[PDF] Rethinking Ghosts In World Religions eBook

Author : Mu-chou Poo
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 14,25 MB
Release : 2009-06-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9047424840

GET BOOK

The central theme of this volume is to re-examine the received concepts and images of ghosts in various religious cultures ranging from the Ancient Near East and Egypt to the Old Testament, the Classical Era, Early Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Early India, and Medieval China. As a religious phenomenon, the realm of ghosts has been less studied than the realm of the divine. Through a collaborative effort by scholars from different disciplines, this volume proposes a multi-cultural approach to construct a wider and complicated picture of the phenomenon of ghosts and spirits in human societies and to have a grasp of the various problems involved in understanding the phenomenon of ghost.

Author : Alan E. Bernstein
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 561 pages
File Size : 29,20 MB
Release : 2017-06-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1501712489

GET BOOK

The idea of punishment after death—whereby the souls of the wicked are consigned to Hell (Gehenna, Gehinnom, or Jahannam)—emerged out of beliefs found across the Mediterranean, from ancient Egypt to Zoroastrian Persia, and became fundamental to the Abrahamic religions. Once Hell achieved doctrinal expression in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the Qur'an, thinkers began to question Hell’s eternity, and to consider possible alternatives—hell’s rivals. Some imagined outright escape, others periodic but temporary relief within the torments. One option, including Purgatory and, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Middle State, was to consider the punishments to be temporary and purifying. Despite these moral and theological hesitations, the idea of Hell has remained a historical and theological force until the present.In Hell and Its Rivals, Alan E. Bernstein examines an array of sources from within and beyond the three Abrahamic faiths—including theology, chronicles, legal charters, edifying tales, and narratives of near-death experiences—to analyze the origins and evolution of belief in Hell. Key social institutions, including slavery, capital punishment, and monarchy, also affected the afterlife beliefs of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Reflection on hell encouraged a stigmatization of "the other" that in turn emphasized the differences between these religions. Yet, despite these rivalries, each community proclaimed eternal punishment and answered related challenges to it in similar terms. For all that divided them, they agreed on the need for—and fact of—Hell.

Author : Renee Baribeau
Publisher : Hay House, Inc
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 18,53 MB
Release : 2018-02-06
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 1401952763

GET BOOK

A practical guide to connect to powerful wind energies that navigate us toward authentic joy, power, and purpose. In this book, you’ll explore the rich mythology and cultural significance of wind, and discover a powerful system to utilize the subtle, healing energies in your life. Winds of Spirit will teach you how to connect with your true inner self, use your body as a compass, and receive life-changing messages from nature. Based on an ancient sacred technique used by farmers, shamans and sailors, this system will show you how to navigate your personal path, providing insight into how to manage the wind patterns and shifting conditions affecting you. You will also learn how to invoke wind deities—gods and goddesses from around the world—and the cardinal winds from the four quadrants of the sky, each of which relate to the inner landscape of your life: mind, emotions, body, and spirit. By working with the omnipresent winds in your life, you can restore harmony and balance, heal the body, and inspire creativity. Experiential practices include wind breath, wind bath, wind knots, and more!

Author : Olu Jenzen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 554 pages
File Size : 42,17 MB
Release : 2016-03-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1317042182

GET BOOK

Despite the much vaunted ’end of religion’ and the growth of secularism, people are engaging like never before in their own ’spiritualities of life’. Across the West, paranormal belief is on the rise. The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures brings together the work of international scholars across the social sciences and humanities to question how and why people are seeking meaning in the realm of the paranormal, a heretofore subjugated knowledge. With contributions from the UK and other European countries, the USA, Australia and Canada, this ground-breaking book attends to the paranormal as a position from which to critique dominant forms of knowledge production and spirituality. A rich exploration of everyday life practices, textual engagements and discourses relating to the paranormal, as well as the mediation, technology and art of paranormal activity, this book explores themes such as subcultures and mainstreaming, as well as epistemological, methodological, and phenomenological questions, and the role of the paranormal in social change. The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures constitutes an essential resource for those interested in the academic study of cultural engagements with paranormality; it will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, popular culture, sociology, cultural geography, literature, film and music.

Author : Theresa Bane
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 23,74 MB
Release : 2014-01-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0786488948

GET BOOK

This exhaustive volume catalogs nearly three thousand demons in the mythologies and lore of virtually every ancient society and most religions. From Aamon, the demon of life and reproduction with the head of a serpent and the body of a wolf in Christian demonology, to Zu, the half-man, half-bird personification of the southern wind and thunder clouds in Sumero-Akkadian mythology, entries offer descriptions of each demon's origins, appearance and cultural significance. Also included are descriptions of the demonic and diabolical members making up the hierarchy of Hell and the numerous species of demons that, according to various folklores, mythologies, and religions, populate the earth and plague mankind. Very thoroughly indexed.

