This is the third volume of the immensely useful "Nag Hammadi Bibliography," the first volume of which covered 1948-1969 and was the first publication in the Nag Hammadi Studies series. The second volume covered 1970-1994. This third volume provides a complete integration of Supplements II/1-II/8 to the Bibliography as published in "Novum Testamentum" 1998-2008, with additions and corrections. This latest update contains 3,063 entries, with the set of three volumes containing 11,580 entries. Nag Hammadi and Gnostic studies continue to be of critical importance for the study of ancient religions in the Graeco-Roman world and for the study of the world of early Christianity, and the present bibliography provides an indispensable reference tool for work in these fields.

There has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of the US population that is not religious. However, there is, to date, very little research on the social movement that is organizing to serve the needs of and advocate for the nonreligious in the US. This is a book about the rise and structure of organized secularism in the United States. By organized secularism we mean the efforts of nonreligious individuals to build institutions, networks, and ultimately a movement that serves their interests in a predominantly religious society. Researchers from various fields address questions such as: What secularist organizations exist? Who are the members of these organizations? What kinds of organizations do they create? What functions do these organizations provide for their members? How do the secularist organizations of today compare to those of the past? And what is their likely impact on the future of secularism? For anyone trying to understand the rise of the nonreligious in the US, this book will provide valuable insights into organized efforts to normalize their worldview and advocate for their equal treatment in society.

This is the first investigation of the history of Russian Freemasonry, based on the premise that the facts of the Russian Enlightenment preclude application of the interpretative framework commonly used for the history of western thought. Coverage includes the development of early Russian masonry, the formation of the Novikov circle in Moscow, the programme of Rosicrucianism and its Russian variant and, finally, the clash between the Rosicrucians and the State.

A clear, concise and detailed historical analysis of the eclectic and beautiful visual and material culture of paganism. The book begins with an introduction that clarifies what we mean by ‘pagan’. It traces the pre-Christian origins of paganism, the development of the different aspects of pagan belief over centuries and how materials from the pre-Christian religions of Europe, North Africa and West Asia are built into the practices of today’s Pagans. The book is then organized into three broad sections – Ancient Ways, Ritual and Community – each containing three themed chapters. For each of the nine themed chapters, illustrated narrative text is interspersed with double-page presentations of the key figures, key stories and key iconography relevant to that theme. Paintings and artefacts are examined in detail, identifying and explaining the symbolism and the stories depicted in each. As the book progresses, readers will not only come to understand the many symbols that define pagan religions and practices, but will also discover the beliefs and philosophies of pagans from around the world, from polytheism to pantheism and from magic and ritual to ideas about the afterlife.

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1978 and 1992, draw together research by leading academics in the area of the occult and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The collection examines occultism from a broad range of disciplines, from shamanism and the occult tarot, to the esoteric and spiritualism. It includes volumes across the disciplines of religion, covering new religious movements, spiritualism, ritual and magic practices. The three books that comprise this set include investigations into the evolution of occultism, as well as the history and practices of the occult as a religious movement. This collection brings back into print insightful and detailed books and will be a must-have resource for academics and students, not only of religion and anthropology, but also of history and psychology.

The Golden Dawn is one of most prolific and legendary of all Western secret and esoteric societies. Hundreds of people, from the rich and famous to the common man, have walked through its halls of the neophyte. Very few stood as tall in the history of the occult sciences as Arthur Edward Waite, the creator of the Rider Waite Tarot Deck. He founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in England in 1915. For the first time in more than 80 years, these secret ceremonies are revealed and made available to you. Included in this volume are the following deeply spiritual rites: 1) Invocation of the Rosicrucian current during the Equinoxes, 2) Celebration of the Solstices, 3) Ceremony of Consecrating the Rosicrucian Temple in the First and Second Orders, 4) Consecrating the Temple in the Highly Secret Third Order, 5) Ceremony for Enthroning the Keeper of the Sacred Mysteries, and 6) The Ceremony Of Consecration On The Threshold Of Sacred Mystery For The Watchers of the Holy House. Be part of a historical moment in the tradition of the Western Mysteries. If you are an aspirant of the Rosicrucian Mysteries or the Golden Dawn Tradition and looking for moving mystical ceremonies filled with high levels of esoteric wisdom, you will find them in this book.

