The enigmatic and richly illustrative tarot deck reveals a host of strange and iconic mages, such as The Tower, The Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man and The Fool: over which loom the terrifying figures of Death and The Devil. The 21 numbered playing cards of tarot have always exerted strong fascination, way beyond their original purpose, and the multiple resonances of the deck are ubiquitous. From T. S. Eliot and his "wicked pack of cards" in "The Waste Land" to the psychic divination of Solitaire in Ian Fleming's "Live and Let Die"; and from the satanic novels of Dennis Wheatley to the deck's adoption by New Age practitioners, the cards have in modern times become inseparably connected to the occult. They are now viewed as arguably the foremost medium of prophesying and foretelling. Yet, as the author shows, originally the tarot were used as recreational playing cards by the Italian nobility in the Renaissance. It was only much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, that the deck became associated with esotericism before evolving finally into a diagnostic tool for mind, body and spirit. This is the first book to explore the remarkably varied ways in which tarot has influenced culture. Tracing the changing patterns of the deck's use, from game to mysterious oracular device, Helen Farley examines tarot's emergence in 15th century Milan and discusses its later associations with astrology, kabbalah and the Age of Aquarius.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of a controversial school of Russian thinkers, led by the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and united in the conviction that humanity was entering a new stage of evolution in which it must assume a new, active, managerial role in the cosmos. In the first account in English of this fascinating tradition, George M. Young offers a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the lives and ideas of the Russian Cosmists.
Suppressed during the Soviet period and little noticed in the West, the ideas of the Cosmists have in recent decades been rediscovered and embraced by many Russian intellectuals and are now recognized as essential to a native Russian cultural and intellectual tradition. Although they were scientists, theologians, and philosophers, the Cosmists addressed topics traditionally confined to occult and esoteric literature. Major themes include the indefinite extension of the human life span to establish universal immortality; the restoration of life to the dead; the reconstitution of the human organism to enable future generations to live beyond earth; the regulation of nature to bring all manifestations of blind natural force under rational human control; the transition of our biosphere into a "noosphere," with a sheath of mental activity surrounding the planet; the effect of cosmic rays and currently unrecognized particles of energy on human history; practical steps toward the reversal and eventual human control over the flow of time; and the virtues of human androgyny, autotrophy, and invisibility.
The Russian Cosmists is a crucial contribution to scholarship concerning Russian intellectual history, the future of technology, and the history of western esotericism.

Yoga, karma, meditation, guru--these terms, once obscure, are now a part of the American lexicon. Combining Hinduism with Western concepts and values, a new hybrid form of religion has developed in the United States over the past century. In Transcendent in America, Lola Williamson traces the history of various Hindu-inspired movements in America, and argues that together they constitute a discrete category of religious practice, a distinct and identifiable form of new religion.

Williamson provides an overview of the emergence of these movements through examining exchanges between Indian Hindus and American intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and illuminates how Protestant traditions of inner experience paved the way for Hindu-style movements' acceptance in the West.

Williamson focuses on three movements--Self-Realization Fellowship, Transcendental Meditation, and Siddha Yoga--as representative of the larger of phenomenon of Hindu-inspired meditation movements. She provides a window into the beliefs and practices of followers of these movements by offering concrete examples from their words and experiences that shed light on their world view, lifestyle, and relationship with their gurus. Drawing on scholarly research, numerous interviews, and decades of personal experience with Hindu-style practices, Williamson makes a convincing case that Hindu-inspired meditation movements are distinct from both immigrant Hinduism and other forms of Asian-influenced or "New Age" groups.

Yoga. Humanistic Psychology. Meditation. Holistic Healing. These practices are commonplace today. Yet before the early 1960s they were atypical options for most people outside of the upper class or small groups of educated spiritual seekers. Esalen Institute, a retreat for spiritual and personal growth in Big Sur, California, played a pioneering role in popularizing quests for self-transformation and personalized spirituality. This "soul rush" spread quickly throughout the United States as the Institute made ordinary people aware of hundreds of ways to select, combine, and revise their beliefs about the sacred and to explore diverse mystical experiences. Millions of Americans now identify themselves as spiritual, not religious, because Esalen paved the way for them to explore spirituality without affiliating with established denominations The American Soul Rush explores the concept of spiritual privilege and Esalen's foundational influence on the growth and spread of diverse spiritual practices that affirm individuals' self-worth and possibilities for positive personal change. The book also describes the people, narratives, and relationships at the Institute that produced persistent, almost accidental inequalities in order to illuminate the ways that gender is central to religion and spirituality in most contexts.

