In October 1994, fifty-three members of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland and Québec were murdered or committed suicide. This incident and two later group suicides in subsequent years played a pivotal role in inflaming the cult controversy in Europe, influencing the public to support harsher actions against non-traditional religions. Despite the importance of the Order of the Solar Temple, there are relatively few studies published in English. This book brings together the best scholarship on the Solar Temple including newly commissioned pieces from leading scholars, a selection of Solar Temple documents, and important previously published articles newly edited for inclusion within this book. This is the first book-length study of the Order of the Solar Temple to be published in English.

Undeservedly, the weird and chilling ghost stories of Arthur Christopher Benson and Robert Hugh Benson have been neglected for far too long. As exercises in the art of luring the reader into a state of unease, they are as potent as they were when the ink was barely dry on the page.

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism’s social and economic base has long been in mortuary services—a base now threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead. Bonds of the Dead explores the crisis brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan. Mark Rowe offers a crucial account of how religious, political, social, and economic forces in the twentieth century led to the emergence of new funerary practices in Japan and how, as a result, the care of the dead has become the most fundamental challenge to the continued existence of Japanese temple Buddhism. Far from marking the death of Buddhism in Japan, Rowe argues, funerary Buddhism reveals the tradition at its most vibrant. Combining ethnographic research with doctrinal considerations, this is a fascinating book for anyone interested in Japanese society and religion.

Spontaneous combustion and exhumation, drug mules and devil worshippers, a gruesome killing beneath the Palmerston North Airport control tower, a mysterious death in a historic homestead, a first-hand dissection of the infamous Mark Lundy case ... In The Cause of Death, provincial pathologist Dr Cynric Temple-Camp lifts the lid on the most unusual stories of death and murder he's encountered during his 30-year career.

An examination of the shadow side of prophecy in human history and our attitudes toward fate and predicting the future • Explores the divinatory techniques and traditions of classical Greece and Rome as compared with ancient China • Contains new information concerning the location of the Greek Oracle of the Dead at Baia • Shows how the latest discoveries in science may validate the system of the I Ching • First U.S. Edition of Netherworld Many methods for predicting the future, such as tarot, runes, the I Ching, and other divinatory oracles, can be traced back to ancient cultures. In Oracles of the Dead Robert Temple examines the Greek and Roman traditions and techniques of divination and compares them to those of ancient China. He reveals the real physical location of the "hell" of the ancient Greeks--known in antiquity as the Oracle of the Dead and used for séances intended to contact the spirits of the dead--and provides photographs from his explorations there. Relating them to the ancient belief in the Oracle of the Dead, Temple examines the various mysteries associated with Delphi and the other oracles of the ancient world and explains how they were used to allow visitors to experience contact with the divine. Furthermore, his examination of the Chinese oracular system shows how the latest developments in science are validating the system of the I Ching.

True stories of life and death from a New Zealand pathologist From the number-one bestselling author of The Cause of Death comes a book about the unlikely, extraordinary, obscure and often tragic ways humans meet their end. A dead body without a trace of trauma; alien parasites; worms of the brain; crocodile attacks and bizarre eating disorders ... In The Quick and the Dead, pathologist Dr Cynric Temple-Camp takes readers into a world of disease and death as he seeks answers for those who were unlucky, and those still alive to tell the tale.