Earth-Based Religions Books - Page 12

Fire from Within

Carlos Castaneda

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Disappointing Delusions 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Although I have no doubt that Castaneda under the influence of multiple mind altering drugs believed his experiences to be of great import to occult science, Thomas Vaughan summed the such likes in saying, The spirals of their towers of Babel seem to ascend to the clouds, but when a foundation in Light of Truth is sought; there is none to be found.
It serves no purpose than to take up time and research; except to perceive just how far God will permit a man to delude himself via demonic influence.
Matthew P. Dec
Founder - asrpcp.org

Editorial Review:

Each of Carlos Castaneda's books is a brilliant and tantalizing burst of illumination into the depths of our deepest mysteries, like a sudden flash of light, like a burst of lightning over the desert at night, which shows us a world that is both alien and totally familiar -- the landscape of our dreams.

Fire from Within is the author's most brilliant thought-provoking and unusual book, one in which Castaneda, under the tutelage of don Juan and his "disciples," at last constructs, from the teachings of don Juan and his own experiences, a stunning portrait of the "sorcerer's world" that is crystal-clear and dizzying in its implications.

Celtic Mandala 2009 Wall Calendar

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

This is a great Calendar for all ages and beliefs 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This has everything from Yule to the Dali Lama's birthday. IT has something for everyone and the pictures teach of the Celtic folklore. IT 's just a beautiful piece of time keeping

This is my third year purchasing this calendar. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Truly beautiful work. I am hooked and will continue to buy this as long as I can find it!

Simply gorgeous 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is the third year that I have ordered this calendar. The art work is beautiful and the description of each months design is very interesting. The calendar is in twelve month format with decent sized blocks for each day so that I can write in all the chores that need doing.

Editorial Review:

The Celts perceived the presence of divine forces in all aspects of nature. Patterns of harmony and balance, dark and light, winter and summer, female and male, are woven throughout Celtic tradition. Celtic knots and patterning reflect their belief in the continuity of life, the interconnection of all things: plants, animals and otherworldly divinities. The Celtic Mandala 2009 wall calendar presents the magical weavings of Welsh artist Jen Delyth in calendar form. Jen's work is founded in her deep connection to her Celtic heritage. She creates intricate drawings then collages them with her nature photography, further symbolizing the connection to the natural world.

Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

Daniel Pinchbeck

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 49 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience.

While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe.

Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival.

Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.


From the Hardcover edition.

Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology

Sun Bear, Wabun Wind

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The Medicine Wheel is a springboard of power that will allow you to link up to all the energies of the universe." -- Sun Bear

Millions of people around the world have incorporated Native American philosophy into their everyday lives. Now, with this special 25th anniversary edition of the late Sun Bear's classic bestseller, readers old and new can benefit from the teachings and techniques of the Medicine Wheel.

In The Medicine Wheel, Sun Bear and Wabun put forth a whole new system of earth astrology to help guide people not only in their daily living but also in their life paths. In the authors' own words, this book was written to "help all people relate better to our Earth Mother...and find a kinship with the universe." The Medicine Wheel is a beautiful and inspiring approach to graceful, holistic living in trying modern times. The Medicine Wheel's philosophy is derived from a basic principle known by all people who live close to the earth: Once you fully embrace the elemental forces of nature, you become a part of the whole. Let this book be your first step toward finding peace and prosperity -- and your own special place in the circle of life.

Black Elk Speaks, New Edition

John G. Neihardt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Black Elk Speaks is the story of the Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during the momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century. Black Elk met the distinguished poet, writer, and critic John G. Neihardt (1881-1973) in 1930 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and chose Neihardt to tell his story. Neihardt understood and conveyed Black Elk’s experiences in this powerful and inspirational message for all humankind.

When Black Elk received his great vision, white settlers were invading the Lakotas’ homeland, decimating buffalo herds, and threatening to extinguish the Lakotas’ way of life. The Lakotas fought fiercely to retain their freedom and way of life, a dogged resistance that resulted in a remarkable victory at the Little Bighorn and an unspeakable tragedy at Wounded Knee. Black Elk Speaks offers much more than a precious glimpse of a vanished time, however. As related by Neihardt, Black Elk’s searing visions of the unity of humanity and the earth have made this book a venerated spiritual classic. Whether appreciated as the poignant tale of a Lakota life, a history of a Native nation, or an enduring spiritual testament, Black Elk Speaks is unforgettable.

