While many of the most significant black intellectual movements of the second half of the twentieth century have been perceived as secular, Josef Sorett demonstrates in this book that religion was actually a fertile, fluid and formidable force within these movements. Spirit in the Dark examines how African American literary visions were animated and organized by religion and spirituality, from the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s.

Much has changed for the Chanku. For so long they kept their shapeshifting ability secret, but now they have assimilated into the human world in ways they never once thought possible. As the daughter of Anton Cheval (the universally acknowledged leader of the Chanku Nation) and CEO of Cheval International, Lily Cheval chooses to live alone in San Francisco, headquarters of the pack's business interests. A series of murders near both the pack compound in Montana and the San Francisco Bay Area leave her wary and worried for her fellow Chanku. The bodies of human women are turning up-women raped by men, but killed by wolves. Aldo Xenakis, a charismatic cult leader, is blaming the Chanku, inciting fear among residents throughout the west. When Lily meets his son, Sebastian, their connection is intense and immediate, yet tempered by the darkness she senses in him-he is a powerful wizard who uses magic to shift into wolf form, but is he the killer? Driven by passion, Sebastian and Lily come together in sensual ecstasy, a joining that leaves Lily shaken but utterly alive. Could Sebastian be the man she's been waiting for, or is he her worst enemy? This book contains adult content.

Dark spirits. Haunts existing only in tales told to children late at night around the fire. But there are those who believe otherwise, and to find their secrets a marauding wizard will stop at nothing. Summoned by the Count of Velos, the tracker Maraine has been commissioned to pursue the wizard. The trail leads into the goblin lands of the Runik. But what he finds is an old terror left forgotten in a dwarven tomb that has been loosed upon the world. Desperate to survive it, Maraine becomes entangled with a tribe of goblins and partners with its captain, Hezok. Together they track the trail of the dark spirit and discover the true intentions of the marauding wizard. This unlikely union becomes the only chance of stopping the dark spirit and its ceaseless mayhem, if it can be stopped.

Like the other women of her island, Lana expected to become a diver, harvesting jewels from a native fish. But during her initiation dive, she finds a blood-red jewel that marks her as someone with power. Though she hides the jewel, the mark it represents will drive her away from her home island and into an apprenticeship with a one-armed witch. Alaya Dawn Johnson has created an unforgettable coming-of-age story set in a world where wielding the power of magic requires understanding the true meaning of sacrifice.

What is the worth of your spirit? In the world of Awya, where life is scattered across isles in a seemingly endless ocean of black liquid, the Isle of Winder is home to uymns whose primary trade is agriculture and flower cultivation. Here, an umyn boy by the name of Amory Demshen becomes obsessed with Tempertime Cemetery a collection of portals powered by spirits that link the isles of Awya together, and a place forbidden to those without proper training and knowledge. Amory disobeys the laws and his mother, sacrificing the qualities of youth and the virtues of his upbringing to pursue a selfish adventure connived by a hidden, sinister force. Unnerving truths and perilous consequences await as Amory equipped with an authoritative jar, a chest of bewitching cards, and a flying stone slab plunges into the darkness of the spirit collectors. Will Amory learn the worth of a spirit in time to save his own?

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and influential of German philosophers. In this book, S. J. McGrath not only makes Schelling's ideas accessible to a general audience, he uncovers the romantic philosopher's seminal role as the creator of a concept which shaped and defined late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology: the concept of the unconscious. McGrath shows how the unconscious originally functioned in Schelling's philosophy as a bridge between nature and spirit. Before Freud revised the concept to fit his psychopathology, the unconscious was understood largely along Schellingian lines as primarily a source of creative power. Schelling's life-long effort to understand intuitive and non-reflective forms of intelligence in nature, humankind and the divine has been revitalised by Jungians, as well as by archetypal and trans-personal psychologists. With the new interest in the unconscious today, Schelling's ideas have never been more relevant. The Dark Ground of Spirit will therefore be essential reading for those involved in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and philosophy, as well as anyone with an interest in the history of ideas.

Despite what some scholarship has suggested, Shintô does exhibit a unifying cognitive integrity. Spirit Tree offers a unique social psychological interpretation of Shintô ritual at the Hakozaki Hachiman Shrine in Fukuoka, Japan and situates the cosmological organization of this practice within the larger context of ritual in East Asia. Employing a comparative approach, this study blends two theoretical orientations: cultural anthropology and Jungian psychology. Hakozaki's rituals are a combination of a Yayoi period female medium tradition with a complex set of Chinese Yin-Yang Five Phase principles. Both systems are based on the feminine archetype, a fundamental conceptual foundation of Shintô ritual practice, which cognitively links woman and the earth. While the female shaman tradition is female-affirming in outlook, the later Chinese system is much less so. This monograph is a new acknowledgement of the conceptual continuity of Shintô ritual as an outgrowth of social cognition.