Download or read book Binding Words written by Don C. Skemer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Middle Ages, textual amulets--short texts written on parchment or paper and worn on the body--were thought to protect the bearer against enemies, to heal afflictions caused by demonic invasions, and to bring the wearer good fortune. In Binding Words, Don C. Skemer provides the first book-length study of this once-common means of harnessing the magical power of words. Textual amulets were a unique source of empowerment, promising the believer safe passage through a precarious world by means of an ever-changing mix of scriptural quotations, divine names, common prayers, and liturgical formulas. Although theologians and canon lawyers frequently derided textual amulets as ignorant superstition, many literate clergy played a central role in producing and disseminating them. The texts were, in turn, embraced by a broad cross-section of Western Europe. Saints and parish priests, physicians and village healers, landowners and peasants alike believed in their efficacy. Skemer offers careful analysis of several dozen surviving textual amulets along with other contemporary medieval source materials. In the process, Binding Words enriches our understanding of popular religion and magic in everyday medieval life.
Download or read book European Witch Trials written by Richard Kieckhefer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.
Download or read book Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture written by C. Michel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-11-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection introduces readers to the history and practice of the Vodou religion, and corrects many misconceptions. The book focuses specifically on the role Vodou plays in Haiti, where it has its strongest following, examining its influence on spiritual beliefs, cultural practices, national identity, popular culture, writing and art.
Download or read book The Origin of the Grail Legend written by Arthur C. L. Brown and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Relative Native written by Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro and published by Hau. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to collect the most influential essays and lectures of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Published in a wide variety of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought together here for the first time in a one major volume, which includes his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere." Rounded out with new English translations of a number of previously unpublished works, the resulting book is a wide-ranging portrait of one of the towering figures of contemporary thought--philosopher, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, and more. With a new afterword by Roy Wagner elucidating Viveiros de Castro's work, influence, and legacy, The Relative Native will be required reading, further cementing Viveiros de Castro's position at the center of contemporary anthropological inquiry.
Download or read book Priests Tongues and Rites written by Jacco Dieleman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an investigation into the sphere of production and use of two related bilingual magical handbooks found as part of a larger collection of magical and alchemical manuscripts around 1828 in the hills surrounding Luxor, Egypt. Both handbooks, dating to the Roman period, contain an assortment of recipes for magical rites in the Demotic and Greek language. The library which comprises these two handbooks is nowadays better known as the Theban Magical Library. The book traces the social and cultural milieu of the composers, compilers and users of the extant spells through a combination of philology, sociolinguistics and cultural analysis. To anybody working on Greco-Roman Egypt, ancient magic, and bilingualism this study is of significant importance.
Download or read book Proceedings Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages written by and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. for 1975-1979 contain the proceedings of the 26th-30th annual meeting.
Download or read book Shadow of Night written by Deborah Harkness and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling second installment in the All Souls series, from the author of The Discovery of Witches and The Black Bird Oracle. Look for the hit series “A Discovery of Witches,” now streaming on AMC+, Sundance Now, and Shudder! Picking up from A Discovery of Witches’ cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes reluctant witch Diana Bishop and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew's old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782—the lost and enchanted manuscript whose mystery first pulled Diana and Matthew into one another's orbit—deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew's past tightens around them. Together they find they must embark on a very different—and vastly more dangerous—journey. “A captivating and romantic ripping yarn,”* Shadow of Night confirms Deborah Harkness as a master storyteller, able to cast an “addictive tale of magic, mayhem and two lovers”(Chicago Tribune).
Download or read book The Sex Thieves written by Julien Bonhomme and published by Hau. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the "sex thieves" are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the "penis snatcher," asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon--unique in its spatial and temporal scale--without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other. Bonhomme argues that the public belief in sex thieves cannot be considered a superstition or form of mass hysteria. Rather, he brings to light multiple factors that explain the rumor's success and shows how the cultural dynamic can operate on a vast scale. Analyzing the rumor on both transnational and local levels, he demonstrates how it arises from the ambiguities and dangers of anonymity, and thus that it reveals an occult flipside to everyday social interaction. Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo Paganism written by Shelley Rabinovitch and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether you're looking for information on blessings, the Green Man, divination, ritual components, or spellwork, you can find it all in the Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism. Here is the ultimate source of information on all things Wiccan and Neo-Pagan, an indispensable tool for anyone wanting to learn about the history, traditions, and major figures of modern nontraditional religions. Organized alphabetically and designed to be both clear and comprehensive, this book provides definitions and detailed entries on a wide range of subjects -- including Witchcraft, Shamanism, Gaia theory, the Burning Times, Pagan festivals, Wiccan holidays, and much more. There are essays on Witchcraft and Paganism's influence on pop culture, including the crop of Wicca-inspired books, movies, and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, The Craft, and the Harry Potter series. From Altar to Otter Zell, and all points in between, the illustrated Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism is the first and last Wyrd on nontraditional religion -- the ultimate reference for anyone interested in past, present, and practice. Book jacket.