"Charms, Charmers, and Charming" brings together the work of many of today's key scholars in the field of verbal charming. The essays it contains cover vernacular magical texts and practice from Malaysia to Madagascar, and from England to Estonia. As the most comprehensive collection of research on charms, charmers, and charming available in the English language, it forms an essential reader on the topic.

There are far fewer publications on the ethnology of Micronesia than for any other region in the Pacific. This dearth is especially seen in the traditional religion, folklore, and iconography of the area. Haynes and Wuerch have located 1,193 relevant titles. For the first time, these mostly scarce or unpublished materials are now accessible in this essential research tool. The focus is on tradition, which became modified after contact with the West--the adaptation and persistence of these traditions are included in this bibliography.

Traditional Micronesian iconography is largely religious in nature, as is the case with most tribal or preliterate societies. There is also a large corpus of Micronesian myths, legends, beliefs, and practices that may not fit the Western concept of religion, but would be classified under folklore. That distinction cannot be consistently made in Micronesian cultures, nor in most other preliterate, thus prehistoric, societies. The overlap of religion and folklore is pervasive, so the scope of subjects included is broad. The subject matter encompasses magic, sorcery, ritual, cosmology, mythology, iconography, iconology, oral traditions, songs, chants, dance, music, traditional medicine, and many activities of daily life. Only those works that directly treat these subjects in the context of religion or folklore are included in this volume.

The second of two volumes on the relationship between popular religion and the self-help tradition in American culture, this book continues chronologically where the first left off. As with the first volume, this work focuses on the intersection of American history and popular religion and is intended as an introductory interpretive guide to major self-help figures and movements with origins in popular religious movements. This volume spans from Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the history of Christian Science, with discussions of Mary Baker Patterson, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy, through Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. Peale and Schuller, with the exception of Evangelist Billy Graham, constitute the public face of mainstream American Protestantism and bring this two-volume study to its conclusion in the second half of the 20th century.

This reference will serve as a valuable research tool for American religion and popular culture scholars. Together with the first volume, "Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture," these two meticulously researched volumes clearly define and present the broad scope of the self-help tradition as it pervades American culture and as it developed and was influenced by popular religion. An extensive bibliography is included.

Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners' beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism-especially in post-Soviet societies-and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

In its most general sense, the term "Spiritual but Not Religious" denotes those who, on the one hand, are disillusioned with traditional institutional religion and, on the other hand, feel that those same traditions contain deep wisdom about the human condition. This edited collection speaks to what national surveys agree is a growing social phenomenon referred to as the "Spiritual but Not Religious Movement" (SBNRM). Each essay of the volume engages the past, present and future(s) of the SBNRM. Their collective contribution is analytic, descriptive, and prescriptive, taking stock of not only the various analyses of the SBNRM to date but also the establishment of a new ground upon which the continued academic discussion can take place. This volume is a watershed in the growing academic and public interest in the SBNRM. As such, it will vital reading for any academic involved in Religious Studies, Spirituality and Sociology.

This book proposes that the drive for religiosity and experiences of the sacred are far from lost in contemporary western societies. The contributors' objective is to explore the myriad of ways late modern shamanism is becoming more vital and personally significant to people, communities, and economies in Nordic countries.

