Download or read book Demons and Spirits of the Land written by Claude Lecouteux and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-07-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the wild spirits that once roamed the lands and inhabited the waters and the pagan rites used to gain their good will • Explores medieval stories and folk traditions of brownies, fairies, giants, dragons, will-o’-the-wisps, and demons • Explains the specific rites performed to negotiate with the local spirits and ensure their permission before building on new land • Shows how these beliefs carried through to modern times, especially in architecture Our pagan ancestors knew that every forest has brownies and fairies, every spring its lady, and every river malevolent beings in its depths. They told tales of giants in the hills, dragons in the lakes, marshes swarming with will-o’-the-wisps, and demons and wild folk in the mountains who enjoyed causing landslides, avalanches, and floods. They both feared and respected these entities, knowing the importance of appeasing them for safe travel and a prosperous homestead. Exploring medieval stories, folk traditions, spiritual place names, and pagan rituals of home building and site selection, Claude Lecouteux reveals the multitude of spirits and entities that once inhabited the land before modern civilization repressed them into desert solitude, impenetrable forests, and inaccessible mountains. He explains how, to our ancestors, enclosing a space was a sacred act. Specific rites had to be performed to negotiate with the local spirits and ensure proper placement and protection of a new building. These land spirits often became the household spirit, taking up residence in a new building in exchange for permission to build on their territory. Lecouteux explores Arthurian legends, folk tales, and mythology for evidence of the untamed spirits of the wilderness, such as giants, dragons, and demons, and examines the rites and ceremonies used to gain their good will. Lecouteux reveals how, despite outright Church suppression, belief in these spirits carried through to modern times and was a primary influence on architecture, an influence still visible in today’s buildings. The author also shows how our ancestors’ concern for respecting nature is increasingly relevant in today’s world.
Download or read book African Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry written by Ras Michael Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.
Download or read book Spirits of Earth written by Robert A. Birmingham and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between A.D. 700 and 1100 Native Americans built more effigy mounds in Wisconsin than anywhere else in North America, with an estimated 1,300 mounds—including the world’s largest known bird effigy—at the center of effigy-building culture in and around Madison, Wisconsin. These huge earthworks, sculpted in the shape of birds, mammals, and other figures, have aroused curiosity for generations and together comprise a vast effigy mound ceremonial landscape. Farming and industrialization destroyed most of these mounds, leaving the mysteries of who built them and why they were made. The remaining mounds are protected today and many can be visited. explores the cultural, historical, and ceremonial meanings of the mounds in an informative, abundantly illustrated book and guide. Finalist, Social Science, Midwest Book Awards
Download or read book The Laws of the Spirit World written by Khorshed Bhavnagri and published by Jaico Publishing House. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WITH A BRAND NEW LOOK! ON FEBRUARY 22, 1980, KHORSHED AND RUMI BHAVNAGRI’S WORLD WAS SHATTERED. ONE MONTH LATER, A NEW ONE OPENED. Khorshed and Rumi Bhavnagri lost their sons, Vispi and Ratoo, in a tragic car crash. With both their sons gone, the couple felt they would not survive for long. They had lost all faith in God until a miraculous message from the Spirit World gave them hope and sent them on an incredible journey.
Download or read book Creating Sanctuary written by Jessi Bloom and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this beautiful, inspiring, and hands-on, practical book we are invited to look deeply at the landscape around us and create sacred respites from our busy worlds.” —Rosemary Gladstar, herbalist and author We all need a personal sanctuary—a place where we can be in harmony with the natural world and can nurture our bodies, minds, and souls. And this sanctuary doesn’t have to be an exotic destination, it can be in your own backyard. In Creating Sanctuary, Jessi Bloom taps into multiple sources of traditional plant wisdom to help readers find a deeper connection to the outdoor space they already have—no matter the size. Equal parts inspirational and practical, this engaging guide includes tips on designing a healing space, plant profiles for 50 sacred plants, recipes that harness the medicinal properties of plants, and simple instructions for daily rituals and practices for self-care. Hands-on, inspiring, and beautiful, Creating Sanctuary is a must-have for everyone seeking a new ways to revitalize their lives.
