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.

Searching for Africa in Brazil

Author: Stefania Capone Laffitte
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392046
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
Searching for Africa in Brazil is a learned exploration of tradition and change in Afro-Brazilian religions. Focusing on the convergence of anthropologists’ and religious leaders’ exegeses, Stefania Capone argues that twentieth-century anthropological research contributed to the construction of an ideal Afro-Brazilian religious orthodoxy identified with the Nagô (Yoruba) cult in the northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers, Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomblé leaders. She demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of Candomblé on anthropologists, reshaping in their own interest narratives of Afro-Brazilian religious practice. The anthropological narratives were then taken as official accounts of religious orthodoxy by many practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil. Capone draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro as she demonstrates that there is no pure or orthodox Afro-Brazilian religion. Challenging the usual interpretations of Afro-Brazilian religions as fixed entities, completely independent of one another, Capone reveals these practices as parts of a unique religious continuum. She does so through an analysis of ritual variations as well as discursive practices. To illuminate the continuum of Afro-Brazilian religious practice and the tensions between exegetic discourses and ritual practices, Capone focuses on the figure of Exu, the sacred African trickster who allows communication between gods and men. Following Exu and his avatars, she discloses the centrality of notions of prestige and power—mystical and religious—in Afro-Brazilian religions. To explain how religious identity is constantly negotiated among social actors, Capone emphasizes the agency of practitioners and their political agendas in the “return to roots,” or re-Africanization, movement, an attempt to recover the original purity of a mythical and legitimizing Africa.

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.

Traditional Brazilian Black Magic

Author: Diego de Oxóssi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1644112272
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
• Explains how Kimbanda’s presiding deity Eshu embodies both masculine and feminine principles, both god and devil, and thus represents human nature itself with all its vices and virtues • Discusses Kimbanda’s magical practices, initiation rites, sacred knives, and sacrificial offerings • Details the seven realms and the entities that inhabit and govern each of them Although it has been demonized as a form of Satanic cult, Kimbanda--the tradition of Afro-Brazilian black magic--is a spiritual practice that embraces both the light and dark aspects of life through worship of the entities known as Eshu and Pombajira. Exploring the history and practice of Kimbanda, also known as Quimbanda, Diego de Oxóssi builds a timeline from the emergence of Afro-Brazilian religions in the 17th century when African slaves were first brought to Brazil, through the development of Orisha cults and the formation of Candomblé, Batuque, Macumba, and Umbanda religious practices, to the modern codification of Kimbanda by Mãe Ieda do Ogum in the 1960s. He explains how Kimbanda’s presiding deity Eshu Mayoral embodies both masculine and feminine principles, both god and devil, and thus represents human nature itself with all its vices and virtues. Discussing the magical practices, initiation rites, and spiritual landscape of Kimbanda, the author explains how there are seven realms, each with nine dominions, and he discusses the entities that inhabit and govern each of them. The author explores spirit possession and Kimbanda’s sacrificial practices, which are performed in order to honor and obtain the blessing of the entities of the seven realms. He discusses the sacred knives of the practice and the role each plays in it. He also explores the 16 zimba symbols and sigils used to attract the spirits most apt to realizing the magician’s will as well as traditional enchantment songs to summon and work with those spirits. Offering an accessible guide to Kimbanda, the author shows that this religion of the people is popular because it recognizes the dark and light sides of human morality and provides a way to interact with the deities to produce direct results. DIEGO DE OXÓSSI is a Chief of Kimbanda and Orishas Priest. For more than 20 years he has been researching and presenting courses, lectures, and workshops on pagan and African-Brazilian religions. He writes a weekly column at CoreSpirit.com and is the publisher at Arole Cultural. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil.

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 Ethnobotany of Eden

Author: Robert A. Voeks
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022654785X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
In the mysterious and pristine forests of the tropics, a wealth of ethnobotanical panaceas and shamanic knowledge promises cures for everything from cancer and AIDS to the common cold. To access such miracles, we need only to discover and protect these medicinal treasures before they succumb to the corrosive forces of the modern world. A compelling biocultural story, certainly, and a popular perspective on the lands and peoples of equatorial latitudes—but true? Only in part. In The Ethnobotany of Eden, geographer Robert A. Voeks unravels the long lianas of history and occasional strands of truth that gave rise to this irresistible jungle medicine narrative. By exploring the interconnected worlds of anthropology, botany, and geography, Voeks shows that well-intentioned scientists and environmentalists originally crafted the jungle narrative with the primary goal of saving the world’s tropical rainforests from destruction. It was a strategy deployed to address a pressing environmental problem, one that appeared at a propitious point in history just as the Western world was taking a more globalized view of environmental issues. And yet, although supported by science and its practitioners, the story was also underpinned by a persuasive mix of myth, sentimentality, and nostalgia for a long-lost tropical Eden. Resurrecting the fascinating history of plant prospecting in the tropics, from the colonial era to the present day, The Ethnobotany of Eden rewrites with modern science the degradation narrative we’ve built up around tropical forests, revealing the entangled origins of our fables of forest cures.

Medicine, Health and Being Human

Author: Lesa Scholl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351402137
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
Medicine, Health and Being Human begins a conversation to explore how the medical has defined us: that is, the ways in which perspectives of medicine and health have affected cultural understandings of what it means to be human. With chapters that span from the early modern period through to the contemporary world, and are drawn from a range of disciplines, this volume holds that incremental historical and cultural influences have brought about an understanding of humanity in which the medical is ingrained, consciously or unconsciously, usually as a mode of legitimisation. Divided into three parts, the book follows a narrative path from the integrity of the human soul, through to the integrity of the material human body, then finally brought together through engaging with end-of-life responses. Part 1 examines the move from spirituality to psychiatry in terms of the way medical science has influenced cultural understandings of the mind. Part 2 interrogates the role that medicine has played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in constructing and deconstructing the self and other, including the fusion of visual objectivity and the scientific gaze in constructing perceptions of humanity. Part 3 looks at the limits of medicine when the integrity of one body breaks down. It contends with the ultimate question of the extent to which humanity is confined within the integrity of the human body, and how medicine and the humanities work together toward responding to the finality of death. This is a valuable contribution for all those interested in the medical humanities, history of medicine, history of ideas and the social approaches to health and illness.

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.