Ritual As Remedy

• Explains how ritual can serve as a way to ground yourself, invite in the new, let go of what needs to be shed, and tap into your own inner powers • Shares ancient and modern rituals, ceremonies, and practices to connect with the seasons, the lunar cycles, and the five elements, as well as open your heart, dance with your shadow self, grow your intuition, and connect with your body • Offers detailed instructions for each ritual, ceremony, and transformative healing practice HEALING BALM for psyche and soul, ritual invokes a unique magic that allows us to step beyond the mundane and touch base with the sacred turning points in our life and the truth of our soul’s calling. In this evocative guide, Mara Branscombe offers potent soul-care rituals and ceremonies to purify and strengthen minds, hearts, and bodies, so as to enable us to activate our inner power. Connecting with the pagan wheel of the year, the five elements, and the lunar cycle, soulstirring rituals and step-by-step healing protocols show a path towards a deeper, heart-centered living. Transformative practices such as guided meditations and visualizations, breathwork, altar creation, and discovery of our personal empowerment mantras facilitate our healing journey. Ancient and modern ceremonies and specific spiritual formulas help us embody a loving existence, dance with our shadow self, engage with grief, grow our intuition, dismantle limiting beliefs, and heal toxic patterns to find inner strength and peace. Ritual as Remedy is an invitation to shape-shift, heal, transform, and reclaim one’s true soul purpose through powerful self-care protocols that awaken freedom, joy, and a wild, untamed self-love.

Spells are conjured, herbs collected, and potions concocted in this fascinating history of the practices and beliefs of Norway's folk healers at home and in the New Land.

Healing with Herbs and Rituals is an herbal remedy-based understanding of curanderismo and the practice of yerberas, or herbalists, as found in the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Part One, "Folk Healers and Folk Healing," focuses on individual healers and their procedures. Part Two, "Green Medicine: Traditional Mexican-American Herbs and Remedies," details traditional Mexican-American herbs and cures. These remedies are the product of centuries of experience in Mexico, heavily influenced by the Moors, Judeo-Christians, and Aztecs, and include everyday items such as lemon, egg, fire, aromatic oil, and prepared water. Symbolic objects such as keys, candles, brooms, and Trouble Dolls are also used. Dedicated, in part, to curanderos throughout Mexico and the American Southwest, Healing with Herbs and Rituals shows us these practitioners are humble, sincere people who have given themselves to improving lives for many decades. Today's holistic health movement has rediscovered the timeless merits of the curanderos' uses of medicinal plants, rituals, and practical advice.

Divination is an important feature of cultures all over the world. While some may still question the efficacy of divination systems, they continue to serve their communities by diagnosing ailments, prescribing healing treatments, and solving problems. Yet despite their universality, there are relatively few comprehensive studies of divination systems. This volume seeks to fill this gap regarding the use of divination in healing. Here some of the worldÕs leading authorities draw on their own fieldwork and participation in ritual to present detailed case studies, demonstrating that divination rituals can have therapeutic effects. As the contributors examine the systems of knowledge that divination articulates and survey the varieties of divinatory experience, they seek to analyze divination as an epistemological system, as a social process, and as a therapeutic endeavor. While some of their findings reinforce traditional assumptions about the importance of social control, spirit relations, and community support in the divination process, the authors place these considerations within new epistemological frameworks that emphasize the use of alternative modes of knowing. In this wide-ranging volume, readers will find coverage of classic Ifa systems; Buddhist-influenced shamanic practices in the former Soviet Union; the reconciliation of Muslim beliefs and divinatory practices in Thailand; Native American divination used in diagnosis; Maya calendrical divination in Guatemala; mediumistic and chicken oracle divination among the Sukuma of Tanzania; Ndembu divination, focusing on the process of collective healing; and divination among the Samburu (Maasai) of Kenya, featuring dialogues from actual healing sessions. Together, these contributions argue for new perspectives on the study of divination that emphasize not only the epistemological roots of these systems but also their multifaceted therapeutic functions. Divination and Healing is a rich source of both data and insight for scholars of ritual, religion, medical anthropology, and the psychology of altered states of consciousness.

This therapeutic guide offers ways to rediscover and implement natural practices in 21st-century daily life.

Did gods create mankind, or did mankind create gods? Why, when and how did mankind begin to worship gods? Religious scriptures the world over claim that one or the other god made man, but science has not yet identified any supernatural power that created and governed human beings. Was it man who came up with the idea of gods to help him cope with his own fears? Could it be that ancient people attributed natural phenomena-unfathomable and frightening to them-to the working of invisible gods? What kind of sufferings or bewilderments made people bow before unseen powers or gods as we call them? When were these gods created? Who invented morals and methods of worship? Who wrote the ancient scriptures such as the Bible and the Vedas? Most crucially, have gods and the scriptures shaped our responses to the world around us? The Evolution of Gods seeks to answer these questions, and explains scientifically how, when and why religions and gods came into being. Ajay Kansal marshals anthropological and historical facts about the development of religions in a simple and straightforward manner to assert that it was mankind that created gods, and not the other way around.

In this pioneering work one of the world's leading experts on Native American traditions offers a detailed survey of Native American practices and beliefs regarding health, medicine, and religion. In contrast to the sharp Euro-American division between medicine and religion, Native American medical beliefs and practices can only be assessed, says the author, in their relation to their religious ideas. Spanning the full length and breadth of Native North American cultural areas, from the Northeast to the Southwest, the Southeast to the Northwest, the book offers "thick" descriptions of traditional Native American medical and religious beliefs and practices, demonstrating that for Native Americans medicine and religion are two sides of the same coin: a coherent and holistic system in which supernaturalism acts as a motor in healing.

This cultural exploration offers an unparalleled presentation of Pennsylvania’s ritual healing traditions known as powwowing or Braucherei in Pennsylvania Dutch, through original primary source materials, including manuscripts, ritual objects, and books—most of which have never before been available to English-speaking readers. Although methods and procedures have varied considerably over three centuries of ritual practice within the Pennsylvania Dutch cultural region, the outcomes and experiences surrounding this tradition have woven a rich tapestry of cultural narratives that highlight the integration of ritual into all aspects of life, as well as provide insight into the challenges, conflicts, growth, and development of a distinct Pennsylvania Dutch folk culture. Volume IV of the Annual Publication Series of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania.