After coming of age and graduating in the tumultuous sixties, Ahad Cobb found himself wandering without direction. A chance road trip with a friend led him to Ram Dass, thus beginning an enthusiastic journey of spiritual awakening and deep involvement with three spiritual communities originating in the sixties and still thriving today: the Ram Dass satsang, Lama Foundation, and Dances of Universal Peace. Sharing his opening to the inner life, his poetry and dreams, his spiritual passions and astrological insights, Ahad Cobb's memoir begins with his summer with Ram Dass and his satsang, immersed in meditation, devotion, and guru's grace. His path takes him to New Mexico, to a newly established intentional spiritual community, Lama Foundation, where he lives on the land for thirteen years, experiencing the disciplines and rewards of communal living and spiritual practice. At Lama, he is initiated into universal Sufism in the tradition of Hazrat Inayat Khan and the Dances of Universal Peace. He travels overseas to spend time with Sufis in Chamonix, Istanbul, Konya, and Jerusalem. After the birth of his son, Ahad moves off the mountain and serves as sacred dance leader and musician for 35 years in Santa Fe and later Albuquerque. When Lama Foundation is nearly destroyed by a forest fire in 1996, Ahad serves as a trustee, guiding the rebuilding of the community. He imparts insights from his personal work with Jungian analysis and trauma release, shares his search for and discovery of his soul mate, and details his twelve years of study with Hart DeFouw in the wisdom stream of Vedic astrology. Offering a poignant reflection on life lived from the inside out, and the delicate balance between spirituality and psychology, this memoir leads readers on an outer and inner journey steeped in poetry, music, astrology, dreams, inner work, and spiritual practice in the context of community devoted to awakening.

Exploring occultist, magician, poet, painter, and writer Aleister Crowley's longstanding and intimate association with Paris, Tobias Churton provides the first detailed account of Crowley's activities in the City of Light. Using previously unpublished letters and diaries, Churton explores how Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn's Inner Order in Paris in 1900 and how, in 1902, he relocated to Montparnasse. Soon engaged to Anglo-Irish artist Eileen Gray, Crowley pontificates and parties with English, American, and French artists gathered around sculptor Auguste Rodin: all keen to exhibit at Paris's famed Salon d'Automne. In 1904--still dressed as "Prince Chioa Khan" and recently returned from his Book of the Law experience in Cairo--Crowley dines with novelist Arnold Bennett at Paillard's. In 1908 Crowley is back in Paris to prove it's possible to attain Samadhi (or "knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel") while living a modern life in a busy metropolis. In 1913 he organizes a demonstration for artistic and sexual freedom at Oscar Wilde's tomb. Until war spoils all in 1914, Paris is Crowley's playground. The author details how, after returning from America in 1920, and though based at his "Abbey of Thelema" in Sicily, Crowley can't leave Paris alone. When Mussolini expels him from Italy, Paris becomes home from 1924 until 1929. Churton reveals Crowley's part in the jazz-age explosion of modernism, as the lover of photographer Berenice Abbott, and many others, and how he enjoyed camaraderie with Man Ray, Nancy Cunard, Andre Gide, and Aimee Crocker. The author explores Crowley's adventures in Tunisia, Algeria, the Riviera, his battle with heroin addiction, his relationship with daughter Astarte Lulu--raised at Cefalu--and finally, a high-level ministerial conspiracy to get him out of Paris. Reconstructing Crowley's heyday in the last decade and a half of France's Belle Epoque and the "roaring Twenties," this book illuminates Crowley's place within the artistic, literary, and spiritual ferment of the great City of Light.

This volume makes available for the first time in English translation over a thousand texts written between the fifth century BC, and the fifth century AD, of curses inscribed on stone tablets from North Africa, to England, and Syria to Spain. A substantial introduction supplies the full cultural, social and historical context to the ancient Graeco-Roman practice of cursing enemies and rivals by writing an incantation on a tablet and dedicating it to a god or spirit. The selected translations, arranged thematically, are fully annotated and accompanied by extensive commentary.

In Dante's Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Peter Geschiere sketches it as a central ember at the core of human relationships, one brutally revealed in the practice of witchcraft. Examining witchcraft in its variety of forms throughout the globe, he shows how this often misunderstood practice is deeply structured by intimacy and the powers it affords. In doing so, he offers not only a comprehensive look at contemporary witchcraft but also a fresh - if troubling - new way to think about intimacy itself. Geschiere begins in the forests of southeast Cameroon with the Maka, who fear "witchcraft of the house" above all else. Drawing a variety of local conceptions of intimacy into a global arc, he tracks notions of the home and family - and witchcraft's transgression of them - throughout Africa, Europe, Brazil, and Oceania, showing that witchcraft provides powerful ways of addressing issues that are crucial to social relationships. Indeed, by uncovering the link between intimacy and witchcraft in so many parts of the world, he paints a provocative picture of human sociality that scrutinizes some of the most prevalent views held by contemporary social science. One of the few books to situate witchcraft in a global context, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust is at once a theoretical tour de force and an empirically rich and lucid take on a difficult-to-understand spiritual practice and the private spaces it so greatly affects.

