The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, and wizard have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadows - the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. Robin Roberts argues that the female ghost is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts. Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. Roberts's analysis begins with comedic female ghosts in literature and film and moves into horror by examining the successful play The Woman in Black and the legend of the weeping woman, La Llorona. Roberts then situates the canonical works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison in the tradition of the female ghost to explore how the ghost is used to portray the struggle and pain of women of color. Roberts further analyzes heritage sites that use the female ghost as the friendly and inviting narrator for tourists. The book concludes with a comparison of the British and American versions of the television hit Being Human, where the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity.

Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550-1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. Although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. Chesters describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the 'haunted house', the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigne, as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity. It will be of interest to any scholar or student working in the field of early modern European history, literature or thought.

This fascinating and insightful tour through present-day meetings of Spiritualists, UFOlogists, and dowsers illuminates our obsession with the paranormal and challenges the misunderstanding of the paranormal as a marginal or inconsequential feature of America's religious landscape. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 75 percent of Americans believe in some form of paranormal activity. The United States has had a collective fascination with the paranormal since the mid-1800s, and it remains an integral part of our culture. Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America examines three of the most vibrant paranormal gatherings in the United States-Lily Dale, a Spiritualist summer camp; the Roswell UFO Festival; and the American Society of Dowsers' annual convention of "water witches"-to explore and explain the reasons for our obsession with the paranormal. Both academically informed and thoroughly entertaining, this book takes readers on a "road trip" through our nation, guided by professor of American religion Darryl V. Caterine, PhD. The author interprets seemingly unrelated case studies of phantasmagoria collectively as an integral part of the modern discourse about "nature" as ultimate reality. Along the way, Dr. Caterine reveals how Americans' interest in the paranormal is rooted in their anxieties about cultural, political, and economic instability-and in a historic sense of alienation and homelessness. Chronologies focusing on the main developments in Spiritualist, UFOlogical, and dowsing history Photographs of materials, culture, and events at Lily Dale, the Roswell UFO Festival, and The American Society of Dowsers annual convention taken by the author A bibliography of authoritative scholarly works, primary texts, and theoretical frameworks pertinent to the study of Spiritualism, UFOlogy, and dowsing

Sigmund Freud and The Forsyth Case uses newly discovered primary sources to investigate one of Sigmund Freud's most mysterious clinical experiences, the Forsyth case. Maria Pierri begins with a preliminary illustration of the case, its historical context, and how it connects to Freud's interests in 'thought-transmission', or telepathy. Sigmund Freud and The Forsyth Case details Pierri's attempts to recover the lost original case notes, which are published here for the first time, to identify the patient involved and to set the case into the broader frame of Freud's work. The book also explores Freud's further investigations into thought-transmission, focusing around a meeting of the Secret Committee in October 1919 and his clinical work with his own daughter Anna. Occultism and the Origins of Psychoanalysis traces the origins of key psychoanalytic ideas back to their roots in hypnosis and the occult. Maria Pierri follows Sigmund Freud's early interest in 'thought transmission', now known as telepathy. Freud's private investigations led to discussions with other leading figures, including Sandor Ferenczi, with whom he held a 'dialogue of the unconsciouses', and Carl Jung. Freud and Ferenczi's work assessed how fortune tellers could read the past from a client, inspiring their investigations into countertransference, the analytic relationship, unconscious communication and mother-infant relationality. Pierri clearly links modern psychoanalytic practice with Freud's interests in the occult using primary sources, some of which have never before been published in English. These books will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, Freudian ideas, psychoanalytic theory, the occult, spirituality and the history of psychology.

