Book picks similar to
Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey
spirituality
philosophy
non-fiction
anthropology
The Modern Guide to Witchcraft: Your Complete Guide to Witches, Covens, and Spells
Skye Alexander - 2014
Looking for an enchanting love potion? Want to create your own sacred space and promote good energy? The Modern Guide to Witchcraft helps you harness your own inner power so you can shape your destiny. With the help of spellcraft expert Skye Alexander, you'll tap into your own magic and create incantations, potions, and charms. As she carefully guides you through each step of these witchcraft practices and details ways of personalizing them to your specific situation, you'll gain confidence in your own knowledge and inner force. Once you learn to harness your natural talents as a witch, you'll discover that a whole new world of possibilities exists.
The Morrigan: Celtic Goddess of Magick and Might
Courtney Weber - 2019
"She is warrior, queen, death omen, mother, murderer, lover, spy, conspirator, faery, shape-shifter, healer, and sometimes the living earth itself. A captivating contradiction: a demonic female who both haunts and heals; benevolent in one moment, ghastly the next, and kind the moment after that.”The Morrigan is one of Pagan Ireland’s most famous—and notorious—goddesses. Her name translated as “phantom queen” or “great queen,” the Morrigan is famous for being a goddess of war, witchcraft and death, protection and retribution. This book also explores her patronage of motherhood, healing, shapeshifting, and the land. Classified among the Sidhe (fairies), the Morrigan dates back at least to Ireland’s Iron Age, but she is as modern as she is ancient―enjoying a growing contemporary and global following.Author Courtney Weber provides a guide for the modern devotee of this complex, mysterious goddess that encompasses practical veneration with modern devotionals, entwined with traditional lore and Irish-Celtic history.
The Serpent and the Rainbow
Wade Davis - 1985
Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti—from the African origins of its people to the successful Haitian independence movement, down to the present day, where vodoun culture is, in effect, the government of Haiti’s countryside. The Serpent and the Rainbow combines anthropological investigation with a remarkable personal adventure to illuminate and finally explain a phenomenon that has long fascinated Americans.
New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic
Cory Thomas Hutcheson - 2021
Folklore expert Cory Thomas Hutcheson guides you to the crossroads of folk magic, where you'll learn about different practices and try them for yourself.This treasure trove of witchery features an enormous collection of stories, artifacts, rituals, and traditions. Explore chapters on magical heritage, divination, familiars, magical protection, and spirit communication. Discover the secrets of flying, gathering and creating magical supplies, living by the moon, working contemporary folk magic, and more. This book also provides brief profiles of significant folk magicians, healers, and seers, so you can both meet the practitioners and experience their craft. With New World Witchery, you'll create a unique roadmap to the folk magic all around you.
The Green Witch: Your Complete Guide to the Natural Magic of Herbs, Flowers, Essential Oils, and More
Arin Murphy-Hiscock - 2017
She embraces the power of nature; she draws energy from the Earth and the Universe; she relies on natural objects like stones and gems to commune with the land she lives off of; she uses plants, flowers, oils, and herbs for healing; she calls on nature for guidance; and she respects every living being no matter how small.In The Green Witch, you will learn the way of the green witch, from how to use herbs, plants, and flowers to make potions and oils for everyday healing as well as how crystals, gems, stones, and even twigs can help you find balance within. You’ll discover how to find harmony in Earth’s great elements and connect your soul to every living creature. This guide also contains directions for herbal blends and potions, ritual suggestions, recipes for sacred foods, and information on how to listen to and commune with nature. Embrace the world of the green witch and discover what the power of nature has in store for you.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, The Mage — As Delivered By Abraham The Jew Unto His Son Lamech — As A Grimoire of The 15th Century
Abraham von Worms - 1897
From Abramelin he took his concepts of protections, purifications, evocations, vestments, and dromena down to specific details. This system of Abramelin the Mage is known from a unique 15th century manuscript persevered in the Bibliotheque de l`Arsenal in Paris. In it, Abraham of Wurzburg, a cabalist and connoisseur of magics, describes a tour that he made of the then civilized world, visiting sorcerers, magicians, and cabalists, estimating their powers and virtues. This quest is in itself as fascinating as the similar tours of Gurdjieff. The high point of Abraham`s travels was found in a small town on the banks of the Nile, where he encountered the great magician Abramelin, whose complete system Abraham thereupon sets out in detail. This amounts to a complete course in ceremonial magic (both white and black), which the student can pursue by himself. Abramelin, whose system is based mostly on Hellenistic theurgy of the Iamblichan sort, but with Jewish increments from the Cabala, explains the qualifications needed to become a magician, purifications and asceticisms to be practiced month by month, studies and activities permitted during this period, selections of place and time for working magic, equipment needed, prayers and formulas, evocation of good and evil spirits, commanding spirits, to do one`s will, overcoming rebellious spirits, an similar material. Specific instructions are offered to develop such powers as clairvoyance, divining metals and treasurers, warding off evil magic, healing illness, levitation, transportation, rendering oneself invisible, creating illusions and glamour, reading minds, placing compulsions, working black magic, and a host of other abilities. We do not guarantee that Abramelin's techniques work, not that the results are desirable...
