A Guide to Celebrating the 12 Days of Yule (Heathen-style!): Folklore, Activities and Recipes For The Whole Family to Enjoy For 12 Days!
Jenn Campus - 2016
For most Pagans of any denomination, Yule is a high holy season. The ancient festival was a 12 daylong celebration beginning on the eve of the Winter Solstice (known to most Pagans as Yule) and ending at the new calendar year. This celebration was so important in ancient times that it was converted by the Christians to the 12 Days of Christmas. Many Pagans, especially those devoted to the Norse and Anglo Saxon Gods and Goddesses try to find some way to keep these 12 days, yet many are unsure exactly how to celebrate. Social media blows up in the weeks leading up to the Solstice with questions like: How do you celebrate? What do you do exactly? What activities, what rituals, what prayers and celebrations? For the past several years I have been working on this guide in an attempt to answer some of those questions for my own family and for others. This guide is a result of creating family traditions for this special and most sacred (not to mention FUN!) time of year. I put it all together into one little, handy and easy to follow guide, so that you and your family can celebrate the 12 Days of Yule together, with a little inspiration from what our family has been doing. Please enjoy!
Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena
Jerome Clark - 1993
The 200 mysteries and hoaxes are thoroughly examined, including cattle mutilations, crop circles, spontaneous human combustion, Martian lore, Roswell, Loch Ness, the Old Hag, weather phenomena, faeries, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, living dinosaurs, ghosts, pterodactyl sightings, flying humanoids, hollow earth, and other absorbing puzzles. Along the way readers will learn of hoaxes and witness the creation of various modern myths.
TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution
Robert Anton Wilson - 2002
have a drug TSAR(!) who proudly destroys millions of lives and bullies the governments of the rest of the world into prosecuting an insane war on [some] drugs? How did a Nazi spy come to have an enormous influence on current U.S. foreign policy? Will the 'war on terrorism' put the last nail in the coffin of YOUR rights? Would Hannibal Lecter make a better president that George W. Bush?Bob's keen wit skewers those who are forcing us all into slavery, and warns us that there is little time left. How long will it be before Bob's books are banned as 'literary terrorism'?
Ghosts: A Haunted History
Lisa Morton - 2015
From the earliest recorded writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh to twenty-first-century ghost-hunting TV shows, ghosts have been part of almost every time and every culture . . . and yet there’s very little evidence to support their existence. Ghosts: A Supernatural History is a historical and global exploration of these mysterious apparitions. It asks: What exactly is a ghost? Are poltergeists, wraiths and revenants technically ghosts? How does ‘ghost’ relate to ‘soul’? And how many different kinds of ghost are there? It visits the spirits of the classical world, including the Egyptian five-part soul and the first haunted-house comedy play, Mostellaria by Plautus (254–184 BCE). We encounter the frightening phantoms of the Middle Ages – which might incinerate priests or devour children – and the nineteenth-century rise of Spiritualism – essentially a religion devoted to ghosts. Ghosts are everywhere: from India’s bhūta to the Hungry Ghost Festival in China and Mexico’s La Llorona legend, as well as the Bell Witch of the American South and ‘the most haunted house in England’, Borley Rectory.Ghosts also delves into the history of the spirit on page and screen. How did Horace Walpole’s pioneering Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto of 1764 lead to the 2007 hit film Paranormal Activity? Classic ghost tales, from Ann Radcliffe’s works to the chilling short stories of M. R. James and Stephen King’s The Shining, reveal how the real meaning of ghosts has shifted over the centuries. Wide-ranging, informative and featuring 60 chilling, unearthly images, this book will appeal to the very wide audience for the supernatural.