From top hats to top secrets, this book is a celebration of illusion technology and mechanisms of trickery through a genre-crossing selection of films.
This important two-volume contribution to the field of secular studies offers the first comprehensive examination of atheists and non-religious people around the world.
Chromatius of Aquileia and the Making of a Christian City examines how the increasing authority of institutionalized churches changed late antique urban environments.
Critical spirituality is a way of naming a desire to work with what is meaningful in the context of enabling a socially just, diverse and inclusive society.
Besteht eine Beziehung zwischen Persephone, der griechischen Göttin, die von Hades in die Unterwelt entführt wurde, und der Pflanzenwelt, die uns umgibt und aus der wir unsere Nahrung gewinnen?
Originally published in 1974 Intimacy and Ritual is a sympathetic study of spiritualist activities and their relation to the practitioners' secular lives.
*; Details the healing techniques and folk wisdom the author learned from her Italian grandparents and from healers in Southern Italy, including plant preparation methods, medicines, rituals, recipes, kitchen magic, and protective magic*; Provides a materia medica of plants important in this tradition, sharing each plant's history, mythology, and both practical and magical uses*; Reveals how working with traditional plant medicines can help us connect to and revitalize our own ancestral traditions for deep inner healingBuilding upon the in-depth folk wisdom she learned from her immigrant grandparents as well as from local healers in Southern Italy, second-generation Italian-American and experienced herbalist Lisa Fazio shares herbal traditions and practices from the Italian diaspora and reveals how working with traditional plant medicines can help us connect to ancestral traditions for deep inner healing.
Baron Rosen's Babi/Baha'i archives presents private letters and diplomatic correspondence from the nineteenth century, preserved among the prominent Russian scholar Baron Victor Rosen's materials in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St.
Winner of the IAJS Book Award 2023 for Best Theoretical BookTraditionally, alchemy has been understood as a precursor to the science of chemistry but from the vantage point of the human spirit, it is also a discipline that illuminates the human soul.
This book demonstrates that living martyrdom was an important spiritual aspiration in the late antique Latin west and argues that, consequently, attempts to define, study, or locate martyrdom must move away from conceptualizations that require or center on death.
This comprehensive annotated bibliography, first published in 1990, guides the user helpfully through where to find information on various elements on alchemy when researching.
This innovative book offers an original insight into the context and times of St Teresa of Avila (1515 - 1582) as well as exploring her contemporary relevance from the perspective of some of the foremost thinkers and scholars in the Teresian field today including Professors Julia Kristeva, Rowan Williams and Bernard McGinn.
This book explores local cultural discourses and practices relating to manifestations and experiences of the demonic, the spectral and the uncanny, probing into their effects on people's domestic and intimate spheres of life.
In 1631, at the epicenter of the worst excesses of the European witch-hunts, Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit priest, published the Cautio Criminalis, a book speaking out against the trials that were sending thousands of innocent people to gruesome deaths.
2025 AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PUBLISHERS PROSE AWARDS WINNER: EUROPEAN HISTORYIn June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd.
This volume illustrates the complexity and variety of early Christian thought on the subject of the image of God as a theological concept, and the difficulties that arise even in the interpretation of particular authors who gave a cardinal place to the image of God in their expositions of Christian doctrine.
Late Antiquity was an era of remarkable change as beliefs were shaped and reshaped by the competing philosophies of traditional Greco-Roman religion, Middle and Neoplatonist philosophy, and the theology of the early Church.
An exploration of the sexual practices and doctrinal secrets of Gnosticism*; Reconstructs the lost world of Gnostic spiritual-erotic experience through examination of every surviving text written by heresiologists *; Investigates the sexual gnosis practices of the Barbelo Gnostics of the 2nd century and their connections to the Gnostic Aeon Sophia, the Wild Lady of Wisdom *; Explains the vital significance of ';the seed' as a sacrament in Gnostic practiceExamining every surviving text written by heresiologists, accounts often ignored in favor of the famous Nag Hammadi Library, Tobias Churton reveals the most secret inner teaching passed down by initiated societies: the tradition of sexual gnosis--higher union with God through the sacrament of sex.
This book is the first major study of England's biggest and best-known witch trial which took place in 1612, when ten witches were arraigned and hung in the village of Pendle in Lancashire.
Magic has been an important term in Western history and continues to be an essential topic in the modern academic study of religion, anthropology, sociology, and cultural history.
Spirit Possession and Communication in Religious and Cultural Contexts explores the phenomenon of spirit possession, focusing on the religious and cultural functions it serves as a means of communication.
Su-un and His World of Symbols explores the image which Choe Che-u (Su-un), the founder of Donghak (Eastern Learning) Korea's first indigenous religion, had of himself as a religious leader and human being.
Originally published in 1982, The Shaman and the Magician draws on the author's wide experience of occultism, western magic and anthropological knowledge of shamanism, to explore the interesting parallels between traditional shamanism and the more visionary aspects of magic in modern western society.
Examines the left-hand path and reveals the masters of the tradition *; Explores the practices and beliefs of many left-hand path groups, including the Cult of Set, the Hell-Fire Club, and heretical Sufi, Zoroastrian, Christian, and Muslim sects *; Investigates many infamous occult personalities, including Helena Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, the Marquis de Sade, and Anton LaVey *; Explains the true difference between the right-hand path and the left-hand path--union with and dependence on God versus individual freedom and self-empowerment From black magic and Satanism to Gnostic sects and Gurdjieff's Fourth Way, the left-hand path has been linked to many practices, cults, and individuals across the ages.
A leading figure in the Theosophical Society, Leadbeater was a prolific author, writing on subjects ranging from Buddhism, Masonic history and the origins of Christianity through to the power of thought and the fourth dimension.
