Divination is only a small part of a witch's stock in trade, and although a basic introduction to the subject can be learned from books, proficiency will only come through vigorous practice. This proficiency comes through the discovery of certain secret matters by a great variety of means, correspondences, signs and occult techniques. Before a witch can perform any of these operations with any degree of success, we need to develop the `art of seeing' and the ability to divine with rod, fingers and birds. Divination is what could be referred to as the practical element of Craft magic, and we don't even have to be witches to be able to read the portents. But it helps! A companion volume to Pagan Portals: By Spellbook & Candle and Pagan Portals: By Wolfsbane & Mandrake Root, from popular Moon Books author Melusine Draco.

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought. Studying transatlantic spiritualist literature from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, Christine Ferguson focuses on its incorporation and dissemination of bio-determinist and eugenic thought. She asks why ideas about rational reproduction, hereditary determinism and race improvement became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists and biographers in this period. She also examines how these concerns drove emerging Spiritualist understandings of disability, intelligence, crime, conception, the afterlife and aesthetic production. The book draws on rare material, including articles and serialized fiction from Spiritualist periodicals such as Light, The Two Worlds and The Medium and Daybreak as well as on Spiritualist healing, parentage and sex manuals. Key Features: *The first major study of Transatlantic Spiritualism's sustained commitment to eugenics, bio-determinism and hard hereditarianism *Devotes a chapter to eugenic and raciological writing of Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African-American Rosicrucian and sex magician whose work has only recently been rediscovered by scholars * Interdisciplinary and historicist methodology * The rich transatlantic reading demonstrates the continuity and influence between British and American Spiritualist writings on the body, reproduction and mental fitness

Flourishing by A.D. 250-300, Maya civilization extended over large sections of modern Mexico and Guatemala, as well as Belize, and into present-day El Salvador and Honduras. The pre-Conquest inhabitants of this vast area left important clues to their understanding of religious and historical events in the remains of their architecture, painting, sculpture, distinctive polychrome ceramics, and sophisticated hieroglyphic writing. A vital key to understanding these clues is an appreciation of the solar, lunar, and planetary cycles that are woven through the Maya chronological records. The Maya concepts of time figured heavily in their association of human rulers with celestial deities and cosmic events, and in the physical orientation of cities and buildings. In fact, scholars are now realizing that virtually every aspect of pre-Hispanic Mayan life was ordered by a religion based on the apparent annual movement of the sun through the sky. In The Cosmos of the Yucatec Maya, Merideth Paxton provides an ingenious and thorough new study of parts of two of the Maya books, or codices, with particular focus on a previously unrecognized image of the solar year that appears in the manuscript known as the Madrid Codex. The motif of the solar year also underlies her identification of a regional organization among the ruins of the Yucatec Maya settlements. Incorporating analyses of art, archaeology, astronomy, and colonial and modern ethnography pertaining to Yucatan, as well as studies of sixteenth-century Spanish beliefs, Dr. Paxton elicits fascinating new meanings from her sources and she invites Mesoamerican specialists and students to consider links between components of pre-Conquest Maya civilization. This innovative, scholarly text is essential reading for all who are interested in Mesoamerica, and it is sure to stimulate additional developments in the field of Maya cosmology and ideology.

Following on from "The History of Western Astrology Volume I", Nicholas Campion examines the foundation of modern astrology in the medieval and Renaissance worlds. Medieval and Renaissance Europe marked the high water mark for astrology. It was a subject of high theological speculation, was used to advise kings and popes, and to arrange any activity from the beginning of battles to the most auspicious time to have one's hair cut. Nicholas Campion examines the foundation of modern astrology in the medieval and Renaissance worlds. Spanning the period between the collapse of classical astrology in the fifth century and the rise of popular astrology on the web in the twentieth, Campion challenges the historical convention that astrology flourished only between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Concluding with a discussion of astrology's popularity and appeal in the twenty-first century, Campion asks whether it should be seen as an integral part of modernity or as an element of the post-modern world.