Using south-western England as a focus for considering the continued place of witchcraft and demonology in provincial culture in the period between the English and French revolutions, Barry shows how witch-beliefs were intricately woven into the fabric of daily life, even at a time when they arguably ceased to be of interest to the educated.

This fascinating book explores how traumatic experience interacts with unconscious phantasy based in folklore, the supernatural and the occult. Drawing upon trauma research, case study vignettes, and psychoanalytic theory, it explains how therapists can use literature, the arts, and philosophy to work with clients who feel cursed and manifest self-sabotaging states. The book examines the challenges that can arise when working with this client population and illustrates how to work through them while navigating potent transferences and projective identifications. It's an important read for students, psychotherapists, and counselors in the mental health field.

Not only does this book give a well-researched account of the politicization of Haitian Voodoo and the Voodooization of Haitian politics, it also lays the ground for the development of creative policies by the state vis-a-vis the cult. It is an indispensable research tool for the students of Afro-American, Caribbean and African societies in particular, and for religionists and political scientists in general.

Available as a single volume or as part of the 10 volume set "Frances Yeats: Selected Works"

Non-sensationalist historical account of Nazi occultism Explores both prewar and postwar manifestations of this phenomenon Draws on a global set of examples and case studies

An interdisciplinary study of the supernatural and the occult in fin-de-siecle France (1870-1914), the present volume examines the explosion of interest in devil-worship, magic and mysticism both from a historical perspective and through analysis of key literary works of the period.

Blending the allure of the supernatural with keen historical insights and more than 500 photos, this enchanting chronicle of magic around the world will bewitch skeptics and true believers alike. Magic and the occult have held humanity in their thrall for thousands of years. This sweeping history traces its origins across time and culture—from the protective amulets of ancient Egypt to ceremonial magic in India, Celtic paganism to modern magic tricks. National Geographic Book of Magic and the Occult illuminates this enthralling world across more than 90,000 years of history. You’ll meet witches and wizards, healers and alchemists, discovering the legends behind them and how they have enriched modern culture. You’ll also encounter a host of spellbinding subjects, including: Mystical moments, including spooky gatherings, strange happenings, and ghost stories Magic in pop culture, from Harry Houdini to Harry Potter Places of power, from Mount Fuji to “phantom” islands like Hy-Brasil Magical creatures like dragons and the Loch Ness Monster The art of divination, including the Chinese Zodiac, numerology, and tarot Modern magic, from neopaganism to astrology and herbalism Filled with more than 500 vivid illustrations and dynamic maps, this bewitching book is the true story of magical beliefs around the world.

Discover your fortune, change your destiny. Use your star sign to reach your fitness goals, kickstart your career with crystal energy, sort out of your love life with tarot or embark on some deep self-reflection with palmistry. With expert guidance from a Romany-Gypsy psychic and diviner, The Modern Oracle will teach you the key methods of fortune telling and divination, helping you answer life's big questions and solve everyday dramas. Find out what your future holds.

Tales of alien abductions, miraculous relics, and haunted castles have attracted believers and skeptics across the globe for centuries. Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell tackles the world's most seemingly inexplicable myths in Adventures in Paranormal Investigation.

With four decades of experience in the field, Nickell employs skepticism and scientific analysis to pull truth from the mires of false evidence and trickery that surround both old and new legends and mysteries. Unlike authors who engage in hype and sensationalism in order to foster or debunk myths, Nickell approaches each case with a rational and scientific approach intended to find the truth. Occam's Razor -- all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best one -- is a principal instrument in his investigative toolbox, as well as the belief that it is the claimant's responsibility to provide the extraordinary proof required in such extraordinary cases.

