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There are two kinds of people in this world. One seeks wisdom; the other, seeks gratification. One is angered by injustice; the other is unconcerned. One is loyal to all living brothers and sisters; the other is loyal to a nation. One rejects dogma and thinks independently; the other blindly bows to authority, ridiculing free thinkers. One stands up to oppression; the other does nothing Which one are you? We, in modern Europe, have strayed from our Natural Path. Our rich ancestral wisdoms are in...

Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the “spirit realm.” In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends...

"A Grimoire of Shadows" is one of the great, underground classics of modern Witchcraft. Only now available to the public, this major work has always been much in demand, and it is the sourcebook from which a large number of Wiccan traditions have developed.

In Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries, ethnomusicologist Marc Gidal explains how and why a multi-faith community in southern Brazil uses music to combine and segregate three Afro-Brazilian religions: Umbanda, Quimbanda, and Batuque. Spirit Song will be the first book in any language about the music of Umbanda and its close relative Quimbanda-twentieth-century fusions of European Spiritism, Afro-Brazilian religion, and Folk Catholicism-as well as the first publication in E...

W. Y. Evans-Wentz, great Buddhist scholar and translator of such now familiar works as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, spent his final years in California. There, in the shadow of Cuchama, one of the Earth's holiest mountains, he began to explore the astonishing parallels between the spiritual teaching of America's native peoples and that of the deeply mystical Hindus and Tibetans. Cuchama and Sacred Mountains, a book completed shortly before his death...

This text provides an examination of Celtic Christianity, a religion which flourished in Britain during the Dark ages, and which, in its profound respect for the dignity and sanctity of nature, had far more in common with Buddhism than with the later institutional Christianity of the West. The author describes the essence of the Celtic spirit, and how it manifests itself in Celtic Christianity's reverence for the earth, creatures, sea and sky - an aspect which has parallels with the Native Ameri...

This second volume provides a literal, line-by-line English translation of the Popol Vuh, capturing the beauty, subtlety, and high poetic language characteristic of K'iche'-Maya sacred writings. By arranging the work according to its poetic structure, Christenson preserves the poem's original phraseology and grammar, allowing subtle nuances of meaning to emerge.

A pioneering work of high quality, this collection of anthropological studies provides one of the most detailed records available for an African society—or indeed for any group—of the semantics of ritual symbolism. It combines unusually detailed ethnographic description, based upon field work among the Ndembu of Zambia, with remarkable theoretical sophistication. Professor Turner describes the ritual phenomena in terms both of practice and of their sociological and psychological implications wit...

Africa is home to hundreds of ethnic groups, who together speak more than a thousand languages. It is not surprising, then, that Africa's enormous range of peoples, cultures, and ways of life has engendered a wide diversity of religious practices. This Very Short Introduction offers a wide-ranging look at the myriad indigenous religious traditions on the African continent. Drawing on archeological research, historical evidence, ethnographic studies, and archival materials such as missionary re...

Personhood and relationality have re-animated debate in and between many disciplines. We are in the midst of a simultaneous "ontological turn", a "(re)turn to things" and a "relational turn", and also debating a "new animism". It is increasingly recognised that the boundaries between the "natural" and "social" sciences are of heuristic value but might not adequately describe reality of a multi-species world. Following rich and provocative dialogues between ethnologists and Indigenous experts, re...

In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous people of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including a...

The trickster appears in the myths and folktales of nearly every traditional society. Robert Pelton examines Ashanti, Fon, Yoruba, and Dogon trickster-figures in their social and mythical contexts and in light of contemporary thought, exploring the way the trickster links animality and ritual transformation; culture, sex, and laughter; cosmic process and personal history; and, divination and social change.