Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

This is a much needed textbook on fixed stars and their relationship to the natal planets. Bernadette Brady (Brady's Book of Fixed Stars, Samuel Weiser, 1998) has a mission - and that mission is to draw astrologers closer to the foundations of their art, bringing the glory and magnitude of the fixed stars into every day astrology, where she firmly believes they belong. With our light-polluted skies and busy lives, it is easy to practise a form of astrology where we never actually look out at the stars or planets - and in doing so the author shows that we lose vital astrological information about our natal relationship to the heavens. This book offers rare material on the detailed interpretations of an individual's natal heliacal rising and setting stars; these stars yield insight into the nature of one's soul and spiritual path. Additionally, the author gives a comprehensive listing of the meaning of every star when combined with all the planets and nodal axis, for natal as well as predictive use. Tables are provided to help the reader find their own key stars for their time of birth allowing them to work with, and embrace, the sky using the methods that were first employed at the dawn of astrology.

Astrology has been open to criticism through a large part of its long history. In this groundbreaking book Bernadette Brady gives new insights in the intensity of these criticisms by placing astrology into its initial setting, its original world of ancient creation myths linked to the great creative void. Modern chaos theory has now rediscovered this void and Brady maps astrology to chaos theory to produce "chaotic astrology". The result is an insight into fate, freewill and the nature of astrology itself implying that it is neither a science nor a religion, and suggests instead that astrology is an instrument of chaos, a fertile and pragmatic tool for understanding the patterns of life. Original and insightful as ever, Brady navigates the reader through a breath-taking journey which can change forever the way one views the world.

This work radically rethinks astrology's place in society. Emerging when cultures were embedded in chaotic creation mythology, astrology has persisted into modern society. Reasons for this longevity are an enigma, yet the answer may lie in chaos theory and complexity. These theories reveal that the themes of coincidence and cycles, constitutive of chaotic creation mythologies, are in fact the common features of a lived life experience. Brady argues that astrology is actually a vernacular expression of chaos and complexity, and it thus offers insights into the efficacy of the synchronicities of life. Brady thereby offers us a profound reassessment of astrology and its cultural contexts.

Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.