Possession

In a world where Thinkers control the population and Rules are not meant to be broken, 15-year-old Violet Schoenfeld must make a choice to control or be controlled after learning truths about her "dead" sister and "missing" father.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages to express predicative possession, as in "the boy has a bat". It presents the results of the author's fifteen-year research project on the subject. Predicative possession is the source of many grammaticalization paths - as in the English perfect tense formed from to have - and its typology is an important key to understanding the structural variety of the world's languages and how they change. Drawing on data from some 400 languages representing all the world's language families, most of which lack a close equivalent to the verb to have, Professor Stassen aims (a) to establish a typology of four basic types of predicative possession, (b) to discover and describe the processes by which standard constructions can be modified, and (c) to explore links between the typology of predicative possession and other typologies in order to reveal patterns of interdependence. He shows, for example, that the parameter of simultaneous sequencing - the way a language formally encodes a sequence like "John sang and Mary danced" - correlates with the way it encodes predicative possession. By means of this and other links the author sets up a single universal model in order to account for all morphosyntactic variation in predicative possession found in the languages of the world, including patterns of variation over time. Predicative Possession will interest scholars and advanced students of language typology, diachronic linguistics, morphology and syntax.

It is August 18, 1634. Father Urbain Grandier, convicted of sorcery that led to the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of provincial Loudun in France, confesses his sins on the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, then perishes in flames lit by his own exorcists. A dramatic tale that has inspired many artistic retellings, including a novel by Aldous Huxley and an incendiary film by Ken Russell, the story of the possession at Loudun here receives a compelling analysis from the renowned Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau. Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe. At the time of his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau was a director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He was author of eighteen books in French, three of which have appeared in English translation as The Practice of Everyday Life,The Writing of History, and The Mystic Fable, Volume 1, the last of which is published by The University of Chicago Press. "Brilliant and innovative. . . . The Possession at Loudun is [de Certeau's] most accessible book and one of his most wonderful."—Stephen Greenblatt (from the Foreword)

This book is exclusively devoted to demonic possession and exorcism in early modern England. It offers modernized versions of the most significant early modern texts on nine cases of demonic possession from the period 1570 to 1650, the key period in English history for demonic possession. The nine stories were all written by eyewitnesses or were derived from eyewitness reports. They involve matters of life and death, sin and sanctity, guilt and innocence, of crimes which could not be committed and punishments which could not be deserved. The nine critical introductions which accompany the stories address the different strategic intentions of those who wrote them. The modernized texts and critical introductions are placed within the context of a wide-ranging general Introduction to demonic possession in England across the period 1550 to 1700.

The spiritual status of the early modern child was often confused and uncertain, and yet in the wake of the English Reformation became an issue of urgent interest. This book explores questions surrounding early modern childhood, focusing especially on some of the extreme religious experiences in which children are documented: those of demonic possession and godly prophecy.

The book includes articles, documentation and a catalog of the Ethnographic Department of the Museum of the Contemporary. It is the fruit of a long-term project carried out at the Mamuta Art and Research Center and curated by the Sala-Manca Group. It contains articles by Yoram Bilu, Rachel Elior, Freddie Rokem and Diego Rotman on the Dybbuk; by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Daphna Ben-Shaul on Sukkot, and on the Eternal Sukkah project; by Shalom Sabar on electric Shabbat candles, and by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman on different art projects. The book also includes documentation of artworks and a project by Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Yeshaiahu Rabinowtz, Ktura Manor, Hannan Abu Huseein, Reuven Zehavi, Sala-Manca, Samuel Rotman, Shira Borer, Nir Yahalom, Chen Cohen, Pessi Komar, Adi Kaplan, and Shahar Carmel, among others.

Medicine, instead of healing, contributes to the disease progression and creates other diseases, including other Cancer. “What comes to you of good is from Allah, but what comes to you of evil, (O man), is from yourself.” (Qur’an, An-Nisa 4:79) When person commits the Sin, a black spot appears on his heart, and if he seeks forgiveness, this black spot is removed, and if he returns to Sin the black spot grows until his heart becomes black and he will be doomed. “Disease is an Expiation of the Sins”, in this book I have described 351 Sins. The Sins involve the Evil Jinn. Demons possess the humans because of the Sins, revenge, desire of control, attraction, Sorcery, Evil Eye, anger, fear and depression. The most frequent Sins: denying or associating partners to Allah, the Creator of all things.Cancer is a Jinn (Demonic) Possession. The anti-Cancer treatment excites the hidden Evil Jinn and the Jinn spread more the disease. Additionally, medicine creates other diseases due to the side effects. Doctors cannot help, cannot remove your Sins and make you sicker and die. “Know for certain that when you break no one will heal you except you.”(Ibn Al-Qayyim) Repentance from the Sins is obligatory. “A trial is not sent down except due to a Sin, and it is not lifted except with repentance.” (Ali Ibn Abi Talib) Demons are afraid of Allah only, our Creator. The Ultimate Cure is within the Qur’an: Ruqyah, Negative Ions and Prophetic Medicine. “Whoever abandons the Qur’an would abandon treating sickness and seeking healing through it.”

The Grammar of Possession: Inalienability, incorporation and possessor ascension in Guaraní, is an exhaustive study of linguistic structures in Paraguayan Guaraní which are directly or indirectly associated with the semantic domain of inalienability. Constructions analyzed in the book include adnominal and predicative possessive constructions, noun incorporation, and possessor ascension. Examples are drawn from a rich data base that incorporate native speaker intuitions and resources in the construction of illustrative linguistic forms as well as the analysis of the communicative use of the forms under study. The book provides a complete picture of inalienability as a coherent integrated system of grammatical and semantic oppositions in a language that has received little attention in the theoretical linguistic literature. The analysis moves from general principles to specific details of the language while applying principles of Cognitive Grammar and Functional Linguistics. There is an explicit aim to uncover the particularities of form-meaning connections, as well as the communicative and discourse functions of the structures examined. Other approaches are also considered when appropriate, resulting in a theoretically informed study that contains a rich variety of considerations.