Napolean Mondragon is more than an immortal vampire. He is the sovereign lord of the house of Jadon, the very heartbeat of the race, and a fearsome leader who rules with wisdom, integrity, and strength. Even as Napolean carries the blood of every vampire in his veins, he also carries a dark secret of shame in his heart...A secret that will soon be used against him by his enemies.When Brooke Adams arrives in Dark Moon Vale for a business conference, she is unaware of the hidden danger that dwells within the valley's majestic forest. A rising star in the corporate world, she has only one goal: to sell a leading-edge concept to her boss and advance her career. Little does she know, her life is about to change...forever. Caught in a tangled web of vengeance and deception, Napolean and Brooke will be forced to confront their inner demons, each other, and their primordial destiny in a battle to survive a DARK POSSESSION.

An ethnographically rich account of the Vodhum (voodoo) cult amongst the Watchi in Southern Togo.

This book studies the psychology surrounding the development of owning and sharing in humans across different cultures.

An innovative work of both economic anthropology and literary history, Arts of Possession draws on philosophical, theoretical, literary, historical, and archival sources and insights to situate the household at the center of the social and cultural imagination of fourteenth-century England. D. Vance Smith argues that in a period commonly represented as precapitalist there actually existed a sophisticated economic discourse -- and that discourse underlies common forms of representation and the writing of literary texts. His work provides a new historiography of capital and of the development of the relation between economic sophistication and cultural practices. Smith reads well-known and less-appreciated works -- such as Winner and Waster, Sir Launfal, The Canterbury Tales, and Piers Plowman -- for what they can tell us about the surpluses and economies that drew the medieval imagination, and about the complex ethics of possession at the heart of the fourteenth-century household. In bringing this to light, Smith's book itself becomes an eloquent meditation on the poetics and ethics of possession.

My father always said fear was a weakness. Well, that's easy to say when you don't have to worry about vampire slayers or holy water. I hate fear, but undead life goes on. In the two months since I was attacked in the hospital morgue and turned into a vampire, I've killed my evil sire, Cyrus, fallen in love with my new sire, Nathan, and have even gotten used to drinking blood. Just when things are finally returning to normal—as normal as they can be when sunlight can kill you—Nathan becomes possessed. And then he slaughters an innocent human. Now it's my job to find Nathan before the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement does, because they're just waiting for an excuse to terminate him—and anyone foolish enough to help him. But it gets worse. It turns out that Nathan's been possessed by one of the most powerful and wicked vampires alive—the Soul Eater. And who knows what vile plan he's concocted? With the Soul Eater and my possessed sire on the loose, I have a lot to fear. Including being killed. Again.

This two-volume text reviews spirit possession throughout history, analyzes case studies from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, and examines rites for exorcism. From the beginning of civilization to the present day, and across all major religions and cultures, there have been documented cases of people seemingly overtaken by an unseen entity. The invading force—whether good or bad—appears to replace the possessor's soul with the spirit's own persona, resulting in mystifying symptoms such as levitation or other supernatural feats, speaking in tongues, and even horrific and inexplicably accelerated physical distortion and deterioration. This is a two-volume chronological history and examination of spirit possession that addresses its phenomenological, psychological, and neurobiological aspects, and its effects on societies. Volume one reviews spirit possession from the upper Paleolithic era to modern times, while Volume two focuses on case studies and rites of exorcism.

Possession, a seemingly irrational phenomenon, has posed challenges to generations of scholars rooted in Western notions of body-soul dualism, self and personhood, and a whole set of presuppositions inherited from Christian models of possession that was “good” or “bad.” The authors of the essays in this book present a new and more promising approach. They conceive spirit possession as a form of communication, of expressivity, of culturally defined behavior that should be understood in the context of local, vernacular theories and empiric reflections. With the aim of reformulating the comparative anthropology of spirit possession, the editors have opened corridors between previously separate areas of research. Together, anthropologists and historians working on several historical periods and in different European, African, South American, and Asian cultural areas attempt to redefine the very concept of possession, freeing it from the Western notion of the self and more clearly delineating it from related matters such as witchcraft, devotion, or mysticism. The book also provides an overview of new research directions, including novel methods of participant observation and approaches to spirit possession as indigenous historiography