Download or read book Spirit of the Land written by Conrad Heisner and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2008-12 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land ownership is exciting but being a part of the land, claimed by the land, opens a bond to all the people of the land. From ancient people to modern people land has fashioned an identity and bond between people who share common problems, troubles, joys and celebrations. It is as though people become connected through the ages. Our own stories are what tell about the connected lore. Lore is personal, but never private. Telling the lore, sharing the lore creates, and is created by, spirits mingling stories into a common humanity. Lore is humorous; lore is heartbreaking; serious and silly, but lore of identity is the backbone of culture. It is why we laugh together and why we cry together. My stories are not much different than the stories of all time. In this book some of the Spirits of the Land do their speaking through what I remember, through what I have learned about events, and through imagination. Childhood memories, significant times in life, historical understandings- these are the body of lore ready to be woven into our spirit as people. As I sought to understand all of this I was guided by a powerful voice. It was a mystical voice, a driving voice. I came to know the voice of the spirit world as a physical body, a face I could see, hear and talk to, in a small pool of water. The face and the voice came at her own will and sometimes overtook my will. The face and voice left my view when it willed me to act on my own strengths. But the voice of the face is never gone. The spirit is never gone. It is the Spirit of the Land.
Download or read book Beyond the Burning Lands written by John Christopher and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes excerpt from the author's The Sword of the Spirits.
Download or read book The House of the Spirits written by Isabel Allende and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2005-04-19 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history. In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds. The House of the Spirits not only brings another nation’s history thrillingly to life, but also makes its people’s joys and anguishes wholly our own.
Download or read book Landscape of the Spirits written by Todd W. Bostwick and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2002-09-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High above the noise and traffic of metropolitan Phoenix, Native American rock art offers mute testimony that another civilization once thrived in the Arizona desert. In the city's South Mountains, prehispanic peoples pecked thousands of images into the mountains' boulders and outcroppings—images that today's hikers can encounter with every bend in the trail. Todd Bostwick, an archaeologist who has studied the Hohokam for more than twenty years, and Peter Krocek, a professional photographer with a passion for archaeology, have combed the South Mountains to locate nearly all of the ancient petroglyphs found in the canyons and ridges. Their years of learning the landscape and investigating the ancient designs have resulted in a book that explores this wealth of prehistoric rock art within its natural and cultural contexts, revealing what these carvings might mean, how they got there, and when they were made. Landscape of the Spirits is the first book to cover these ancient images and is one of the most comprehensive treatments of a rock art location ever published. It conveys the range of different rock art elements and compositions found in the South Mountains—animals, humans, and geometric shapes, as well as celestial and calendrical markings at key sites—through accurate descriptions, drawings, and photographs. Interpretations of the petroglyphs are based on Native American ethnographic accounts and consider the most recent theories concerning shamanism and archaeoastronomy. Written in a simple and accessible style, Landscape of the Spirits is an indispensable volume for anyone exploring the South Mountains, and for rock art enthusiasts everywhere who wish to broaden their understanding of the prehistoric world. It is both an authoritative overview of these ancient wonders and an unprecedented benchmark in southwestern rock art research at a single geographic location.
Download or read book Song of the Spirits written by Sarah Lark and published by AmazonCrossing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lark recounts...the sometimes peaceful, sometimes uneasy relationship between the Maori natives and the pakeha--the colonists. And the land, which can be rocky and formidable and also breathtakingly beautiful, is as much a character as anyone else." --Historical Novel Society New Zealand, 1893: William Martyn is better educated and more cultivated than the other men breaking their backs searching for gold near Queenstown. William is the son of landed Irish nobility, and he comes to town ready to invest in the best equipment. On his search for supplies, he encounters spirited and beautiful young Elaine O'Keefe, who promptly falls in love with him. He is captivated by her charms until Kura, Elaine's half-Maori cousin, comes to visit. William succumbs at once to Kura's exotic beauty and free-spiritedness, and tension develops not only between the two cousins but also between the colonial settlers and their Maori neighbors.
