Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and geographies, the Brill Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling presents modern spirit possession in a variety of contexts. Weaving together the interrelated movements of Spiritualism along with its specific Franco and Latin American currents, articles explore the nineteenth-century beginnings of séances and trance mediumship. Channelling, an heir to Spiritualism begun in the 1970s and still flourishing today, is brought into direct conversation with its predecessors with a view to showing both continuity and disjuncture as the products of new cultural and religious needs. The Brill Handbook marks the first extensive collection on these two interrelated movements and examines themes such as gender, race, performance, and technology in each instance.

A comprehensive guide to understanding and mastering healing and psychic techniques. Tap into your intuition, heart and soul and be amazed at how your skills unfold and develop in surprising ways. The Spiritual Guidebook includes information about opening the third eye, chakras, tarot, mediumship, crystals, reiki, healing, meditation, channelling, automatic writing, auras, scrying, psychometry, energy, essential oils, yoga, guides, shamanism, numerology, health, quantum physics, sacred geometry, self-hypnosis, mind power, past lives and spirit releasement. Written by Anna Comerford, an award-winning Australian psychic the Spiritual Guidebook will expand your psychic knowledge and intuitive-healing abilities in ways you never imagined.

The author of the bestselling "Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft" writes a handbook for anyone who wishes to communicate with spirits, as well as for the less adventurous who simply want to satisfy their curiosity about the subject.

This volume addresses the diversification of mental healthcare provision and patients’ health-seeking behavior by putting Brazilian Spiritism and its translocal relations at the center of its inquiry. Comparative chapters document and critically assess the affective arrangements of Spiritist spaces in Brazil and Germany and how practices contribute to healing and the diversification of a globally circulating mental health agenda. The book addresses the human experience within Spiritist psychiatric clinics and affiliated Spiritist centers in Brazil, which in migratory contexts also have connections to Germany. Chapters interrogate the spaces where people inside and outside Brazil engage in implementing Spiritist practices in mental healthcare, introducing the Aesthetics of Healing as a conceptual tool to understand interactions between religion and medicine more broadly. Establishing a novel analytical and interdisciplinary perspective on embodied aspects of sensory experience and perception, this compelling volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students involved with mental health research, medical anthropology, Spiritualism, and cross-cultural psychology. Practitioners in the fields of transcultural psychiatry and the sociology of religion will also find the volume of use.

Over the centuries, Buddhist ideas have influenced medical thought and practice in complex and varied ways in diverse regions and cultures. A companion to Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources, this work presents a collection of modern and contemporary texts and conversations from across the Buddhist world dealing with the multifaceted relationship between Buddhism and medicine. Covering the early modern period to the present, this anthology focuses on the many ways Buddhism and medicine were shaped by the forces of colonialism, science, and globalization, as well as ruptures and reconciliations between tradition and modernity. Editor C. Pierce Salguero and an international collection of scholars highlight diversity and innovation in the encounters between Buddhist and medical thought. The chapters contain a wide range of sources presenting different perspectives rooted in distinct times and places, including translations of published and unpublished documents and transcripts of ethnographic interviews as well as accounts by missionaries and colonial authorities and materials from the contemporary United States and United Kingdom. Together, these varied sources illustrate the many intersections of Buddhism and medicine in the past and how this nexus continues to be crucial in today’s global context.

This book explores how people draw upon spiritual, religious, or faith-based practices to support their mental wellness amidst forms of chronicity. From diverse global contexts and spiritual perspectives, this volume critically examines several chronic conditions, such as psychosis, diabetes, depression, oppressive forces of colonization and social marginalization, attacks of spirit possession, or other forms of persistent mental duress. As an inter- and transdisciplinary collection, the chapters include innovative ethnographic observations and over 300 in-depth interviews with care providers and individuals living in chronicity, analyzed primarily from the phenomenological and hermeneutic meaning-making traditions. Overall, this book depicts a modern global era in which spiritualty and religion maintain an important role in many peoples’ lives, underscoring a need for increased awareness, intersectoral collaboration, and practical training for varied care providers. This book will be of interest to scholars of religion and health, the sociology and psychology of religion, medical and psychological anthropology, religious studies, and global health studies, as well as applied health and mental health professionals in psychology, social work, physical and occupational therapy, cultural psychiatry, public health, and medicine.

This book provides a comparative analysis of cosmopolitan (esoteric) religious movements, such as Theosophy, Groupe Independent des Études Ésotériques, Anthroposophy, and Monism, in England, France, Germany, and India during the late nineteenth-century to the interwar years. Despite their diversity, these factions manifested a set of common features—anti-materialism, embrace of Darwinian evolution, and a belief in universal spirituality—that coalesced in a transnational field of analogous cosmopolitan spiritual affinities. Yet, in each of their geopolitical locations these groups developed vastly different interpretations and applications of their common spiritual tenets. This book explores how such religious innovation intersected with the social (labor and economic renewal), cultural (education and religious innovation) and political (Empire and anti-colonial) dynamics in these vastly different national domains. Ultimately, it illustrates how an innovative religious discourse converged with the secular world and became applied to envision a new social order—to spiritually re-engineer the world.