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This book provides a selection of studies on witchcraft and
demonology by those involved in an interdisciplinary research group
begun in Hungary thirty years ago. They examine urban and rural
witchcraft conflicts from early modern times to the present, from a
region hitherto rarely taken into consideration in witchcraft
research. Special attention is given to healers, midwives, and
cunning folk, including archaic sorcerer figures such as the
taltos; whose ambivalent role is analysed in social, legal, medical
and religious contexts. This volume examines how waves of
persecution emerged and declined, and how witchcraft was
decriminalised. Fascinating case-studies on vindictive
witch-hunters, quarrelling neighbours, rivalling midwives, cunning
shepherds, weather magician impostors, and exorcist Franciscan
friars provide a colourful picture of Hungarian and Transylvanian
folk beliefs and mythologies, as well as insights into historical
and contemporary issues.
Possession, a seemingly irrational phenomenon, has posed challenges
to generations of scholars rooted in Western notions of body-soul
dualism, self and personhood, and a whole set of presuppositions
inherited from Christian models of possession that was "good" or
"bad." The authors of the essays in this book present a new and
more promising approach. They conceive spirit possession as a form
of communication, of expressivity, of culturally defined behavior
that should be understood in the context of local, vernacular
theories and empiric reflections. With the aim of reformulating the
comparative anthropology of spirit possession, the editors have
opened corridors between previously separate areas of research.
Together, anthropologists and historians working on several
historical periods and in different European, African, South
American, and Asian cultural areas attempt to redefine the very
concept of possession, freeing it from the Western notion of the
self and more clearly delineating it from related matters such as
witchcraft, devotion, or mysticism. The book also provides an
overview of new research directions, including novel methods of
participant observation and approaches to spirit possession as
indigenous historiography
This third, concluding volume of the series publishes 14 studies
and the transcription of a round-table discussion on Carlo
Ginzburg's Ecstasies. The themes of the previous two volumes,
"Communicating with the Spirits," and "Christian Demonology and
Popular Mythology," are further expanded here both as regards their
interdisciplinary approach and the wide range of regional
comparisons. While the emphasis of the second volume was on current
popular belief and folklore as seen in the context of the
historical sources on demonology, this volume approaches its
subject from the point of view of historical anthropology. The
greatest recent advances of witchcraft research occurred recently
in two fields: (1) deciphering the variety of myths and the
complexity of historical processes which lead to the formation of
the witches' Sabbath, (2) the micro-historical analysis of the
social, religious, legal and cultural milieu where witchcraft
accusations and persecutions developed. These two themes are
completed by some further insights into the folklore of the
concerned regions which still carries the traces of the traumatic
historical memories of witchcraft persecutions.
This is the second volume of a series of three. The authors -
recognized historians, ethnologists, folklorists coming from four
continents - present the latest research findings on the
relationship, coexistence and conflicts of popular belief systems,
Judeo-Christian mythology and demonology in medieval and modern
Europe. The present volume focuses on the divergence between
Western and Eastern evolution, on the different relationship of
learned demonology to popular belief systems in the two parts of
Europe. It discusses the conflict of saints, healers, seers,
shamans with the representatives of evil; the special function of
escorting, protecting, possessing, harming and healing spirits; the
role of the dead, the ghosts, of pre-Christian, Jewish and
Christian spirit-world, the antagonism of the devil and the saing.
The author has undertaken extensive research on the history of folk
beliefs connected with communication with the supernatural sphere.
In this text, she examines the relics of European shamanism in
early modern sources, and the techniques and belief-systems of
mediators found in the records of witchcraft trials from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Pocs also explores the kinds
of communication systems known to early modern Hungarians, the role
of these systems in everyday village life, and how they were
connected to contemporary European systems. On the basis of her
material and analysis, she contributes a number of details and
identifies types of mediators and systems which function up to the
twentieth century.
Focuses on the problem of communication with the other world: the
phenomenon of spirit possession and its changing historical
interpretations, the imaginary schemes elaborated for giving
accounts of the journeys to the other world, for communicating with
the dead, and finally the historical archetypes of this kind of
religious manifestation-trance prophecy, divination, and shamanism.
Recognized historians and ethnologists analyze the relationship,
coexistence and conflicts of popular belief systems,
Judeo-Christian mythology and demonology in medieval and modern
Europe. The essays address links between rites and beliefs,
folklore and literature; the legacy of various pre-Christian
mythologies; the syncretic forms of ancient, medieval and modern
belief- and rite-systems; "pure" examples from
religious-ethnological research outside Europe to elucidate
European problems.
This book provides a nuanced picture of the notions of body and
soul held by the peoples of Europe through the soul concepts
associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition and other religions
and denominations; and the alternative traditions preserved
alongside Christianity in folklore collections, linguistic and
literary records. The studies also emphasize the connections
between these notions and beliefs related to death and the dead, as
well as questions of communication between the human world and the
spirit world. The essays here focus on the roles notions of the
soul and the spirit world play in the everyday life, religion and
mentality of various communities; their folklore and literary
representations, as well as the narrative metaphors, motifs, topoi
and genres of ideas about the soul and about supernatural
communication, along with questions of the relationship between
narratives and religious notions.This book will appeal to
researchers and students of religion, mythology, folklore and the
anthropology of religion, as well as general readers interested in
the humanities.
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