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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies
'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.
The Secret Teachings of All Ages is perhaps the most comprehensive
and complete esoteric encyclopedia ever written. The sheer scope
and ambition of this book are stunning. In this book Manly P. Hall
has successfully distilled the essence of more arcane subjects than
one would think possible. He covers Rosicrucianism and other secret
societies, alchemy, cryptology, Kabbalah, Tarot, pyramids, the
Zodiac, Pythagorean philosophy, Masonry, gemology, Nicholas
Flammel, the identity of William Shakespeare, The Life and
Teachings of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus, The Qabbalah, The Hiramic
Legend, The Tree of the Sephiroth, Mystic Christianity, and there
are more than 200 illustrations included here. This is essential
reading for anyone wishing to explore esoteric knowledge.
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. -- .
This book gives the beginner and experienced practitioner alike a
modern, 21st century view into the powerful and often misunderstood
magical current called 'Chaos Magick'. Written in a clear and
easily accessible style it examines the theory behind many
techniques used in magical, artistic, religious and scientific
systems of thought; then links and applies them towards desired
goals. Separated into two volumes the book can be used by the
reader as a workbook with rituals, techniques and exercises to be
followed, as a window into contemporary magical thought at the turn
of the century or simply as a rollercoaster of a good read! However
you choose to use it, this book will leave you feeling positive,
inspired and ready to apply any of the methods presented to your
own life.
In this title, the history of alchemy traced from its earliest
roots through to its influence in modern-day science. Beginning in
China in the search for the secret of immortality, and appearing
independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the
arts of smelting and alloying metals, alchemy received a great
boost in Europe from studies by Islamic and Jewish alchemists.
Translated into Latin and then combined with what was known of
Greek natural science these accounts provoked an outburst of
attempts to manipulate matter and to change it into transformative
substances known as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life.
Alchemy's heyday in Europe was the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Demonstrations of the art were performed in royal courts
and specimens of the gold so transmuted can be seen in various
museums today. During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to
amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then
growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists -
principally Carl Jung - perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for
aspects of their theories about human nature.
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