Download or read book Persuasions of the Witch s Craft written by T. M. Luhrmann and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To find out why reasonable people are drawn to the seemingly bizarre practices of magic and witchcraft, Luhrmann immersed herself in the arcane world of Londoners who call themselves magicians. Her report is as fascinating as the esoteric world itself. Illustrated.
Download or read book Persuasions of the Witch s Craft written by T. M. Luhrmann and published by Pan. This book was released on 1994 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Earthly Bodies Magical Selves written by Sarah M. Pike and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-01-24 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book incorporates the author's personal experience and scholarly work concerning ritual, sacred space, self-identity, and narrative.
Download or read book Magic Witchcraft and the Otherworld written by Susan Greenwood and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology's long and complex relationship to magic has been strongly influenced by western science and notions of rationality. This book takes a refreshing new look at modern magic as practised by contemporary Pagans in Britain. It focuses on what Pagans see as the essence of magic - a communication with an otherworldly reality. Examining issues of identity, gender and morality, the author argues that the otherworld forms a central defining characteristic of magical practice. Integrating an experiential ethnographic approach with an analysis of magic, this book asks penetrating questions about the nature of otherworldly knowledge and argues that our scientific frameworks need re-envisioning. It is unique in providing an insider's view of how magic is practised in contemporary western culture.
Download or read book When God Talks Back written by T.M. Luhrmann and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists. Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise.
Download or read book Salem Possessed written by Paul Boyer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1976-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tormented girls writhing in agony, stern judges meting out harsh verdicts, nineteen bodies swinging on Gallows Hill. The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion, individual and organized, which had been growing for more than a generation before the witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entangled in it. From rich and varied sources—many previously neglected or unknown—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the events of 1692 more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the already massive literature on Salem. “Salem Possessed,” wrote Robin Briggs in The Times Literary Supplement, “reinterprets a world-famous episode so completely and convincingly that virtually all the previous treatments can be consigned to the historical lumber-room.” Not simply a dramatic and isolated event, the Salem outbreak has wider implications for our understanding of developments central to the American experience: the breakup of Puritanism, the pressures of land and population in New England towns, the problems besetting farmer and householder, the shifting role of the church, and the powerful impact of commercial capitalism.
Download or read book A Community of Witches written by Helen A. Berger and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Community of Witches explores the beliefs and practices of Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft - generally known to scholars and practitioners as Wicca. While the words "magic," "witchcraft," and "paganism" evoke images of the distant past and remote cultures, this book shows that Wicca has emerged as part of a new religious movement that reflects the era in which it developed. Imported to the United States in the late 1960s from the United Kingdom, the religion absorbed into its basic fabric the social concerns of the time: feminism, environmentalism, self-development, alternative spirituality, and mistrust of authority.
Download or read book Witching Culture written by Sabina Magliocco and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness. Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. She discusses rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources, and examines the cultural politics surrounding the movement—how the Neo-Pagan movement creates identity by contrasting itself against the dominant culture and how it can be understood in the context of early twenty-first-century identity politics. Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America.
Download or read book Mastering Witchcraft written by Paul Huson and published by Backinprint.com. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enduring classic since its publication in 1970, Mastering Witchcraft is one of the best how-to manuals for those wishing to practice traditional European Witchcraft as a craft rather than a New Age religion. Starting from first principles, Huson instructs the novice step by step in the arts of circle casting, blessing and banning, the uses of amulets and talismans, philters, divination, necromancy, waxen images, knots, fascination, conjuration, magical familiars, spells to arouse passion or lust, attain vengeance, and of course, counter-spells to exorcize and annul the malice of others. "A genuine vade mecum."-The Catholic Herald.
Download or read book The Trickster and the Paranormal written by George P. Hansen and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2001-08-20 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paranormal and supernatural events have been reported for millennia. They have fostered history’s most important cultural transformations (e.g., via the miracles of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed). Paranormal phenomena are frequently portrayed in the world’s greatest art and literature, as well as in popular TV shows and movies. Most adults in the U.S. believe in them. Yet they have a marginal place in modern culture. No university departments are devoted to studying psychic phenomena. In fact, a panoply of scientists now aggressively denounces them. These facts present a deeply puzzling situation. But they become coherent after pondering the trickster figure, an archaic being found worldwide in mythology and folklore. The trickster governs paradox and the irrational, but his messages are concealed. This book draws upon theories of the trickster from anthropology, folklore, sociology, semiotics, and literary criticism. It examines psychic phenomena and UFOs and explains why they are so problematical for science.
Download or read book How God Becomes Real written by T.M. Luhrmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more. A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.
Download or read book No Go the Bogeyman written by Marina Warner and published by Arrow. This book was released on 2000 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ogres and giants, bogeymen and bugaboos embody some of our deepest fears, dominating popular fiction, from tales such as 'Jack the Giant Killer' to the cannibal monster Hannibal Lecter, from the Titans of Greek mythology to the dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK, from Frankenstein to MEN IN BLACK. Following her brilliant study of fairy tales, FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE, Marina Warner's enthralling new book explores the ever increasing presence of such figures of male terror, and the stratagems we invent to allay the monsters we conjure up. From ogres to cradle songs, from bananas to cannibals, Warner traces the roots of our commonest anxieties, unravelling with vigorous intelligence, originality and relish, the myths and fears which define our sensibilities. Illustrated with a wealth of images - from the beautiful and the bizarre to the downright scary - this is a tour de force of scholarship and imagination.
Download or read book Our Most Troubling Madness written by Prof. T.M. Luhrmann and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schizophrenia has long puzzled researchers in the fields of psychiatric medicine and anthropology. Why is it that the rates of developing schizophrenia—long the poster child for the biomedical model of psychiatric illness—are low in some countries and higher in others? And why do migrants to Western countries find that they are at higher risk for this disease after they arrive? T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow argue that the root causes of schizophrenia are not only biological, but also sociocultural. This book gives an intimate, personal account of those living with serious psychotic disorder in the United States, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It introduces the notion that social defeat—the physical or symbolic defeat of one person by another—is a core mechanism in the increased risk for psychotic illness. Furthermore, “care-as-usual” treatment as it occurs in the United States actually increases the likelihood of social defeat, while “care-as-usual” treatment in a country like India diminishes it.
Download or read book Never Again the Burning Times written by Loretta Orion and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating ethnography explores contemporary witchcraft from the unusual perspective of self-identified witches & magicians.
Download or read book Persuasions of the Witch s Craft written by Tanya M. Luhrmann and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1992 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book All Acts of Love Pleasure Inclusive Wicca written by Yvonne Aburrow and published by . This book was released on 2014-11-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Living Witchcraft written by Allen Scarboro and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1994-09-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the only ethnography of a living community of witches in the United States. Ravenwood, based near Atlanta, is one of the largest American covens and has supported and encouraged this research through to publication. Of unprecedented importance in clearing the name of witchcraft, the leader of the coven is a civil rights activist, still dedicated in her wiser years to the individual's right to freedom of religion. A must read in women's studies, shamanism, comparative religion and American studies.