Download or read book The Tradition of Household Spirits written by Claude Lecouteux and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how the ancient customs of constructing and keeping a house formed a sacred bond between homes and their inhabitants • Shares many tales of house spirits, from cajoling the local land spirit into becoming one’s house spirit to the good and bad luck bestowed by mischievous house elves • Explains the meaning behind door and window placement, house orientation, horsehead gables, the fireplace or hearth, and the threshold • Reveals the charms, chants, prayers, and building practices used by our ancestors to bestow happiness and prosperity upon their homes and their occupants Why do we hang horseshoes for good luck or place wreaths on our doors? Why does the groom carry his new bride over the threshold? These customs represent the last vestiges from a long, rich history of honoring the spirits of our homes. They show that a house is more than a building: it is a living being with a body and soul. Examining the extensive traditions surrounding houses from medieval times to the present, Claude Lecouteux reveals that, before we entered the current era of frequent moves and modular housing, moving largely from the countryside into cities, humanity had an extremely sacred relationship with their homes and all the spirits who lived there alongside them--from the spirit of the house itself to the mischievous elves, fairies, and imps who visited, invited or not. He shows how every aspect of constructing and keeping a house involved rites, ceremony, customs, and taboos to appease the spirits, including the choice of a building lot and the very materials with which it was built. Uncovering the lost meaning behind door and window placement, the hearth, and the threshold, Lecouteux shares many tales of house spirits, from the offerings used to cajole the local land spirit into becoming the domestic house spirit to the good and bad luck bestowed upon those who seek the help of the “Little Money Man.” He draws on studies and classic literature from old Europe--from Celtic lands and Scandinavia to France and Germany to the far eastern borders of Europe and into Russia--to explain the pagan roots behind many of these traditions. Revealing our ancestors’ charms, prayers, and practices to bestow happiness and prosperity upon their homes, Lecouteux shows that we can invite the spirits back into our houses, old or new, and restore the sacred bond between home and inhabitant.
Download or read book Spirit of the New England Tribes written by William S. Simmons and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning three centuries, this collection traces the historical evolution of legends, folktales, and traditions of four major native American groups from their earliest encounters with European settlers to the present. The book is based on some 240 folklore texts gathered from early colonial writings, newspapers, magazines, diaries, local histories, anthropology and folklore publications, a variety of unpublished manuscript sources, and field research with living Indians.
Download or read book Spirits of Blood Spirits of Breath written by Barbara Alice Mann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither half of the cosmos can exist without its twin. Both halves are, therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth" but this erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Alice Mann rescues the authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as possible to their earliest versions and sources, and Indian records, including pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann respects each Indigenous culture as a discrete unit, rather than generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical, linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists alike a window into the purportedly lost, and often caricatured, world of Indigenous American thought.
Download or read book Remains of Ritual written by Steven M. Friedson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.
Download or read book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind written by Felicitas D. Goodman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1990-08-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dr. Goodman has pioneered in the study of bodily postures and altered states of consciousness.” —Stanley Krippner, professor of personal mythology and parapsychology “And suddenly the understanding of my own vision washed over me like a mighty wave . . . For life or for death, I was committed to that mighty realm of which I was shown a brief reminder, the world where all was forever motion and emergence, that realm where the spirits ride the wind.” —from the Prologue Anthropologist and spiritual explorer Felicitas Goodman reexamines our notions of the nature of reality by studying the ritual postures of native art assumed by her subjects during trance states. For readers desiring to discover this world of ancient myths, she has included a practical guide on how to achieve such ecstatic experiences. “The book is clearly written for the general reader and includes many descriptions of trance experiences. It may serve as a good introduction to the nature and appeal of the shamanic revival in modern Western cultures.” —Theological Book Review “A case study in experiential anthropology that offers a unique mix of autobiography, mythology, experiential research, and archaeological data to support a challenging thesis—that certain body postures may help induce specific trance states.” —Shaman’s Drum “This is a spellbinding and exceptionally readable book by an extraordinary woman.” —Yoga Journal
Download or read book Arab and Jew written by David K. Shipler and published by Crown. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • “A rich, penetrating, and moving portrayal of Arab-Jewish hostility, told in human terms.”—Newsday Now expanded and updated • “The best and most comprehensive work there is in the English language on this subject.”—The New York Times In this monumental work, extensively researched and more relevant than ever, David Shipler delves into the origins of the prejudices that exist between Jews and Arabs that have been intensified by war, terrorism, and nationalism. Focusing on the diverse cultures that exist side by side in Israel and Palestine, Shipler examines the process of indoctrination that begins in schools; he discusses the effects of socioeconomic differences, the clashes of Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives, religious conflicts between Islam and Judaism, views of the Holocaust, and much more. And he writes of the people: the Arab woman in love with a Jew, the retired Israeli military officer now disillusioned, the Palestinian militant devoted to violent means, the Israeli and Palestinian schoolchildren who reach across the divides in search of reconciliation. Their stories, and the hundreds of others, reflect not only the reality of “wounded spirits” but also the healing inside minds necessary for eventual coexistence in the promised land.
Download or read book Spirits of the Ordinary written by Kathleen Alcalá and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, Alcala presents a magical, multigenerational tale of family passions set along the Mexican-American border in the 1870s. "A strong and finely rendered book in which passions both ordinary and extraordinary are made vivid and convincing".--Larry McMurtry.
