John Beloff is one of our foremost authorities in parapsychology. He is credited with an instrumental role in the acceptance of parapsychology into academia. On April 21 and 22, 2000, a two-day international conference was held by the Koestler Parapsychology Unit of the Psychology Department at the University of Edinburgh to celebrate Beloff's eightieth birthday. Most of the essays in this work were presented at this conference honoring John Beloff. All of the contributors have published a number of articles in mainstream philosophy and their essays promote Beloff's greatest interest--a philosophical interaction with parapsychology. The book is divided into three sections and each section has three papers. The papers in the first section, "Parapsychology, Philosophy and the Mind," explore "the mind-brain problem," parapsychology and the principle of closure, and a cross-cultural perspective on dualism and the self. The second section, "Parapsychology, Self and Survival," looks at parapsychological phenomena and the sense of self, chrysalid therapy, and the problem of super psi. The third section, "Parapsychology, Religion and Spirituality," features papers that discuss parapsychology and how it relates to Hume's view of miracles, to religion, and to the origin of the Copernican hypothesis.

Kimberly B. Stratton investigates the cultural and ideological motivations behind early imaginings of the magician, the sorceress, and the witch in the ancient world. Accusations of magic could carry the death penalty or, at the very least, marginalize the person or group they targeted. But Stratton moves beyond the popular view of these accusations as mere slander. In her view, representations and accusations of sorcery mirror the complex struggle of ancient societies to define authority, legitimacy, and Otherness. Stratton argues that the concept "magic" first emerged as a discourse in ancient Athens where it operated part and parcel of the struggle to define Greek identity in opposition to the uncivilized "barbarian" following the Persian Wars. The idea of magic then spread throughout the Hellenized world and Rome, reflecting and adapting to political forces, values, and social concerns in each society. Stratton considers the portrayal of witches and magicians in the literature of four related periods and cultures: classical Athens, early imperial Rome, pre-Constantine Christianity, and rabbinic Judaism. She compares patterns in their representations of magic and analyzes the relationship between these stereotypes and the social factors that shaped them. Stratton's comparative approach illuminates the degree to which magic was (and still is) a cultural construct that depended upon and reflected particular social contexts. Unlike most previous studies of magic, which treated the classical world separately from antique Judaism, Naming the Witch highlights the degree to which these ancient cultures shared ideas about power and legitimate authority, even while constructing and deploying those ideas in different ways. The book also interrogates the common association of women with magic, denaturalizing the gendered stereotype in the process. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of discourse as well as the work of other contemporary theorists, such as Homi K. Bhabha and Bruce Lincoln, Stratton's bewitching study presents a more nuanced, ideologically sensitive approach to understanding the witch in Western history.

This book addresses the troubling questions confronting the modern Jewish worshiper by bringing to the reader the insights of such twentieth-century Jewish theologians as Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Avraham Y. Kook, Mordecai M. Kaplan, R. Arele, Aaron Rote, Elie Munk, Abraham J. Heschel, Jakob J. Petuchowski, Eugene B. Borowitz, and Lawrence A. Hoffman, as well as a variety of feminist theologians. By discussing these theologians, the author discusses a variety of obstacles to prayer: the inability to concentrate on the words and meaning of formal liturgies, the paucity of emotional involvement and lack of theological conviction among worshipers, and the anthropomorphic and, particularly, the masculine emphasis of prayer nomenclature. The result is a book of great interest not just for Jewish worshipers but for anyone interested in the meaning of prayer and the modern approaches to it.

Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States. The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the ""High John the Conquer"" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the ""walking boy"" and the ""Ring Shout,"" a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between ""Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo"" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2000 The roots of European witchcraft and magic lie in Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern cultures and in the Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic traditions of the Continent. For two millennia, European folklore and ritual have been imbued with the belief in the supernatural, yielding a rich trove of histories and images. The six volumes in the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe combine traditional approaches of political, legal, and social historians with critical syntheses of cultural anthropology, historical psychology, and gender studies. The series provides a modern, scholarly survey of the supernatural beliefs of Europeans from ancient times to the present day. Each volume contains the work of distinguished scholars chosen for their expertise in a particular era or region. The chronological scope of this volume ranges from the heroic age of Homer's Greek East to the time of the rise of Christianity, a period of well over a thousand years. In this long millennium the political and cultural landscapes of the Mediterranean basin underwent significant changes, as competing creeds and denominations rose to the fore, and often accused each other of sorcery. Other volumes in the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Biblical and Pagan Societies The Middle Ages The Period of the Witch Trials The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries The Twentieth Century

"A pioneer work in . . . the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft."--Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University

Confessing to "Familiarity with the Devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens, was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. In 1662, Ann Cole was "taken with very strange Fits" and fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events in Salem took place.

More than three hundred years later the question still haunts us: Why were these and other women likely witches? Why were they vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft? In this work Carol Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.

"A remarkable achievement. The 'witches' come alive in this book, not as stereotypes, but as real women living in a society that suspected and feared their independence and combativeness."--Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Cornell University

The European Witch-Hunt seeks to explain why thousands of people, mostly lower-class women, were deliberately tortured and killed in the name of religion and morality during three centuries of intermittent witch-hunting throughout Europe and North America. Combining perspectives from history, sociology, psychology and other disciplines, this book provides a comprehensive account of witch-hunting in early modern Europe. Julian Goodare sets out an original interpretation of witch-hunting as an episode of ideologically-driven persecution by the 'godly state' in the era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Full weight is also given to the context of village social relationships, and there is a detailed analysis of gender issues. Witch-hunting was a legal operation, and the courts' rationale for interrogation under torture is explained. Panicking local elites, rather than central governments, were at the forefront of witch-hunting. Further chapters explore folk beliefs about legendary witches, and intellectuals' beliefs about a secret conspiracy of witches in league with the Devil. Witch-hunting eventually declined when the ideological pressure to combat the Devil's allies slackened. A final chapter sets witch-hunting in the context of other episodes of modern persecution. This book is the ideal resource for students exploring the history of witch-hunting. Its level of detail and use of social theory also make it important for scholars and researchers.

Throughout history, magic has been as widely and passionately practiced as religion. But while religion continues to flourish, magic stumbles towards extinction. What is magic? What does it do? Why do people believe in magic? Ariel Glucklich finds the answers to these questions in the streets of Banaras, India's most sacred city, where hundreds of magicians still practice ancient traditions, treating thousands of Hindu and Muslim patients of every caste and sect. Through study and interpretation of the Banarsi magical rites and those who partake in them, the author presents fascinating living examples of magical practice, and contrasts his findings with the major theories that have explained (or explained away) magic over the last century. These theories, he argues, ignore an essential sensory phenomenon which he calls "magical experience": an extraordinary, though perfectly natural, state of awareness through which magicians and their clients perceive the effects of magic rituals.

In 1988 Ericka and Julie Ingram began making a series of accusations of sexual abuse against their father, Paul Ingram, who was a respected deputy sheriff in Olympia, Washington. At first the accusations were confined to molestations in their childhood, but they grew to include torture and rape as recently as the month before. At a time when reported incidents of "recovered memories" had become widespread, these accusations were not unusual. What captured national attention in this case is that, under questioning, Ingram appeared to remember participating in bizarre satanic rites involving his whole family and other members of the sheriff's department.

Remembering Satan is a lucid, measured, yet absolutely riveting inquest into a case that destroyed a family, engulfed a small town, and captivated an America obsessed by rumors of a satanic underground. As it follows the increasingly bizarre accusations and confessions, the claims and counterclaims of police, FBI investigators, and mental health professionals. Remembering Satan gives us what is at once a psychological detective story and a domestic tragedy about what happens when modern science is subsumed by our most archaic fears.