This new edition features two additional essays by John G. Neihardt that further illuminate his experience with Black Elk; an essay by Alexis Petri, great-granddaughter of John G. Neihardt, that celebrates Neihardt’s remarkable accomplishments; and a look at the legacy of the special relationship between Neihardt and Black Elk, written by Lori Utecht, editor of Knowledge and Opinion: Essays and Literary Criticism of John G. Neihardt.

For more information on John G. Neihardt, visit www.neihardt.com

Cottage Witchery: Natural Magick for Hearth and Home

Ellen Dugan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Had Potential... 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book started out strong and seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. I've been hoping for a book that focuses on the home, and ways to not only bring magic in, but also tips and ideas for decorating in a more magical way. The first few chapters seem to do exactly that - with detailed descriptions of what a witch's home could be, basic blessings, tips on finding the center of your home, etc. I was really excited! Unfortunately, soon after, the author committed the cardinal sin of many Wiccan titles: trying to do too much. She seemed to lose her focus, and the book becomes a mishmash of different ideas - protection, elemental work, feng shui, color magic, herbal magic, etc. Because she tries to cram so much in, she manages only to skim the surface of any of these areas - which means she gives information that has been given 1000 times elsewhere. I'm not new to magick, so I don't need the "color magick 101" course. I was hoping for more depth here, but it just wasn't there...

Editorial Review:

A practical, natural magick guide to the enchantment of the hearth and home. Teaches Witches of all levels how to strengthen a home's aura and energy. How to use begonias and lilacs for protection, perform tea leaf readings and bless the home with fruit. Also learn how to perform houseplant magick and create a loving home for all the family Ellen Dugan, the author of Garden Witchery, is the ideal guide to show us how to bring the beauty of nature and its magickcal energies indoors. Using common household and outdoor items - such as herbs, spices, dried flowers, plants, stones, and candles - she offers a down-to-earth approach to creating an enchanted home.

Walking with Grandfather: The Wisdom of Lakota Elders

Joseph M., III Marshall

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since the tide of interest created by Black Elk Speaks over 70 years ago, Native American lineage holders have been cautious about sharing their spiritual truths to the reading public because the essence of this wisdom has been so often misunderstood. In Walking with Grandfather, authentic Lakota lineage holder and award-winning storyteller Joseph M. Marshall breaks this silence with the very best from a lifetime of lessons passed on to him by his grandfather. With him, readers gain access to the timeless teachings that until now remained largely unheard outside the culture of the Lakota people. Part of an unbroken series of narratives dating back countless centuries, this rare new transmission includes Marshall’s rendition of legendary stories such as: • "The Way of Wolves"—important lessons about parenting • "The Shadow Man"—a story on war and the warrior within us all • "Follow Me"—reflections on leaders and leadership • "The Wisdom Within"—the passage of truly becoming an elder—plus many more stories found both in the book and in the author’s own words on the accompanying audio CD.

"We believe that life’s gift to us is wisdom," explains Joseph M. Marshall, "and that it is the one gift that must be given back." Join this master of traditional storytelling as he takes us through the rich oral history of the Lakota—and shows us how we can rediscover the invaluable wisdom of our elders.

Reckoning (Wicca)

Cate Tiernan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Now it's Alisa's Turn 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Alisa now knows that she is a witch, that she has telekinetic powers, and that she has other family, including an uncle, that she never knew about. When things at home get too tense with her stepmother-to-be, Alisa runs away to visit her newly discovered family.

Things become weird almost from the start. Her uncle is friendly, her grandmother seems surly, and Alisa seems to be falling for her cousin's boyfriend. To top it of, a family ghost seems to be becoming far more active and dangerous.

Alisa must show courage and strength in order to deal with her new family, her old family, her new powers, and the secrets behind the ghost.

A wonderful story which stands apart from the Morgan/Hunter main storyline, but one that ultimately leaves the reader wanting an extra chapter. As the story reaches its conclusion, we don't find out how things really turn out. We suspect how they do, but the book and the series conclude without any more information. Maybe there will be another Super Edition that will finish things up (or maybe a spin-off series?)

