Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World


Book Description

First English translation of Victor Hugo’s writings on his experiments in spiritualism • Reveals Hugo’s conversations with renowned discarnate entities such as Shakespeare, Plato, Galileo, and Jesus • Examines his contacts with aliens from the planets Mercury and Jupiter and the revelation that our entire universe is a quantum hologram • Discusses Hugo’s possible role as a grand master of the Priory of Sion During Victor Hugo’s exile on the Isle of Jersey, where he and his family and friends escaped the reign of Napoléon III, he conducted “table-tapping” séances, transcribing hundreds of channeled conversations with entities from the beyond. Among his discarnate visitors were Shakespeare, Plato, Hannibal, Rousseau, Galileo, Sir Walter Scott, and Jesus. According to the transcripts, Jesus, during his three visits, condemns Druidism, faults Christianity, and suggests a new religion with Hugo as its prophet. To the skeptic, some of the “conversations” may seem self-serving--at best, the subconscious wishes of the naïve participants. But author John Chambers places Hugo’s experiments firmly in the tradition of visionary literature and psychic exploration, aligning those experiences with the poetry of William Blake, the table-tapping experiences of the Fox sisters, and the channeled writings of the great modern-day Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill, whose spirits’ utterances uncannily resemble those of Hugo’s. Hugo’s transcriptions are the missing link between the early nineteenth century’s fascination with the kabbalistic Zohar, reincarnation, and the writings of the Illuminati and the rise of spiritualism and the societies for the study of psychic phenomena in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.




How Heaven Works


Book Description

In 1948, Vietnam's great 20th Century mystic Phạm Công Tắc (1890-1959) began a series of sermons making Caodaism's claims to universal salvation the clearest. In only two decades, Caodaism had stamped its fast-growing presence on the nation. With potent creative and poetic skill Phạm Công Tắc invited his co-religionists to take a shamanic journey with him to examine the heavens and literally see how they would be saved. The 35 sermons translated here are provided with a commentary and extensive introduction by Hartney. How Heaven Works is a fascinating insight into the deep connection between shamanic atmosphere, literature, and Modern syncretic concepts of salvation.




Cultural Integration and the Gospel in Vietnamese Mission Theology


Book Description

Postcolonial Vietnam has an urgent need for contextualized theology of mission, God, Christ, and the church that is rooted in indigenous cultural traditions and the dual Vietnamese spirit of resistance and assimilation. Dr KimSon Nguyen navigates the religio-cultural dimensions of Vietnamese spirituality and Daoism that have hindered the assimilation of the Christian faith in the Vietnamese context and explores a fresh approach to missiology in Vietnam. Dr Nguyen draws upon his deep knowledge of Vietnamese evangelical history to analyze contextualization and mission theology in Vietnam. He proposes an evangelical theology of God as Ðạo (way / 道), the centrality of the Vietnamese home as the “house of the Lord,” and ancestor veneration as a theological framework for an indigenous theology of the family. Narrowing the gap between culturally removed evangelical missionary practice and widespread syncretistic spirituality in Vietnam, Nguyen calls for a paradigm shift in Vietnamese mission theology that is both robustly evangelical and authentically Vietnamese.




Word of Mouth


Book Description

"Word of Mouth brings together the insights of queer and lyric theory to tell the story of how gossip modeled forms of sociality and voice that poets experimented with over the course of the twentieth century. Through a set of case studies of culturally diverse American poets--Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, and others--who absorbed and contended with the loose talk that swirled about them and their work, the book argues that gossip became a vehicle for the performance of alternative sexualities and concomitant meditations on alternative modes of poetic practice. At the heart of this argument is a queer revaluation of modern lyric poetry. Attending to gossip's key role in modern and contemporary poetry enables a recognition of the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem--as, for example, an utterance smudging the lines between private and public, knowing and unknowing, intimacy and strangeness--have been shaped by, and afforded a uniquely suitable space for, the expression of queer sensibilities. More than simply mapping a curious poetic mode, then, Word of Mouth contributes a crucial, and largely neglected, queer perspective to current lyric studies and its renewed scholarly debate over the practices and forms of lyric poetry. The book presents new and instructive queer contexts for understanding the influential formal achievements of Stein, Hughes, O'Hara, and Merrill, and uncovers the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality"--