The Book of Spells
Nicola de Pulford - 1998
This "recipe-style" book presents spells from many different times and cultures. They include ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Mayan, North American Indian, and Druidic charms, ingredients, dances, and incantations for looking and feeling one's best, for catching and keeping a mate, for repelling unwanted suitors, for gaining a measure of fame and fortune, for protecting against bad luck, and much more. There is also detailed information on potent herbs and their uses, including rosemary, St. John's Wort, garlic, mistletoe, ginger root, sage and bay leaves. Includes more than 300 full-color illustrations.
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
Victor Turner - 1969
Turner demonstrates how the analysis of ritual behavior and symbolism may be used as a key to understanding social structure and processes. He extends Van Gennep's notion of the "liminal phase" of rites of passage to a more general level, and applies it to gain understanding of a wide range of social phenomena. Once thought to be the "vestigial" organs of social conservatism, rituals are now seen as arenas in which social change may emerge and be absorbed into social practice.As Roger Abrahams writes in his foreword to the revised edition: "Turner argued from specific field data. His special eloquence resided in his ability to lay open a sub-Saharan African system of belief and practice in terms that took the reader beyond the exotic features of the group among whom he carried out his fieldwork, translating his experience into the terms of contemporary Western perceptions. Reflecting Turner's range of intellectual interests, the book emerged as exceptional and eccentric in many ways: yet it achieved its place within the intellectual world because it so successfully synthesized continental theory with the practices of ethnographic reports."
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer
Diane Wolkstein - 1983
Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. With the long-awaited publication of this book, we have for the first time in any modern literary form one of the most vital and important of ancient myths: that of Inanna, the world's first goddess of recorded history and the beloved deity of the ancient Sumerians.The stories and hymns of Inanna (known to the Semites as Ishtar) are inscribed on clay tablets which date back to 2,000 B.C. Over the past forty years, these cuneiform tablets have gradually been restored and deciphered by a small group of international scholars. In this groundbreaking book, Samuel Noah Kramer, the preeminent living expert on Sumer, and Diane Wolkstein, a gifted storyteller and folklorist, have retranslated, ordered, and combined the fragmented pieces of the Cycle of Inanna into a unified whole that presents for the first time an authentic portrait of the goddess from her adolescence to her completed womanhood and godship. We see Inanna in all her aspects: as girl, lover, wife, seeker, decision maker, ruler; we witness the Queen of Heaven and Earth as the voluptuous center and source of all fertile power and the unequaled goddess of love.Illustrated throughout with cylinder seals and other artifacts of the period, the beautifully rendered images guide the reader through Inanna's realm on a journey parallel to the one evoked by the text. And the carefully wrought commentaries providing an historical overview, textual interpretations, and aannotations on the art at once explicate and amplify the power, wonder, and mystery embedded in these ancient tales.Inanna--the world's first love story, two thousand years older than the Bible--is tender, erotic, frightening, and compassionate. It is a compelling myth that is timely in its rediscovery."A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade
The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft
Rebecca L. Stein - 2007
It is aimed at students encountering anthropology for the first time. Reviewers describe the text as vivid, rich, user-friendly, accessible, and well-organized. The text examines religious expression from a cross-cultural perspective while incorporating key theoretical concepts. In addition to providing a basic overview of anthropology, including definition of key terms and exposure to ethnographies, the text exposes students to the varying complexity of world religions.
A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book
Ceisiwr Serith - 2011
Included is an extensive section on the requisites of ritual and how to use ritual and prayer to create lasting change in your life and in the world.A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book is suitable for all pagans: Druids, Wiccans, solitaries, Greek & Norse Reconstructionists, Mystery Cult Reconstructionists, and more, offering perfect petitions or invocations to invoke, embrace, and honor the major events that make up our lives.
The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
Lynne McTaggart - 2003
Original, well researched, and well documented by distinguished sources, The Field is a book of hope and inspiration for today's world.
A Witch Alone: Thirteen Moons to Master Natural Magic
Marian Green - 1991
It is a practical manual of instruction for those who choose the solo path of study and particularly stresses the importance of being in tune with nature. As there are approximately 13 moons each year – the book is divided into 13 parts. Each section is aimed at lasting from the new moon to the dark to make the student fully aware of the changing power in the tides of the sea and the tides of the self. The moon-long sections deal with a variety of taditional arts, skills and mental exercises which enables the aspiring witch to discover the inner world of magic inside him/herself.
The Mystical Qabalah
Dion Fortune - 1957
This Weiser Classics edition is newly re-typeset and include a new foreword by Judika Illes and a new afterword by Stuart R. Harrop, co-director of the Society of Inner Light (founded in 1924 by Dion Fortune).Dion Fortune's classic, The Mystical Qabalah, explores all aspects of the Qabalah, including the esoteric sciences of astrology and tarot, which form the basis of the Western Mystery Traditions. It provides a key to the practical working of this mystical system for both novice and initiate alike.
Living with Honour: A Pagan Ethics
Emma Restall Orr - 2008
This book gives an account of ethics from a pagan viewpoint for the modern world.