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe. Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people in Europe were forced to flee their native lands and live in a state of physical or internal exile as a result of religious conflict and upheaval. Drawing on new insights from history of emotions methodologies, Feeling Exclusion explores the complex relationships between communities in exile, the homelands from which they fled or were exiled, and those from whom they sought physical or psychological assistance. It examines the various coping strategies religious refugees developed to deal with their marginalization and exclusion, and investigates the strategies deployed in various media to generate feelings of exclusion through models of social difference, that questioned the loyalty, values, and trust of "others". Accessibly written, divided into three thematic parts, and enhanced by a variety of illustrations, Feeling Exclusion is perfect for students and researchers of early modern emotions and religion.

Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives of Northern Italy, The Night Battles recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti, literally, "good walkers." These men and women described fighting extraordinary ritual battles against witches and wizards in order to protect their harvests. While their bodies slept, the souls of the benandanti were able to fly into the night sky to engage in epic spiritual combat for the good of the village. Carlo Ginzburg looks at how the Inquisition's officers interpreted these tales to support their world view that the peasants were in fact practicing sorcery. The result of this cultural clash, which lasted for more than a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into the Inquisition's mortal enemies-witches. Relying upon this exceptionally well-documented case study, Ginzburg argues that a similar transformation of attitudes-perceiving folk beliefs as diabolical witchcraft-took place all over Europe and spread to the New World. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on the interplay of chance and discovery, as well as on the relationship between anomalous cases and historical generalizations.

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages' reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.

Nearly half a century after the defeat of the Third Reich, Nazism remains a subject of extensive historical inquiry, general interest, and, alarmingly, a source of inspiration for resurgent fascism in Europe. Goodrick-Clarke's powerful and timely book traces the intellectual roots of Nazism back to a number of influential occult and millenarian sects in the Habsburg Empire during its waning years. These sects combined notions of popular nationalism with an advocacy of Aryan racism and a proclaimed need for German world-rule.

This book provides the first serious account of the way in which Nazism was influenced by powerful millenarian and occult sects that thrived in Germany and Austria almost fifty years before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.

These millenarian sects (principally the Ariosophists) espoused a mixture of popular nationalism, Aryan racism, and occultism to support their advocacy of German world-rule. Over time their ideas and symbols, filtered through nationalist-racist groups associated with the infant Nazi party, came to exert a strong influence on Himmler's SS.

The fantasies thus fueled were played out with terrifying consequences in the realities structured into the Third Reich: Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the hellish museums of Nazi apocalypse, had psychic roots reaching back to millenial visions of occult sects. Beyond what the TImes Literary Supplement calls an intriguing study of apocalyptic fantasies, this bizarre and fascinating story contains lessons we cannot afford to ignore.

In this initiatic novel, bestselling author and acclaimed spiritual teacher Barbara Hand Clow weaves an erotically charged story of romance, deep earth forces, psychic powers, the aristocracy, and Vatican world control revealed by an ancient ruby that inspires mystical visions. Set in Rome in 2012, the story follows Sarah Adamson, a beautiful young Catholic graduate student from Boston studying at the Vatican Library for her thesis on the first Christian heretic, Marcion of Pontus. She is being courted by two utterly different men: Simon Appel, a descendent of the kabbalist Isaac Luria who covers Vatican affairs for the New York Times, and Armando Pierleoni, the scion of an ancient Italian aristocratic family with strong ties to the Vatican. After a terrible encounter with the dark side at a castle in Tuscany, Sarah is given a ring set with a ruby crystal, a powerful stone that was once the third eye of an ancient Buddha statue in Nepal. With the mystic ring on her finger, Sarah’s visionary abilities are ignited. She remembers her past life as the Sibyl of Cumae, a Roman oracle whose powers are now being channeled by the Vatican to maintain world control. As Sarah’s research and visions reveal the cause of evil in the Church and Simon’s reporting exposes the depth of the sexual abuse scandals surrounding the Vatican, the two form an alliance with an ex-lover of both Simon and Armando, Claudia, who describes secret priestly power rituals going on in Vatican City. As the heightened energies of the winter solstice of 2012 arrive and 2013 dawns, will Simon and Sarah be able to harness their divine powers for transformation? Will the Vatican seek new direction as it elects a new pope? Revealing the very nature of how evil gets into the world, this novel of romance, mystery, heresy, and spirituality uncovers the esoteric foundations for the emergence of a golden new age.