Adventures in Paranormal Investigation features Nickell's on-site explorations in unusual phenomena. Among the forty unique cases, Nickell examines mysteries ranging from snake charmers who purport to hold influence over the reptiles, to the Holocaust victims who reportedly haunt a gas chamber in Dachau, to Lake Simcoe's resident lake monster Igopogo in Canada. In addition to the case studies, Nickell analyzes how the propensity to fantasize can affect human perceptions of and belief in paranormal activity and how his personal experience with the paranormal was altered when intuition led to the discovery of a daughter he didn't know existed.

More than just another myth-busting text, Adventures in Paranormal Investigation brings together reason and scientific analyses to explain both the phenomena and the role of human perception therein, establishing Nickell as the foremost paranormal investigator of our time.

An investigation into the underpinnings and superstructures of the Pagan world view Pagan religions have tended to be more concerned with practice that with theory and in a system that has no dogma - no legislated doctrine - that is as it should be. Yet as the movement grows and matures, it is inevitable that we will begin to think in a more abstract way about our models and systems. John Michael Greer has provided a primer on the kinds of ideas and themes that must be included in any discussion of the theology and philosophy of Neo-pagan religions.  Much of the book takes shape in a dialogue with existing ideas in theology, philosophy, and comparative religion. It looks to find a middle ground between too much and too little reference to the work of other scholars to find a comprehensible yet intellectually rigorous middle ground. It aims to be part of a conversation, that stretches out over the centuries.  Voices of polytheist spirituality have had little place in that conversation for many years, but much of value has been said in their absence. The rebirth of polytheism as a living religious tradition in the Western world will inevitably force a reassessment of much of that heritage, and pose challenges to some of its most cherished assumptions.  Yet reassessment is not necessarily rejection, and the traditions of modern polytheism are deeply enough indebted to legacies from the past that an attentive ear to earlier phases of the conversation is not out of place.

The presentation of the magical and mantic in Celtic literature has persistently been dogged by misunderstanding and over-romanticized readings. Among the misconceptions about the ancient and medieval Celtic peoples, the notion of a specifically 'Celtic' astrology remains widespread in the popular mind. This study aims to counter such myth-making, and to demonstrate how a number Irish and Welsh literary writers in the medieval and Early Modern period conceived of portents in the heavens - comets, blood-coloured moons, darkened suns - and what they knew of the complex art of astrology.
Early Irish churchmen felt that the end of the world was imminent, and this book explores the ways in which they saw signs in the heavens as evidence of impending apocalypse, and how they adapted such millenarian imagery for use in native sagas in Irish. It then moves on to an extended discussion of the cloud-divination ascribed to Irish druids in high medieval literary texts; this has sometimes naively been taken as evidence for the actual customs of the druidic caste, but it is shown here to be a development of the later Middle Ages, long after the druids' disappearance. Turning to Wales, the cosmological knowledge of two linked figures is scrutinized: the super-poet Taliesin, and King Arthur's prophet Merlin, whom Geoffrey of Monmouth represented in the mid 12th century as an astrological sage with a purpose-built observatory. Evidence for the knowledge of astrology amongst the learned poets of later medieval Wales is then laid out, with an analysis of a powerful late 15th century poem indicting the evil influence of the planet Saturn; such knowledge seems to have been largely medical in nature, and the book concludes with an examination of a number of Welsh astrological texts in manuscript, setting them against the longest astrological poem in a Celtic language, the mid 17th century Puritan mystic Morgan Llwyd's spiritualizing and evangelical 'Heavenly Science'.

Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams situates the life and fiction of the Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Aren Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic, kabbalah, alchemy and ritual experience in Williams's seven novels of supernatural fantasy. From this specific analysis, he develops more broadly applicable approaches to the serious expression of religious experience in fiction. Roukema shows that esoteric knowledge has frequently been blurred into fiction because of its inherent narrativity and adaptability, particularly by authors already attracted to the syncretism, multivalence and lived fantasy of the modern occult experience.

