Sacred Leaves of Candomblé

Author: Robert A. Voeks
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292773854
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Winner, Hubert Herring Book Award, Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies Candomblé, an African religious and healing tradition that spread to Brazil during the slave trade, relies heavily on the use of plants in its spiritual and medicinal practices. When its African adherents were forcibly transplanted to the New World, they faced the challenge not only of maintaining their culture and beliefs in the face of European domination but also of finding plants with similar properties to the ones they had used in Africa. This book traces the origin, diffusion, medicinal use, and meaning of Candomblé's healing pharmacopoeia—the sacred leaves. Robert Voeks examines such topics as the biogeography of Africa and Brazil, the transference—and transformation—of Candomblé as its adherents encountered both native South American belief systems and European Christianity, and the African system of medicinal plant classification that allowed Candomblé to survive and even thrive in the New World. This research casts new light on topics ranging from the creation of African American cultures to tropical rain forest healing floras.

Sacred Leaves

Author: Diego de Oxossi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780738767055
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Discover the power, magic, and secrets of Afro-Brazilian herbal witchcraft with this thorough guide. Compiling three volumes into one updated edition, Sacred Leaves spotlights the authentic day-to-day magic practiced in the Orisha religion, making these techniques accessible to all readers. Author Diego de Oxóssi teaches you how to identify plants through their physical and magical characteristics. Then, you will learn how to harvest these sacred ingredients and put them to use in potions, tinctures, baths, and other healing tools. Available in English for the first time, de Oxóssi's three-volume collection guides you through working with Orisha energies, moon phases, planetary vibrations, and more.

Afro-Caribbean Religions

Author: Nathaniel Samuel Murrell
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439901759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the largest African population in the world outside of Africa, and has historic ties to the Caribbean, Murrell includes a section on Candomble, Umbanda, Xango, and Batique. This accessibly written introduction to Afro-Caribbean religions examines the cultural traditions and transformations of all of the African-derived religions of the Caribbean along with their cosmology, beliefs, cultic structures, and ritual practices. Ideal for classroom use, Afro-Caribbean Religions also includes a glossary defining unfamiliar terms and identifying key figures.

Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature

Author: Bron Taylor
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441122788
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1927

Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, originally published in 2005, is a landmark work in the burgeoning field of religion and nature. It covers a vast and interdisciplinary range of material, from thinkers to religious traditions and beyond, with clarity and style. Widely praised by reviewers and the recipient of two reference work awards since its publication (see www.religionandnature.com/ern), this new, more affordable version is a must-have book for anyone interested in the manifold and fascinating links between religion and nature, in all their many senses.

Women and New and Africana Religions

Author: Lillian Ashcraft-Eason
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313082723
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
This volume explores the lives of women around the world from the perspective of the New and Africana faiths they practice. This probing and thought-provoking series of essays brings together in one volume the multifaceted experiences of women in the New and Africana religions as practiced today. With this work, religion becomes a lens for examining the lives of women of diverse ethnicities and nationalities across the social spectrum. In Women and New and Africana Religions, readers hear from women from a number of religious/spiritual persuasions around the world, including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, and North America. These voices form the core of remarkable explorations of family and environment, social and spiritual empowerment, sexuality and power, and ways in which worldview informs roles in religion and society. Each essay includes scene-setting historical and social background information and fascinating insights from renowned scholars sharing their own research and firsthand experiences with their subjects.

The Formation of Candomble

Author: Luis Nicolau Parés
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469610922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Book Description
Formation of Candomble: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil"

Reincarnation in America

Author: Lee Irwin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498554083
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
Reincarnation in America: An Esoteric History surveys the complex history of reincarnation theories across multiple fields of discourse in a pre-American context, ranging from early Greek traditions to Medieval Christian theories, Renaissance esotericism, and European Kabbalah, all of which had adherents that brought those theories to America. Rebirth theories are shown in all these groups to be highly complex and often disjunctive with mainstream religions even though members of conventional religions frequently affirm the possibility of rebirth. As a history of an idea, reincarnation theory is a current, vital belief pattern that cuts across a wide spectrum of social, cultural, and scientific domains in a long, complex history not reducible to any specific religious or theoretical explanation. This book is cross-disciplinary and multicultural, linking religious studies perspectives with science based research; it draws upon many distinct disciplines and avoids reduction of reincarnation to any specific theory. The underlying thesis is to demonstrate the complexity of reincarnation theories; what is unique is the historical overview and the gradual shift away from religious theories of rebirth to new theories that are therapeutic and trans-traditional.

Garden Plots

Author: Shelley Saguaro
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754637530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Focusing on a range of twentieth-century texts and including relevant twenty-first century writing, Garden Plots explores the ways in which gardens in fiction represent more than just a familiar theme. Bound up with wider aesthetic and ideological issues, gardens, like literary forms, are subject to transformations. The term 'plots' is a keyword in this approach. It refers to garden plots, literary plots, and more generally, the plotting that is political, polemical, and subversive. Each of the six chapters includes four texts that are familiar and representative. Authors include Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Carol Shields, J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jamaica Kincaid, and Philip K. Dick.

Working Cures

Author: Sharla M. Fett
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807827096
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.

AfroLatinas and LatiNegras

Author: Rosita Scerbo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666910341
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
AfroLatinas as a subject of scholarship are woefully underrepresented, and this edited volume, AfroLatinas and LatiNegras: Culture, Identity, and Struggle from an Intersectional Perspective, offers an important and timely intervention. The consistent attention to AfroLatinas’ agency across all the chapters is empowering and attentive to the difficult circumstances of asserting that agency, and to the tremendous breadth of what agency can look like. The authors argue for the analytical power of the concept of Intersectionality while considering the hegemonic pressures on AfroLatinidad and the essentializing moves that an intersectional approach enables: evading, overthrowing, and resisting systems of power. Through the study of multiple cultural expressions of Blackness, such as photography, colonial inquisition records, dance, music, fiction, non-fiction, poetic memoir, and religious expression, and throughout different region of the Americas, the chapter contributors of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes, such as sovereignty and colonialism, have on narrative and cultural production. Rosita Scerbo, Concetta Bondi, and the contributors acknowledge that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality, and the inclusion of activist voices broadens this volume's reach and links theory to praxis.