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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies
"Sociologist Victor began his involvement with satanic-cult
phenomena by investigating a local panic centered in southwestern
New York state. After an introductory section, his book begins with
a description of this research, then proceeds with an excellent
general review of recent fear about satanic cults in the U.S. He
concludes that there is no evidence for the actual existence of
organized satanic cults." -- Choice
'The fables of witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deepe root in
the heart of man, that few or none can indure with patience the
hand and correction of God.' Reginald Scot, whose words these are,
published his remarkable book The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584.
England's first major work of demonology, witchcraft and the
occult, the book was unashamedly sceptical. It is said that so
outraged was King James VI of Scotland by the disbelieving nature
of Scot's work that, on James' accession to the English throne in
1603, he ordered every copy to be destroyed. Yet for all the anger
directed at Scot, and his scorn for Stuart orthodoxy about wiches,
the paradox was that his detailed account of sorcery helped
strengthen the hold of European demonologies in England while also
inspiring the distinctively English tradition of secular magic and
conjuring. Scot's influence was considerable. Shakespeare drew on
The Discoverie of Witchcraft for his depiction of the witches in
Macbeth. So too did fellow-playwright Thomas Middleton in his
tragi-comedy The Witch. Recognising Scot's central importance in
the history of ideas, Philip Almond places his subject in the
febrile context of his age, examines the chief themes of his work
and shows why his writings became a sourcebook for aspiring
magicians and conjurors for several hundred years. England's First
Demonologist makes a notable contribution to a fascinating but
unjustly neglected topic in the study of Early Modern England and
European intellectual history.
The Empty Seashell explores what it is like to live in a world
where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and
contradictory to be an object of belief. In a book based on more
than three years of fieldwork between 1991 and 2011, Nils Bubandt
argues that cannibal witches for people in the coastal, and
predominantly Christian, community of Buli in the Indonesian
province of North Maluku are both corporeally real and
fundamentally unknowable.
Witches (known as gua in the Buli language or as suanggi in
regional Malay) appear to be ordinary humans but sometimes,
especially at night, they take other forms and attack people in
order to kill them and eat their livers. They are seemingly
everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The reality of gua,
therefore, can never be pinned down. The title of the book comes
from the empty nautilus shells that regularly drift ashore around
Buli village. Convention has it that if you find a live nautilus,
you are a gua. Like the empty shells, witchcraft always seems to
recede from experience.
Bubandt begins the book by recounting his own confusion and
frustration in coming to terms with the contradictory and
inaccessible nature of witchcraft realities in Buli. A detailed
ethnography of the encompassing inaccessibility of Buli witchcraft
leads him to the conclusion that much of the anthropological
literature, which views witchcraft as a system of beliefs with
genuine explanatory power, is off the mark. Witchcraft for the Buli
people doesn't explain anything. In fact, it does the opposite: it
confuses, obfuscates, and frustrates. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida
s concept of aporia an interminable experience that remains
continuously in doubt Bubandt suggests the need to take seriously
people s experiential and epistemological doubts about witchcraft,
and outlines, by extension, a novel way of thinking about
witchcraft and its relation to modernity."
The dark side of the dark side ...He has everything he should want
in life. A good job. A nice home. A nice car. A beautiful wife and
family. A retirement plan. An active social life. A prestigious
reputation. Envious neighbours. A pet dog. Yet there remains
emptiness inside. In a search for meaning, he begins a journey from
which he cannot return. Grasping at everything he can, experiments
in ritual magick lead him into the realms of sex, drugs, organised
crime, aliens and angels as his life spirals further and further up
and down the paths of initiation and illumination while grappling
with insanity, annihilation and transformation.
This study explores cases in which men were accused of witchcraft
in England and the British colonies of New England between 1592 and
1692. Using a series of case studies that begin in Elizabethan
Norfolk and end with the Salem trials in Massachusetts, this book
examines six individual male witches and argues they are best
understood as masculine witches, not feminized men. Each case
considers the social circumstances of the male witch as a gendered
context for the accusations of witchcraft against him. Instead of
seeking to identify a single causal condition or overarching
gendered circumstance whereby men were accused of witchcraft, this
study examines the way that masculinity shaped the accusations of
witchcraft made against each man. In each case, a range of
masculine social and cultural roles became implicated in
accusations of witchcraft, making it possible to explore how
beliefs in witches interacted with early modern English gender
cultures to support the religious, legal, and cultural logic of the
male witch. The result is an approach to early modern English
witchcraft prosecution that includes, rather than problematizes,
the male witch.
This book is based on the author's ten-year research into the
politics of belief surrounding paranormal ideas. Through a detailed
examination of the participants, issues, strategies and underlying
factors that constitute the contemporary paranormal debate, the
book explores the struggle surrounding the status of paranormal
phenomena. It examines, on the one hand, how the principal arbiters
of religious and scientific truths - the Church and the academic
establishment - reject paranormal ideas as 'occult' and
'pseudo-scientific', and how, on the other hand, paranormal
enthusiasts attempt to resist such labels and instead establish
paranormal ideas as legitimate knowledge. The author contends that
the paranormal debate is the outcome of wider discursive processes
that are concerned with the construction and negotiation of truth
in Western society generally. More specifically, the debate is seen
as an aspect of the "boundary work" that defines the contours of
religious and scientific orthodoxy. The book paves new ground in
understanding the nature of belief relating to a topic that has
long held fascination to academics and lay people alike -
paranormal ideas. It develops a discursive framework for
understanding a contemporary social phenomenon, hence placing the
study at the cutting edge of ethnographic development that seeks to
integrate discursive perspectives with empirical accounts of
sociological phenomena. Most importantly, the study is intended to
contribute to the debate surrounding communicative action, by
outlining a discursive perspective on the negotiation of ideational
differences that goes beyond the incommensurability theories that
have dominated the sociology of communication and knowledge.
Why do the innocent suffer in a world created by a loving God? Does
this mean that God cannot prevent this suffering, despite His
supposed omnipotence? Or is God not loving after all? This in brief
is 'the problem of evil'. The Devil provides one solution to this
problem: his rebellion against God and hatred of His works is
responsible for evil. The Christian Devil has fascinated writers
and theologians since the time of the New Testament, and inspired
many dramatic and haunting works of art. Today he remains a potent
image in popular culture. The Devil: A Very Short Introduction
presents an introduction to the Devil in the history of ideas and
the lives of real people. Darren Oldridge shows us that he is a
more important figure in western history than is often appreciated,
and also a richly complex and contradictory one. Oldridge focuses
on three main themes: the idea of the Devil being integral to
western thought from the early Middle Ages to the beginnings of
modernity; the principle of 'demonic inversion' (the idea that as
the eternal leader of the opposition, the Devil represents the
mirror image of goodness); and the multiplicity and instability of
ideas about the Devil. While belief in the Devil has declined, the
idea of an abstract force of evil is still remarkably strong.
Oldridge concludes by exploring 'demonological' ways of thinking in
our own time, including allegations of 'satanic ritual abuse' and
the on-going 'war on terror'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short
Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds
of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books
are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our
expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and
enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly
readable.
This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from
angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination,
prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural,
religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland
put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The
supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of
understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and
emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and
future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has
much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought
about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising
twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The
supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and
elite understandings of the supernatural. -- .
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