Once associated with astrology and occultist prophecy, the art of interpreting personal character based on facial and other physical features dates back to antiquity. About Face tells the intriguing story of how physiognomics became particularly popular during the Enlightenment, no longer as a mere parlor game but as an empirically grounded discipline. The story expands to illuminate an entire tradition within German culture, stretching from Goethe to the rise of Nazism. In About Face, Richard T. Gray explores the dialectical reversal - from the occult to the scientific realm - that entered physiognomic thought in the late eighteenth century, beginning with the positivistic writings of Swiss pastor Johann Caspar Lavater. Originally claimed to promote understanding and love, physiognomics devolved into a system aimed at valorizing a specific set of physical, moral, and emotional traits and stamping everything else as ""deviant."" This development not only reinforced racial, national, and characterological prejudices but also lent such beliefs a presumably scientific grounding. In the period following World War I, physiognomics experienced yet another unprecedented boom in popularity. Gray explains how physiognomics had by then become a highly respected ""super-discipline"" that embraced many prominent strands of German thought: the Romantic philosophy of nature, the ""life philosophy"" propagated by Dilthey and Nietzsche, the cultural pessimism of Schopenhauer, Husserl's method of intuitive observation, Freudian psychoanalysis, and early-twentieth-century eugenics and racial biology. A rich exploration of German culture, About Face offers fresh insight into the intellectual climate that allowed the dangerous thinking of National Socialism to take hold.

This book contains 11 essays and a comprehensive bibliography. The essays reveal the extent to which Philip K. Dick's personal obsessions pre-figured postmodernist concerns with humanity's self-alienation, cultural and personal paranoia, and the politics of simulation, deceit, and self-deception. The contributors reveal how Dick's ontological concerns, stated in his repeated questioning of "What is real?," are also political concerns. Thus, they examine the philosophical and religious foundations on which his work rests, offering much-needed arguments which reveal both his philosophical depth and the extent to which he drew from esoteric and occult religions. His cultural critique also receives significant exposition, as the contributors reveal how Dick's fiction enacts the larger cultural struggles of cold war America, with its conflicting private visions and public realities, and its personal and political loyalties. The contributors argue for the significance of heretofore neglected or marginalized texts of Dick as well, including in their discussions many early short stories from the early 1950s and neglected novels of the mid-1960s, arguing that there is a need to understand how Dick shaped (or misshaped) his fictions so as to reimagine the life of his society.

The southwest Virginia murder trials of a young schoolteacher named Edith Maxwell made her a cause celebre of the 1930s. No newspaper reader or radio listener could avoid hearing of her case in 1935 or 1936, and few magazines neglected to run at least one story on the case. In the media attention that it received, the Maxwell case rivaled the Scopes monkey trial of the 1920s, and for some it seemed to involve many of the same sociological issues--the conflict between modernism and tradition, between urban and rural values, between the sexes, and between generations. Feminist organizations like the National Women's Party and other women's business and professional organizations rallied to Edith's defense because women were not allowed on criminal juries in Virginia in the 1930s.

This is the first modern study of Agrippa's occult philosophy as a coherent part of his intellectual work. By demonstrating his sophistication, it challenges traditional interpretations of Agrippa as an intellectual dilettante, and uses modern theory and philosophy to elucidate the intricacies of his thought. It also argues for a new, interdisciplinary approach to magic and its place within early modern culture, using a transhistorical conversational model to understand and interpret the texts. The analysis walks the reader through the text of "De occulta philosophia," Agrippa's 1533 masterpiece, explicating the often hidden structure and argument of the work. This volume will especially interest early modern intellectual historians, historians of religions, and scholars interested in the history of linguistic philosophy.

India and the Occult explores the reception of Indian spirituality among Western occultists through case studies. Rather than focusing on the activities of Theosophical Society, India and the Occult looks at the 'hard-core' occultism, in particular the British 20th century currents associated with Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth Grant, etc.

In the first chapters of this book we simultaneously follow two threads. While considering the lives of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria in their nineteenth-century incarnations and in earlier incarnations, we examine the planetary configurations accompanying not only their conception, birth, and death, but also various significant events in their lives. In this way we experience how these two perspectives-the biographical and the astrological-weave together and are intimately interconnected. As illuminating as this is, the author also indicates however that astrological calculation alone can never suffice for the truly deep biographical research into karma and reincarnation demonstrated in this work. The author shows that although it is clear that an individual's destiny is connected with the positions of the celestial bodies-that certain regular occurrences are evident-nonetheless no strict regularities exist. He maintains moreover that a certain level of clairvoyance is requisite for any serious astrological study of destiny; even more-that real astrology requires initiation. Such astrological research, when successfully carried out as it is here, relating salient celestial configurations to the life-drama of well-known historical personalities, reads like fine literature. On a practical level this work illustrates several important new tools for the astrologer: how to calculate hermetic charts, how to cast horoscopes not only of birth and death but also of conception (including the astrological significance of the embryonic period between conception and birth), and then also how to apply these various horoscopes in describing the spiral of life that unfolds in seven-year periods during the course of a person's earthly existence. All this reveals profound and fascinating regularities-among them the discovery that stellar configurations during the embryonic period are reflected again and again in the subsequent periods of life. Quite new for most readers will be the author's treatment of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, indicating that the names given these planets are deeply meaningful in the light of spiritual science. To make his case he extends Rudolf Steiner's description of cosmic evolution by drawing upon Greek mythology, particularly Orphic cosmology. This book by Robert Powell is of the greatest possible interest. Professor Konrad Rudni_ki Astronomical Observatory Jagiellonian University Cracow, Poland

