A Spirit Walker's Guide to Shamanic Tools
A Spirit Walker's Guide to Shamanic Tools

Author: Evelyn C. Rysdyk

Publisher: Weiser Books

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1609259432

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Build Your Own Shamanic Toolkit In this beautifully illustrated guide, artist and shamanic teacher Evelyn C. Rysdyk shows you how to create, decorate, consecrate, and use various sacred tools in ritual and healing. Navaho traditional healers bring rattles, corn pollen, eagle feathers, and sage smoke together with songs and dances to affect healing. Ulchi shamans use drums, rattles, and larch tree wands called gimsacha to work healing magic. Manchu shamans will perfume the air with incense and tie on a heavy bustle of iron jingles as a part of their ceremonial costume. Modern shamanic practitioners likewise use sacred tools to facilitate our connection to helper spirits in the Upper, Middle and Lower Worlds, as well as the spirits of nature. While you can purchase many of these tools, there’s nothing quite as powerful as making your own. You’ll find instructions for making rattles, drums, masks, mirrors, spirit figures, fans, bells, pouches, wands, prayer bundles, flutes, whistles, and more. Plus suggestions for responsible ways to obtain the materials you’ll need. “Having an intimate connection to all the spirits that came together in my favorite rattle—knowing that the tiny pebbles came from the local riverbank, the wood handle from a lightning-struck maple in my yard, and the rawhide from a black bear that was hunted by a native friend for food—gives it a far deeper meaning and power.” —from the introduction The author’s original artwork and photographs of shamans and their authentic tools appear throughout the book.

Making Place through Ritual
Making Place through Ritual

Author: Lea Schulte-Droesch

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-09-10

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 3110540851

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Indian indigenous societies are especially known for their elaborate rituals, which offer an excellent chance for studying religion as practice. However, few detailed ethnographic works exist on the ritual practices of these societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand, India this book offers insights into contemporary, previously not described rituals of the Santal, one of the largest indigenous societies of Central India. Its focus lies on culturally specific notions of place as articulated and created during these rituals. In three chapters the book discusses how the Santal "make place" on different local, regional and global levels through their rituals: They reaffirm their ancestral roots in their land during large sacrificial rituals. They offer sacrifices to the dangerous deities of the forest in exchange for rain. And they claim their region to be a "Santal region" through large festivals celebrated in sacred groves, which they link to national and global discourses of indigeneity and environmentalism. Through an analysis of the rituals of a specific society, this book addresses broader issues. It presents an example of how to study religion as a practical activity. It portrays culture-specific perceptions of the environment. And last, the book underlines the potential that lies in choosing place as a lens to study social phenomena in context.

Creating a Nation with Cloth
Creating a Nation with Cloth

Author: Ping-Ann Addo

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0857458965

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Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation— fonua—which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the “multi-territorial nation,” the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.

Cannabis
Cannabis

Author: Robert Clarke

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-06-28

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0520292480

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Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the natural origins and early evolution of this famous plant, highlighting its historic role in the development of human societies. Cannabis has long been prized for the strong and durable fiber in its stalks, its edible and oil-rich seeds, and the psychoactive and medicinal compounds produced by its female flowers. The culturally valuable and often irreplaceable goods derived from cannabis deeply influenced the commercial, medical, ritual, and religious practices of cultures throughout the ages, and human desire for these commodities directed the evolution of the plant toward its contemporary varieties. As interest in cannabis grows and public debate over its many uses rises, this book will help us understand why humanity continues to rely on this plant and adapts it to suit our needs.

