In high-Andean Peru, Rapaz village maintains a temple to mountain beings who command water and weather. By examining the ritual practices and belief systems of an Andean community, this book provides students with rich understandings of unfamiliar religious experiences and delivers theories of religion from the realm of abstraction. From core field encounters, each chapter guides readers outward in a different theoretical direction, successively exploring the main paths in the anthropology of religion. As well as addressing classical approaches in the anthropology of religion to rural modernity, Salomon engages with newer currents such as cognitive-evolution models, power-oriented critiques, the ontological reworking of relativism, and the "new materialism" in the context of a deep-rooted Andean ethos. He reflects on central questions such as: Why does sacred ritualism seem almost universal? Is it seated in social power, human psychology, symbolic meanings, or cultural logics? Are varied theories compatible? Is "religion" still a tenable category in the post-colonial world? At the Mountains’ Altar is a valuable resource for students taking courses on the anthropology of religion, Andean cultures, Latin American ethnography, religious studies, and indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Book Review

Richard Gavin's new collection has some of the finest weird fiction I have ever read, tales that are unique and effective. His sequel to H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Hound' is especially delicious. This is a wonderful book, highly recommended! W. H. Pugmire Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read. S. T. Joshi If you hear some in Kadath saying, Numinous, Terrifying, or Beautiful, they are either talking about the Northern Lights or the work of Richard Gavin. Canada? They re calling it Canada now? Whatever. Don Webb Canadian author Richard Gavin has established himself as a leading contemporary writer of weird fiction. His richly nuanced prose style, his imaginative range, and his shrewdness in the portrayal of character and domestic conflict make his tales far more than mere shudder-coining. In this fourth collection of short stories and novelettes, Gavin again casts a wide imaginative net, from haunted Canadian woodlands to the carnivorous mesas of the American frontier, from Lovecraft s New England to the spirit traditions of Japan. Of the dozen stories included in this book, eight are previously unpublished a rich new feast of terror for devotees of a writer who works in the tradition of Poe, Machen, Blackwood, and Ligotti. Richard Gavin is the author of three previous short story collections, Charnel Wine (2004), Omens (2007), and The Darkly Splendid Realm (2009). Gavin lives in Ontario, Canada, with his beloved wife and their brood.

Father Kaleeg Hainsworth, an Eastern Orthodox priest with a lifetime of experience in the Canadian wilderness, grounds this manifesto in the literary, philosophical, mystical and historical teachings of the spiritual masters of both East and West, outlining the human experience of the sacred in nature. The spiritual ecology described here is fully engaged with the wilderness beyond our backyards; it is an ecology which takes in nature as "red in tooth and claw" and offers a way forward in the face of accelerating climate change. This manifesto also challenges our modern self-conception as dominators or stewards of the natural world, claiming these roles emerged from western industrial history and are directly responsible for the environmental damage and alienation from nature we know today. The ecological scope of this book begins with a meditation on natural beauty as the divine that breathes through all aspects of life. We discover along the way that awe and mystery are so vital to the human experience of the natural world that without them we are doomed to treat nature as little more than a resource, a science or a playground for recreation alone. Instead, a new role emerges from these pages, one which accounts for the sacred in nature and places us in relationship to the world of which we are inextricably a part. This role is a priestly one, and Father Hainsworth outlines the significance and benefits of it in detail while also offering a vision of life in which a human being stands in the world of nature as at an altar built in the wilderness, a sacred offering in a holy place.

Much-Afraid had been in the service of the Chief Shepherd, whose great flocks were pastured down in the Valley of Humiliation. She lived with her friends and fellow workers Mercy and Peace in a tranquil little white cottage in the village of Much-Trembling. She loved her work and desired intensely to please the Chief Shepherd, but happy as she was in most ways, she was conscious of several things which hindered her in her work and caused her much secret distress and shame. Here is the allegorical tale of Much-Afraid, an every-woman searching for guidance from God to lead her to a higher place.

"If one suffers, I suffer. If one is chained, I am chained." My faith called me to become a Lance. My compassion drew me into one of the fallen lands. Through my connection with the Chained God, I alone can find and destroy the Horror that stains the land. Death can no longer chain me. But I couldn't have imagined the madness waiting for me in this village. I'm not sure my faith can withstand the secrets I'll uncover. Or that my compassion can survive the violence to come. This Horror may swallow me whole. Death can no longer free me. A creature stalks in the dark. Buildings burn. People die. An altar has been built on the village green.

The Baboquivari Mountains, long considered to be a sacred space by the Tohono O’odham people who are native to the area, are the westernmost of the so-called Sky Islands. The mountains form the border between the floristic regions of Chihuahua and Sonora. This encyclopedic work describes the flora of this unique area in detail. It includes descriptions, identifications, ecology, and extensive etymologies of plant names in European and indigenous languages. Daniel Austin also describes pollination biology and seed dispersal and explains how plants in the area have been used by humans, beginning with Native Americans. The term “sky island” was first used by Weldon Heald in 1967 to describe mountain ranges that are separated from each other by valleys of grassland or desert. The valleys create barriers to the spread of plant species in a way that is similar to the separation of islands in an ocean. The 70,000-square-mile Sky Islands region of southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and northwestern Mexico is of particular interest to botanists because of its striking diversity of plant species and habitats. With more than 3,000 species of plants, the region offers a surprising range of tropical and temperate zones. Although others have written about the region, this is the first book to focus exclusively on the plant life of the Baboquivari Mountains. The book offers an introduction to the history of the region, along with a discussion of human influences, and includes a useful appendix that lists all of the plants known to be growing in the Baboquivari Mountain chain.