In ancient Greece and Rome, dreams were believed by many to offer insight into future events. Artemidorus' Oneirocritica, a treatise on dream-divination and compendium of dream-interpretations written in Ancient Greek in the mid-second to early-third centuries AD, is the only surviving text from antiquity that instructs its readers in the art of using dreams to predict the future. In it, Artemidorus discusses the nature of dreams and how to interpret them, and provides an encyclopaedic catalogue of interpretations of dreams relating to the natural, human, and divine worlds. In this volume, Harris-McCoy offers a revised Greek text of the Oneirocritica with facing English translation, a detailed introduction, and scholarly commentary. Seeking to demonstrate the richness and intelligence of this understudied text, he gives particular emphasis to the Oneirocritica's composition and construction, and its aesthetic, intellectual, and political foundations and context.

Nasr argues that the current ecological crisis has been exacerbated by the reductionist view of nature that has been advanced by modern secular science. What is needed, he believes, if the recovery of the truth to which the great enduring religions all attest: that nature is sacred.

An unabridged edition to include: Wherein I Bow to the Reader - A Prelude to the Quest - A Magician Out of Egypt - I Meet A Messiah - The Anchorite of the Adyar River - The Yoga Which Conquers Death - The Sage Who Never Speaks - With The Spiritual Head of South India - The Hill of the Holy Beacon - Among The Magicians And Holy Men - The Wonder-Worker of Benares - Written in the Stars - The Garden of the Lord - At the Parsee Messiah's Headquarters - A Strange Encounter - In a Jungle Hermitage - Tablets of Forgotten Truth

This book starts with a meticulous explanation of terminology used in astronomy and astrology. This can be considered as a splendid example of how to explain strictly scientific notions to readers who are not necessarily skilled in the exact sciences. From an astronomical point of view, the most interesting part of the work is the presentation of the old Egyptian world system, which the author concludes was the same as the system of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). He considers this astronomical system not just as a transitory historical conception, but as something which possesses permanent value. The author's deep historical studies made it possible for him also to solve the problem of the interchange of Mercury and Venus, something indicated many years ago by Rudolf Steiner. This is an important achievement in the history of astronomy. The main astrological finding of this book is that the zodiac of the stars (sidereal zodiac) - as employed by the Babylonians, Egyptians, and ancient Greeks - is the authentic zodiac. Moreover, the auther promotes a new type of astrological chart (hermetic chart) for the conception, birth, and death of personalities under consideration, in addition to the customary geocentric horoscope and in place of the heliocentric horoscope promoted by Willi Sucher (1902-1985). With the hermetic chart the auther places a new tool in the hands of astrologers and opens up new possibilities for astrology as a science. On this basis he develops his two "laws" of reincarnation, illustrating them by striking examples. These "laws" express themselves by way of certain planetary configurations coinciding at the moments of birth and death in successive incarnations. He believes that with these "laws" the significance of the tropical zodiac is disproved. This work of Robert Powell, presenting a new astrological system, is a valuable step in the development of a new wisdom of the stars in line with the ideas of Willi Sucher. Willi Sucher's books and articles are full of charm - deep in a spiritual sense - representing a star wisdom in an embryonic state. With this book by Robert Powell, the ideas of Willi Sucher are born as an earthly reality and something new is brought into the world. Professor Konrad Rudni_ki Astronomical Observatory Jagiellonian University Cracow, Poland

Shamanism is part of the spiritual life of nearly all Native North Americans. This bibliography gives the reader access to a wealth of information on shamanism from the Bering Strait to the Mexican border and from Maine to Florida. It includes articles and books focusing on the spiritual connections of Native Americans to the world through shamans. The books covered compare practices from tribe to tribe, make distinctions between witchcraft or sorcery and shamanism, and discuss the artifacts and tools of the trade. Many are well illustrated, including collections from the nineteenth century.