Golden Dawn Magic
Golden Dawn Magic

Author: Chic Cicero

Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide

Published: 2019-05-08

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0738757985

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An easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to the Golden Dawn system of magic The Golden Dawn system of magic is known throughout the world as one of the most effective and comprehensive approaches to working with occult powers. But for beginners or intermediate practitioners, it can be difficult to know where to start and where to go for expert guidance. Golden Dawn Magic shares bite-sized exercises and meditations to help you build the skills that are needed for the more advanced rituals, guiding beginner and intermediate practitioners on a powerful journey of magical work. Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero, senior adepts of the Golden Dawn, provide a firm foundation in practical Golden Dawn theory and methods, without the complex lessons and grades of more traditional approaches. This collection ofaccessible step-by-step instructions for visualization, meditation, energy projection, and working with willpower opens the doorways of magic. You will also discover hands-on exercises for learning the Golden Dawn's approach to esoteric arts like tarot and the Qabalah. Once you've mastered the fundamental skills, this book guides you through dozens of more advanced rites, rituals, and techniques, including: Greater and Lesser Banishing Rituals • Expanded Visualizations • Opening by Watchtower • Ritual of the Rose Cross • Prayer of Osiris • Exordiums of Thoth • Godform Assumption • Achieving Invisibility • Creating Your Own Talisman •Telesmatic Images • And Many More Whether you are just becoming interested in the Golden Dawn or you have already gained some experience in these methods, Golden Dawn Magic will be an extraordinary aid to you as you move forward on your journey in this powerful system of magic.

Clothing and Nudity in the Hebrew Bible
Clothing and Nudity in the Hebrew Bible

Author: Christoph Berner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 637

ISBN-13: 0567678490

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The volume discusses nudity and clothing in the Hebrew Bible, covering anthropological, theological, archaeology and religious-historical aspects. These aspects are addressed in three separate sections, enhanced by over a hundred pictures and illustrations. Part I places nudity and clothing in its ancient Israelite context, with discussions of methodology, the ancient Near Eastern evidence (including material culture and iconography), and an assessment of central aspects of the biblical material such as fabrication and uses of textiles, lexicography, theological and anthropological implications. Part II looks at key themes such as mourning, death, encounters with the divine and issues of power and status. Finally, Part III presents several close studies of key passages from narrative, prophetic and wisdom texts where clothing and nudity play an important role.

Fashionable Traditions
Fashionable Traditions

Author: Ayami Nakatani

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1498586503

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Textiles play a decisive role in history: attire not only indicates status, gender, ethnicity, and religion but illustrates how such boundaries are continuously being negotiated, shifted, and recreated. Fashionable Traditions captures the complex reality of Asian handmade textile production and consumption. From traditionalist discourse and cultural authenticity to fashion and market trends, the contributors to this collection demonstrate the multilayered influence of often contradictory forces. In-depth, ethnographic case studies reveal the entangled relationships between local artisans, external interventions, and consumers, while acknowledging the broader frameworks in which such relationships are situated. Together these stories offer a vivid account of the socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics in various parts of Asia and emphasize that fashion is neither a Western prerogative nor do its roots reside solely in the West.

Traveling Prehistoric Seas
Traveling Prehistoric Seas

Author: Alice Beck Kehoe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1315416409

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Alice Kehoe uses critical analysis of large bodies of interdisciplinary evidence to help scholars and students reevaluate the highly controversial theory that people sailed large distances across oceans in ancient times.

Clothing and Difference
Clothing and Difference

Author: Hildi Hendrickson

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780822317913

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This volume examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and raises questions that have previously been directed almost exclusively to a Western and urban context. Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times. Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning. By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development--heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation--have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation. Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

The Performance of Self
The Performance of Self

Author: Susan Crane

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-10-09

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0812201701

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Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes, charivaris, and masking invited the English and French nobility to assert their identities in gesture and costume as well as in speech. These events presumed that performance makes a self, in contrast to the modern belief that identity precedes social performance and, indeed, that performance falsifies the true, inner self. Susan Crane resists the longstanding convictions that medieval rituals were trivial affairs, and that personal identity remained unarticulated until a later period. Focusing on England and France during the Hundred Years War, Crane draws on wardrobe accounts, manuscript illuminations, chronicles, archaeological evidence, and literature to recover the material as well as the verbal constructions of identity. She seeks intersections between theories of practice and performance that explain how appearances and language connect when courtiers dress as wild men to interrupt a wedding feast, when knights choose crests and badges to supplement their coats of arms, and when Joan of Arc cross-dresses for the court of inquisition after her capture.