Download or read book Handbook of the Theosophical Current written by Olav Hammer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title represents pioneering research into an important but under-researched current. The three sections in the book are devoted to the Theosophical Society, Theosophically influenced religious currents, and the interaction between Theosophy and surrounding culture.
Download or read book The Occult World written by Christopher Partridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents students and scholars with a comprehensive overview of the fascinating world of the occult. It explores the history of Western occultism, from ancient and medieval sources via the Renaissance, right up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary occultism. Written by a distinguished team of contributors, the essays consider key figures, beliefs and practices as well as popular culture.
Download or read book Accelerating Human Evolution by Theosophical Initiation written by Yves Mühlematter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main subjects of analysis in the present book are the stages of initiation in the grand scheme of Theosophical evolution. These initiatory steps are connected to an idea of evolutionary self-development by means of a set of virtues that are relative to the individual’s position on the path of evolution. The central thesis is that these stages were translated from the “Hindu” tradition to the “Theosophical” tradition through multifaceted “hybridization processes” in which several Indian members of the Theosophical Society partook. Starting with Annie Besant’s early Theosophy, the stages of initiation are traced through Blavatsky’s work to Manilal Dvivedi and T. Subba Row, both Indian members of the Theosophical Society, and then on to the Sanâtana Dharma Text Books. In 1898, the English Theosophist Annie Besant and the Indian Theosophist Bhagavan Das together founded the Central Hindu College, Benares, which became the nucleus around which the Benares Hindu University was instituted in 1915. In this context the Sanâtana Dharma Text Books were published. Mühlematter shows that the stages of initiation were the blueprint for Annie Besant’s pedagogy, which she implemented in the Central Hindu College in Benares. In doing so, he succeeds in making intelligible how “esoteric” knowledge was transferred to public institutions and how a broader public could be reached as a result. The dissertation has been awarded the ESSWE PhD Thesis prize 2022 by the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.
Download or read book Theosophy and the Study of Religion written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its emergence in the nineteenth century, the Theosophical Society has wielded enormous influence across diverse fields, none more so than the study of religion. This volume explores this legacy in North America, Europe, and India, demonstrating its impact on the conceptualization of “religion” and its influence on methods of comparison. Unveiling overlooked entanglements, the volume challenges standard narratives in the history of religious studies and interrogates the deliberate neglect of theosophy’s influence in the “secular” academy. In doing so, the work confronts lingering ghosts, urging a reappraisal that enriches the study of religion and offers prescriptions for its future.
Download or read book Spiritual Moderns written by Erika Doss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-05-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how and why religion matters in the history of modern American art. Andy Warhol is one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century. He was also an observant Catholic who carried a rosary, went to mass regularly, kept a Bible by his bedside, and depicted religious subjects throughout his career. Warhol was a spiritual modern: a modern artist who appropriated religious images, beliefs, and practices to create a distinctive style of American art. Spiritual Moderns centers on four American artists who were both modern and religious. Joseph Cornell, who showed with the Surrealists, was a member of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Mark Tobey created pioneering works of Abstract Expressionism and was a follower of the Bahá’í Faith. Agnes Pelton was a Symbolist painter who embraced metaphysical movements including New Thought, Theosophy, and Agni Yoga. And Warhol, a leading figure in Pop art, was a lifelong Catholic. Working with biographical materials, social history, affect theory, and the tools of art history, Doss traces the linked subjects of art and religion and proposes a revised interpretation of American modernism.
Download or read book Theosophy across Boundaries written by Hans Martin Krämer and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theosophy across Boundaries brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, philosophy, art, and politics. The first half of the book consists of seven perspectives on the activities of the Theosophical Society in very different regional contexts, ranging from India, Vietnam, China, and Japan to Victorian Britain and Israel, shedding new light on the entanglement of "Western" and "Oriental" ideas around 1900. The second half explores specific cultural influences that Theosophy exerted in the spheres of literature, art, and politics, using case studies from Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Russia. The examples clearly show that Theosophy was part of a truly global movement, thus providing an outstanding example of the complex entanglements of the global religious history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Handbook of Global Contemporary Christianity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Global Contemporary Christianity: Movements, Institutions & Allegiance traces how the largest religion in the world is increasingly expressed in energetic global forms – leading to fresh modes of organisation, belonging, believing, and traditional and syncretic movements.
