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In The Life and Work of Ernesto de Martino: Italian Perspectives on Apocalypse and Rebirth in the Modern Study of Religion, Flavio A. Geisshuesler offers a comprehensive study of one of Italy’s most colorful historians of religions. The book inserts de Martino’s dramatic life trajectory within the intellectual climate and the socio-political context of his age in order to offer a fresh perspective on the evolution of the discipline of religious studies during the 20th century. Demonstrating that scholarship on religion was animated by moments of fear of the apocalypse, it brings de Martino’s perspective into conversation with Mircea Eliade, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz in order to recover an Italian approach that promises to redeem religious studies as a relevant and revitalizing field of research in the contemporary climate of crisis.
The legacy of the Hamiltons’ psychic archive In the wake of the First World War and the 1918–19 pandemic, the world was left grappling with a profound sense of loss. It was against this backdrop that a Winnipeg couple, physician T.G. Hamilton and nurse Lillian Hamilton, began their research, documenting and photographing séances they held in their home laboratory. Their extensive study of the survival of human consciousness after death resulted in a stunning collection of hundreds of photographs, including images of tables flying through the air, mediums in trances, and, most curious of all, ectoplasm—a strange, white substance through which ghosts could apparently manifest. The Art o...
This book offers new theoretical insights into religious, esoteric, and philosophical practices and narratives that deal with "intentional transformative experiences." Exceptional life-changing experiences are often believed to be beyond the individual's control--they are thought to "simply happen." However, many individuals actively and self-reflectively search for transformative experiences. Intentional Transformative Experiences provides analyses of such intentionally sought experiences in different spiritual, religious, and esoteric milieus. Case studies range from South and Central Asian traditions to Western esoteric practices, compare autobiographical narratives of self-cultivation, a...
"This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the famous and secret Tibetan sky-gazing meditation known as "Skullward Leap" "--
"This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the famous and secret Tibetan sky-gazing meditation known as "Skullward Leap" "--
This book focuses on the theme of magic in Tibetan contexts, encompassing both pre-modern and modern text-cultures as well as contemporary practices. It offers a new understanding of the identity and role of magical specialists in both historical and contemporary contexts. Combining the theoretical approaches of anthropology, ethnography, religious and textual studies, the book aims to shed light on experiences, practices and practitioners that have been frequently marginalized by the normative mainstream monastic Buddhist traditions and Western Buddhist scholarship, which focuses primarily on meditation and philosophy. The book explores the intersection between magic/folk practices and Tantra, a complex, socio-religious phenomenon associated not only with the religious and political elites who sponsored it, but also with 'marginal' ethnic groups and social milieus, as well as with lay communities at large, who resorted to ritual agents to fulfil their worldly needs.
"The book explores a diversity of sources to explore how solitary or forest-based practices are celebrated in some parts of the Pali 'imaginaire'. It provides a detailed and sustained analysis of a Buddhist understanding of solitude from one of its early textual traditions, and illuminates the paradox between two apparently 'competing' lifestyles of community and seclusion and discuss their relation and interplay"--
"In The Life and Work of Ernesto de Martino, Flavio A. Geisshuesler offers a comprehensive study of one of Italy's most colorful historians of religions. The book inserts de Martino's dramatic life trajectory within the intellectual climate and the socio-political context of his age in order to offer a fresh perspective on the evolution of the discipline of religious studies during the 20th century. Demonstrating that scholarship on religion was animated by moments of fear of the apocalypse, it brings de Martino's perspective into conversation with Mircea Eliade, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz in order to recover an Italian approach that promises to redeem religious studies as a relevant and revitalizing field of research in the contemporary climate of crisis"--
Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature explores the ways in which 20th-century literature has been influenced by Buddhism, and has been, in turn, a major factor in bringing about Buddhism's increasing spread and influence in the West. Focussing on Britain and the United States, Buddhism's influence on a range of key literary texts will be examined in the context of those societies' evolving modernity. Writers discussed include T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, Iris Murdoch, Maxine Hong Kingston. This book brings together for the first time a series of context-rich interpretations that demonstrate the importance of literature in this ongoing cultural change in Britain and the United States.
A study of Buddhism and iconoclasm in East Asia as part of a general theory of religious destruction.