the 1840s as an interpreter and intelligence officer for General Sir Charles Napier, and published several books about his experiences in 1851 2. He first gained celebrity, however, for his adventurous 1853 trip to Mecca, under the disguise of a pilgrim, which is described in this lively three-volume publication (1855 6). Few Europeans had ever visited the Muslim holy places; one of them was John Lewis Burckhardt, whose 1829 account is also reissued in this series. Volume 1 of Burton's book describes his arrival in Egypt, the weeks he spent in Alexandria and Cairo polishing his linguistic and cultural skills, and how, at the end of Ramadan, he travelled to Suez by camel, and from there by boat to Yanbu al-Bahr.

Vitthal, also called Vithoba, is the most popular Hindu god in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, and the best-known god of that region outside India. His temple at Pandharpur is the goal of an annual pilgrimage that is one of the largest and most elaborate in the world. This book is the foremost study of the history of Vitthal, his worship, and his worshippers. First published in Marathi in 1984, the book remains the most thorough and insightful work on Vitthal and his cult in any language, and provides an exemplary model for understanding the history and morphology of lived Hinduism. The author, Ramachandra Chintaman Dhere, is the leading scholar of religious traditions in Maharashtra and throughout the Deccan, the plateau that covers most of central India. Vitthal exemplifies the synthesis of Vaisnava and Saiva elements that not only typifies Maharashtrian Hindu religious life but also marks Vitthal's resemblance to another prominent South Indian god, Venkates of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. Dhere's analysis highlights Vitthal's connection with pastoralist hero cults, and demonstrates the god's development from a god of shepherds to a god of the majority of the population, including Brahmans. In addition, Dhere also explores the connections of Vitthal with Buddhist and Jain traditions. In the book's final chapter, Dhere presents a culminating stage in the evolution of the worship of Vitthal: the interpretation in spiritual terms of the god, his temple, the town of Pandharpur, and the river that flows past the town. Dhere received India's highest literary award, the Sahitya Akademi prize, for this book.

The purpose of this book, published in 1813 by Thomas Duer Broughton (1778 1835), is to provide an English audience with an accurate description of 'the character, manners, domestic habits and religious ceremonies of the Mahrattas'. Broughton, an army officer in the East India Company, first arrived in India while serving as a cadet in the Bengal establishment in 1795, and eventually rose to the positions of captain in 1805, major in 1816 and colonel in 1829. The book consists of a series of thirty-two letters addressed to his brother, and most of the letters describe the events and the environment of the Rajputana region, beginning with an account of a journey from Agra to Kerowli. The letters which follow all contain fascinating descriptions of festivals and other events, and cultural encounters of all kinds, painting a vivid portrait of life for the British in early nineteenth-century India.

Ancient Jewish sacrifice has long been misunderstood. Some find in sacrifice the key to the mysterious and violent origins of human culture. Others see these cultic rituals as merely the fossilized vestiges of primitive superstition. Some believe that ancient Jewish sacrifice was doomed from the start, destined to be replaced by the Christian eucharist. Others think that the temple was fated to be superseded by the synagogue. In Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple Jonathan Klawans demonstrates that these supersessionist ideologies have prevented scholars from recognizing the Jerusalem temple as a powerful source of meaning and symbolism to the ancient Jews who worshiped there. Klawans exposes and counters such ideologies by reviewing the theoretical literature on sacrifice and taking a fresh look at a broad range of evidence concerning ancient Jewish attitudes toward the temple and its sacrificial cult. The first step toward reaching a more balanced view is to integrate the study of sacrifice with the study of purity-a ritual structure that has commonly been understood as symbolic by scholars and laypeople alike. The second step is to rehabilitate sacrificial metaphors, with the understanding that these metaphors are windows into the ways sacrifice was understood by ancient Jews. By taking these steps-and by removing contemporary religious and cultural biases-Klawans allows us to better understand what sacrifice meant to the early communities who practiced it. Armed with this new understanding, Klawans reevaluates the ideas about the temple articulated in a wide array of ancient sources, including Josephus, Philo, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. Klawans mines these sources with an eye toward illuminating the symbolic meanings of sacrifice for ancient Jews. Along the way, he reconsiders the ostensible rejection of the cult by the biblical prophets, the Qumran sect, and Jesus. While these figures may have seen the temple in their time as tainted or even defiled, Klawans argues, they too-like practically all ancient Jews-believed in the cult, accepted its symbolic significance, and hoped for its ultimate efficacy.

