Nearly half a century after the defeat of the Third Reich, Nazism remains a subject of extensive historical inquiry, general interest, and, alarmingly, a source of inspiration for resurgent fascism in Europe. Goodrick-Clarke's powerful and timely book traces the intellectual roots of Nazism back to a number of influential occult and millenarian sects in the Habsburg Empire during its waning years. These sects combined notions of popular nationalism with an advocacy of Aryan racism and a proclaimed need for German world-rule.

This book provides the first serious account of the way in which Nazism was influenced by powerful millenarian and occult sects that thrived in Germany and Austria almost fifty years before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.

These millenarian sects (principally the Ariosophists) espoused a mixture of popular nationalism, Aryan racism, and occultism to support their advocacy of German world-rule. Over time their ideas and symbols, filtered through nationalist-racist groups associated with the infant Nazi party, came to exert a strong influence on Himmler's SS.

The fantasies thus fueled were played out with terrifying consequences in the realities structured into the Third Reich: Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the hellish museums of Nazi apocalypse, had psychic roots reaching back to millenial visions of occult sects. Beyond what the TImes Literary Supplement calls an intriguing study of apocalyptic fantasies, this bizarre and fascinating story contains lessons we cannot afford to ignore.

Astrology, Tarot cards, Ouija boards, spiritism, psychic healing, palm reading, and old fashioned fortune telling (now called psychic consulting) -- all these are popular in America today. Psychic hotlines are heavily represented on television, with testimonials to their amazing ability to give people accurate details about their past and predictions about their future. Are psychics indeed gifted with supernatural powers? Andre Kole and Terry Holley show convincingly how the success of these and other paranormal phenomena depends on deceit and slight of hand rather than on genuine supernatural powers. This is an age when countless groups and movements, new and old, mark the religious landscape in our culture. As a result, many people are confused or uncertain in their search for spiritual truth and meaning. Because few people have the time or opportunity to research these movements fully, the Zondervan Guide to Cults and Religious Movements series provides essential information and insights for their spiritual journeys. The second wave of books in this series addresses a broad range of spiritual beliefs, from non-Trinitarian Christian sects to witchcraft and neo-paganism to classic non-Christian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. All books but the summary volume, Truth and Error, contain five sections: -A concise introduction to the group being surveyed -An overview of the group s theology --- in its own words -Tips for witnessing effectively to members of the group -A bibliography with sources for further study -A comparison chart that shows the essential differences between biblical Christianity and the group -Truth and Error, the last book in the series, consists of parallel doctrinal charts compiled from all the other volumes. Three distinctives make this series especially useful to readers: -Information is carefully distilled to bring out truly essential points, rather than requiring readers to sift their way through a sea of secondary details. -Information is presented in a clear, easy-to-follow outline form with menu bar running heads. This format greatly assists the reader in quickly locating topics and details of interest. Each book meets the needs and skill levels of both nontechnical and technical readers, providing an elementary level of refutation and progressing to a more advanced level using arguments based on the biblical text. The writers of these volumes are well qualified to present clear and reliable information and help readers to discern truth from falsehood."

This title includes a 2 DVD set. Christopher S Hyatt, Ph.D., Adv. M.ED. was trained in psycho-physiology and clinical psychology. As a research scientist he has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in professional journals and was a Research Fellow at the University of Toronto and the University of Southern California. He fled the world of academia and state sponsored psychology to become an explorer of the human mind ...creating such devices as the "Radical Undoing Series". He is now a world-famous author of a wide variety of books, CDs, and DVDs on post-modern psychology, sex, tantra, kundalini and mysticism ...and an advocate of brain exploration.

Ritual deposition is not an activity that many people in the Western world would consider themselves participants of. The enigmatic beliefs and magical thinking that led to the deposition of swords in watery places and votive statuettes in temples, for example, may feel irrelevant to the modern day. However, it could be argued that ritual deposition is a more widespread feature now than in the past, with folk assemblages - from roadside memorials and love-lock bridges, to wishing fountains and coin-trees - emerging prolifically worldwide. Despite these assemblages being as much the result of ritual activity as historically deposited objects, they are rarely given the same academic attention or heritage status. As well as exploring the nature of ritual deposition in the contemporary West, and the beliefs and symbolisms behind various assemblages, this Element explores the heritage of the modern-day deposit, promoting a renegotiation of the pejorative term 'ritual litter'.

