Includes material on shamanism, death, witchcraft, myth, tricksters, and kachina initiations.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Documents the efforts of indigenous peoples to redefine heritage as a protected resource. Michael Brown takes readers into settings where native peoples defend what they consider to be their cultural property ... By focusing on the complexity of actual cases, Brown casts light on indigenous grievances in diverse fields ... He finds both genuine injustice and, among advocates for native peoples, a troubling tendency to mimic the privatizing logic of major corporations"--Jacket.

"At a time when the New Age movement is starting to make good on the Spiritualists' vision of America as a 'grand clairvoyant nation', Carroll's work raises provocative questions about the tension betwen freedom and authority in the harmonial religions of today." -- Church History "... offers the most comprehensive, sane examination of its topic yet available, no mean achievement for a subject long afflicted by religious partisanship and now perhaps in danger of sympathetic attraction." -- Journal of American History "... fascinating reading it will be for those with a taste for good scholarly writing and a love of the American past and the manifold varieties of the spiritual quest." -- The Quest "In addition to being an excellent introduction to mid-19th-century Spiritualism, Carroll's work also offers scholars a new vantage point from which to view the religious creativity that was so prominent in antebellum America in general." -- Choice During the decade before the Civil War, a growing number of Americans gathered around tables in dimly lit rooms, joined hands, and sought enlightening contact with spirits. The result was Spiritualism, a distinctly colorful religious ideology centered on spirit communication and spirit activity. Spiritualism in Antebellum America analyzes the attempt by spiritually restless Americans of the 1840s and 1850s to negotiate a satisfying combination of freedom and authority as they sought a sense of harmony with the universe.

This introduction to the imaginative world of the Mexica (or Aztec) explores sacrifice in the richly textured life of 16th-century Mexico. Kay Almere Read describes a universe in which every object was timed by a given lifespan and in which sacrifice was the mechanism by which time functioned. This book makes a convincing case for what sacrifice meant religiously and for how it came to be that human sacrifice of staggering proportions could be accepted, matter-of-factly, by the Mexica people.

Ancient star lore exploring the mysterious location of Pueblos in the American Southwest, circa 1100 AD, that appear to be a mirror image of the major stars of the Orion constellation. Many readers are familiar with the correlation between the pyramids of Egypt and the stars of Orion. Beginning in 1100 A.D. on the Arizona desert, the Hopi constructed a similar pattern of villages that mirrors all the major stars in the constellation. "As Above, so Below." The Orion Zone explores this ground-sky relationship and its astounding global significance. Packed with diagrams, maps, astronomical charts, and photos of ruins and rock art, this useful guidebook decodes the ancient mysteries of the Pueblo Indian world.