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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies > General
When strange signs appeared in the sky over Quebec during the
autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their
midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the
colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to act as
if she were possessed. The community tried to make sense of what
was happening, and why. Priests and nuns performed rituals to drive
the demons away, while the bishop and the governor argued about how
to investigate their suspicions of witchcraft. A local miller named
Daniel Vuil, accused of using his knowledge of the dark arts to
torment Hallay, was imprisoned and then executed. Stories of the
demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the
St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe
Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the
everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France.
Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and
witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the
dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church's
wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to
women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As
the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this
study reveals, New France was in a precarious position. The
Possession of Barbe Hallay is both a fascinating account of a case
of demonic possession and an accessible introduction to social and
religious history in early modern North America.
From its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General
director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical
trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a
conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the
end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is
ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In
a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the
myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell
are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and
Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a
nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases;
conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as
hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of
soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav
Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive
travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as
paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new
imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly
comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of
our own making.
What secret power is hiding within you? There is an untamed
wildness within each of us. Once found and nurtured, this wild
power can lead to true and boundless freedom, creativity and
purpose. In Wild Once, internationally renowned High Wiccan
Priestess, Vivianne Crowley, reveals the secret riches to be found
on a hidden path. This is the extraordinary and inspiring guide to
a life lived magically, of adventures into the unknown and of
finding spiritual nourishment. It shows what can happen when you
have the courage to step into the unexplainable and live untamed.
It is also an evocative, intricate account of a hidden world, a
rich tour of modern magical practices, from meditation to
manifestation, shamanism to spellwork. Magic is waiting to be
discovered. It is here, just beneath the surface, if only you know
where to look... We all have wild magic within us; this book will
inspire you to find it. ___________________ PRAISE FOR WILD ONCE
'Utterly contemporary, yet drawing on ancient wisdom' - Philip
Carr-Gomm, author of The Prophecies and DruidCraft: The Magic of
Wicca & Druidry 'A memoir of beautifully told tales about her
magical and well-lived life that will awaken the magic within and
guide you to the enchanted adventure that awaits' - Phyllis Curott,
Priestess of Ara, author of The Witches' Wisdom Tarot 'The best
book on the experience of magic that I have ever read' - Ronald
Hutton, author of The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles
'Heartfelt and often beautiful ... Witches, look no further! This
is the guide you need' - Diane Purkiss 'Wonderfully inspirational
and highly practical - if you have ever wondered what it's like to
be a witch in Real Life, just read this book!' - Rodney Orpheus,
author of Abrahadabra and founding member of The Cassandra Complex
Harry Gilmore has no idea of the terrible danger he faces when he
meets a beautiful girl in a local student bar. Drugged and
abducted, Harry wakes up in a secure wooden compound deep in the
Welsh countryside, where he is groomed by the leaders of a
manipulative cult, run by the self-proclaimed new messiah known as
The Master. When the true nature of the cult becomes apparent,
Harry looks for any opportunity to escape. But as time passes, he
questions if The Master's extreme behavior and teachings are the
one true religion. With Harry's life hanging by a thread, a team of
officers, led by Detective Inspector Laura Kesey, investigate his
disappearance. But will they find him before it's too late?
*Previously published as The Girl in White*
Nobody quite knew what to make of them. Were they simply fun-loving
thrillseekers leaping from surfboards and roaring motorcycles to
hang gliders, and then on to the most advanced rocket-propelled
jetpacks on the planet? Or were they a genuine menace to religious
traditionalists who were outraged when the Order began taking over
churches, cathedrals and temples for their fiery flying rituals?
Bets swung both ways, but as the self-styled revolutionaries
swelled in number and the media culture exulted, zealots turned
violent and the press immediately warned of dogfights in the sky,
street battles, mind games and soul wars.
Behind the scenes, the Powers That Be were strangely silent.
But then word began filtering out that the secret elite were
playing the two sides off against each other and there were
whispers of a hidden agenda that could shift global power, profits
and the future of the world itself.
Telepathy, thought transference, unconscious communication. While
some important early psychological theorists such as William James,
Frederic W. H. Myers and Sigmund Freud all agreed that the
phenomenon exists, their theoretical approaches to it were very
different. James's and Myers's interpretations of and experimental
investigations into telepathy or thought transference were an
inextricable part of their psychical researches. Freud's insistence
on the reality of thought transference had nothing to do with
psychical research or paranormal phenomena, which he largely
repudiated. Thought transference for Freud was located in a theory
of the unconscious that was radically different from the subliminal
mind embraced by James and Myers. Today thought transference is
most commonly described as unconscious communication but was
largely ignored by subsequent generations of psychoanalysts until
most recently. Nonetheless, the recognition of unconscious
communication has persisted as a subterranean, quasi-spiritual
presence in psychoanalysis to this day. As psychoanalysis becomes
more interested in unconscious communication and develops theories
of loosely boundaried subjectivities that open up to transcendent
dimensions of reality, it begins to assume the features of a
religious psychology. Thus, a fuller understanding of how
unconscious communication resonates with mystical overtones may be
more deeply clarified, articulated and elaborated in contemporary
psychoanalysis in an explicit dialogue with psychoanalytically
literate scholars of religion. In Legacies of the Occult Marsha
Aileen Hewitt argues that some of the leading theorists of
unconscious communication represent a 'mystical turn' that is
infused with both a spirituality and a revitalized interest in
paranormal experience that is far closer to James and Myers than to
Freud.
Antero Alli and Klint Finley discuss Antero's 'paratheatre'
projects, his relationships with Christopher Hyatt and Robert Anton
Wilson, and much more. Approximate running time is 36 minutes.
Harry Gilmore has no idea of the terrible danger he faces when he
meets a beautiful girl in a local student bar. Drugged and
abducted, Harry wakes up in a secure wooden compound deep in the
Welsh countryside, where he is groomed by the leaders of a
manipulative cult, run by the self-proclaimed new messiah known as
The Master. When the true nature of the cult becomes apparent,
Harry looks for any opportunity to escape. But as time passes, he
questions if The Master's extreme behavior and teachings are the
one true religion. With Harry's life hanging by a thread, a team of
officers, led by Detective Inspector Laura Kesey, investigate his
disappearance. But will they find him before it's too late?
*Previously published as The Girl in White*
When Jean-Francois Champollion rediscovered how to translate the
Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century he described
them as "....a complex system, a writing that is figurative,
symbolic, and phonetic all within the same text, a single sentence,
I would even say a single word." Since then, although his
discoveries have led to the translation of most of the ancient
Egyptian texts, the emphasis in modern scholarship is to regard the
hieroglyphs purely as sounds and to disregard or even deny their
symbolic meaning. This book explores how the hieroglyphs function
as a comprehensive system of magical symbolism, the medw neter or
Words of the Gods by which the sacred truths of the Inner worlds of
creation are conveyed to humanity. Their effect is 'magical'
because when we study them and ponder their meaning they cause
changes in our consciousness, enabling us to reach a deeper
understanding of ourselves, of our surroundings and of the
universal principles that lie behind all creation. They also
incidentally teach us a great deal about the magical beliefs and
practices of the ancient Egyptians and their perception of the
relationship between the earthly and spiritual worlds. Using many
examples and illustrations, this book demonstrates how the
hieroglyphs formed the basis of Egyptian magic and were the means
by which it was taught and practiced. It offers an entirely new
interpretation of Egyptian magic, and shows how the hieroglyphs can
be used as a magical tool that is as transformative today as it was
in ancient times.
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