Originally published in 1929 by the Rosicrucian Press, "Here, for the first time, is a simple system whereby anyone may determine the fortunate and unfortunate daily, monthly and yearly periods of his life, thereby knowing when to do and when not to do anything that has an important bearing upon the progress of his career or the attainment of self-mastery. No other reference books, almanacs, or charts are necessary; there are no complicated mathematical problems. Here is a fascinating, intriguing, astonishing book that will be a companion for many years." Contents Include: The Problem of Mastership - Man a Free Agent - Cosmic Rhythm and the Cycles of Life - The Periods of Earthly Cycles- The Simple Periods of Human Life - The Complex Yearly Cycle of Human Life With Description of Cycle No. 2 - Periods of the Business Cycle With Description of Cycle No. 3 - How to Use the Periods of the Cycles - The Periods of the Health Cycle With Description of Cycle No. 4 - The Cycles of Disease and Sex - The Daily Cycle of Significant Hours - How to use the Daily Cycle of Seven Periods - Description of Daily Periods - The Soul Cycle - How to Determine the Periods of the Soul Cycle - Description of the Periods of the Soul Cycle - The Cycles of Reincarnation

Undocumented Saints follows the migration of popular saints from Mexico into the US and the evolution of their meaning. The book explores how Latinx battles for survival are performed in the worlds of faith, religiosity, and the imaginary, and how the socio-political realities of exploitation and racial segregation frame their popular religious expressions. It also tracks the emergence of inter-religious states, transnational ethnic and cultural enclaves unified by faith. The book looks at five vernacular saints that have emerged in Mexico and whose devotions have migrated into the US in the last one hundred years: Jesus Malverde, a popular bandido turned saint caudillo; Santa Olguita, an emerging feminist saint linked to border women's experiences of sexual violence; Juan Soldado, a murder-rapist soldier who is now a patron for undocumented immigrants and the main suspect in the death of an eight-year-old victim known now as Santa Olguita; Toribio Romo, a Catholic priest whose ghost/spirit has been helping people cross the border into the US since the 1990s; and La Santa Muerte, a controversial personification of death who is particularly popular among LGBTQ migrants. Each chapter contextualizes a particular popular saint within broader discourses about the construction of masculinity and the state, the long history of violence against Latina and migrant women, female erasure from history, discrimination against non-normative sexualities, and as US and Mexican investment in the control of religiosity within the discourses of immigration.

"This varied collection of essays traces the intertwining of modern Paganisms with popular music through a wide variety of genres. An important contribution to our understanding of emergent Pagan cultures, and a very exciting book." - Sabina Magliocco, California State University "Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music is a crucial contribution to the study of spirituality and music. The wide-ranging coverage and theoretical perspectives presented here provide an essential baseline for approaching this dynamic intersection of expressive forms." - Holly Everett, Memorial University, Canada Paganism is rapidly becoming a religious, creative, and political force internationally. It has found one of its most public expressions in popular music, where it is voiced by singers and musicians across rock, folk, techno, goth, metal, Celtic, world, and pop music. With essays ranging across the US, UK, continental Europe, Australia and Asia, Pop Pagans assesses the histories, genres, performances, and communities of pagan popular music. Over time, paganism became associated with the counter culture, satanic and gothic culture, rave and festival culture, ecological consciousness and spirituality, and new ageism. Paganism has used music to express a powerful and even transgressive force in everyday life. Pop Pagans examines the many artists and movements which have contributed to this growing phenomenon.

"This varied collection of essays traces the intertwining of modern Paganisms with popular music through a wide variety of genres. An important contribution to our understanding of emergent Pagan cultures, and a very exciting book." - Sabina Magliocco, California State University "Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music is a crucial contribution to the study of spirituality and music. The wide-ranging coverage and theoretical perspectives presented here provide an essential baseline for approaching this dynamic intersection of expressive forms." - Holly Everett, Memorial University, Canada Paganism is rapidly becoming a religious, creative, and political force internationally. It has found one of its most public expressions in popular music, where it is voiced by singers and musicians across rock, folk, techno, goth, metal, Celtic, world, and pop music. With essays ranging across the US, UK, continental Europe, Australia and Asia, Pop Pagans assesses the histories, genres, performances, and communities of pagan popular music. Over time, paganism became associated with the counter culture, satanic and gothic culture, rave and festival culture, ecological consciousness and spirituality, and new ageism. Paganism has used music to express a powerful and even transgressive force in everyday life. Pop Pagans examines the many artists and movements which have contributed to this growing phenomenon.