Whether the recently settled religious minorities, Muslims, in particular, can be accommodated as religious groups in European countries has become a central political question and threatens to create long-term fault lines. In this collection of essays, Tariq Modood argues that to grasp the nature of the problem we have to see how Muslims have become a target of a cultural racism, Islamophobia. Yet, the problem is not just one of anti-racism but of an understanding of multicultural citizenship, of how minority identities, including those formed by race, ethnicity and religion, can be incorporated into national identities so all can have a sense of belonging together. This means that the tendency amongst some to exclude religious identities from public institutions and the re-making of national identities has to be challenged. Modood suggests that this can be done in a principled yet pragmatic way by drawing on Western Europe's moderate political secularism and eschewing forms of secularism that offer religious groups a second-class citizenship.

The Indigo Child concept is a contemporary New Age redefinition of self. Indigo Children are described in their primary literature as a spiritually, psychically, and genetically advanced generation. Born from the early 1980s, the Indigo Children are thought to be here to usher in a new golden age by changing the world's current social paradigm. However, as they are "paradigm busters", they also claim to find it difficult to fit into contemporary society. Indigo Children recount difficult childhoods and school years, and the concept has also been used by members of the community to reinterpret conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) and autism. Cynics, however, can claim that the Indigo Child concept is an example of "special snowflake" syndrome, and parodies abound. This book is the fullest introduction to the Indigo Child concept to date. Employing both on- and offline ethnographic methods, Beth Singler objectively considers the place of the Indigo Children in contemporary debates around religious identity, self-creation, online participation, conspiracy theories, race and culture, and definitions of the New Age movement.

How-and why- were UFOs so prevalent in both conspiracy theories and the New Age milieu in the post-Cold War period? In this ground-breaking book, David G. Robertson argues that UFOs symbolized an uncertainty about the boundaries between scientific knowledge and other ways of validating knowledge, and thus became part of a shared vocabulary. Through historical and ethnographic case studies of three prominent figures-novelist and abductee Whitley Strieber; environmentalist and reptilian proponent David Icke; and David Wilcock, alleged reincarnation of Edgar Cayce-the investigation reveals that millennial conspiracism offers an explanation as to why the prophesied New Age failed to arrive-it was prevented from arriving by malevolent, hidden others. Yet millennial conspiracism constructs a counter-elite, a gnostic third party defined by their special knowledge. An overview of the development of UFO subcultures from the perspective of religious studies, UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age is an innovative application of discourse analysis to the study of present day alternative religion.

This volume brings together for the first time case studies on secularists of the 19th and early 20th centuries in national and transnational perspectives including examples from all over Europe. Its focus is on freethinkers taken as secular avant-gardes and early promoters of secularity. The authors of this book deal with multiple historical, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds and, in these contexts, analyze freethinkers' organizations, projects, networks, and contributions to forming a secular worldview, in particular, the promotion of concrete undertakings such as civil baptism or initiatives to leave church. Next to this secularist agenda, the contributions also take into account ambivalences and difficulties freethinkers were faced with, namely, the tensions between a national self-image and the transnational direction the movement has taken; the regional base of many projects and their transregional horizon; freethinkers' cultural programs and their immanent political mission; and the dialogue with respectively the conceptual distinction from other secularist groups. Readers interested in the history of secularity will learn that it was a heterogeneous enterprise already in its beginnings. This set the course for later European and global developments.

A surprisingly large number of English poets have either belonged to a secret society, or been strongly influenced by its tenets. One of the best known examples is Christopher Smart's membership of the Freemasons, and the resulting influence of Masonic doctrines on A Song to David. However, many other poets have belonged to, or been influenced by not only the Freemasons, but the Rosicrucians, Gormogons and Hell-Fire Clubs. First published in 1986, this study concentrates on five major examples: Smart, Burns, William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling, as well as a number of other poets. Marie Roberts questions why so many poets have been powerfully attracted to the secret societies, and considers the effectiveness of poetry as a medium for conveying secret emblems and ritual. She shows how some poets believed that poetry would prove a hidden symbolic language in which to reveal great truths. The beliefs of these poets are as diverse as their practice, and this book sheds fascinating light on several major writers.

Between the years of 1898 and 1926, Edward Westermarck spent a total of seven years in Morocco, visiting towns and tribes in different parts of the country, meeting local people and learning about their language and culture; his findings are noted in this two-volume set, first published in 1926. The first volume contains extensive reference material, including Westermarck's system of transliteration and a comprehensive list of the tribes and districts mentioned in the text. The chapters in this, the second volume, explore such areas as the rites and beliefs connected with the Islamic calendar, agriculture, and childbirth. This title will fascinate any student or researcher of anthropology with an interest in the history of ritual, culture and religion in Morocco.

Having already published a bibliography on Annie Besant, Theodore Besterman in this book continued with the story of her life. She was a prominent British Theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator who lived between 1847 and 1933. Originally published in 1934, this work is fascinating for anyone with an interest in Annie Besant's life specifically or in any of the areas in which she became a household name.

The enigmatic relation between religion and science still presents a challenge to European societies and to ideas about what it means to be 'modern.' This book argues that European secularism, rather than pushing back religious truth claims, in fact has been religiously productive itself. The institutional establishment of new disciplines in the nineteenth century, such as religious studies, anthropology, psychology, classical studies, and the study of various religious traditions, led to a professionalization of knowledge about religion that in turn attributed new meanings to religion. This attribution of meaning resulted in the emergence of new religious identities and practices. In a dynamic that is closely linked to this discursive change, the natural sciences adopted religious and metaphysical claims and integrated them in their framework of meaning, resulting in a special form of scientific religiosity that has gained much influence in the twentieth century. Applying methods that come from historical discourse analysis, the book demonstrates that religious semantics have been reconfigured in the secular sciences. Ultimately, the scientification of religion perpetuated religious truth claims under conditions of secularism.

The New Age movement is a twentieth-century socio-cultural phenomenon in the Western world with Glastonbury as one of its major centers. Through experimenting with a number of ways of analyzing this movement, the authors were able to develop a novel theory of social religious movements of broad applicability. Based around contradictions relating to such central anthropological concepts as communitas, egalitarianism, individualism, holism, and autonomy, it reveals the processes by which, having abandoned a mainstream lifestyle, people come to build up a counter-culture way of life. Drawing on their own work on tribal shamanistic religions, the authors are able to point out interesting similarities between the latter and the Glastonbury New Age movement. Not only that: their model allows them to explain such wide-ranging social and religious movements as the Hutterites, the Kibbutz, and Green communes. In fact, the authors argue, these movements may be regarded as variations of the Glastonbury type.

The New Age movement is a twentieth-century socio-cultural phenomenon in the Western world with Glastonbury as one of its major centers. Through experimenting with a number of ways of analyzing this movement, the authors were able to develop a novel theory of social religious movements of broad applicability. Based around contradictions relating to such central anthropological concepts as communitas, egalitarianism, individualism, holism, and autonomy, it reveals the processes by which, having abandoned a mainstream lifestyle, people come to build up a counter-culture way of life. Drawing on their own work on tribal shamanistic religions, the authors are able to point out interesting similarities between the latter and the Glastonbury New Age movement. Not only that: their model allows them to explain such wide-ranging social and religious movements as the Hutterites, the Kibbutz, and Green communes. In fact, the authors argue, these movements may be regarded as variations of the Glastonbury type.

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.

The Latino population is a pastorally challenging polyculture. This diversity requires spiritual caregivers to approach every Hispanic individual with humbleness. "Cada persona es un mundo," "every person is a world," says Montilla. To equip professionals in ministry for their ministry with and for Latino/as, Montilla centers his presentation on families and rituals at the heart and soul of the Hispanic community as the key to caregiving. In that context he unfolds a variegated picture of the particular cultural guideposts for Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. today, especially their symbols and rituals, attitudes toward health and healing, abiding faith, and contemporary quest for creative agency and dignity. He closes by exploring pastoral strategies with issues of discrimination and racism, and contemporary issues in providing pastoral counseling with Latinas and Latinos.