Winner, 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, presented by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion section of the American Anthropological Association Finalist, 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions presented by the Journal of Africana Religions Before honey can be offered to the Afro-Cuban deity Ochún, it must be tasted, to prove to her that it is good. In... more...

  In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced the Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain to aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish Treatise collected diverse incantations, or nahualtocaitl, used to conjure Mesoamerican deities for daily sustenance and medical activities. Today this work is... more...

The first book on Santería’s holiest divination system to thoroughly explore each family of odu and how their actions and reactions affect the spiritual development of the client. • Includes the major considerations for sacrifice, providing the diviner with ways to placate and supplicate the Afro-Cuban deities known as orishas. • Demonstrates how to properly end a reading so that negative vibrations are fully removed from the diviner's home.... more...

Afro-Eccentricity explores three overlapping stories of Black Religion: the Soul, Black Church, and Ancestor Narratives. Hart contends that these narratives dominate most accounts of Black Religion that, collectively, he calls the "Standard Narrative of Black Religion."

The first book to compare Cuban American and African American religiosity, Afro-Cuban Theology argues that Afro-Cuban religiosity and culture are central to understanding the Cuban and Cuban American condition. Gonzalez interprets this saturation of the Afro-Cuban as transcending race and affecting all Cubans and Cuban Americans in spite of their pigmentation or self-identification. Building on a historical overview of... more...

Honor the Gods with the ancient poetic forms! Now, for the first time in perhaps hundreds of years, here is a vast new collection of liturgical poetry for honoring the Aesir and Vanir in the alliterative meters that the Gods and their worshippers used in the Viking Age. To the Gods, poetry is a precious mead — brewed from honey and the blood of wisdom — which was brought to Asgard by Óðinn himself. Isn’t it only fitting that... more...

Honor the Gods with the ancient poetic forms! Now, for the first time in perhaps hundreds of years, here is a vast new collection of liturgical poetry for honoring the Aesir and Vanir in the alliterative meters that the Gods and their worshippers used in the Viking Age. To the Gods, poetry is a precious mead — brewed from honey and the blood of wisdom — which was brought to Asgard by Óðinn himself. Isn’t it only fitting that you offer them some... more...

The Living Goddesses crowns a lifetime of innovative, influential work by one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable scholars. Marija Gimbutas wrote and taught with rare clarity in her original—and originally shocking—interpretation of prehistoric European civilization. Gimbutas flew in the face of contemporary archaeology when she reconstructed goddess-centered cultures that predated historic patriarchal cultures by many... more...

In August 1986, Alice Auma, a young Acholi woman in northern Uganda, proclaiming herself under the orders of a Christian spirit, raised an army called the 'Holy Spirit Mobile Forces' and with it waged a war, not only against the National Resistance Army of the government but also against internal enemies in the form of 'impure' soldiers, witches and sorcerers. She came close to her goal of overthrowing the government but was defeated and fled to Kenya.... more...

Christianity spread across North Africa early, and it remained there as a powerful force much longer than anticipated. While this African form of Christianity largely shared the Latin language and Roman culture of the wider empire, it also represented a unique tradition that was shaped by its context. Ancient African Christianity attempts to tell the story of Christianity in Africa from its inception to its eventual... more...