Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004687416
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
As magic is a powerful means to influence the natural world and human beings, and is deeply connected to the divine sphere, persons using it are in constant need to justify its use. The ambivalence of magic to serve both well-wishing and ill-wishing aims puts the practitioners ever at risk. This volume illuminates the strategies adopted to legitimise the practice of magic and analyses how these justifications are phrased and formulated in cuneiform texts, thereby revealing the underlying principles and unexplained axioms of using magic in the Ancient Near East.
Author: Edward Bever
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271079878
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
This collection of essays considers the place of magic in the modern world, first by exploring the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and then by illuminating how modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimize their practices through an overt embrace of evolving forms such as esotericism and supernaturalism. Taking a two-track approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of the construction of the modern self and its relation to the modern preoccupation with magic. Essays examine how modern “rational” consciousness is generated and maintained and how proponents of both magical and scientific traditions rationalize evidence to fit accepted orthodoxy. This book also describes how people unsatisfied with the norms of modern subjectivity embrace various forms of magic—and the methods these modern practitioners use to legitimate magic in the modern world. A compelling assessment of magic from the early modern period to today, Magic in the Modern World shows how, despite the dominant culture’s emphatic denial of their validity, older forms of magic persist and develop while new forms of magic continue to emerge. In addition to the editors, contributors include Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng.
Author: Martin Fuchs
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110580934
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1058
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Book Description
This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.
Author: Gina Konstantopoulos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004546138
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
In The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Place of Demons in Mesopotamia, Gina Konstantopoulos analyses the Sebettu, a group of seven divine/demonic figures found across a wide range of Mesopotamian textual and artistic sources in Mesopotamia from the late third to first millennium BCE. The Sebettu appeared both as fierce, threatening demons and as divine, protective, figures. These seemingly contradictory qualities worked together, as their martial ferocity facilitated their religious and political role. When used in royal inscriptions, they became fierce warriors attacking the king’s enemies, retaining that demonic nature. This flexibility was not unique to the Sebettu, and this study thus provides a lens through which to examine the place of demons in Mesopotamia as a whole.
Author: Laura Andrikopoulos
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040175716
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Using the works and theories of Carl Gustav Jung and the astrologers Alan Leo, Dane Rudhyar and Liz Greene, this volume provides a cultural history of psychological astrology in the twentieth century, demonstrating the prevalence of ‘magic’ in modern culture through its presence in astrology. Astrology’s links to psychology are akin to those in wider culture, such as the exploration of the unconscious by writers and artists. The dominant form of astrology in the twentieth century was psychological astrology, a form principally influenced by the work of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Through in-depth exploration of the three major astrologers of the period (Alan Leo, Dane Rudhyar and Liz Greene) and their psychological innovations, this volume considers whether psychology was used by astrology as a survival strategy to legitimise magic in the modern world and whether the result was ‘an astrology that has lost its magic’. Chapters consider the survival of magic in the modern world, the history of astrology as a psychological subject and astrology’s relationship to modernity, as well as a fundamental exploration of the nature of astrology. Ultimately arguing that the existence of psychological astrology represents a form of living magic, this book will be of interest to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students studying Jung and analytical psychology, magic, astrology and alchemy, and culture in the twentieth century more broadly.
Author: Selena Wisnom
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004412972
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
In Weapons of Words Selena Wisnom offers a literary study of three poems central to Babylonian culture: Anzû, Enūma eliš, and Erra and Išum, demonstrating how each uses sophisticated intertextual allusions to compete with its predecessors.
Author: Brian Rappert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135760225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
As mankind finds ever more impious ways to kill and maim, some look to non-lethal weapons as a fix. Brian Rappert discusses the technologies involved and the ethics of, for example blinding someone with a laser, leaving them blind forever, versus killing them outright.
Author: Rebecca Whisnant
Publisher: Spinifex Press
ISBN: 9781876756499
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 468
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Book Description
Prostitution and pornography are linked with racism and male dominance as well as with imperialism, militarism (including torture) and global corporate culture. The result is devastating harm for women and children within these industries. Subjected to physical and psychological violence - poverty, drug addiction and homelessness are their usual companions. With its mix of personal stories, theory, research, testimony, and accounts of current activism, Not For Sale will be an invaluable resource for all those seeking to inform themselves about the realities of the sex business and will serve to strengthen and broaden feminist resistance to pornography and prostitution.
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110387328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1019
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Book Description
A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture. Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil, education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy, saints, the senses, death, and money.
Author: Damon Zacharias Lycourinos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351329952
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
In the Western world, magic has often functioned as an umbrella term for various religious beliefs and ritual practices that seek to influence events by harnessing supernatural power. The definition of these myriad occult and esoteric traditions have, however, usually come from those that are opposed to its practice; notably authorities in religious, legal and intellectual spheres. This book seeks to provide a new perspective, directly from the practitioners of modern Western magic, by exploring how a distinctive mode of embodiment and consciousness can produce a transition from an ‘ordinary’ to a ‘magical’ worldview. Starting with an introduction to the study of magic in the Western academy, the book then presents the author’s own participant observation of five ethnographic case studies of modern Western magic. The focus of these ethnographic case studies is directed towards ideas and methods the informants employ to self-legitimise and self-represent as ‘magicians’. It concludes by discussing the phenomenological implications and issues around embodiment that are inherent to the contemporary practice of magic. This is a unique insight into the lived experience of practitioners of modern magic. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of the Occult and New Religious Movements, as well as Religious Studies academics examining issues around the embodiment and the anthropology of religion.
