Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural

This book is required for a college course. It is a collection of informative short articles abut the cultures around the world.

CONTENTS: * Foreword by James W. Fernandez * Preface 1 - The Anthropological Study of Religion * Why We Became Religious, and The Evolution of the Spirit World - Marvin Harris * Religious Perspectives in Anthropology - Dorothy Lee * The Anthropologist's Encounter with the Supernatural - I.M. Lewis * Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians - Lauriston Sharp 2 - Myth, Ritual, Symbolism, and Taboo * Myth - Mircea Eliade * Ritual - Max Gluckman * Female Circumcision in Egypt and Sudan: A Controversial Rite of Passage - Daniel Gordon * An Anthropologist's Reflections on Symbolic Usage - Raymont Firth * Taboo - Mary Doublas * You Are What You eat: Religious Aspects of the Health Food Movement - Jill Dubisch * Body Ritual among the Nacirema - Horace Miner 3 - Shamans, Priests, and Prophets * Religious Specialists - Victor W. Turner * Priests - C. Von Furer-Haimendorf * The Shaman: A Siberian Spiritualist - William Howells * Dark Side of the Shaman - Michael Fobes Brown * Reflections after Waco: Millennialists and the State - Michael Barkun 4 - The Religious Use of Drugs * Drugs - Francis Huxley * Ritual Enemas - Peter T. Furst & Michael D. Coe * The Sound of Rushing Water - Michael Harner * Psychedelic Drugs and Religious Experience - Robert S. de Ropp 5 - Ethnomedicine: Religion and Healing * Eyes of the Ngangas: Ethnomedicine and Power in Central African Republic - Arthur C. Lehmann * The Psychotherapeutic Aspects of Primitive Medicine - Ari Kiev * A School for Medicine Men - Robert Bergman * Mothering and the Practice of 'Balm' in Jamaica - William Wedeoja * Traditional African Psychotherapy: An Interview with Thomas Adeoye Lambo - Thomas Bass * The Sorcerer and His Magic - Claude Levi-Strauss * Folk Medical Magic and Symbolism in the West - Wayland D. Hand 6 - Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Other Forces of Evil * An Anthropological Perspective on the Witchcraze - James L. Brain * Some Implications of Urban Witchcraft Beliefs - Phillips Stevens, Jr. * Sorcery and Concepts of Deviance among the Kabana, West New Britain - Naomi M. McPherson * Voodoo Death and the Mechanism for Dispatch of the Dying in Arnhem, Australia - Harry D. Eastwell * The Evil Eye: Forms and Dynamics of a Universal Superstition - Helmut Schoeck * Urban Witches - Edward J. Moody 7 - Demons, Exorcism, Divination and Magic * Devils, Witches, and Sudden Death - June Nash * Psychosocial Interpretations of Exorcism - E. Mansell Pattison * Divination - Lucy Mair * Rational Mastery by Man of His Surroundings - Bronislaw Malinowski * Baseball Magic - George Gmelch 8 - Ghosts, Souls, and Ancestors: Power of the Dead * Taraka's Ghost - Stanley A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed * Sorcerers, Ghosts, and Polluting Women: An Analysis of Religious Belief and Population Control - Shirley Lindenbaum * A New Weapon Stirs Up Old Ghosts - William E. Mitchell * The Real Vampire - Paul Barber * Voodoo - Karen McCarthy Brown * The Secrets of Haiti's Living Dead - Gino del Guercio * Voodoo

This is a great book for anyone who is interested in other cultures, religious beliefs, and witchcraft.

This book was interesting in the fact that it went into the supernatural, but kept it's science perspective. I don't know if I would have ever just "picked up" the book to read it. But it was a good text while I was in an Anthropology course. So if you're an Anth major, I definitely suggest it.

People are still confusing Witchcraft and Wicca. Witchcraft in other cultures is on the negative and as it was put evil side. Not all is New Age Wicca. This book is an acedemic look into cultural Witchcraft in it's many forms. It is not a Llewellyn book.