Download or read book The Materiality of Magic written by Dietrich Boschung and published by Brill Fink. This book was released on 2015 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two decades we have had many books and proceedings of conferences on the history, formulas and incantations of magic in antiquity, both in East and West, but this is the first book of its kind that focuses on the material aspects of magic, such as gems, rings, drawings, grimoires, amulets and figurines. In recent years scholars have focused not only on the discourse and practices of magic in antiquity, but also on its practitioners, literary stereotypes and historical shifts. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the material that was used by the magicians for their curses and incantations. Yet there is no magic without materiality. The practice of magic required a specialist expertise that knew how to handle material such as lead, gold, stones, papyrus, figurines or voodoo dolls. That is why we present new insights on the materiality of magic by studying both the materials used for magic as well as the books in which the expertise was preserved.--Publisher.
Download or read book Le Tumulte Noir written by Jody Blake and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.
Download or read book Children of Lucifer written by Ruben van Luijk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Satanism adopts Satan, the Judeo-Christian representative of evil, as an object of veneration. This work explores the historical origins of this extraordinary 'antireligion.'
Download or read book Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World written by Paul Allan Mirecki and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2002 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a series of provocative essays that explore expressions of magic and ritual power in the ancient world. The strength of the present volume lies in the breadth of scholarly approaches represented. The book begins with several papyrological studies presenting important new texts in Greek and Coptic, continuing with essays focussing on taxonomy and definition. The concluding essays apply contemporary theories to analyses of specific test cases in a broad variety of ancient Mediterranean cultures. Paul Mirecki, Th.D. (1986) in Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. Marvin Meyer, Ph.D. (1979) in Religion, Claremont Graduate School, is Professor of Religion at Chapman University, Orange, California, and Director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity.
Download or read book The Pagan Path written by Janet Farrar and published by Phoenix Pub. This book was released on 1995 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has often been stated that Paganism is the fastest growing religion in the world; this book helps to answer why...As a result of many years of research with pagans throughout the world, the authors have compiled an extensive work on paganism today. Chapters include: The Ancient Roots; The Modern Rebirth; Pagans in the Community; Pagan Families; Paganism and Sex; No Place for Satan; Paganism and Christianity; The Global Village; The Way In. Other chapters cover Magic and Divination, Healing, God and Goddess Forms, The Earth our Mother, The Rainbow of Paths, and Pagan Humor. Recommended by Chas Clifton, editor of the Witchcraft Today series of books, and Loretta Hoback of New Age Retailer.
Download or read book The Automatic Message written by André Breton and published by Atlas Press (GB). This book was released on 1997 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects together the two most vital "automatic" texts Surrealism. Breton's prefatory essay The Automatic Message relates this technique to the underlying concepts and aesthetic of the Surrealist movement. The Magnetic Fields (1919) was the first work of literary Surrealism and is thus one of the foundations of modern European thought and writing. This authorised translation is by the poet David Gascoyne, himself a member of the group and a friend of both authors. The Immaculate Conception (1930) traces the interior and exterior life of man from Conception and Intra-Uterine Life to Death and The Original Judgement. The central section is a celebrated series of "simulations" of various types of mental instability.
Download or read book The Wicca Book of Days written by Gerina Dunwich and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate significant milestones in pagan and ancient history each turn of the Wiccan Wheel of Days—from January 1st through December 31st. Researched and compiled by contemporary Wiccan expert and practicing witch Gerina Dunwich, this day-by-day calendar commemorates the pagan festivals and feasts, birthdays, and major events in Wiccan history, legend, and lore. Entries include the Roman festival of Carmentalia on January 11th, Whitsunday on June 4th, and the Chinese Festival of the Hungry Ghosts on August 18th. Highlighting Eastern, Western, and Native American holidays, feasts, and celebrations, The Wicca Book of Days is essential both as a Witch’s calendar and as a highly browsable history of pagan culture and folklore from ancient times to the present.
