Written with a rare combination of analysis and speculation, this comprehensive study of Javanese religion is one of the few books on the religion of a non-Western people which emphasizes variation and conflict in belief as well as similarity and harmony. The reader becomes aware of the intricacy and depth of Javanese spiritual life and the problems of political and social integration reflected in the religion.
"The Religion of Java" will interest specialists in Southeast Asia, anthropologists and sociologists concerned with the social analysis of religious belief and ideology, students of comparative religion, and civil servants dealing with governmental policy toward Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Among the topics considered in this classic study are world origins and supernatural powers, attitudes toward the dead, the medicine man and shaman, hunting and gathering rituals, war and planting ceremonies, and newer religions, such as the Ghost Dance and the Peyote Religion.
"The distinctive contribution of ["Red Man's Religion"] is the treatment of topics, the insight and the perspective of the author, and her ability to transmit these to the reader. . . . Trais and aspects of religion are not treated as abstract entitites, to be enumerated and summated, assigned a geographic distribution, and then abandoned. No page is a dry recital; each is an illumination. Insight and wisdom are framed in poetic prose. An offering of information in such a medium merits gratitude."--"American Anthropologist"

Playing God discusses the genre of rituals known as 'Teyyam' extant in the North Malabar region of Kerala State, India. In this elaborately costumed ritual practitioners invoke the spirit of a deity into themselves that constitutes a splendid theophany in which, when the ritual process is over, the devotees are able to talk to the 'god' and invoke his/her blessings and predictions of their future. This book concentrates on the cult of the Muttappan duo of gods, the most popular among the Teyyams of North Malabar. The Muttappan cult, though originating from worship of a forest god by tribal groups and untouchables of the hill districts of North Malabar, is not only popular in Kerala, but also attracts worshippers from all the castes and regions of South India. Playing God analyses the mythology and ritual praxis of the Muttappan cult and examines attempts to integrate the cult into a wider Hinduism by enunciating a new hermeneutic of the legend and rituals based on the Hindu Advaitic tradition. The book also discusses how the Teyyam ritual contrasts significantly with rituals and worship in Brahminical Hinduism. The popularity of the cult is a reflection of the changing relationships between castes in Kerala, involving a closer symbiosis and reflecting the urge by the untouchable groups of Kerala to gain a higher standing and acceptance in Keralan Hindu society. The rituals are rich in theological significance and symbolism, and have links to the performing arts of Kerala such as Kathakali and Ottam Tullal.

After twenty fruitless years on a frustrating spiritual search, Dawn Paul was faced with no other option but to give up. Disheartened and exhausted, she went on holiday to Peru and this changed her life forever. During a visit to Machu Picchu she received a mystical experience, a vision of the Inca, who instructed her to follow the path of the shaman. Feeling she had finally been given the direction she had been looking for all her life, Dawn promptly resigned from her six figure career in a bank and stepped onto the shamanic path. Over the following years Dawn worked worldwide as a shamanic healer and spiritual teacher, assisting many people of all ages, from all races and religions. A Healer of Souls is Dawn s gift to the general public, and to the wider community without which a shaman cannot exist.

The Wheel of the Year in Ancient Egypt isbn 978190695138 The very oldest Egyptian ritual calendar was lunar. The evidence for this is very complex and in the words of Professor Leo Depuydt, "does not exactly jump out at you " This ancient lunar calendar continued a veiled existence alongside the dominant solar or civil year. Many details are lost so the project of this book is to bring together what has survived. Revealed here is a very ancient pantheon of gods, including Set, Min, & Hathor, one for each month of the lunar year. I have provided for them a unique collection of liturgy, ritual and prayers as may have been offered in the homes, sanctuaries and temples of the original Egypt. Many of these feasts of Ancient Egypt were celebrated on the phases of the moon - principally when it was new or full. So whatever your favorite god or goddess, make offerings on either of these days and you will be reviving an old and authentic form of the Ancient Egyptian magical religion. To complete the picture I present over several chapters all the technical details of the lunar month as well as its more well known civil replacement. Here you will find information on how certain key days were calculated when needed. These later chapters also provide related material on the mysteries of the Northern Constellations. Finally there are descriptions of the thirty lunar days of each month and lunar omens. So in total this is the most complete and authoritative guide to the ritual wheel of the year at all stages of its use in the Ancient Egyptian magical religion.