This book is an analysis of witchcraft and witch hunting as they appeared in southwestern Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Starting from a short analysis of some basic problems in the interpretation of European witchcraft, it proceeds to a study of the shifting denominational views regarding witches and the growth of Catholic orthodoxy. That theoretical vantage yields insight into the patterns in time, space, and confession that characterized all witch hunts in the German Southwest. There follows a narrative analysis of the largest witch hunts and the general crisis of confidence they produced. Analysis is complemented by a summary of what is known about the people accused of witchcraft, as well as an examination of the popular suspicion directed toward old women at the start of most panics and the breakdown of this stereotype as the panics progressed.

Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.

One of the most enigmatic figures in history, Nostradamus - apothecary, astrologer and soothsayer - is a continual source of fascination. Indeed, his predictions are so much the stock-in-trade of the wildest merchants of imminent Doom that one could be forgiven for ignoring the fact that Michel de Nostredame, 1503-1566, was a figure firmly rooted in the society of the French Renaissance. In this bold new account of the life and work of Nostradamus, Denis Crouzet shows that any attempt to interpret his Prophecies at face value is misguided. Nostradamus was not trying to predict the future. He saw himself, rather, as prophesying , i.e. bringing the Word of God to humankind. In a century marked by the extreme violence of the Wars of Religion, Nostradamus profound Christian faith placed him among the evangelicals of his generation. Rejecting the confessional tensions tearing Europe apart, he sought to coax his readers towards an interiorised piety, based on the essential presence of Christ. Like Rabelais, for whom laughter was a therapy to help one cope with the misery of the times, Nostradamus saw himself as a physician of the soul as much as of the body. His unveiling of the menacing and horrendous events which await us in the future was a way of frightening his readers into the realisation that inner hatred was truly the greatest peril of all, to which the sole remedy was to live in the love and peace of Christ. This inspired interpretation penetrates the imaginative world of Nostradamus, a man whose life is as mysterious as his writings. It shows him in a completely new dimension, securing for him a significant place among the major thinkers of the Renaissance.

Offers a full introduction to and survey of runes and runology: their history, how they were used, and their interpretation. Runes, often considered magical symbols of mystery and power, are in fact an alphabetic form of writing. Derived from one or more Mediterranean prototypes, they were used by Germanic peoples to write different kinds of Germanic language, principally Anglo-Saxon and the various Scandinavian idioms, and were carved into stone, wood, bone, metal, and other hard surfaces; types of inscription range from memorials to the dead, through Christian prayers and everyday messages to crude graffiti. First reliably attested in the second century AD, runes were in due course supplanted by the roman alphabet, though in Anglo-Saxon England they continued in use until the early eleventh century, inScandinavia until the fifteenth (and later still in one or two outlying areas). This book provides an accessible, general account of runes and runic writing from their inception to their final demise. It also covers modern uses of runes, and deals with such topics as encoded texts, rune names, how runic inscriptions were made, runological method, and the history of runic research. A final chapter explains where those keen to see runic inscriptions can most easily find them. Professor MICHAEL P, BARNES is Emeritus Professor of Scandinavian Studies, University College London.

Now in hardcover with a fresh new look. The vast store of magical lore within the Three Books of Occult Philosophy has been an essential resource for occultists since its original publication in 1531. Donald Tyson presents these writings in their complete form, supplemented by notes and explanations to contextualise the material for the modern reader.

The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is an authoritative new reference and interpretive volume detailing the origins, development, and influence of one of the richest aspects of Russian cultural and intellectual life - its religious ideas. After setting the historical background and context, the Handbook follows the leading figures and movements in modern Russian religious thought through a period of immense historical upheavals, including seventy years of officially atheist communist rule and the growth of an exiled diaspora with, e.g., its journal The Way. Therefore the shape of Russian religious thought cannot be separated from long-running debates with nihilism and atheism. Important thinkers such as Losev and Bakhtin had to guard their words in an environment of religious persecution, whilst some views were shaped by prison experiences. Before the Soviet period, Russian national identity was closely linked with religion - linkages which again are being forged in the new Russia. Relevant in this connection are complex relationships with Judaism. In addition to religious thinkers such as Philaret, Chaadaev, Khomiakov, Kireevsky, Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Shestov, Frank, Karsavin, and Alexander Men, the Handbook also looks at the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art, film, and the novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Ideas, institutions, and movements discussed include the Church academies, Slavophilism and Westernism, theosis, the name-glorifying (imiaslavie) controversy, the God-seekers and God-builders, Russian religious idealism and liberalism, and the Neopatristic school. Occultism is considered, as is the role of tradition and the influence of Russian religious thought in the West.

