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."

Lucifer: Princeps is a seminal study on the origins of the Lucifer mythos by Peter Grey. It is the first in a two volume work; the companion volume, Praxis, being an exposition of ritual actions, will be published in 2021. The fall of Lucifer, and that of the rebel angels who descended upon the daughters of men, comprise the foundation myth of the Western occult tradition. Lucifer: Princeps is a study of origins, a portrait of the first ancestor of witchcraft and magic. In tracing the genealogy of our patron and prince, the principles that underlie the ritual forms that have come down to us, through the grimoires and folk practices, are elucidated. The study draws on the extensive literature of history, religion and archaeology, engaging with the vital discoveries and advances of recent scholarship, which render previous works on Lucifer, however well intentioned, out of date. A concomitant exegesis of the core texts conjures the terrain and koine of the Ancient Near East, the cradle cultures and language of his nascence. Of critical importance are the effaced cultures and cults that lie behind the Old Testament polemics, viz. those of Assyria, Ugarit and Canaan, as well as Sumeria, Egypt and Greece; they provide the context that give meaning to what would otherwise be an isolated brooding figure, one who makes no sense without being encountered in the landscape. Intended to be the definitive text on Lucifer for the witch, magician and student of the grimoires, Princeps spans wingtip to wingtip from the original flood myth and legends of divine teachers to the Church Fathers, notably Augustine, Origen and Tertullian. The tales of the Garden of Eden, the Nephilim, of the fall of Helel ben Sahar and the Prince of Tyre, the nature of Azazel, and the creation of the Satan are drawn beneath the shadow of these wings into a narrative that binds Genesis and Revelation via the Enochian tradition. The story of the Serpent in the Garden and that of Lucifer are revealed to be a singular myth whose true significance had been lost and can now be restored. It illuminates the path to apotheosis, and the role of the goddess as the transforming initiatrix who bestows the crown.

What does it mean to be a Psychic Witch? Psychic Witch is a guide to learning about and understanding what it means to be a practicing Witch with psychic ability. Carolyn shows you how listening to your inner voice, following nature's rhythms and living Magickally, can assist you in everyday life. She gives you the tools needed to open your psychic potential and the keys to being in balance with the natural world around you. You will learn about psychic energy, creating a spiritual practice through prayer, meditation, affirmations and chakra work, and how being psychic will affect you. This book will teach you the tools needed in order to work with and communicate with the Spiritual realms, what spell work to perform that will help enhance your psychic abilities and how using divination tools can assist you. Each chapter includes a Psychic lesson plan to help guide you along this journey and personal psychic stories by the author as well as her own psychic premonitions regarding future events. This is a must read for any Witch who has only just begun to tap into his or her psychic abilities.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1884 Edition.

As I attempted to digest stories of spiritual cannibalism, of curses that could cost a student her eyesight or ignite the pages of the books she read, I knew I was not alone in my skepticism. And yet, when I caught sight of the waving arms of an industrious scarecrow, the hair on the back of my neck would stand on end. It was most palpable at night, this creepy feeling, when the moon stayed low to the horizon and the dust kicked up in the breeze, reaching out and pulling back with ghostly fingers. There was something to this place that could be felt but not seen.

With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West Africa's witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camp with an outsider's sense of outrage, believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not explain: a woman who confessed she'd attacked a girl given to her as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of the witchcraft she believed helped her kill dozens of people.

In "Spellbound, "Palmer brilliantly recounts the kaleidoscope of experiences that greeted her in the remote witch camps of northern Ghana, where more than 3,000 exiled women and men live in extreme poverty, many sentenced in a ceremony hinging on the death throes of a sacrificed chicken.

As she ventured deeper into Ghana's grasslands, Palmer found herself swinging between belief and disbelief. She was shown books that caught on fire for no reason and met diviners who accurately predicted the future. From the schoolteacher who believed Africa should use the power of its witches to gain wealth and prestige to the social worker who championed the rights of accused witches but also took his wife to a witch doctor, Palmer takes readers deep inside a shadowy layer of rural African society.

As the sheen of the exotic wore off, Palmer saw the camp for what it was: a hidden colony of women forced to rely on food scraps from the weekly market. She witnessed the way witchcraft preyed on people's fears and resentments. Witchcraft could be a comfort in times of distress, a way of explaining a crippling drought or the inexplicable loss of a child. It was a means of predicting the unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable. But witchcraft was also a tool for social control. In this vivid, startling work of first-person reportage, Palmer sheds light on the plight of women in a rarely seen corner of the world.

The Book of Elven Magick, The Philosophy and Enchantments of the Seelie Elves, Volume 2, continues the progression of the color magicks and proceeds on into the nature and establishment of the Elven Vortex/Coven, and our theories on calling the directions/dimensions and much more. It is the completion of and companion to volume 1.

Faunalia is a controversial Pagan festival with a reputation for being wild and emotionally intense. It lasts five days, 80 people attend, and the two main rituals run most of the night. In the tantalisingly erotic Baphomet rite, participants encounter a hermaphroditic deity, enter a state of trance and dance naked around a bonfire. In the Underworld rite participants role play their own death, confronting grief and suffering. These rituals are understood as "shadow work" - a Jungian term that refers to practices that creatively engage repressed or hidden aspects of the self. Sex, Death and Witchcraft is a powerful application of relational theory to the study of religion and contemporary culture. It analyses Faunalia's rituals in terms of recent innovations in the sociology of religion and religious studies that focus on relational etiquette, lived religion, embodiment and performance. The sensuous and emotionally intense ritual performances at Faunalia transform both moral orientations and self-understandings. Participants develop an ethical practice that is individualistic, but also relational, and aesthetically mediated. Extensive extracts from interviews describe the rituals in participants' own words. The book combines rich and evocative description of the rituals with careful analysis of the social processes that shape people's experiences at this controversial Pagan festival.