The Mind Possessed
The Mind Possessed

Author: Emma Cohen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-08-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0198043473

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The cognitive science of religion has made a persuasive case for the view that a number of different psychological systems are involved in the construction and transmission of notions of extranatural agency such as deities and spirits. Until now this work has been based largely on findings in experimental psychology, illustrated mainly with hypothetical or anecdotal examples. In The Mind Possessed, Emma Cohen considers how the psychological systems undergirding spirit concepts are activated in real-world settings. Spirit possession practices have long had a magnetizing effect on academic researchers but there have been few, if any, satisfactory theoretical treatments of spirit possession that attempt to account for its emergence and spread globally. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during eighteen months of fieldwork in Belém, northern Brazil, Cohen combines fine-grained descriptions and analyses of mediumistic activities in an Afro-Brazilian cult house with a scientifically-grounded explanation for the emergence and spread of ideas about spirits, possession and healing. Cohen shows why spirit possession and its associated activities are inherently attention-grabbing. Making a radical departure from traditional anthropological, medicalist and sociological analyses, she argues that a cognitive approach offers more precise and testable hypotheses concerning the spread and appeal of spirit concepts and possession activities. This timely book presents new lines of enquiry for the cognitive science of religion (a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship) and challenges the theoretical frameworks within which spirit possession practices have traditionally been understood.

Island Possessed
Island Possessed

Author: Katherine Dunham

Publisher: Doubleday

Published: 2012-05-16

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0307819841

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Just as surely as Haiti is "possessed" by the gods and spirits of vaudun (voodoo), the island "possessed" Katherine Dunham when she first went there in 1936 to study dance and ritual. In this book, Dunham reveals how her anthropological research, her work in dance, and her fascination for the people and cults of Haiti worked their spell, catapulting her into experiences that she was often lucky to survive. Here Dunham tells how the island came to be possessed by the demons of voodoo and other cults imported from various parts of Africa, as well as by the deep class divisions, particularly between blacks and mulattos, and the political hatred still very much in evidence today. Full of the flare and suspense of immersion in a strange and enchanting culture, Island Possessed is also a pioneering work in the anthropology of dance and a fascinating document on Haitian politics and voodoo.

The Possessed
The Possessed

Author: Elif Batuman

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2011-04-07

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 184708379X

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Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely, and unpretentiously, full of an infectious love for literature.

Possessed
Possessed

Author: Bruce Hood

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0190699914

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Ownership is on most people's lips these days, or at least the lack of ownership. Everywhere people seem to be fighting over what is theirs. They want to take back their property, their lands, their liberty, their bodies, their identity, and their right to do what they want. These demands arequite remarkable when you consider that ownership is not an observable property but rather an abstract concept. And yet this abstract concept controls just about everything we do, and rarely do we stop to consider how it rules our lives. Ownership even explains the anger and political turmoil thatis currently sweeping over Western democracies: people feel they have had something taken away, something they used to own in the past and want back.Possessed is the first accessible book to consider the psychological origins and future of ownership in a rapidly changing world. It reveals how we are compelled to accumulate possessions in a relentless drive to seek status and approval by signalling our values to others by what we own. It tracesthe history of ownership but looks to the future as our drive to own will need to adapt to environmental and technological change.

Possessed Believers
Possessed Believers

Author: David Higginbotham

Publisher:

Published: 2003-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781932124125

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When it comes to evil spirits and their work in the American church today, there is a great lack of understanding. How can Christians be in need of deliverance? Why do some people's problems resist every form of treatment? How do evil spirits enter people? How can we find freedom from our problems? The answers to these tough questions are found in the Bible and are backed up in this book about real life experiences, true conversions, healings, and deliverances. David Higginbotham spent nine years working as a missionary in Africa, where he ministered to people mired in poverty, plagued by AIDS, and entangled in the traditions of witchcraft. In Possessed Believers, he chronicles the events that led him to Africa and the amazing miracles he witnessed there. After seeing tremendous transformations in people's lives as they learned to follow the footsteps of Jesus and His disciples, David Higginbotham knows that there is no suffering too great for God's power and that there is freedom from the oppression of the devil -- no matter who you are or what you've done. Book jacket.

Possessed
Possessed

Author: Tana Stone

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-08

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9781949496352

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I sacrificed myself to save my sister's ship. Now the raider warlord owns me. It was my own fault. I was the navigator of our ship, and I'm the one who led us straight into Vandar territory. We'd heard rumors about the Vandar raiders-everyone in the galaxy had. Terrifying and ruthless, they were a scourge on the Zagrath empire and destroyed everything in their path. Few had actually laid eyes on the Vandar or the notorious warlords who led their fleets of warships-and survived to talk about it. So, when the ruthless aliens board our ship intent on destroying it and killing the crew, I did the only thing I could do. I gave myself to the dark and menacing warlord. In exchange for allowing my sister's ship passage out of the Vandar territory, I must share his bed and travel with his crew of deadly raiders. Even though the sight of the huge, battle-scarred alien terrifies me. But as I adjust to my new life on a savage warship, I discover that the dominant alien warrior wants more than just my body. He wants to possess my soul. And he'll make a new deal with me to get it. Possessed is a full-length sci fi romance novel with an HEA and no cheating. It features steamy scenes on a raider warship, alien horde space battles, and some serious enemies-to-lovers heat. If you like dominant and dangerous alien warriors, alien abduction to seduction romance, and hot scenes with a happily ever after, you'll love Possessed, the first book in Tana Stone's sci-fi romance Raider Warlords of the Vandar series. Each book can be read as a standalone.

Possessed by Memory
Possessed by Memory

Author: Harold Bloom

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0525520899

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In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood. Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens--and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things." As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."

Possessed
Possessed

Author: Rebecca R. Falkoff

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-05-15

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1501752820

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In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

POSSESSED
POSSESSED

Author: Cordelia Lee

Publisher: CordyKet

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13:

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Cordelia Lee has experienced something few in the Western world have even witnessed: exorcism. Demonic possession brought her to a Taoist shaman who could drive out her tormentors, but only temporarily. Cordelia’s problems were multifaceted: a troubled childhood, molests, rape attempt, black magic, anorexia, unfulfilled maternal instinct, failing marriage, and depression. Given the severity of her experiences and the return of the evil spirits, Cordelia had to dedicate her life to healing if she was ever to recover. She had earlier experienced an unexpected kundalini awakening; it awakened her to the spiritual realm and the unseen energies that fill the universe. Things she used to think were illogical and nonexistent. But the spiritual realm that promised answers also held the ghosts that flooded her—and a much more human danger. Not everyone had the kindness of the shaman who exorcised Cordelia. She met other teachers on her journey, and some of these gurus wanted to manipulate her with black magic. Discerning between helpful guides and wolves in sheep’s clothing proved challenging. Yet the promise of healing through earthly and spiritual means urged her forward. With the support of trustworthy friends, Cordelia would become a healer in her own right.