Surrealist artist Max Ernst defined collage as the "alchemy of the visual image." Students of his work have often dismissed this comment as simply a metaphor for the transformative power of using found images in a new context. Taking a wholly different perspective on Ernst and alchemy, however, M. E. Warlick persuasively demonstrates that the artist had a profound and abiding interest in alchemical philosophy and often used alchemical symbolism in works created throughout his career.

A revival of interest in alchemy swept the artistic, psychoanalytic, historical, and scientific circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Warlick sets Ernst's work squarely within this movement. Looking at both his art (many of the works she discusses are reproduced in the book) and his writings, she reveals how thoroughly alchemical philosophy and symbolism pervade his early Dadaist experiments, his foundational work in surrealism, and his many collages and paintings of women and landscapes, whose images exemplify the alchemical fusing of opposites. This pioneering research adds an essential key to understanding the multilayered complexity of Ernst's works, as it affirms his standing as one of Germany's most significant artists of the twentieth century.

In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and successful seducer of women and priest of the parish of Loudun, was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of being in league with the devil and seducing an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley's vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world.

Beginning in the fifth century A.D., various Indian mystics began to innovate a body of techniques with which to render themselves immortal. These people called themselves Siddhas, a term formerly reserved for a class of demigods, revered by Hindus and Buddhists alike, who were known to inhabit mountaintops or the atmospheric regions. Over the following five to eight hundred years, three types of Hindu Siddha orders emerged, each with its own specialized body of practice. These were the Siddha Kaula, whose adherents sought bodily immortality through erotico-mystical practices; the Rasa Siddhas, medieval India's alchemists, who sought to transmute their flesh-and-blood bodies into immortal bodies through the ingestion of the mineral equivalents of the sexual fluids of the god Siva and his consort, the Goddess; and the Nath Siddhas, whose practice of hatha yoga projected the sexual and laboratory practices of the Siddha Kaula and Rasa Siddhas upon the internal grid of the subtle body. For India's medieval Siddhas, these three conjoined types of practice led directly to bodily immortality, supernatural powers, and self-divinization; in a word, to the exalted status of the semidivine Siddhas of the older popular cults. In The Alchemical Body, David Gordon White excavates and centers within its broader Indian context this lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from a body of previously unexplored alchemical sources, he demonstrates for the first time that the medieval disciplines of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced by one and the same people, and that they can only be understood when viewed together. Human sexual fluids and the structures of the subtle body aremicrocosmic equivalents of the substances and apparatus manipulated by the alchemist in his laboratory. With these insights, White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of the entire sweep of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam. This book is an essential reference for anyone interested in Indian yoga, alchemy, and the medieval beginnings of science.

In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.

When strange signs appeared in the sky over Quebec during the autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to act as if she were possessed. The community tried to make sense of what was happening, and why. Priests and nuns performed rituals to drive the demons away, while the bishop and the governor argued about how to investigate their suspicions of witchcraft. A local miller named Daniel Vuil, accused of using his knowledge of the dark arts to torment Hallay, was imprisoned and then executed. Stories of the demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France. Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church's wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this study reveals, New France was in a precarious position. The Possession of Barbe Hallay is both a fascinating account of a case of demonic possession and an accessible introduction to social and religious history in early modern North America.

The Salem witch hunt of 1692 is among the most infamous events in early American history; however, it was not the only such episode to occur in New England that year. Escaping Salem reconstructs the "other witch hunt" of 1692 that took place in Stamford, Connecticut. Concise and accessible, the book takes students on a revealing journey into the mental world of early America, shattering the stereotype of early New Englanders as quick to accuse and condemn.
Drawing on eyewitness testimony, Richard Godbeer tells the story of Kate Branch, a seventeen-year-old afflicted by strange visions and given to blood-chilling wails of pain and fright. Branch accused several women of bewitching her, two of whom were put on trial for witchcraft. Escaping Salem takes us inside the Connecticut courtroom and into the minds of the surprisingly skeptical Stamford townspeople. Were the pain and screaming due to natural or supernatural causes? Was Branch simply faking the symptoms? And if she was indeed bewitched, why believe her specific accusations, since her information came from demons who might well be lying? For the judges, Godbeer shows, the trial was a legal thicket. All agreed that witches posed a real and serious threat, but proving witchcraft (an invisible crime) in court was another matter. The court in Salem had become mired in controversy over its use of dubious evidence. In an intriguing chapter, Godbeer examines Magistrate Jonathan Selleck's notes on how to determine the guilt of someone accused of witchcraft, providing an illuminating look at what constituted proof of witchcraft at the time. The stakes were high--if found guilty, the two accused women would be hanged.
In the afterword, Godbeer explains how he used the trial evidence to build his narrative, offering an inside perspective on the historian's craft. Featuring maps, photos, and a selected bibliography, Escaping Salem is ideal for use in undergraduate U.S. survey courses. It can also be used for courses in colonial American history, culture, and religion; witchcraft in the early modern world; and crime and society in early America.

