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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.
A comprehensive guide to understanding and mastering healing and psychic techniques. Tap into your intuition, heart and soul and be amazed at how your skills unfold and develop in surprising ways. The Spiritual Guidebook includes information about opening the third eye, chakras, tarot, mediumship, crystals, reiki, healing, meditation, channelling, automatic writing, auras, scrying, psychometry, energy, essential oils, yoga, guides, shamanism, numerology, health, quantum physics, sacred geometry, self-hypnosis, mind power, past lives and spirit releasement. Written by Anna Comerford, an award-winning Australian psychic the Spiritual Guidebook will expand your psychic knowledge and intuitive-healing abilities in ways you never imagined.
"This book follows up on recent findings that modern postural yoga is the outcome of a complex process of transcultural exchange and syncretism and digs even deeper, looking to uncover the disparate but entangled roots of contemporary yoga practice. In doing so, it proposes that some of what we call yoga, especially when it comes to North America and Europe, is only slightly genealogically related to pre-modern Indian yoga traditions. Rather, they are equally if not more grounded in Hellenistic theories of the subtle body, Western esotericism and magic, pre-modern European medicine, and late-nineteenth-century women's wellness programs. Marshalling these under the umbrella category of "harmonialism," the present book argues that they constitute a history of analogous practices that were gradually subsumed into the language of yoga. This allows us to fundamentally recontextualize the peculiarities of Western, and especially certain mainstream American form of yoga-their focus on aesthetic representation, their privileging of bodily posture and unsystematic incorporation of breathwork, and above all their overwhelmingly privileged female demographics. The initial chapters of the book lay out the basic shape and history of these concepts and practices, while the later chapters explore their development into a spiritualized form of women's physical culture over the course of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, including the ways in which they became increasingly associated with yoga"--
From Faust (1926) to The Babadook (2014), books have been featured in horror films as warnings, gateways, prisons and manifestations of the monstrous. Ancient grimoires such as the Necronomicon serve as timeless vessels of knowledge beyond human comprehension, while runes, summoning diaries, and spell books offer their readers access to the powers of the supernatural--but at what cost? This collection of new essays examines nearly a century of genre horror in which on-screen texts drive and shape their narratives, sometimes unnoticed. The contributors explore American films like The Evil Dead (1981), The Prophecy (1995) and It Follows (2014), as well as such international films as Eric Valette's Malefique (2002), Paco Cabeza's The Appeared (2007) and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981).
Illuminating the religious and existential themes in Stephen King’s horror stories Who are we? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die? For answers to these questions, people often look to religion. But religion is not the only place seekers turn. Myths, legends, and other stories have given us alternative ways to address the fundamental quandaries of existence. Horror stories, in particular, with their focus on questions of violence and mortality, speak urgently to the primal fears embedded in such existential mysteries. With more than fifty novels to his name, and hundreds of millions of copies sold, few writers have spent more time contemplating those fears than Stephen King. Yet despite being one of the most widely read authors of all time, King is woefully understudied. America’s Dark Theologian is the first in-depth investigation into how King treats religion in his horror fiction. Considering works such as Carrie, The Dead Zone, Misery, The Shining, and many more, Douglas Cowan explores the religious imagery, themes, characters, and, most importantly, questions that haunt Stephen King’s horror stories. Religion and its trappings are found throughout King’s fiction, but what Cowan reveals is a writer skeptical of the certainty of religious belief. Describing himself as a “fallen away” Methodist, King is less concerned with providing answers to our questions, than constantly challenging both those who claim to have answers and the answers they proclaim. Whether he is pondering the existence of other worlds, exploring the origins of religious belief and how it is passed on, probing the nature of the religious experience, or contemplating the existence of God, King invites us to question everything we think we know.
This multidisciplinary study of Scientology examines the organization and the controversies around it through the lens of popular culture, referencing movies, television, print, and the Internet—an unusual perspective that will engage a wide range of readers and researchers. For more than 60 years, Scientology has claimed alternative religious status with a significant number of followers, despite its portrayals in popular culture domains as being bizarre. What are the reasons for the vital connections between Scientology and popular culture that help to maintain or challenge it as an influential belief system? This book is the first academic treatment of Scientology that examines the movement in a popular-culture context from the perspective of several Western countries. It documents how the attention paid to Scientology by high-profile celebrities and its mention in movies, television, and print as well as on the Internet results in millions of people being aware of the organization—to the religious organization's benefit and detriment. The book leads with a background on Scientology and a discussion of science fiction concepts, pulps, and movies. The next section examines Scientology's ongoing relationship with the Hollywood elite, including the group's use of celebrities in its drug rehabilitation program, and explores movies and television shows that contain Scientology themes or comedic references. Readers will learn about how the Internet and the mainstream media of the United States as well as of Australia, Germany, and the UK have regarded Scientology. The final section investigates the music and art of Scientology.
Believing in Bits advances the idea that religious beliefs and practices have become inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media. How did we come to associate things such as mindreading and spirit communications with the functioning of digital technologies? How does the internet�s capacity to facilitate the proliferation of beliefs blur the boundaries between what is considered fiction and fact? Addressing these and similar questions, the volume challenges and redefines established understandings of digital media and culture by employing the notions of belief, religion, and the supernatural.
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.
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.
Few people know that Susanna Moodie participated in spiritual séances with her husband, Dunbar, and her sister, Catharine Parr Traill. Moodie, like many other women, found in her communications with the departed an important space to question her commitment to authorship and her understanding of femininity. Retracing the history of possession and mediumship among women following the emergence of spiritualism in mid-nineteenth-century Canada – and unearthing a vast collection of archival documents and photographs from séances – Claudie Massicotte pinpoints spiritualism as a site of conflict and gender struggle and redefines modern understandings of female agency. Trance Speakers offers a new feminist and psychoanalytical approach to the religious and creative practice of trance, arguing that by providing women with a voice for their conscious and unconscious desires, this phenomenon helped them resolve their inner struggles in a society that sought to confine their lives. Drawing attention to the fascinating history of spiritualism and its persistent appeal to women, Massicotte makes a strong case for moving this practice out of the margins of the past. A compelling new reading of spiritual possession as a response to conflicting interpretations of authorship, agency, and gender, Trance Speakers shines a much-needed light on women’s religious practices and on the history of spiritualist traditions and travels across North America and Europe.