The Routledge History of Witchcraft is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of the belief in witches from antiquity to the present day, providing both an introduction to the subject of witchcraft and an overview of the on-going debates. This extensive collection covers the entire breadth of the history of witchcraft, from the witches of Ancient Greece and medieval demonology through to the victims of the witch hunts, and onwards to children's books, horror films, and modern pagans. Drawing on the knowledge and expertise of an international team of authors, the book examines differing concepts of witchcraft that still exist in society and explains their historical, literary, religious, and anthropological origin and development, including the reflections and adaptions of this belief in art and popular culture. The volume is divided into four chronological parts, beginning with Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Part One, Early Modern witch hunts in Part Two, modern concepts of witchcraft in Part Three, and ending with an examination of witchcraft and the arts in Part Four. Each chapter offers a glimpse of a different version of the witch, introducing the reader to the diversity of witches that have existed in different contexts throughout history. Exploring a wealth of texts and case studies and offering a broad geographical scope for examining this fascinating subject, The Routledge History of Witchcraft is essential reading for students and academics interested in the history of witchcraft.

The etiology of the Wimbum people in the Western Grassfields of Cameroon is described through an examination of the way in which the meanings of key concepts, used to interpret and explain illness and other forms of misfortune, are continually being produced and reproduced in the praxis of everyday communication. During the course of numerous dialogues, witchcraft, a highly ambivalent force, gradually emerges as the prime mover. As destructive cannibals or respectable elders the witches are the ultimate cause of all significant illness, misfortune and death, and as diviners they are also the ultimate judges who apportion moral responsibility. Even the ancestors and the traditional gods turn out to be fronts behind which the witches hide their activities.The study is on three levels: a medical anthropological exploration of explanations of illness and misfortune; a detailed ethnography of traditional African cosmology and witchcraft; and an examination of recent theoretical issues in anthropology such as the nature of ethnographic fieldwork and the possibility of dialogical or postmodern ethnography.

Bringing together leading historians, anthropologists, and religionists, this volume examines the unbridled passions of witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the present. Witchcraft is an intensely emotional crime, rooted in the belief that envy and spite can cause illness or even death. Witch-trials in turn are emotionally driven by the grief of alleged victims and by the fears of magistrates and demonologists. With examples ranging from Russia to New England, Germany to Cameroon, chapters cover the representation of emotional witches in demonology and art; the gendering of witchcraft as female envy or male rage; witchcraft as a form of bullying and witchcraft accusation as a form of therapy; love magic and demon-lovers; and the affective memorialization of the "Burning Times" among contemporary Pagan feminists. Wide-ranging and methodologically diverse, the book is appropriate for scholars of witchcraft, gender, and emotions; for graduate or undergraduate courses, and for the interested general reader.

Enlivened with 102 photographs and 50 figures and maps, "Shamans, Witches, and Maya Priests" explores the "old ways" that still prevail in the Q'anjob'al, Akatek, and Chuj communities of the remote northwestern Cuchumatan Mountains. Krystyna Deuss provides vivid descriptions and images of the traditional rites and rituals she witnessed during fifteen years of fieldwork. These sacred moments include blood sacrifices for the good of the community and private shamanic rituals--as well as black magic. Deuss also includes a selection of the prayers she recorded.

