“An academic memoir . . . addresses topics as diverse as Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism, American counterculture, and the history of the paranormal.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Over the course of his twenty-five-year career, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s study of religion has had two major areas of focus: the erotic expression of mystical experience and the rise of the paranormal in American culture. This book brings these two halves together in surprising ways through a blend of memoir, manifesto, and anthology, drawing new connections between these two realms of human experience and revealing Kripal’s body of work to be a dynamic whole that has the potential to renew and reshape the study of religion. Kripal tells his story, biographically, historically and politically contextualizing each of the six books of his Chicago corpus, from Kali’s Child to Mutants and Mystics, all the while answering his censors and critics and exploring new implications of his thought. In the process, he begins to sketch out a speculative “new comparativism” in twenty theses. The result is a new vision for the study of religion, one that takes in the best of the past, engages with outside critiques from the sciences and the humanities, and begins to blaze a new positive path forward. A major work decades in the making, Secret Body will become a landmark in the study of religion. “Kripal presents us with a compilation of theories, cultural references and anecdotes making up an impassioned thesis about the future of religious studies and ‘what human beings may become’ . . . For all its eccentricities, Kripal’s work is playful, engaging and original.” —Times Higher Education

The Mystical Presence of Christ investigates the connections between exceptional experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, Richard Kieckhefer reveals the entanglements between these experiences and those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of ordinary, everyday devotional culture. Kieckhefer begins his book by reconsidering the "who" and the "how" of Christ's mystical presence. He argues that Christ's humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which Kieckhefer proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. Kieckhefer then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations—during prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example—with attention to gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century (Angela of Foligno, the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of Montau, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Walter Hilton, among others), Kieckhefer shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience. Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in the workings of late medieval religion.

Mystical AF shares Natalia's journey from darkness to lightness of being, through love, loss, spirituality, self-discovery and ultimately, success. This personal memoir utilizes the lens of Astrology as it guides the reader to uncover their own unique purpose and shares mystical yet practical tools to help infuse the sacred into your everyday life.

Since the beginning of civilization, numbers have been more than just a way to keep count. Perfect Figures tells the stories of how each number came to be and what incredible associations and superstitions have been connected to them ever since. Along the way are some of the great oddities of numbers' past as:-a time when finger-counting was a sign of intelligence (the Venerable Bede could count to a million on his hands)-the medieval Algorists, who were burnt at the stake for their use of Arabic rather than Roman numerals-the Bank of England, which stubbornly kept accounts on notched wooden sticks until 1826Filled with Crumpacker's eloquent wit and broad intelligence, Perfect Figures brings the history of numbers to life just as Bill Bryson did for the English language in The Mother Tongue.

Weave the wisdom of every one of the 12 zodiac signs into your everyday life with supportive practices like creativity prompts, tarot card pulls, and seasonal rituals. You are all 12 signs. Going beyond the popular Sun-Moon-Rising astrology, this insightful guide inspires you to expand the possibilities of who you think you can be. Transformational astrologer Britten LaRue teaches you how to embrace the whole of the zodiac, with month-by-month invitations to connect with the part of yourself that is each sign. For example, if you don’t have any major placements in Leo in your chart, you might assume that you don’t have any Leo qualities. But when you decide that you’re not a Leo, you deny yourself the play, the visibility, and the big-hearted leadership that the Leo inside of you craves. Living Astrology shows you how to coax your inner Leo forward during Leo season with exercises like a tarot spread for accessing courage, journaling prompts to court your inner drag queen, and a ritual for connecting to your lion’s heart under the New Moon. With supportive practices like creativity prompts, tarot card pulls, and altar settings to help you live what you learn, Living Astrology offers a radical and fresh take on the ancient wisdom of astrology. Because astrology isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you live.

Where do Mysticism and and political action meet? How does faith empower its adherents to resist oppression? What are the origins of authentic contemporary mysticism? From the thirteenth-century Franciscan movement to African American mystics, this wide-ranging volume of essays considers exemplars of Christian mysticism (including Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, the Quakers, and the Society of Friends) whose practices and influence brought about social change. Linking major conceptual issues and social theory, the essays examine the historical impact of mysticism in contemporary life and argue for a hermeneutical approach to mysticism in its historical context. The contributors look at how mystical empowerment can serve as a catalyst for expressing compassion in acts of justice and long-term social change. We learn how Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, driven by mystical experiences to take up lives of preaching, faced the same misogynistic religious environments as did women mystics throughout history, which has submerged this key area of women’s experience. The final two essays describe the development of socially engaged Buddhism in Asia and America and the mystical roots of deep ecology.

This edited volume explores the dialogue between art and music with that of mystical currents at the turn of the twentieth century. The volume draws on the most current research from both art historians and musicologists to present an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mysticism’s historical importance. The chapters in this edited volume gauge the scope of different interpretations of mysticism and illuminate how an exchange between the sister arts unveil an underlying stream of metaphysical, supernatural, and spiritual ideas over the course of the century. Case studies include Charles Tournemire, Joseph Péladan, Erik Satie, Hilma af Klint, Jean Sibelius, František Kupka, and Wassily Kandinsky. The contributors’ unique theoretical perspectives and disciplinary methodologies offer expert insight on both the rewards and inevitable aesthetic complications that arise when one artform meets another. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, musicology, visual culture, and mysticism.