Statues, paintings, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.

Statues, paintings, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.

A young writer travels to Maine to tell the unusual story of America’s longest-running camp devoted to mysticism and the world beyond. They believed they would live forever. So begins Mira Ptacin’s haunting account of the women of Camp Etna—an otherworldly community in the woods of Maine that has, since 1876, played host to generations of Spiritualists and mediums dedicated to preserving the links between the mortal realm and the afterlife. Beginning her narrative in 1848 with two sisters who claimed they could speak to the dead, Ptacin reveals how Spiritualism first blossomed into a national practice during the Civil War, yet continues—even thrives—to this very day. Immersing herself in this community and its practices—from ghost hunting to releasing trapped spirits to water witching— Ptacin sheds new light on our ongoing struggle with faith, uncertainty, and mortality. Blending memoir, ethnography, and investigative reportage, The In-Betweens offers a vital portrait of Camp Etna and its enduring hold on a modern culture that remains as starved for a deeper sense of connection and otherworldliness as ever.

Scared of ghosts, Alison is a most unlikely medium. But her huge natural gifts for sensing the presence of spirits and angels have taken her on an extraordinary life journey, helping thousands of others with her channelling and healing abilities. Her down-to-earth English humour has also brought her fame as hostess of the TV programme Rescue Mediums.

This 1750 text, written by a Catholic missionary in Tonkin, is the earliest known systematic first-hand account of Vietnamese religious practice, including chapters on Confucianism, Buddhism, the worship of spirits, magicians, fortune tellers and diviners, and Christianity in the region. It was recently discovered in a Paris archive and will be of interest to a broad array of scholars. Includes a facsimile of the original manuscript.