Industry of Magic & Light is a love letter to the counterculture of the 1960s and a requiem for its passing. The much-anticipated prequel to Keenan's cult classic debut, This is Memorial Device, Industry of Magic & Light is set in the same mythical Airdrie in the 1960s and early 70s and centres on a group of hippies running their own psychedelic light show. Told in two halves - the first in the form of an inventory of the contents of a caravan abandoned by one of the hippies, the second in the form of a tarot card reading - it is not so much a book about the 1960s as a direct channelling of the decade's energies, bringing to life how even the smallest and dreariest of working class towns felt so full of possibility in the wake of the psychedelic moment. Via artefacts from the time - everything from poetry chapbooks, record reviews and musical instruments through bubblegum wrappers, bicycle repair kits and mysterious cassette recordings - the book opens out into adventures along the hippy trail in Afghanistan and behind the Iron Curtain that leads a cast of new and returning characters - as well as the authorities - to believe that they are literally making magic. Simultaneously a forensics of the 1960s, a detective novel, an occult thriller, a vision quest, and the hallucinatory exposition of a moment where it felt like anything was possible, Industry of Magic & Life brings to life the streets of small working class towns as transformational sites of utopian joy.

Film is a kind of magic, a world of shadows and light, where anything is possible and the dead come back to life. Film can persuade us to believe in anything and special effects can work miracles. It is therefore the perfect medium for expressing occult phenomena, and since the beginnings of cinema history, film has done just that. Movie Magick explores the way in which films have been inspired by Alesiter Crowley's famous definition of "Magick" as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." This naturally encompasses classic occult movies, such as Hammer's adaptations of Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, but also ventures further afield into the cultural background of the modern occult revival, exploring the way in which occult movies have responded to the esthetics of fin de siecle decadence, the symbolist writings of Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Wagnerian music drama, the Faust legend, the pseudo-science of Theosophy, the occult psychedelia of the 1960s, occult conspiracy theories and some of the more arcane aspects of animation. The result is a cinematic grimoire, which will appeal to both sorcerers and apprentices of movie magick.

Universities And The Occult Rituals Of The Corporate World explores the metaphorical parallels between corporatised, market-oriented universities and aspects of the occult. In the process, the book shows that the forms of mystery, mythmaking and ritual now common in restructured institutions of higher education stem from their new power structures and procedures, and the economic and sociopolitical factors that have generated them.

Wood argues that universities have acquired occult aspects, as the beliefs and practices underpinning present-day market-driven academic discourse and practice weave spells of corporate potency, invoking the bewildering magic of the market and the arcane mysteries of capitalism, thriving on equivocation and evasion. Making particular reference to South African universities, the book demonstrates the ways in which apparently rational features of contemporary Western and westernised societies have acquired occult aspects. It also includes discussion of higher education institutions in other countries where neoliberal economic agendas are influential, such as the UK, the USA, the Eurozone states and Australia.

Providing a unique and thought-provoking look at the impact of the marketisation of Higher Education, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of higher education, educational policy and neoliberalism. It should also be of great interest to academics in the fields of anthropology, folklore and cultural studies, as well as business, economics and management.

Academics tend to look on 'esoteric', 'occult' or 'magical' beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.

"A pioneer work in . . . the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft."--Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University

Confessing to "Familiarity with the Devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens, was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. In 1662, Ann Cole was "taken with very strange Fits" and fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events in Salem took place.

More than three hundred years later the question still haunts us: Why were these and other women likely witches? Why were they vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft? In this work Carol Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.

