The history of projected images at the turn of the seventeenth century reveals a changing perception of chance and order, contingency and form. In Projecting Spirits, Pasi Väliaho maps how the leading optical media of the period—the camera obscura and the magic lantern—developed in response to, and framed, the era's key intellectual dilemma of whether the world fell under God's providential care, or was subject to chance and open to speculating. As Väliaho shows, camera obscuras and magic lanterns were variously employed to give the world an intelligible and manageable design. Jesuit scholars embraced devices of projection as part of their pursuit of divine government, whilst the Royal Society fellows enlisted them in their quest for empirical knowledge as well as colonial expansion. Projections of light and shadow grew into critical metaphors in early responses to the turbulences of finance. In such instances, Väliaho argues, "projection" became an indispensable cognitive form to both assert providence, and to make sense of an economic reality that was gradually escaping from divine guidance. Drawing on a range of materials—philosophical, scientific and religious literature, visual arts, correspondence, poems, pamphlets, and illustrations—this provocative and inventive work expands our concept of the early media of projection, revealing how they spoke to early modern thinkers, and shaped a new, speculative concept of the world.

In his richly illustrated Religion and Architecture in Premodern Indonesia Gaudenz Domenig investigates the nature of Indonesian ethnic religions by focusing on land opening rituals, sacred groves, and architectural responses to the custom of presenting offerings. Since deities and spirits were supposed to taste offerings on the spot, it was a task of architecture to attract them and to guide them into houses where offerings were presented. Domenig quotes numerous sources to show that certain material elements of the house were viewed as spirit attractors, spirit ladders or spirit pathways. Various ‘exotic’ features of Indonesian vernacular architecture thus become understandable as relics from times when architecture was still responding to indigenous religions practised in the archipelago.

How literary and religious traffic between Bengal and Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries impelled a complex and contested cosmopolitan imperial culture. From Little London to Little Bengal traces the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. To some, Calcutta appeared to be a “Little London,” while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as “Little Bengal.” Circling between the two, this study reads British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions. Together and apart, Britons and Bengalis waged a transcultural agon under the dynamic conditions of early nineteenth-century imperialism, struggling to claim cosmopolitan perspectives and, in the process, to define modernity. Daniel E. White shows how an ambivalent Protestant contact with Hindu devotion shaped understandings of the imperial mission for Britons and Indians during the period. Investigating global metaphors of circulation and mobility, communication and exchange, commerce and conquest, he follows the movements of people, ideas, books, art, and artifacts initiated by writers, publishers, educators, missionaries, travelers, and reformers. Along the way, he places luminaries like Romantic poet Robert Southey and Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy in dialogue with a fascinating array of lesser-known figures, from the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and the radical English journalist James Silk Buckingham to the mixed-race prodigy Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. In concert and in conflict, these cultural emissaries and activists articulated national and cosmopolitan perspectives that were more than reactions on the part of marginal groups to the metropolitan center of power and culture. The British Empire in India involved recursive transactions between the global East and West, channeling cultural, political, and religious formations that were simultaneously distinct and shared, local, national, and transnational.

I’m sure that you will all be very excited to hear that, after many years of nigh incomparable introspective extractions of extravagant interdimensional immersion and dangerous mystical experimentation, I have, finally, and with great authoritative finality, solved the Earth. Huzzah! All that remains now is to translate these tactical transmutations into the tongues of all tribes, and surely prosperity and understanding shall proliferate among mankind for the duration of eternity! Alas, though I paint this serious topic in playful and lyrical whimsy, my intent to assist in the evolution of beneficial wisdom and understanding is sincere. Perhaps the serious tribe will be one of the first to translate some of these concepts into their more mechanically logical tone. Oh, did you think I meant other languages? No, no. The tribes assimilate information even among the same language in very different ways. Many English speakers scarce read a thing but can feel truth deeply through singing, for such is the intuitive method of their tribe's reception. If you perceive merit in my musings, I may humbly request your assistance in this act of mass translation (and perhaps even salvation), as, alas, ideological keys have no value if they never reach the locks they belong to...

In WORKING WITH ANGELS, FAIRIES AND NATURE SPIRITS, bestselling author and teacher Dr William Bloom presents reveals a world that lies behind everyday reality and shows you how to co-operate with these invisible beings of energy who are a fundamental part of every aspect of our lives. Learn: *How to sense angels and spirits and communicate with them *How to co-operate with this inner world for inspiration and guidance *How to work with angels for healing and spiritual growth *How they can help you fulfil yourself and help others *How they can bring you a deeper understanding of all aspects of life.

Shalini Masih grew up in a stimulating environment of priests and healers, witnessing firsthand states of spirit possession and exorcism. In adulthood, she revisited these experiences, motivating her to extend psychoanalysis outside the clinic's realms into spaces of traditional healing. The outcome of her detailed exploration acknowledges the hugely productive interface between cultural manifestations and concerns of psychoanalysis without reducing the phenomenon of spirit possession to something formulaic. Instead, Psychoanalytic Conversations with States of Spirit Possession: Beauty in Brokenness highlights the intrinsic beauty of this complex experience, illustrating relevant themes through culturally sensitive psychoanalytic conversations with participants who felt haunted and possessed by ghosts. The author's journey reveals the ghosts of her own inner world. She draws upon her reveries, dreams, and nightmares to make sense of the unconscious processes in her informant's testimonies, journeys that are so often undertaken from one grotesque ghost to another until these ghastly beings reappear as broken part-selves in search of the glue of spiritual meaning.

Would you betray one to save another?Once upon a time-traveler's life Graysea had to choose between love of family and that of a romantic kind; The choice was not as easy as the sixteen-year-old Spirit Projector expected. Every quarter of a century, a male and female Alorian are selected as Spirit Projectors; one to send their spirit backward through time and the other to go forward. They bring balance and healing to Alora Valley but danger if they fall in love. Sixteen-year-old Graysea Wealer must locate the male Spirit Projector and deceive him into falling in love with her - if she cannot, her six-year-old brother will die and she will become the next Usurper.