This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.

Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa reconstructs the biography of an ordinary South African, Jimmy Mohale. Born in 1964, Jimmy came of age in rural South Africa during apartheid, then studied at university and worked as a teacher during the anti-apartheid struggle. In 2005, Jimmy died from an undiagnosed sickness, probably related to AIDS. Jimmy gradually came to see the unanticipated misfortune he experienced as a result of his father's witchcraft and sought remedies from diviners rather than from biomedical doctors. This study casts new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between South African politics, witchcraft and the AIDS pandemic.

On February 3, 1913, the first General Meeting of the newly formed Anthroposophical Society was convened in Berlin. Six weeks later, in Holland, Rudolf Steiner spoke for the first time to an anthroposophical audience in a detailed, intimate way of the esoteric schooling of the individual human being in earthly life. Hence the fundamental importance of these lectures for anthroposophical inner development. Steiner deals here with the subtle effects of spiritual development at every level of the human being. Beginning with straightforward questions relating to the body's experience of foodstuff - meat, coffee, alcohol, and so forth - he unfolds the universe of anthroposophical spiritual striving until it includes direct perception of Paradise and the Holy Grail, as well as the role of the human being as evolving between the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. This edition also includes as a prologue Steiner's crucial lecture on "The Being of Anthroposophy," which has never before appeared in English. In this, Steiner says: Sophia will become objective again, but she will take with her what humanity is, and objectively present herself in this form. Thus, she will present herself not only as Sophia, but as Anthroposophia - as the Sophia who, after passing through the human soul, through the very being of the human being, henceforth bears that being within her, and in this form she will confront enlightened human beings as the objective being Sophia who once stood before the Greeks.

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees, which enables him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago. The author's conclusions are persuasive: at the core is not material riches, but a secret - a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than...the Holy Grail.

The most complete summation to date of the New Testament evidence for magical practice by Jesus and the early Christians. The very notion of Jesus being a sorcerer runs so against the grain of the Western cultural myth that even non-Christians are likely to find it far-fetched or even vaguely disturbing. Nevertheless, scholars steadily accumulated evidence for magical practices in the New Testament throughout much of the 20th century. It is that ever expanding body of knowledge that has made this book possible. This book examines the following: The nature of the earliest Christian documents, the defects of their trans-mission, and the evidence for the suppression of descriptions of magical acts. The closely related problem of the New Testament accounts as historical sources. The radically apocalyptic nature of Jesus' message and the expectations of the early church. The failure of the apocalypse to occur and the theological reaction to that failure. The role of magic and mystery religion in early Christianity. A revisiting of the story of the "beloved disciple" and what it may tell us about Jesus and suppression of evidence about his life. Contents: Documentary Evidence / Infancy Narratives / Confrontation / Resurrection as Ghost Story /Apocalyptic Prophet / Apocalypse Postponed, / Magic and Mystery, / Jesus the Magician / Spirit Versus Spirit, / Ecstatic Inner Circle, / Christian Mysteries, / Secret Gospel of Mark, / Beloved Disciple, / On the Use of Boys in Magic, / Apocalypse, Magic, and Christianity, / "Son of David." / Mary Magdalene

Kentucky has a rich legacy of ghostly visitations. Lynwood Montell has harvested dozens of tales of haunted houses and family ghosts from all over the Bluegrass state. Many of the stories were collected from elders by young people and are recounted exactly as they were gathered. Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky includes chilling tales such as that of the Tan Man of Pike County, who trudges invisibly through a house accompanied by the smell of roses, and the famed Gray Lady of Liberty Hall in Frankfort, a houseguest who never left. Montell tells the story of a stormy night, shortly before Henry Clay's death, when the ghost of the statesman's old friend Daniel Boone calls upon him, and then recounts the more modern story of the ghouls that haunt the rehearsal house of the band The Kentucky Headhunters.

Included are accounts of haunted libraries, mansions, bedrooms, log cabins, bathrooms, college campuses, apartments, furniture, hotels, and distilleries, as well as reports of eerie visitations from ghostly grandmothers, husbands, daughters, uncles, cousins, babies, slaves, Civil War soldiers, dogs, sheep, and even wildcats. Almost all of Kentucky's 120 counties are represented. Though the book emphasizes the stories themselves, Montell offers an introduction discussing how local history, local character, and local flavor are communicated across the generations in these colorful stories.

Filled with spells, recipes, and crafts, this book helps you discover the magical rhythms of the natural world. Join Anna Franklin, bestselling author of The Hearth Witch s Compendium, as she shares time-honoured recipes and step-by-step instructions for bringing enchantment and joy into your life. You will discover dozens of incantations and spells to help you celebrate the cycles of the seasons, honour the gods and spirits, and release negative energy and anxiety. The world is filled with magic, if we can just slow down and learn how to channel it. The Hearth Witch s Year provides hands-on tips for sabbats, solstices, saints days, and more than 100 other auspicious dates so you can connect with the earth s natural energies and manifest your deepest desires.