This study of modernism's high imperial, occult-exotic affiliations presents many well-known figures from the period 1880-1960 in a new light. Modernism and the Occult traces the history of modernist engagement with 'irregular', heterodox and imported knowledge.

Ren Gunon (1886-1951) is undoubtedly one of the luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of recent philosophies. His oeuvre of 26 volumes is providential for the modern seeker: pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, at the same time it directs the reader to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization. The present volume, first published in 1958 by Gunon's friend and collaborator Paul Chacornac, whose bookstore, journal (first called Le Voile d'Isis, later changed to tudes Traditionnelles), and publishing venture-ditions Traditionnelles-were so instrumental in furthering Gunon's work, was the first full-length biography of this extraordinary man to appear, and has served as the foundation for the many later biographies that have appeared in French, as well as the lone biography in English, Ren Gunon and the Future of the West, by Robin Waterfield. Its translation and publication in conjunction with The Collected Works of Ren Gunon represents an important step in the effort to bring Gunon's oeuvre before a wider public.

A Dweller on Two Planets was "channeled" to FREDERICK SPENSER OLIVER (1866-1899) at his Northern California home near Mount Shasta over a period of three years, beginning when he was seventeen. The true author, according to Oliver, was Phylos the Thibetan, a spirit and one-time inhabitant of the lost continent of Atlantis. Oliver claimed not to have written any of the text, asserting here that he was merely transmitting that which Phylos revealed to him. In fact, professed Oliver, the manuscript was dictated to him out of sequence (much of it backward) so that he could not interfere with the outcome. In this classic of new age and spiritual literature, Phylos describes in rich detail the culture, politics, architecture, and science of Atlantis, as well as its demise. He addresses karma and reincarnation, and predicts technological innovations in the 20th century that match and even exceed those of Atlantis. Supporters maintain that many of those predictions came true. Read for yourself and decide.

This classic study of the French magician Eliphas Levi and the occult revival in France is at last available again after being out of print and highly sought after for many years. Its central focus is Levi himself (1810-1875), would-be priest, revolutionary socialist, utopian visionary, artist, poet and, above all, author of a number of seminal books on magic and occultism. It is largely thanks to Levi, for example, that the Tarot is so widely used today as a divinatory method and a system of esoteric symbolism. The magicians of the Golden Dawn were strongly influenced by him, and Aleister Crowley even believed himself to be Levi's reincarnation. The book is not only about Levi, however, but also covers the era of which he was a part and the remarkable figures who preceded and followed him the esoteric Freemasons and Illuminati of the late 18th century, and later figures such as the Rosicrucian magus Josephin Peladan, the occultist Papus (Gerard Encausse), the Counter-Pope Eugene Vintras, and the writer J.-K. Huysmans, whose work drew strongly on occult themes. These people were avatars of a set of traditions which are now seen as an important part of the western heritage and which are gaining increasing attention in the academy. Christopher McIntosh's vivid account of this richly fascinating era in the history of occultism remains as fresh and compelling as ever.

"The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions," wrote Washington Irving in the 1820s. This part of New York, straddling the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, is still rife with stories of the paranormal, including a temperance reformer who haunts the Bull's Head Inn, a floating ball of fire at the College of Saint Rose, the ghost girl of the Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie, the spirits of West Point, UFOs at Indian Point 3 nuclear power plant, and the phantoms of Smalley's Inn in Carmel.

Through in-depth interviews with 22 New Agers and Neo-Pagans, this study proposes a new model of religious identity from a sociological standpoint. The analysis demonstrates that in spite of their great diversity of beliefs and lack of strong organizational ties, a discernible community of alternative spiritualists does exist. This volume will appeal not only to scholars of the sociology of religion, but also to sociologists interested in community building, social movements, and self-identity.