"A remarkable achievement. The 'witches' come alive in this book, not as stereotypes, but as real women living in a society that suspected and feared their independence and combativeness."--Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Cornell University

The untold account of the countless Americans who believe in, or personally experience, paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs and psychics Given the popularity of television shows such as Finding Bigfoot, Ghost Hunters, Supernatural, and American Horror Story, there seems to be an insatiable public hunger for mystical happenings. But who believes in the paranormal? Based on extensive research and their own unique personal experiences, Christopher Bader, Joseph Baker and Carson Mencken reveal that a significant number of Americans hold these beliefs, and that for better or worse, we undoubtedly live in a paranormal America. Readers will join the authors as they participate in psychic and palm readings, and have their auras photographed, join a Bigfoot hunt, follow a group of celebrity ghost hunters as they investigate claims of a haunted classroom, and visit a support group for alien abductees. The second edition includes new and updated research based on findings from the Baylor Religion survey regarding America's relationship with the paranormal. Drawing on these diverse and compelling sources of data, the book offers an engaging account of the social, personal, and statistical stories of American paranormal beliefs and experiences. It examines topics such as the popularity of paranormal beliefs in the United States, the ways in which these beliefs relate to each other, whether paranormal beliefs will give rise to a new religion, and how believers in the paranormal differ from "average" Americans. Brimming with fascinating anecdotes and provocative new findings, Paranormal America offers an entertaining yet authoritative examination of a growing segment of American religious culture.

Extracted from Volumes 1, 8, and 18. Includes Jung's Foreword to Phenomenes Occultes (1939), "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena," "The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits," "The Soul and Death," "Psychology and Spiritualism," "On Spooks: Heresy or Truth?" and Foreword to Jaffe: Apparitions and Precognition."

'A major work ... an extraordinary tour de force, [this book] will materially help to bring both sides (science and paranormal studies) together in a way which could lead to real and important advances in our view of the universe' - New Scientist First published in 1978, Mysteries is the powerful and enlightening sequel to The Occult, continuing Colin Wilson's investigations into the paranormal, the occult and the supernatural. The experience of his own panic attacks gave Wilson his insight into the concept of the ladder or hierarchy of selves with which we are all associated. In this book he fully explores this idea of multiple selves, explaining how our lower, childish selves are linked to depression and anxiety. The book offers an optimistic message to counteract our contemporary tendency towards pessimism and nihilism: purposeful activity will always allow us to call on our higher selves and bring concentration, control and a sense of meaning into life. Wilson uses the concept of the multi-personality to explain a wide range of paranormal phenomenon, from dowsing and demonic possession to precognition and spoon-bending, and he analyses the work of all the big names in 20th-century supra-rational research (from T C Lethbridge to Margaret Murray to Carl Jung) from this perspective. The story ranges widely, from the stone circles to 1960s LSD adventures, and Wilson's analysis is woven with hundreds of entertaining paranormal anecdotes and case studies taken from throughout history, including his own experiences of dowsing at the Merry Maidens stone circle and of visions and lucid dreaming.

Michael Constantine Psellus (1018-1178 C.E) was one of the most notable writers and philosophers of the Byzantine era. The Byzantine domain was effectively the eastern Greek speaking part of the Roman Empire centred on Byzantium (Constantinople, modern Istanbul) which split off from the Latin West in 364 C.E. Its intellectual legacies helped lay the foundations for the Italian Renaissance. It was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that released a tide of Greek reading scholars into Western Europe, particularly Venice. With them came much of the magical and Hermetic knowledge which the Greeks in their turn had inherited from the Egyptians. "The Key of Solomon" was one such text. It is therefore essential to the understanding of such magical texts that one understands exactly how the Byzantines understood the nature of daemons. Psellus forms the bridge between the ancient world, Byzantine Greek, and the grimoire conception of the nature of daemons. Hailing from Constantinople, Psellus' career was an illustrious and practical one, serving as a political advisor to a succession of emperors, playing a decisive role in the transition of power between various monarchs. He became the leading professor at the newly founded University of Constantinople, bearing the honorary title, 'Consul of the Philosophers'. He was the driving force behind the university curriculum reform designed to emphasise the Greek classics, especially Homeric literature. Psellus is credited with the shift from Aristotelian thought to the Platonist tradition, and was adept in politics, astronomy, medicine, music, theology, jurisprudence, physics, grammar and history.

The growing presence in Western society of non-mainstream faiths and spiritual practices poses a dilemma for the law. Building on a thorough history of the legal regulation of fortune-telling laws in four countries, Faith or Fraud examines the impact of people who identify as "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR) on the future legal understanding of religious freedom. Unlike SBNR belief systems that can encompass multiple religions, philosophies, and folklore, traditional legal interpretations of "freedom of religion" are based on organized religion and are ultimately shown to have failed to evolve along with ideas about religion itself.