Persephone Unveiled reveals the goddess in all her guises, as the daughter of Demeter; the Queen of the Underworld; the archetypal female healer; and as a central figure in the Eleusinian Mysteries, where celebrants experienced sacred visions through secret rituals fueled by an LSD-like substance. The author examines the known details about the psychoactive agent and explores the Mysteries' influence on, and relationship to, early Christianity. Guided meditations, using active imagination techniques, help readers summon an experience with the goddess.

This book focuses on how the the scientific discovery of "plant sex" unfolded due to cultural biases, beliefs, and perceptions about plant reproduction. "Flora Unveiled" is a deep history of perceptions about plant gender and sexuality, from the Paleolithic to the nineteenth century. The evidence suggests that a plants-as-female gender bias both prevented the discovery of two sexes in plants until the late 17th century, and delayed its acceptance for another 150 years.

Reveals the striking parallels between indigenous cultures of the Americas and the ancient Homeric world as well as Tolkien’s Middle Earth • Explores the shamanic use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey and the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien • Examines Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism • Reveals how the Odyssey emerged precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. The native way of viewing the world--that is, understanding our cosmos as living, sentient, and interconnected--can be found hidden throughout Western literature, beginning with the very origin of the European literary tradition: Homer’s Odyssey. Weaving together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine healers in North and South America, the authors explore the use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Tolkien’s final novella, Smith of Wootton Major. The authors examine Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism. They show the deep affinities between the healing powers of ancient bardic song and the icaros of the shamans of the Amazon rain forest, how Odysseus’s battle with Circe--wielder of narcotic plants and Mistress of Animals--follows the traditional method of negotiating with a plant ally, and how Odysseus’s journey to the land of the dead signifies the universal practice of the vision quest, a key part of shamanic initiation. Emerging precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness, Homer’s work represents a window into the lost native mind of the Western world. In this way, the Odyssey as well as Tolkien’s work can be seen as an awakening and healing song to return us to our native minds and bring our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.

Mysticism and esotericism are two intimately related strands of the Western tradition. Despite their close connections, however, scholars tend to treat them separately. Whereas the study of Western mysticism enjoys a long and established history, Western esotericism is a young field. The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism examines both of these traditions together. The volume demonstrates that the roots of esotericism almost always lead back to mystical traditions, while the work of mystics was bound up with esoteric or occult preoccupations. It also shows why mysticism and esotericism must be examined together if either is to be understood fully. Including contributions by leading scholars, this volume features essays on such topics as alchemy, astrology, magic, Neoplatonism, Kabbalism, Renaissance Hermetism, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, numerology, Christian theosophy, spiritualism, and much more. This Handbook serves as both a capstone of contemporary scholarship and a cornerstone of future research.

“I believe we all carry grief that has gone unnamed and unmourned,” writes best-selling author Christine Valters Paintner. “Nothing in our culture prepares us to deal with darkness and grief. We are told to cheer up and move on, to shop or drink our way to forgetting the pain we carry. Yet I believe that being faithful to our own dark moments is the path of true prayer.” In her book, A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness, Paintner offers an invitation to enter the wisdom of holy darkness and to find there a path toward hope and spiritual maturity. Paintner has experienced multiple journeys through grief that have brought her face-to-face with what she calls the “midwinter God”—the seeming absence of the God of life in dark and fallow seasons of loss. She has learned to confront her own terror in that darkness and to approach it with curiosity to see what it has to teach her. This endeavor has illuminated a path for her to embrace a life of profound depth, one that honors both the trials of suffering and the richness of joy. With her characteristic integrative and creative practices, Paintner, abbess of the online Abbey of the Arts, guides her readers to view darkness as a place where seeds of holiness begin to germinate. Each chapter of this book unfolds as an invitation to grow in understanding of holy darkness and also meditate, reflect, and create with these elements: Paintner’s reflections on various themes of loss and acceptance Insights on a scripture passage written by Paintner’s husband, John A guided meditation to bring the teachings into your heart Prompts for an expressive arts practice to process these insights through creativity Reflection questions to integrate what you have experienced Writing samples from people who have worked through this material in an online retreat Autumn and winter are vital to the health of nature and to our own bodies. It is a time of releasing and letting go—a season that invites us to slow down, to welcome the growing darkness, and to grow stiller and quieter. Darkness can be an uncomfortable and uneasy place, but it is also a place of profound incubation and gestation, a source of tremendous and hard-wrought wisdom. With Paintner as our guide, we can encounter this midwinter God with vulnerable courage that leads us to hope-filled wholeness.

Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens examines the emerging concern for controlling states of psychological ecstasy in the history of western thought, focusing on ancient Greece (c. 750-146 BCE), particularly the Classical Period (c. 500-336 BCE) and especially the dialogues of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE). Employing a diverse array of materials ranging from literature, philosophy, medicine, botany, pharmacology, religion, magic, and law, Pharmakon fundamentally reframes the conceptual context of how we read and interpret Plato's dialogues. Michael A. Rinella demonstrates how the power and truth claims of philosophy, repeatedly likened to a pharmakon, opposes itself to the cultural authority of a host of other occupations in ancient Greek society who derived their powers from, or likened their authority to, some pharmakon. These included Dionysian and Eleusinian religion, physicians and other healers, magicians and other magic workers, poets, sophists, rhetoricians, as well as others. Accessible to the general reader, yet challenging to the specialist, Pharmakon is a comprehensive examination of the place of drugs in ancient thought that will compel the reader to understand Plato in a new way.

A close examination of the relationship between media, art, and the “Electra complex” The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra is a philosophy of “the girl” as a model of contemporary transgressive subjectivity. Elisabeth von Samsonow asserts that focusing on the girl’s escape from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art. Presenting an interpretation of contemporary technics, Anti-Electra argues that technology today encompasses Electra’s gadgets and toys. According to von Samsonow, satellite drive technologies such as wireless telephones, WLAN, and GPS echo the “preoedipal constellation” that the girl specializes in. And with the help of the girl, the cartography of overlapping zones between humankind and animals, as well as between humankind and apparatuses, is redesigned through what the book holds as a “radical totemism.” Anti-Electra ultimately offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society.