Anyway, a fine book about courage, strength and self-discovery.

Editorial Review:

Alisa is half blood witch and is desperate to find out more about her witch ancestry so she runs away to find her late mother's witch family. From the moment she arrives, terrifying events envelop the entire family and Alisa herself appears to become the target of her ancestor's ghost. But there is no ghost. Alisa's striking resemblance to her mother is so distressing to her grandmother Evelyn, that it triggers dormant telekinetic powers in Evelyn which are responsible for causing the havoc. The revelation reconciles Alisa to her estranged family and to her own powers as a witch. Now she is ready to go home.

Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft

Paul Boyer, Stephen Nissenbaum

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Rational Look at an Irrational Moment 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

From an enormous body of surviving documents, the authors piece together a micro-historical account of life in 17th century Salem (Danvers), MA, comparable to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic description of a medieval French heretic town, Montaillou: the promised land of error. Their conclusion: "the witchcraft outbreak was rooted in the prosaic, everyday lives of obscure and inarticulate men and women. ... The spark which finally set off the volatile mix [of geography, economics, politics, and the times] came with the unlikely convergence of a set of chance factors in the early 1690's." Among these chance factors were the arrival of a new minister (Samuel Parris) and his voodoo-practicing slave (Tituba), heightened interest in fortune telling and the occult, a long-standing feud over land between the Putnams and Porters, the Montague-Capulet marriage of Joseph Putnam and Elizabeth Porter, and perhaps most of all, the peculiar political and economic status of Salem Village.

One of the reasons life in Salem, even before 1692, is so well documented is because its inhabitants were a querulous, litigious bunch, frequently bringing lawsuits against each other: "What made Salem Village disputes so notorious, and ultimately so destructive, was the fact that structural defects in its organization rendered the Village almost helpless in coping with whatever disputes might arise." About fours years before the witchcraft crisis, both the King of England (to whom colonists owed allegiance, and looked to for support), and the Governor of Massachusetts were removed from office. A new governor was not in office until 1692, after the crisis had already begun.

What people in Salem most quarreled about land. Salem Village quite literally had its back up against a wall, the Ipswich River. There was no room for expansion, and average landholding size had decreased by half, from 250 acres in 1660 to 125 in 1690. (Carol F. Karlsen makes a good case in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: witchcraft in colonial New England, that women, rather than their male counterparts, who inherited or controlled land were "at risk" of being accused witches.) When young girls resorted to fortune telling to know who their future husbands might be, they were seeking urgent, practical, economic help in a "down market."

The farming community of Salem Village was also encroached politically and economically from the more urban, coastal Salem Town to its south, and eastern Salem Village which naturally aligned itself with Salem Town. Salem Village had "no ecclesiastical apparatus." It had no church and had to travel a long distance to Town Center for communion. Salem Village balked at paying taxes without what it considered necessary services, and in 1690 requested independent township status. In the decade or so before the witch crisis, Salem Village had gone through three unordained ministers before settling on the divisive, but ordained, Samuel Parris. Those aligned with Parris, mostly farmers located in western Salem Village, "treated those who threatened them not as a political opposition but as an aggregate of morally defective individuals ... it was a perfectly normal procedure for a town to rid itself of deviant and threatening individuals - by changing them if possible, by exile or execution if necessary."

As does Richard Godbeer in Escaping Salem: the other witch hunt of 1692, Boyer and Nissenbaum ask why events in Salem went so awry. There had been many witchcraft cases tried throughout the colonies and in Salem before 1692. For two centuries, Europe had been in the midst of a "witch craze" that claimed as many as 100,000 people. (By comparison, the Spanish Inquisition only executed about 5,000.) But in previous cases - in the colonies, and in Salem - executions were rare. It's surprising to read that elsewhere, before 1692, people were accused of witchcraft and brought to trial more than once over their lifetimes, without suffering execution or significant punishment. And therein might lie some explanation.