Explore the ancient art of astrology to fill your every day with magic. The stars have a language all of their own and when understood, they become a timeless and powerful tool. Celestial bodies affect each of us, and understanding their influences and transits can illuminate your challenges, deepen your strengths, and enrich your relationships with yourself and others. This book is an easy-to-understand beginner's guide to the zodiac signs, planets and astrological houses. Learn how they each affect you and find out what crystals and essential oils can give you a boost. Everything is interconnected, and with A Beginner's Guide to Astrology, you can explore how the stars influence who you are while shining a light on who you can be.

Sir James George Frazer originally set out to discover the origins of one ancient custom in Classical Rome - the plucking of the Golden Bough from a tree in the sacred grove of Diana, and the murderous succession of the priesthood there - and was led by his invetigations into a twenty-five year study of primitive customs, superstitions, magic and myth throughout the world. The monumental thirteen-volume work which resulted has been a rich source of anthropological material and a literary masterpiece for more than half a century. Both the wealth of his illustrative material and the broad sweep of his argument can be appreciated in this very readable single volume.

This fascinating book explores how traumatic experience interacts with unconscious phantasy based in folklore, the supernatural and the occult. Drawing upon trauma research, case study vignettes, and psychoanalytic theory, it explains how therapists can use literature, the arts, and philosophy to work with clients who feel cursed and manifest self-sabotaging states. The book examines the challenges that can arise when working with this client population and illustrates how to work through them while navigating potent transferences and projective identifications. It's an important read for students, psychotherapists, and counselors in the mental health field.

Austrian philosopher, playwright, and artist Rudolf Steiner (1861 1925) is perhaps best known as an educational philosopher and reformer, the founder of Steiner (or Waldorf) schools located around the world. Steiner was an active member and leader of the German branch of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society before forming his own Anthroposophical Society. His engagement with the occult stems from his work in theosophy and anthroposophy, philosophies invested in reaching and understanding the 'supersensible' world that relies on a cultivation of body, spirit, and soul. This anonymous translation of the fourth German edition was published by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1914; the first edition was published in Germany in 1909. Steiner asserts in this work the necessary and intrinsic connection between what is possible through cognition with the power of the soul and the spirit. It will be of interest to scholars of spiritual philosophy, spiritual movements, and social psychology.

The lawyer and journalist Henry Steel Olcott (1832 1907) published People from the Other World in 1875. Part 1 of the work is a careful account of Olcott's 1874 investigations into the famous Eddy brothers of Chittenden, Vermont, and their claimed psychic powers. Part 2 is a report into two Philadelphia mediums who claimed to be able to call up two spirits called John and Katie King. The account includes descriptions of s ances, healings, levitation, teleportation and the famous Compton transfiguration. Olcott, a founding member of the Theosophical Society and its first president, was a pioneer of psychical research. This work, deeply influenced by Helena Blavatsky (1831 1891), who he met at Chittenden, is one of his most popular. It offers an important insight into the nineteenth-century fascination with the occult and is a classic example of a Victorian attempt to approach the supernatural with the rigours of scientific investigation.

Non-sensationalist historical account of Nazi occultism Explores both prewar and postwar manifestations of this phenomenon Draws on a global set of examples and case studies

Despite Enlightenment scepticism about the supernatural, stories about spirits were regularly printed and shared throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This case-study in the transmission of a single story (of a young gunsmith near Bristol conjuring spirits, leading to his early death) reveals both how and why successive generations found meaning in such accounts. It shows the workings of an expanding national print culture, but also the continued importance of locality, oral culture and manuscript copying, especially among the newly educated. It offers an insight into the culture of Anglican clergy, spiritual autodidacts, evangelical preachers, pioneering astrologers, mesmerists and spiritualists, revealing the on-going appeal of Bible-based providentialism. Initially told as a warning-lesson against meddling with the demonic, the story also appealed to those keen to uphold the existence of spirits, and to various groups who themselves wished to communicate with spirits, while its portrayal of a doomed youth attracted sympathy.