"Christopher White's "Unsettled Minds "makes clear how important new psychologies of religion were for those Protestants navigating their way out of Calvinism and evangelical revivalism. Just as his religious liberals remapped mind and spirit, White has remapped the historical terrain of religion and psychology in American culture. He spotlights not a cultural world absorbed with ecstasy, altered states, or mythic depths, but instead one riveted on measured stages of spiritual growth and effective habits of self-discipline."--Leigh Eric Schmidt, Princeton University
"An important contribution to the growing literature on the history of religious experience and of the distinctive dynamics of Christian interiority in the modern U.S."--Robert Orsi, Northwestern University
"Today, when brain researchers and psychologists are again attempting to explain religion, this remarkable study suggests that we should not be surprised to see religious believers creatively embracing new scientific findings and making use of them for religious purposes unexpected by scientists."--Ann Taves, author of "Fits, Trances, and Visions"

The Raelians came to the attention of the world in 2002 when the spokesperson for Clonaid, a company founded by Raelian followers, announced that the first human clone had been born--a claim that although has not been independently substantiated, prompted outrage and condemnation from scientists, religious organizations, and the White House. Aliens Adored is the first full length, in-depth look at the Raelian movement, a fascinating new religion founded in the 1970s by charismatic prophet, Rael. Born in France as Claude Vorilhon, the former race-car driver started the religion after he experienced a visitation from the aliens (the "elohim") who, in his cosmology, created humans by cloning themselves. The millenarian movement awaits the return of the alien creators, and in the meantime seeks to develop the potential of its adherents through free love, sexual experimentation, opposition to nuclear proliferation and war, and the development of the science of cloning. Sociologist Susan J. Palmer has studied the Raelian movement for more than a decade, observing meetings and rituals, and enjoying unprecedented access to the group's leaders as well as to its rank-and-file members. In Aliens Adored she provides a thorough analysis of the movement, focusing on issues of sexuality, millenarianism, and the impact of the scientific worldview on religion and the environment. Palmer traces Rael's philosophy and the formation of the Raelian subculture. Rael's radical sexual ethics, his gnostic anthropocentricism, and shallow ecotheology offer us a mirror through which we see how our worldviews have been shaped by the forces of globalization, postmodernism, and secular humanism.

In "Kwaio Religion," Roger Keesing examines how the Kwaio, challenged by 110 years of European colonialism and now by the militant Christianity of their own rapidly Westernizing nation, have managed to continue their ancestral ways. Drawing on fieldwork carried out over a lost 20 years, Keesing explores the phenomenological reality of world where one's group includes the living and the dead, where conversations with the spirits, and the sing of their presence and acts, are very much a part of everyday life. He describes conceptions of "mana" and "tabu" that shed revealing light on old issues regarding Oceanic religion. Keesing situates the elegant though largely implicit structures of Kwaio cosmology within a framework of the "political economy of knowledge," examining the distribution of expertise in the community and the uses of religion as ideology, and asking how symbolic systems are perpetuated and changed. Questioning some currently fashionable anthropological approaches to symbolism, myth, ritual, and cosmology--approaches Keesing characterizes as "cultural cryptography"-- "Kwaio Religion" challenges common assumptions about cultural symbols and shared meanings.

ANTHROPOLOGY / SHAMANISM A moving testament to interior ways of knowing. --Publishers Weekly Profound and personal, cosmic and compassionate. . . . Memoir, Andean adventure, and quest for wisdom, the book is an even deeper, wiser, more moving tour of the extraordinary, with Villoldo a refreshing guide, frank amd engaging. --San Francisco Chronicle A narrative rich in myth, history, and metaphor. --Booklist Island of the Sun recounts the American psychologist Alberto Villoldo's return to Peru in search of the Quechua Indian shaman Don Jicaram. The authors' earlier book, Dance of the Four Winds, described Villoldo's first initiation, under Don Jicaram, into the secrets of the Inca Medicine Wheel and the spiritual journey of the Four Winds. Villoldo had begun that journey in the South, "where one goes to confront and shed the past." With use of the powerful mind-altering plant ayahuasca, he had continued to the West, a direction also inhabited by fear and death. Now in Island of the Sun he prepares himself for the journey to the North, where lies the wisdom of the ancient Inca shamans. Traveling from Machu Picchu to the "Island of the Sun," a sacred site in Bolivia, Villoldo uncovers a profound secret about the journey to the East--the journey home. ALBERTO VILLOLDO, Ph.D., is also the author of Dance of the Four Winds, Millenium, Healing States, and Realms of Healing. ERIK JENDRESEN is a playwright and screenwriter.