Atlantis Rising Magazine Issue 135 PDF download – SEEKING THE “LOST” EQUATOR


Book Description

In This 88-page edition: ANCIENT MYSTERIES SEEKING THE “LOST” EQUATOR Ice-Age-Era Artifact of a Destroyed Civilization? BY JONATHON A. PERRIN THE PARANORMAL TUNNELING THROUGH TIME Could Visitors from the Past & the Future Be Here After All? BY MARTIN RUGGLES THE UNEXPLAINED VANISHING ACTS Tracking the Strange Disappearances of People & Animals Worldwide BY WILLIAM B. STOECKER UFOs U.S. FORCES VS. UFOS BEFORE ROSWELL Could Forgotten Accounts, Force a Look at Evidence Once Considered Taboo? BY FRANK JOSEPH THE UNEXPLAINED GIANTS IN THE PAPERS Lost Details of the Senora Skeleton Finds BY JAMES VIERA & HUGH NEWMAN CONSCIOUSNESS CHURCH ENERGY What Mystic Science Were the Builders Practicing? BY CHARLES SHAHAR THE OTHER SIDE “THE WAY” OF ST. JAMES Was It Sacred, or a Cover for the Profane? BY STEVEN SORA ANCIENT WISDOM QUEST FOR A GOLDEN AGE Have We Been Here Before? BY GEOFFREY ASHE THE OTHER SIDE THE DIMENSIONS OF INSPIRATION The Strange Case of Victor Hugo Yet Unsolved BY JOHN CHAMBERS ALTERNATIVE SCIENCE REALITY Fundamentally Speaking–What Is It Anyway? BY ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D. THE FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGIST FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGY AND CONSCIOUSNESS BY MICHAEL A.CREMO ASTROLOGY SNOW WHITE, THE GOBLIN, FAROUT And Other Denizens of the Outer Solar System BY JULIE LOAR PUBLISHER’S LETTER THE SUN’ A CRYSTAL IN THE MAKING? BY J. DOUGLAS KENYON




Get to the Point!


Book Description

In this indispensable guide for anyone who must communicate in speech or writing, Schwartzberg shows that most of us fail to convince because we don't have a point-a concrete contention that we can argue, defend, illustrate, and prove. He lays out, step-by-step, how to develop one. In Joel's Schwartzberg's ten-plus years as a strategic communications trainer, the biggest obstacle he's come across-one that connects directly to nervousness, stammering, rambling, and epic fail-is that most speakers and writers don't have a point. They typically have just a title, a theme, a topic, an idea, an assertion, a catchphrase, or even something much less. A point is something more. It's a contention you can propose, argue, defend, illustrate, and prove. A point offers a position of potential value. Global warming is real is not a point. Scientific evidence shows that global warming is a real, human-generated problem that will have a devastating environmental and financial impact is a point. When we have a point, our influence snaps into place. We communicate belief, conviction, and urgency. This book shows you how to identify your point, leverage it, stick to it, and sell it and how to train others to identify and successfully make their own points.




Toilers of the Sea


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Laboratories of Faith


Book Description

At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in séances and magic rituals were seekers after experimental data as well as spiritual truth. A young astronomy student wrote of his quest: "I am not in the presence or under the influence of any evil spirit: I study Spiritism as I study mathematics." He did not see himself as an ecstatic visionary but rather as a sober observer. For him, the darkened room of occult practice was as much laboratory as church. In an evocative history of alternative religious practices in France in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, John Warne Monroe tells the interconnected stories of three movements—Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism. Adherents of these groups, Monroe reveals, attempted to "modernize" faith by providing empirical support for metaphysical concepts. Instead of trusting theological speculation about the nature of the soul, these believers attempted to gather tangible evidence through Mesmeric experiments, séances, and ceremonial magic. While few French people were active Mesmerists, Spiritists, or Occultists, large segments of the educated general public were familiar with these movements and often regarded them as fascinating expressions of the "modern condition," a notable contrast to the Catholicism and secular materialism that prevailed in their culture. Featuring eerie spirit photographs, amusing Daumier lithographs, and a posthumous autograph from Voltaire, as well as extensive documentary evidence, Laboratories of Faith gives readers a sense of what being in a séance or a secret-society ritual might actually have felt like and why these feelings attracted participants. While they never achieved the transformation of human consciousness for which they strove, these thinkers and believers nevertheless pioneered a way of "being religious" that has become an enduring part of the Western cultural vocabulary.




The Publishers Weekly


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The Athenaeum


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