In African cultures, the spiritual and the physical exist in close communion. This relationship explains many aspects of African societies. Here, Daniel Laine presents a vivid photographic portrayal of men and women as they perform exorcisms, dances and other ritual of African mysticism.

South Africa and Zimbabwe are home to the largest cluster of ancient stone ruins found to date on Earth. Adam's Calendar is at the centre of it all - the oldest functioning megalithic Sun Calendar found to date. Since 2007, more than 5 million circular stone structures have been identified by Michael Tellinger and a small group of independent researchers. These structures are not "stand-alone" stone circles - they are all connected to each other by channels of stone, and held in a large mesh of agricultural terraces that cover entire mountains and resembles a never-ending spider's web. The great mystery is that the original stone structures have no doors or entrances - indicating that they were not originally constructed as dwellings for people or animals. Additional research and the discovery of mysterious tools and artefacts, indicate that the builders had an advanced knowledge of Cymatics - study of sound - and knew how to use sound as a tool. Together with many ancient gold mines, all this activity has been dated with various scientific techniques to well over 100,000 years - and provides much support for the presence of the Sumerian Anunnaki on Earth - mining gold in Southern Africa. A place often referred to as the ABZU. Scholars have told us that the first civilization on Earth emerged in a land called Sumer some 6000 years ago. These archaeological findings in southern Africa suggest that the Sumerians inherited much of their knowledge from an earlier civilization that emerged many thousands of years before them in southern Africa, the cradle of humankind.

Taking the influential work of Arthur Huff Fauset as a starting point to break down the false dichotomy that exists between mainstream and marginal, a new generation of scholars offers fresh ideas for understanding the religious expressions of African Americans in the United States. Fauset's 1944 classic, Black Gods of the Metropolis, launched original methods and theories for thinking about African American religions as modern, cosmopolitan, and democratic. The essays in this collection show the diversity of African American religion in the wake of the Great Migration and consider the full field of African American religion from Pentecostalism to Black Judaism, Black Islam, and Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement. As a whole, they create a dynamic, humanistic, and thoroughly interdisciplinary understanding of African American religious history and life. This book is essential reading for anyone who studies the African American experience.

Thompson examines the altar traditions in cultures from the Atlantic coast region of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

This collection of fascinating and revealing tales captures the sprawling diversity of African mythology. Four hundred alphabetically arranged entries touch on virtually every aspect of African religious belief, from Africa's great epic themes (dualistic gods, divine tricksters, creator gods, and heroes) to descriptions of major mythic systems (the Dogon, the Asante, and the San) and beyond. Scheub covers the entire continent, from the mouth of the Nile to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope, including North African as well as sub-Saharan cultures. His retellings provide information about the respective belief system, the main characters, and related stories or variants. Perhaps most important, Scheub emphasizes the role of mythmaker as storyteller--as a performer for an audience. He studies various techniques, from the rhythmic movements of a Zulu mythmaker's hands to the way a storyteller will play on the familiar context of other myths within her cultural context. An invaluable bridge to the richly diverse oral cultures of Africa, this collection uncovers a place where story and storyteller, tradition and performance, all merge.

For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history -- the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.