Ritual America

Ritual America

Author: Craig Heimbichner

Publisher: Feral House

Published: 2012-03-06

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1936239159

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"Adam Parfrey is one of the nation's most provocative publishers."—Seattle Weekly "Secret society historian Craig Heimbichner follows the Middle Path to wisdom. He works the graveyard shift in the secret lodge."—Joan d'Arc, Paranoia magazine Secret societies—now a staple of bestseller novels—are pictured as sinister cults that use hooded albinos to menace truth-seekers. Some conspiracy books claim that fraternal orders are the work of serpentine aliens and interbred humans who wish to supplant earth of its energy, and later, its very existence. On the other side of the aisle, books by high-ranked Freemasons—skeptical in tone but no less partisan in approach—protect their organization's public image by denying the existence of its most contentious ideas. Ritual America reveals the biggest secret of them all: that the influence of fraternal brotherhoods on this country is vast, fundamental, and hidden in plain view. In the early twentieth century, as many as one-third of America belonged to a secret society. And though fezzes and tiny car parades are almost a thing of the past, the Gnostic beliefs of Masonic orders are now so much a part of the American mind that the surrounding pomp and circumstance has become faintly unnecessary. The authors of Ritual America contextualize hundreds of rare and many never-before printed images with entertaining and far-reaching commentary, making an esoteric subject provocative, exciting, and approachable. Adam Parfrey is the author of Cult Rapture: Revelations of the Apocalyptic Mind and It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps. He is editor of the influential Apocalypse Culture series Love, Sex, Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Craig Heimbichner has recently appeared on a National Geographic documentary about the Bohemian Grove, contributed to the Feral House compilation Secret and Suppressed II, and wrote about the famous occult order the O.T.O. in Blood and Altar.


Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America

Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America

Author: Mark Christopher Carnes

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1989-01-01

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780300051469

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In this study of American 19th-century secret orders, the author argues that religious practices and gender roles became increasingly feminized in Victorian America and that secret societies, such as the Freemasons, offered men and boys an alternative, male counterculture.


Ritual Healing in Suburban America

Ritual Healing in Suburban America

Author: Meredith B. McGuire

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780813513133

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Many Americans believe that people who practice folk healing are uneducated and too poor to afford conventional medical care. Contrary to this popular belief, Meredith McGuire finds that a large number of college-educated, middle-class suburbanites participate in a variety of nonmedical healing groups. In suburban New Jersey, people practice such diverse alternatives as psychic healing, New Age therapies, naturopathy, Christian Science, Transcendental Meditation, reflexology, acupuncture, yoga, Jain meditation, Therapeutic Touch, reflexology, shiatsu, rebirthing, and occult therapies. McGuire places these various healing groups into broader categories according to their traditional sources of inspiration and their beliefs about healing power. She then looks at the participants' diverse ideas about health and illness. By locating alternative healing in the context of these beliefs, she shows the many ways the adherents experience ritual healing. -- From publisher's description.


Awkward Rituals

Awkward Rituals

Author: Dana W. Logan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-05-06

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0226818500

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A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual. In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution. Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.


Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence

Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence

Author: Richard J. Chacon

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2007-09-06

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780816525270

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This groundbreaking multidisciplinary book presents significant essays on historical indigenous violence in Latin America from Tierra del Fuego to central Mexico. The collection explores those uniquely human motivations and environmental variables that have led to the native peoples of Latin America engaging in warfare and ritual violence since antiquity. Based on an American Anthropological Association symposium, this book collects twelve contributions from sixteen authors, all of whom are scholars at the forefront of their fields of study. All of the chapters advance our knowledge of the causes, extent, and consequences of indigenous violenceÑincluding ritualized violenceÑin Latin America. Each major historical/cultural group in Latin America is addressed by at least one contributor. Incorporating the results of dozens of years of research, this volume documents evidence of warfare, violent conflict, and human sacrifice from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, including incidents that occurred before European contact. Together the chapters present a convincing argument that warfare and ritual violence have been woven into the fabric of life in Latin America since remote antiquity. For the first time, expert subject-area work on indigenous violenceÑarchaeological, osteological, ethnographic, historical, and forensicÑhas been assembled in one volume. Much of this work has heretofore been dispersed across various countries and languages. With its collection into one English-language volume, all future writersÑregardless of their discipline or point of viewÑwill have a source to consult for further research. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Richard J. Chacon and RubŽn G. Mendoza 1.ÊÊStatus Rivalry and Warfare in the Development and Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization Matt OÕMansky and Arthur A. Demarest 2.ÊÊAztec Militarism and Blood Sacrifice: The Archaeology and Ideology of Ritual Violence RubŽn G. Mendoza 3.ÊÊTerritorial Expansion and Primary State Formation in Oaxaca, Mexico Charles S. Spencer 4.ÊÊImages of Violence in Mesoamerican Mural Art Donald McVicker 5.ÊÊCircum-Caribbean Chiefly Warfare Elsa M. Redmond 6.ÊÊConflict and Conquest in Pre-Hispanic Andean South America: Archaeological Evidence from Northern Coastal Peru John W. Verano 7.ÊÊThe Inti Raymi Festival among the Cotacachi and Otavalo of Highland Ecuador: Blood for the Earth Richard J. Chacon, Yamilette Chacon, and Angel Guandinango 8.ÊÊUpper Amazonian Warfare Stephen Beckerman and James Yost 9.ÊÊComplexity and Causality in Tupinamb‡ Warfare William BalŽe 10.ÊÊHunter-GatherersÕ Aboriginal Warfare in Western Chaco Marcela Mendoza 11.ÊÊThe Struggle for Social Life in Fuego-Patagonia Alfredo Prieto and Rodrigo C‡rdenas 12.ÊÊEthical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence in Latin America Richard J. Chacon and RubŽn G. Mendoza References About the Contributors Index


The Necromantic Ritual Book

The Necromantic Ritual Book

Author: Leilah Wendell

Publisher: Westgate Co

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13: 9780944087039

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Successful working of any of these devotions will enable you to share consciousness with the Angel of Death as well as becoming 'one' with your own death.


Ritual Imports

Ritual Imports

Author: Claire Sponsler

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1501729926

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Throughout the Americas, performances deriving from medieval European rituals, ceremonies, and festivities made up a crucial part of the cultural cargo shipped from Europe to the overseas settlements. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from Plymouth, England, to Newfoundland, bringing with him "morris dancers, hobby horses, and Maylike Conceits" for the "allurement of the savages" and the "solace of our people." His voyage closely resembled that of twelve Franciscan friars who in 1524 had arrived in what is now Mexico armed with a repertoire of miracle plays, religious processions, and other performances. These two events, although far from unique, helped shape initial encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples; they also marked the first stages of the process that would lead—by no means smoothly—to a distinctively American culture. Ritual Imports is a groundbreaking cultural history of European performance traditions in the New World, from the sixteenth century to the present. Claire Sponsler examines the role of survivals and adaptations of medieval drama in shaping American culture from colonization through nation building and on to today's multicultural society. The book's subjects include New Mexican matachines dances and Spanish conquest drama, Albany's Pinkster festival and Afro-Dutch religious celebrations, Philadelphia's mummers and the Anglo-Saxon revival, a Brooklyn Italian American saint's play, American and German passion plays, and academic reconstructions of medieval drama. Drawing on theories of cultural appropriation, Ritual Imports makes an important contribution to medieval and American studies as well as to cultural studies and the history of theater.


American Vaudeville as Ritual

American Vaudeville as Ritual

Author: Albert F. McLeanJr.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0813184797

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This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticsm or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers—which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.


The Power of Ritual in Prehistory

The Power of Ritual in Prehistory

Author: Brian Hayden

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-09-13

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1108426395

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Secret societies in tribal societies turn out to be key to understanding the origins of social inequalities and state religions.


Most Dangerous Book in the World

Most Dangerous Book in the World

Author: S. K. Bain

Publisher: Trine Day

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 1937584194

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In this shocking exposé, investigative researcher and author S. K. Bain reveals the truth behind the mass-murdering psychopaths responsible for the events of September 11, 2001, and reconstructs the occult-driven script for this Global Luciferian MegaRitual. As Bain uncovers, the framework for the entire event was a psychological warfare campaign built upon a deadly foundation of black magick and high technology. The book details the sinister nature of the defining event of the 21st century and explains the vast scope of the machinery of oppression that has been constructed around us.