In this landmark book, first published in English in 1958, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a comprehensive survey of Yoga in theory and practice from its earliest antecedents in the Vedas through the twentieth century.

A new introduction by David Gordon White provides invaluable insight into Eliade's life and work, highlighting the key moments in Eliade's academic and spiritual education, as well as the personal experiences that shaped his worldview. "Yoga" is not only one of Eliade's most important books, it is also his most personal--the only one to analyze a religious tradition that he had truly lived.

The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond examines the evidence for the pre-history and origin of drama. The belief that drama developed from religious ritual has been commonplace since the time of Aristotle but there is little agreement on just how this happened. Recently, scholars have even challenged the historical connection between drama and ritual. This volume is the most thorough examination on the origins of Greek drama to date. It brings together seventeen essays by leading scholars in a variety of fields, including classical archaeology, iconography, cultural history, theater history, philosophy, and religion. Though it primarily focuses up on ancient Greece, the volume includes comparative studies of ritual drama from ancient Egypt, Japan, and medieval Europe. Collectively, the essays show how the relationship of drama to ritual is one of the most controversial, complex, and multi-faceted questions of modern times.

Tariq Ramadan has emerged as one of the foremost voices of reformist Islam in the West. In one of his previous books, 'Western Muslims and the Future of Islam'he urged his fellow Muslims to participate fully in the civil life of the Western societies in which they live, and addressed many of the issues that stand in the way of such participation. In this new book he tackles head-on the thorniest of these issues - namely, the rulings of Islamic jurists that make Islam seem incompatible with modern, scientifically and technologically advanced, democratic societies. He argues that it is crucial to find theoretical and practical solutions that will enable Western Muslims to remain faithful to Islamic ethics while fully living within their societies and their time. He notes that Muslim scholars often refer to the notion of ijtihad (critical and renewed reading of the foundational texts) as the only way for Muslims to take up these modern challenges. But, Ramadan argues, in practice such readings have effectively reached the limits of their ability to serve the faithful in the West as well as the East. In this book he sets forward a radical new concept of ijtihad, which puts context - including the knowledge derived from the hard and human sciences, cultures and their geographic and historical contingencies - on an equal footing with the scriptures as a source of Islamic law. This global and comprehensive approach, he says, seems to be the only way to go beyond the current limits and face up to the crisis in contemporary Islamic thought: Muslims need a contemporary global and applied ethics. After setting out this proposal, Ramadan applies his new methodology to several practical case studies involving controversial issues in five areas: medical ethics, education, economics, marriage and divorce, culture and creativity. His radical proposal and the conclusions to which it leads him are bound to provoke discussion and controversy. Muslims and non-Muslims alike will have to contend with Ramadan's new idea of the very basis of Islam in the modern world.

Here, Thierry Zarcone and Angela Hobart offer a vigorous and authoritative exploration of the link between Islam and shamanism in contemporary Muslim culture, examining how the old practice of shamanism was combined with elements of Sufism in order to adapt to wider Islamic society. Shamanism and Islam thus surveys shamanic practices in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, to show how the Muslim shaman, like his Siberian counterpart, cultivated personal relations with spirits to help individuals through healing and divination. It explores the complexities and variety of rituals, involving music, dance and, in some regions, epic and bardic poetry, demonstrating the close links between shamanism and the various arts of the Islamic world. This is the first in-depth exploration of 'Islamized shamanism', and is a valuable contribution to the field of Islamic Studies, Religion, Anthropology, and an understanding of the Middle East more widely.

Although temples have been important in South Indian society and history, there have been few attempts to study them within an integrated anthropological framework. Professor Appadurai develops such a framework in this ethnohistorical case study, in which he interprets the politics of worship in the Sri Partasarati Svami Temple, a famous ancient Sri Vaisnava shrine in India. The author uses the methods and concepts of both cultural anthropology and social history to construct a model of institutional change in South Asia under colonial rule. Focusing on the problem of authority as a cultural concept and as a managerial reality, Professor Appadurai considers some classic problems of South Asian anthropology: problems of deference, sumptuary symbolism, and religious organization. In addition, he addresses such issues as the nature of conflict under a hybrid colonial legal system, the political implications of sumptuary disputes, and the structure of relations between polity and religion in pre-modern South Asia. These aspects of the study should interest a broad range of scholars.