There was an intellectual and class distinction about what constituted witchcraft. To the literate, learned community, the crime of witchcraft was making a covenant with the Devil; a kind of super-heresy that not only denied Church dogma, but actively aligned itself against the Church, and God. Among the "obscure and inarticulate men and women" of Salem Village and elsewhere, witchcraft was magic; spells, amulets, potions, and the like that gave witches advantage over someone. It was easy to show someone had advantage - their livestock did not die when others did, or their children were healthy, or they were rich, had more land, and so on - but it was more difficult to show someone made a pact with the Devil. Who could give witness but the Devil himself (who lies), and the accused, his servant? Magistrates were more likely to err on the side of the defendant, and acquit accused witches - sometimes, even reversing a jury's verdict - to the consternation, fear, and dissatisfaction of the accusers. An ideal condition for vigilantism.

(In 1933, in my hometown, mobs broke into the jail, and beat two accused kidnapper/murderers senseless, then dragged their bodies across the street to the park where they were hanged, their bodies mutilated, and set afire. One reason "obscure and inarticulate men and women" in my town took such drastic action was s string of kidnappings, most notably that of Charles Lindbergh's son, that had gone unpunished.)

What made Salem Village erupt was not just pent-up rivalries and conflicts, but what's now called lack of "adult supervision." Why didn't someone simply tell the young accusers to go to their rooms and behave themselves? Why were they taken seriously? (English law at that time, did not admit evidence from anyone younger than fourteen years old.)

It can't be overlooked that Tituba, and the original accusers were members of Reverend Parris' household. Already the target of attacks from forces aligned with Salem Town, Parris easily equated himself, as representative of the Church, with the Church and God himself under attack. "The prevailing motif of that commentary [in Parris' Sermon Book] - from 1689 to 1692 at any rate - is one ofn encircling menace: a menace which thrusts closer and closer to the heart of the Village as it becomes increasingly cosmic in origin. In this quite specific sense, Parris unconsciously helped set the scene for the climax of 1692."

Boyer and Nissenbaum make a good case that the antics of the accusers - mostly young girls, but including young women as well - had more in common with the behavior of people at revival meetings such as the "Little Awakening" in 1734 Northhampton, MA, or the "Great Awakening" and "Second Great Awakening" in 19th century Kentucky. The very use of the word "awakening" - a stage in mysticism - is significant. As medievalist Teofilo F. Ruiz points out in his UCLA course The Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in the Western Tradition, mysticism has always been one of the few avenues open to women to achieve equality of power and influence. Boyer and Nissenbaum conclude, "the young people of both Northhampton and Salem Village at least momentarily broke out of their `normal' subservient and deferential social role to become the de facto leaders of the town and (for many, at least) the unchallenged source of moral authority."

Reverend Parris, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, benefitted in his role as leader in this war against "the invisible world." Again referring to the similarities between Salem and later revival movements, the authors conclude: "The crucial difference between the two episodes is the interpretation which the adult leadership of each community placed upon physical states which in themselves were strikingly similar." The beleaguered Parris saw witches. Others would later see God. What was needed, and arguably, was eventually provided by Governor Phips, was someone to say "Reverend Parris. Have you no shame!"

Editorial Review:

The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion which had been growing for more than a generation before building toward the climactic witch trials. "Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entagled in it.

777 And Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

777 is a modern grimoire 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

All the nuts and bolts data needed to create any magical ceremony for any purpose may be found in this book. Crowley's insights into the inner meanings of the various subjects of Qabalah will greatly help any magician work with the literary aspect of the magical tradition. This book is a must for any magical library of any tradition.

More of a bible than the Bible... 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

...for any Thelemite or serious high magician. Inside are all the tools required to devise ceremonies of any type. Want to do a love spell? Look at all the correspondences for Netzach, including colors, scents, and goddesses, and then use your imagination and decorate and prepare your altar! (That might be a rather physical form of love, though. Want love on a higher plane? Then try the correspondences for path 14. It will be more nurturing and loving, untainted by the corruption of Netzach.)

There is also a lot on Gematria which can be useful for some magicians, I suppose. To be truthful, I feel Gematria is somewhat overrated in modern magick, due in part to Crowley. Certainly it has its place, but I've seen too many magicians put way too much credence in the way numbers add up to the point they become silly numerologists. Either way though, here is a good place to start for making your own Gematric encyclopedia.

Editorial Review:

This edition includes Liber 777, Gematria (from Equinox Volume 1, Number 5), and Sepher Sephiroth (from Equinox Volume 1, Number 8).