This volume introduces what has sometimes been called "the third component of western culture". It traces the historical development of those religious traditions which have rejected a world view based on the primacy of pure rationality or doctrinal faith, emphasizing instead the importance of inner enlightenment or gnosis: a revelatory experience which was typically believed to entail an encounter with one's true self as well as with the ground of being, God.

The contributors to this book demonstrate this perspective as fundamental to a variety of interconnected traditions. In Antiquity, one finds the gnostics and hermetics; in the Middle Ages several Christian sects. The medieval Cathars can, to a certain extent, be considered part of the same tradition. Starting with the Italian humanist Renaissance, hermetic philosophy became of central importance to a new religious synthesis that can be referred to as Western Esotericism. The development of this tradition is described from Renaissance hermeticists and practitioners of spiritual alchemy to the emergence of Rosicrucianism and Christian theosophy in the seventeenth century, and from post-enlightenment aspects of Romanticism and occultism to the present-day New Age movement.

"Dance of the Four Winds" recounts the adventures of the American psychologist Alberto Villoldo as he journeys to Peru to explore the visionary ceremonies of the native shamans. Here Quecha masters use the jungle plant "ayahuasca" to further their spiritual progress along the four paths of the Medicine Wheel. Entering a magical realm of enigmatic sorcerers and powerful animal totems, Villoldo confronts the hidden powers of his own mind as he unlocks the secrets of the human psyche.

White Eagle speaks of four major initiations, related to the four elements (earth, air, fire and water). Every experience of life, from the least to the most profound, forms a part of one or other of these four major initiations by which we eventually attain mastery over ourselves, over the circumstances of our life and over the very substance of matter itself.

In the spring of 1935, at Snaketown, Arizona, two Pima Indians recounted and translated their entire traditional creation narrative. Juan Smith, reputedly the last tribesman with extensive knowledge of the Pima version of this story, spoke and sang while William Smith Allison translated into English and Julian Hayden, an archaeologist, recorded Allison's words verbatim. The resulting document, the "Hohokam Chronicles", is the most complete natively articulated Pima creation narrative ever written and a rare example of a single-narrator myth. Now this extraordinary work, composed of thirty-six separate stories, is presented in its entirety for the first time. Beautifully expressed, the narrative constitutes a kind of scripture for a native church, beginning with the creation of the universe out of the void and ending with the establishment in the sixteenth century of present-day villages. Central to the story is the murder/resurrection of a god-man, Siuuhu, who summoned the Pimas and Papagos (Tohono O'odham) as his army of vengeance and brought about the conquest of his murderers, the ancient Hohokam. Donald Bahr extensively annotates the text and supplements it with other Pima-Papago versions of similar stories. Important as a social and historic document, this book adds immeasurably to the growing body of Native American literature and to our knowledge of the development of Pima-Papago culture.

An invitation to embrace your feminine powers, awaken your soul's creativity, and ignite your inner wild magic * Explains how to awaken your spiritual Womb to find strength within and how to reclaim your softness and vulnerability as a feminine superpower * Explores Earth Magic, the Moon Mysteries, Flower of Life teachings, Dragon wisdom, the shamanic powers of grief, the feminine archetypes of the Witch and the Priestess, and powerful goddesses from around the world * Reveals sacred spaces in the world where the power of the Goddess lives on The Womb is the seat of our primal power and intuition--our "wild knowing." Spirit weavers are those who have heard this wild voice from within and have followed that call--embarking on a grail quest to follow the feminine path of magic, awaken to the depths of their soul, and embody their true feminine essence. Inviting you onto the spiral path of the spirit weaver, Seren Bertrand shares wisdom teachings and rituals from the feminine path of magic and her own ancestral lineage of old European witches and faerie folk, spirit keepers and story weavers. She explores Flower of Life teachings, the moon mysteries, and dragon wisdom. She unveils the shamanic powers of grief and deeply examines the feminine archetypes of the witch and the priestess. Drawing on powerful feminine spiritual icons from around the world, such as Kali, Isis, Teresa of Avila, and Mary Magdalene, she explains how to awaken your spiritual Womb to find strength within and how to reclaim your soft powers of heart-opening vulnerability. She explores the lost traditions of the Goddess lineage and reveals sacred spaces in the world where her memory lives on. She shares the Womb Mysteries of alchemical union, revealing how to awaken the wild feminine and wild masculine and become sacred lovers who balance their light and shadow. From working with the cycles of the moon and learning how to root your power into the earth to healing the ancestral wounds left by the generations before you, Seren's medicine teachings, like secret spells, cast an enchantment over your feminine soul, awakening its fertility and wild inner magic.