Faunalia is a controversial Pagan festival with a reputation for being wild and emotionally intense. It lasts five days, 80 people attend, and the two main rituals run most of the night. In the tantalisingly erotic Baphomet rite, participants encounter a hermaphroditic deity, enter a state of trance and dance naked around a bonfire. In the Underworld rite participants role play their own death, confronting grief and suffering. These rituals are understood as "shadow work" - a Jungian term that refers to practices that creatively engage repressed or hidden aspects of the self. Sex, Death and Witchcraft is a powerful application of relational theory to the study of religion and contemporary culture. It analyses Faunalia's rituals in terms of recent innovations in the sociology of religion and religious studies that focus on relational etiquette, lived religion, embodiment and performance. The sensuous and emotionally intense ritual performances at Faunalia transform both moral orientations and self-understandings. Participants develop an ethical practice that is individualistic, but also relational, and aesthetically mediated. Extensive extracts from interviews describe the rituals in participants' own words. The book combines rich and evocative description of the rituals with careful analysis of the social processes that shape people's experiences at this controversial Pagan festival.

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.

This book examines the lives of the famous Russian painter, thinker, and mystic Nikolai Roerich and his wife, Elena Roerich, the "mother" of Agni Yoga esoteric teaching. Extensively researched, it focuses on the couple's spiritual quest, resulting in their gradual transformation under the influence of theosophy, spiritualism and Elena's psychic "fiery experience" into mystics and gurus who fashioned their new version of the "myth of the Masters," the invisible guides of humanity. Special attention is given to N. Roerich's travels in Central Asia and Far East, his cultural and public activities and particularly his Buddho-Communist utopia. The myth of the Masters revived will appeal to those interested in New Age esotericism, mysticism, and Russian thought in the first half of the 20th century.

"Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960" is an anthology that investigates the impact of the Fifteen-Year War (1931-1945) on artistic practices and brings together twenty scholars including art historians, historians, and museum curators from the United States, Canada, France, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. This will be the first art-historical anthology that examines responses to the war within and outside Japan in the wartime and postwar period. The anthology will scrutinize official and unofficial war artists who recorded, propagated, or resented the war; explore the unprecedented transnationality of artistic activity under Japan s colonial expansion; and consider the role of today s museum institutions in remembering the war through art. Contributors include: Asato Ikeda, Aya Lousa McDonald, Ming Tiampo, Akihisa Kawata, Mikiko Hirayama, Mayu Tsuruya, Michael Lucken, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Mark H. Sandler, Maki Kaneko, Kendall Brown, Reita Hirase, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Kari Shepherdson-Scott, Aida-Yuen Wong, Hyeshin Kim, Laura Hein, and Julia Adeney Thomas.

For some eighty-five years--between, roughly, 1725 and 1810--the American colonies were agitated by what can only be described as a revolutionary movement. This was not the well-known political revolution that culminated in the War of Independence, but a revolution in religious and ethical thought. Its proponents called their radical viewpoint "deism." They challenged Christian orthodoxy and instead endorsed a belief system that celebrated the power of human reason and saw nature as God's handiwork and the only revelation of divine will. This illuminating discussion of American deism presents an overview of the main tenets of deism, showing how its influence rose swiftly and for a time became a highly controversial subject of debate in the colonies. The deists were students of the Enlightenment and took a keen interest in the scientific study of nature. They were thus critical of orthodox Christianity for its superstitious belief in miracles, persecution of dissent, and suppression of independent thought and expression. At the heart of his book are profiles of six "rational infidels," most of whom are quite familiar to Americans as founding fathers or colonial patriots: Benjamin Franklin (the ambivalent deist), Thomas Jefferson (a critic of Christian supernaturalism but an admirer of its ethics), Ethan Allen (the rough-edged "frontier deist"), Thomas Paine (the arch iconoclast and author of The Age of Reason), Elihu Palmer (the tireless crusader for deism and perhaps its most influential proponent), and Philip Freneau (a poet whose popular verses combined deism with early romanticism). This is a fascinating study of America's first culture war, one that in many ways has continued to this day.

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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.

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.