Journey into the underworld through three thousand years of visions of hell, from the ancient Near East to modern America From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to twenty-first-century visions of Hell on earth, The Penguin Book of Hell takes us through three thousand years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron; meet the Devil as imagined by a twelfth-century Irish monk - a monster with a thousand giant hands; wander the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno and witness the debates that raged in Victorian England when new scientific advances cast doubt on the idea of an eternal hereafter. Drawing upon religious poetry, epics, theological treatises, stories of miracles and accounts of saints' lives, this fascinating volume of hellscapes illuminates how Hell has long haunted us, in both life and death.

This title includes a 2 DVD set. Christopher S Hyatt, Ph.D., Adv. M.ED. was trained in psycho-physiology and clinical psychology. As a research scientist he has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in professional journals and was a Research Fellow at the University of Toronto and the University of Southern California. He fled the world of academia and state sponsored psychology to become an explorer of the human mind ...creating such devices as the "Radical Undoing Series". He is now a world-famous author of a wide variety of books, CDs, and DVDs on post-modern psychology, sex, tantra, kundalini and mysticism ...and an advocate of brain exploration.

In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar John of Rupescissa sent a dramatic warning to his followers: the last days were coming; the apocalypse was near. Deemed insane by the Christian church, Rupescissa had spent more than a decade confined to prisons--in one case wrapped in chains and locked under a staircase--yet ill treatment could not silence the friar's apocalyptic message. Religious figures who preached the end times were hardly rare in the late Middle Ages, but Rupescissa's teachings were unique. He claimed that knowledge of the natural world, and alchemy in particular, could act as a defense against the plagues and wars of the last days. His melding of apocalyptic prophecy and quasi-scientific inquiry gave rise to a new genre of alchemical writing and a novel cosmology of heaven and earth. Most important, the friar's research represented a remarkable convergence between science and religion. In order to understand scientific knowledge today, Leah DeVun asks that we revisit Rupescissa's life and the critical events of his age--the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Avignon Papacy--through his eyes. Rupescissa treated alchemy as medicine (his work was the conceptual forerunner of pharmacology) and represented the emerging technologies and views that sought to combat famine, plague, religious persecution, and war. The advances he pioneered, along with the exciting strides made by his contemporaries, shed critical light on later developments in medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry.

A complete guide to working with the Birth Odus of your Orishas Birth Chart * Offers step-by-step instructions to calculate your Birth Odus and cast your full Orisha Birth Chart * Presents detailed interpretations of each of the 16 Birth Odus, showing how their energies manifest in an individual's personality, relationships, financial status, and general approach to life * Shares self-transformation techniques to help you improve the positive qualities of your chart while embracing, integrating, and neutralizing negative energies and tendencies Much like the celestial influences revealed by a natal astrology chart or the numerology of your birth date, African spiritual traditions believe that every person has specific personal energies ruling how we relate to each other and the way we foresee and achieve life goals. Called the birth Odus, these inner energies influence your choices and decisions throughout life, defining and differentiating you from everyone else--and revealing the best ways to maximize your potential and meet the challenges you face. Offering a complete guide to discovering, interpreting, and working with your birth Odus, Diego de Oxossi details step by step how to calculate your birth Odus and cast your full Orisha birth Chart. He explains the Afro-Brazilian concept of numerology and its relationship with the 16 Odus and their related Orishas, the deities of the Afro-Brazilian spiritual tradition. He explores how to determine the influences in the major and minor houses of your Orisha birth chart, including those related to personality and identity, career and success, relationships and love, and challenges and personal evolution. Presenting case studies from his practice, the author offers detailed interpretations of each of the 16 birth Odus, showing how their energies manifest in an individual's life. He looks at the positive and negative aspects of each Odu, including how the negative aspects represent the shadow forces that one has to overcome to succeed in life. He offers self- transformation techniques to help you improve the positive qualities of your chart while embracing, integrating, and neutralizing the negative energies and tendencies. Revealing how to better know yourself and understand the spiritual dynamics behind your choices and behaviors, this guide shows you how to work with the energies of the Odus and the strength of the Orishas to improve your communication and relationship skills, overcome life's challenges, and ensure success and happiness on your life's path.