Each year, about two million pilgrims from over 100 countries converge on the Islamic holy city of Mecca for the hajj. While the hajj is first and foremost a religious festival, it is also very much a political event. No government can resist the temptation to manipulate the hajj for political and economic gain. Every large Muslim state has developed a comprehensive hajj policy and a powerful bureaucracy to enforce it. The Muslim world's leading multinational organization, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has established the first international regime explicitly devoted to pilgrimage. Yet, Robert Bianchi argues, no secular or religious authority - national or international - can really control the hajj. State-sponsored pilgrimage management consistently backfires, giving government opponents valuable ammunition and allowing them to manipulate the symbols and controversies of the hajj to their own ends. Bianchi has been researching the hajj for over ten years and draws on interviews with and data from hajj directors in five Muslim countries (Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, Indonesia, and Nigeria), statistics from Saudi Arabian hajj authorities, as well as his personal experience as a pilgrim. The result is the most complete picture of the hajj available anywhere, and a wide-ranging work on Islam, politics, and power.

The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond examines the evidence for the pre-history and origin of drama. The belief that drama developed from religious ritual has been commonplace since the time of Aristotle but there is little agreement on just how this happened. Recently, scholars have even challenged the historical connection between drama and ritual. This volume is the most thorough examination on the origins of Greek drama to date. It brings together seventeen essays by leading scholars in a variety of fields, including classical archaeology, iconography, cultural history, theater history, philosophy, and religion. Though it primarily focuses up on ancient Greece, the volume includes comparative studies of ritual drama from ancient Egypt, Japan, and medieval Europe. Collectively, the essays show how the relationship of drama to ritual is one of the most controversial, complex, and multi-faceted questions of modern times.

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self- expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

Yantra Yoga, the Buddhist parallel to the Hathayoga of the Hindu tradition, is a system of practice entailing bodily movements, breathing exercises, and visualizations. Originally transmitted by the mahasiddhas of India and Oddiyana, its practice is nowadays found in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to the Anuttaratantras, more generally known under the Tibetan term "trulkhor," whose Sanskrit equivalent is "yantra." The Union of the Sun and Moon Yantra (Phrul 'khor nyi zla kha sbyor), orally transmitted in Tibet in the eighth century by the great master Padmasambhava to the Tibetan translator and Dzogchen master Vairochana, can be considered the most ancient of all the systems of Yantra, and its peculiarity is that it contains also numerous positions which are also found in the classic Yoga tradition.
Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, one of the great living masters of Dzogchen and Tantra, started transmitting this profound Yoga in the seventies and at that time wrote this commentary, which is based on the oral explanations of some Tibetan yogins and siddhas of the twentieth century. All Western practitioners will benefit from the extraordinary instructions contained in this volume.

The comprehensive 2005 study of rituals in early modern Europe argues that between about 1400 and 1700 a revolution in ritual theory took place that utterly transformed concepts about time, the body, and the presence of spiritual forces in the world. Edward Muir draws on extensive historical research to emphasize the persistence of traditional Christian ritual practices even as educated elites attempted to privilege reason over passion, textual interpretation over ritual action, and moral rectitude over gaining access to supernatural powers. Edward Muir discusses wide ranging themes such as rites of passage, carnivalesque festivity, the rise of manners, Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the alleged anti-Christian rituals of Jews and witches. This edition examines the impact on the European understanding of ritual from the discoveries of new civilizations in the Americas and missionary efforts in China and adds more material about rituals peculiar to women.

The book of Genesis tells us that God made a covenant with Abraham, promising him a glorious posterity on the condition that he and all his male descendents must be circumcised. For thousands of years thereafter, the distinctive practice of circumcision served to set the Jews apart from their neighbors. The apostle Paul rejected it as a worthless practice, emblematic of Judaism's fixation on physical matters. Christian theologians followed his lead, arguing that whereas Christians sought spiritual fulfillment, Jews remained mired in such pointless concerns as diet and circumcision. As time went on, Europeans developed folklore about malicious Jews who performed sacrificial murders of Christian children and delighted in genital mutilation. But Jews held unwaveringly to the belief that being a Jewish male meant being physically circumcised and to this day even most non-observant Jews continue to follow this practice. In this book, Leonard B. Glick offers a history of Jewish and Christian beliefs about circumcision from its ancient origins to the current controversy. By the turn of the century, more and more physicians in America and England--but not, interestingly, in continental Europe--were performing the procedure routinely. Glick shows that Jewish American physicians were and continue to be especially vocal and influential champions of the practice which, he notes, serves to erase the visible difference between Jewish and gentile males. Informed medical opinion is now unanimous that circumcision confers no benefit and the practice has declined. In Jewish circles it is virtually taboo to question circumcision, but Glick does not flinch from asking whether this procedure should continue to be the defining feature of modern Jewish identity.