This two-volume work presents a comprehensive survey of all the ways people celebrate religious life around the globe. Religious Celebrations is an alphabetically organized encyclopedia that covers more than 800 celebratory occasions from all of the world's major religious communities as well as many of the minor faith traditions. The encyclopedia provides a complete reference tool for examining the myriad ways people worldwide celebrate their religious lives across religious boundaries, providing information on numerous celebratory activities never before covered in a reference work. Offering the most comprehensive coverage of religious holidays ever assembled, this two-volume book covers festivals, commemorations, holidays, and annual religious gatherings all over the world, with special attention paid to the celebrations in larger countries. Entries written by distinguished researchers and specialists on different religious communities capture the unique intensity of each event, be it fasting or feasting, frenzied activity or the universal cessation of work, a huge gathering of the faithful en masse or a small family-centered event. The work spotlights celebrations that currently exist without overlooking now-abandoned celebrations that still impact the modern world.

Volume 2 of this memoir picks up where Volume 1 left off with the author on her way to the Krishnamurti Educational Center in Alresford, England, about 60 miles southwest of London, to live and study in this spiritual community. As she turns from the external journey of her youth and young adulthood to an inward psychic journey, devastating and sublime in its revelations, we witness the author’s continued quest to explode her natural sexual Shakti Energy into an influential and artful feminine wisdom. From mid-life to cronehood, we wonder at the unfolding of a relationship of chaos and love, at her embracing of celibacy, join her in the darkness of unknowingness, and journey into the hidden influence of the patriarchy. We cheer as she meets the challenges of attaining her bona fides as a Process Work therapist and delight in witnessing her heart opening during three months volunteering at an orphanage in India. Further, we follow the author’s growing psychological and emotional maturity through sorceric maneuvers and psychedelic medicine work. Her journey culminates in an unexpected relationship with a tantric partner that, through their united body energies, leads to a vast, formidable, and sustained opening to sublime joy and connection with the very fabric of life. In this and the previously published volume, the author unashamedly exemplifies a pathway through conventional, societal, and familial limits to the hidden spiritual truths behind women’s sexuality and truth-telling. These two books are nothing less than a call for women in every walk of life to dare to embrace their personal stories, family lineage, intimate relationships, motherhood, and sexual energies with wonder and curiosity and courageously tell their stories. The author proposes that this vital ownership and declaration by women of their full feminine wisdom and power is the key to reshaping our society and sustaining the beauty and plentitude of planet Earth so she can sustain us.

An exploration of the Siva Sutras which describe the creative principle behind the universe and how it manifests to human consciousness.

This volume explores the potentials of Goddess spirituality in the field of cultural critique, and strings together innovative readings of already existing literary texts and cultural phenomena from the critical perspective of Goddess spirituality. The chapters explore a colourful array of texts and authors, and focus on issues as diverse as the persistence of the figure of the Magna Mater in the life, writing and thought of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, the inability of Advaita Vedanta to come out of the shadow of the Great Mother, the possibility of pluralizing the Eurocentric notion of the Muse by invoking the figure of Goddess Sarasvati in the field of English Studies, and a reappraisal of Kipling’s Kim from the perspective of the philosophical and spiritual discourses of Prajnaparamita, the Buddhist Goddess of Perfect Wisdom. The book also offers a comparative study of Minoan Goddess Spirituality and tantric philosophy with reference to Aphrodite, Diotima and the Indian Mother Goddesses, the possibility of simultaneously tantricizing notions of modernity and modernizing tantra itself with reference to the works of Lata Mani and William Schindler, and an investigation of the Mother-centric spiritual sensibilities in various religious discourses and devotional literatures, among other discussions. In short, this book investigates the possibilities of inserting the figure of the Great Mother into the critical domain of cultural pluralism, thereby celebrating a multiculturalism that is not based on violence and conflict (antagonism) but grounded in harmony. The Mother is seen by the discourse articulated here mainly as a middle ground between flesh and spirit, knowledge and passion, justice and compassion – and, in the red shadow of the Mother, social epistemologies and academic discourses are radically renegotiated.