Download or read book Recycled Lives written by Julie Chajes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sizeable minority of people with no particular connection to Eastern religions now believe in reincarnation. The rise in popularity of this belief over the last century and a half is directly traceable to the impact of the nineteenth century's largest and most influential Western esoteric movement, the Theosophical Society. In Recycled Lives, Julie Chajes looks at the rebirth doctrines of the matriarch of Theosophy, the controversial occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). Examining her teachings in detail, Chajes places them in the context of multiple dimensions of nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural life. In particular, she explores Blavatsky's readings (and misreadings) of Spiritualist currents, scientific theories, Platonism, and Hindu and Buddhist thought. These in turn are set in relief against broader nineteenth-century American and European trends. The chapters come together to reveal the contours of a modern perspective on reincarnation that is inseparable from the nineteenth-century discourses within which it emerged, and which has shaped how people in the West tend to view reincarnation today.
Download or read book The New Age Movement written by Margrethe Løøv and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-31 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element introduces New Age religion, a loosely cohesive conglomerate of different spiritual currents with no common founder, leader, institution, dogma, or scripture. This Element emphasizes both the unity and diversity of the New Age.
Download or read book The Soul Searcher s Handbook written by Emma Mildon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From healing crystals and meditation to aromatherapy and numerology, this fun and fresh beginner’s guide to everything body-mind-spirit defines New Age practices for anyone embarking on a spiritual journey. What type of crystal should I put in my car for a road trip? Should I Feng Shui the apps on my phone? In this illuminating introduction for the modern-day witchy soul searcher, Emma Mildon shines light on everything your parents didn’t teach you about New Age practices with the air of a knowledgeable and witty best friend. With something for every type of spiritual seeker, The Soul Searcher’s Handbook offers easy tips, tricks, and how-tos for incorporating everything from dreamology and astrology to mysticism and alternative healing into your daily practices. Your one-stop shop for all things magical and enlightening—handy, accessible, entertaining, and packed with all the wisdom you need. So embrace the goddess within, dig your toes into the sacred soil of Mother Earth, and open your soul to your full potential. Regardless of what you’re seeking, The Soul Searcher’s Handbook is your number one guide to awakening a more fulfilled and soulful you.
Download or read book Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and geographies, the Brill Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling presents modern spirit possession in a variety of contexts. Weaving together the interrelated movements of Spiritualism along with its specific Franco and Latin American currents, articles explore the nineteenth-century beginnings of séances and trance mediumship. Channelling, an heir to Spiritualism begun in the 1970s and still flourishing today, is brought into direct conversation with its predecessors with a view to showing both continuity and disjuncture as the products of new cultural and religious needs. The Brill Handbook marks the first extensive collection on these two interrelated movements and examines themes such as gender, race, performance, and technology in each instance.
Download or read book Esotericism and Deviance written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of deviance has been central to the academic study of (Western) esotericism since its inception. This book, being the proceedings of the 6th Biennial Conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), explores the relationship between esotericism and various forms of deviance (as concept, category, and practice) from antiquity until late modernity. The volume is the first to combine incisive conceptual explorations of the concept of deviance and how it informs and challenges the study of esotericism alongside a wide range of empirically grounded case discussions.
Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason A. Josephson-Storm and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the early human sciences and their deep connections to spiritualism dispenses with the myth that separates magic and modernity. Many theorists contend that the defining feature of modernity is our collective loss of faith in spirits, myths, and magic. But in The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues against this narrative, showing that attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than not. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. He demonstrates that the founding figures of these “mythless” disciplines were in fact profoundly enmeshed in the occult and spiritualist revivals of Britain, France, and Germany. It was in response to this milieu that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
Download or read book Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century written by Jake Poller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century saw an unprecedented spike in the study of altered states of consciousness. New ASCs, such as those associated with LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, were cultivated and studied, while older ASCs were given new classifications: out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, psychokinesis, extrasensory perception. Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century analyses these different approaches and methodologies, and includes exciting new research into neglected areas. This volume investigates the representation of ASCs in the culture of the twentieth century and examines the theoretical models that attempt to explain them. The international contributors critically examine a variety of ASCs, including precognition, near-death experiences, telepathy, New Age ‘channelling’, contact with aliens and UFOs, the use of alcohol and entheogens, analysing both the impact of ASCs on the culture and how cultural and technological changes influenced ASCs. The contributors are drawn from the fields of English and American literature, religious studies, Western esotericism, film studies, sociology and history of art, and bring to bear on ASCs their own disciplinary and conceptual perspectives, as well as a broader interdisciplinary knowledge of the subject. The collection represents a vital contribution to the growing body of work on both ASCs and the wider academic engagement with millennialism, entheogens, occulture and the paranormal.
Download or read book Explorations in Music and Esotericism written by Elizabeth T. Abbate and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars explore from many fresh angles the interweavings of two of the richest strands of human culture-music and esotericism-with examples from the medieval period to the modern age. Music and esotericism are two responses to the intuition that the world holds hidden order, beauty, and power. Those who compose, perform, and listen to music have often noted that music can be a bridge between sensory and transcendent realms. Such renowned writers as Boethius expanded the definition of music to encompass not only sounded music but also the harmonic fabric of human and cosmic life. Those who engage in pursuits called "esoteric," from ancient astrology, magic, and alchemy to recent and more novel forms of spirituality, have also remarked on the relevance of music to their quests. Esotericists have composed music in order to convey esoteric meaning, performed music to create esoteric influences, and listened to music to raise their esoteric awareness. The academic study of esotericism is a young field, and few researchers have probed the rich interface between the musical and esoteric domains. In Explorations in Music and Esotericism, scholars from numerous fields introduce the history of esotericism and current debates about its definition and extent. The book's sixteen chapters present rich instances of connections between music and esotericism, organized with reference to four aspects of esotericism: as a form of thought; as the keeping and revealing of secrets; as an identity; and as a signifier. Edited by Marjorie Roth and Leonard George. Contributors: Elizabeth Abbate, Malachai Komanoff Bandy, Adam Bregman, Charles E. Brewer, Benjamin Dobbs, Anna Gawboy, Pasquale Giaquinto, Adam Knight Gilbert, Joscelyn Godwin, Virginia Christy Lamothe, Andrew Owen, Christopher Scheer, Codee Ann Spinner, Woodrow Steinken, and Daphne Tan.
Download or read book Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present written by Georgiana D. Hedesan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the role of innovation in understanding the history of esotericism. It illustrates how innovation is a mechanism of negotiation whereby an idea is either produced against, or adapted from, an older set of concepts in order to respond to a present context. Featuring contributions from distinguished scholars of esotericism, it covers many different fields and themes including magic, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Tarot, apocalypticism and eschatology, Mesmerism, occultism, prophecy, and mysticism.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements written by James R. Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of New Religious Movements (NRMs) is one of the fastest-growing areas of religious studies, and since the release of the first edition of The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements in 2003, the field has continued to expand and break new ground. In this all-new volume, James R. Lewis and Inga B. Tøllefsen bring together established and rising scholars to address an expanded range of topics, covering traditional religious studies topics such as "scripture," "charisma," and "ritual," while also applying new theoretical approaches to NRM topics. Other chapters cover understudied topics in the field, such as the developmental patterns of NRMs and subcultural considerations in the study of NRMs. The first part of this book examines NRMs from a social-scientific perspective, particularly that of sociology. In the second section, the primary factors that have put the study of NRMs on the map, controversy and conflict, are considered. The third section investigates common themes within the field of NRMs, while the fourth examines the approaches that religious studies researchers have taken to NRMs. As NRM Studies has grown, subfields such as Esotericism, New Age Studies, and neo-Pagan Studies have grown as distinct and individual areas of study, and the final section of the book investigates these emergent fields.