Author : Ole-Albert Rønning
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 26,22 MB
Release : 2017-07-14
Category : History
ISBN : 135172598X

GET BOOK

Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today presents an examination of Nordic donation and gift-giving practices in the Nordic and Western world, beginning in late Antiquity and extending through to the present day. Through chapters contributed by leading international researchers, this book explores the changing legal, social and religious frameworks that shape how donations and gifts are given. In addition to donations to ecclesiastical, charitable and cultural institutions, this books also highlights the sociolegal challenges and the tensions that can occur as a result of transferring property, including answering key questions such as who has a right to what. It also presents, for the first time, an insight into the dynamics of donations and the interplay between individual motivations, strategic behaviour and the legal setting of inheritance law. Offering a broad chronological and European perspective and including a wide range of illuminating case studies Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today is ideal for students of Nordic and European legal and social history.

Author : Siam Bhayro
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 447 pages
File Size : 10,10 MB
Release : 2017-02-06
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004338543

GET BOOK

In many near eastern traditions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, demons have appeared as a cause of illness from ancient times until at least the early modern period. This volume explores the relationship between demons, illness and treatment comparatively. Its twenty chapters range from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt to early modern Europe, and include studies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They discuss the relationship between ‘demonic’ illnesses and wider ideas about illness, medicine, magic, and the supernatural. A further theme of the volume is the value of treating a wide variety of periods and places, using a comparative approach, and this is highlighted particularly in the volume’s Introduction and Afterword. The chapters originated in an international conference held in 2013. "Ultimately, Demons and Illness admirably performs the important task of reminding modern scholars of premodern health of the integral role played by these complex and shifting entities in the lives of people across the globe and through the centuries." -Rachel Podd, Fordham University, in: Social History of Medicine 32.3 (2019) "Given the sheer breadth of its scope, the volume is, of course, illustrative rather than comprehensive in its coverage, yet there is a definite coherence to its content, aided by the introduction and afterword which bookend the work and help begin to draw out the threads of commonality and difference. As such it constitutes a significant and welcome resource for comparative explorations of historical-cultural links between demons, illness, medicine, and magic, while offering a clear invitation to future work." -Matthew A. Collins, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43.5 (2019)

Author : Margaret Toscano
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 37,96 MB
Release : 2016-04-22
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1317122712

GET BOOK

The notion of an infernal place of punishment for 'undesired' elements in human culture and human nature has a long history both as religious idea and as cultural metaphor. This book brings together a wide array of scholars who examine hell as an idea within the Christian tradition and its 'afterlife' in historical and contemporary imagination. Leading scholars grapple with the construction and meaning of hell in the past and investigate its modern utility as a means to describe what is perceived as horrific or undesirable in modern culture. While the idea of an infernal region of punishment was largely developed in the context of early Jewish and Christian religious culture, it remains a central belief for some Christians in the modern world. Hell's reception (its 'afterlife') in the modern world has extended hell's meaning beyond the religious realm; hell has become a pervasive image and metaphor in political rhetoric, in popular culture, and in the media. Bringing together scholars from a variety of fields to contribute to a wider understanding of this fascinating and important cultural idea, this book will appeal to readers from historical, religious, literary and cultural perspectives.

Author : Nancy Mandeville Caciola
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 13,66 MB
Release : 2016-03-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1501703463

GET BOOK

Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

Author : Mengxing Fu
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 34,81 MB
Release : 2021-08-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000431312

GET BOOK

By comparison of late nineteenth-century ghost stories between China and Britain, this monograph traces the entangled dynamics between ghost story writing, history-making, and the moulding of a gendered self. Associated with times of anxiety, groups under marginalisation, and tensions with orthodox narratives, ghost stories from two distinguished literary traditions are explored through the writings and lives of four innovative writers of this period, namely Xuan Ding (宣鼎) and Wang Tao (王韬) in China and Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit in Britain. Through this cross-cultural investigation, the book illuminates how a gendered self is constructed in each culture and what cultural baggage and assets are brought into this construction. It also ventures to sketch a common poetics underlying a "literature of the anomaly" that can be both destabilising and constructive, subversive, and coercive. This book will be welcomed by the Gothic studies community, as well as scholars working in the fields of women’s writing, nineteenth-century British literature, and Chinese literature.