Dead Spirit Research Articles

영혼의 교체 현상 연구

The fetal implant of soul is accepted as the natural process of soul reincanation to some religions, whereas 'walk-in' is considered an erratic phenomenon. Although records of such 'walk-in' appear sporadically in ancient Chinese literature, considering the natural cycle and replacement of non-meterial souls and materal bodies, it seems there is an inevitable principle that has been applied to them. That is, if a soul has to go through a certain amount of karma in its life, a physical time is allotted so that one can finish it. As we put it together, if we recall the first question we had about this phenomenon, why doesn't Spiritual World lead him to a new fetus and live a new life, even if it's a spirit that dies without a fixed life span? Suppose people die unexpectedly before fully living their given life span, regarding the principle mentioned we can only wonder, why doesn't the Spiritual World lead the souls to a new fetus and let them live a new life? The question is why souls are allowed to put into a dying body under the condition similar to a previous life. As a result of a sumarizing and analyzing the above various cases, my view is that if souls plan to live a certain physical time on a planet, the mission to complete the physical life process designated for those souls will remain in that planet's time. Otherwise, there is no reason for the administrators of the Spiritual World to give the souls more time for physical life in a way called 'walk-in'. In the Spiritual World, the 'walk-in' phenomenon did not just give time for recycling body and physical life. As seen in the case of Jukgyejeong, he hears from the administrators of the Spiritual World that the purpose of 'walk-in' is to let people “know what is good and what is sinful” by reincarnating through other people's bodies.. The same sayings are recorded in the case of bang's daughter. Lee's daughter-in-law's spirit is put into Bang's daughter on the grounds that “it would be difficult to encourage people to live doing good deeds” unless she is revived through other's body and succeed the generation. In many other records, the main point of the conversation by dead spirits with the managers of Spiritual World after their arrival to the Spiritual World was the inspection of good and evil deeds. In this regard, there is a consistent standard in the Spiritual World, that is poetic justice. In general, there is a view that this record in ancient literature is made up to teach “know what is good and what is sinful”, however, in actuality, the principle of the Spiritual World itself was “know what is good and what is sinful”, and the basic laws of all life phenomena encouraged good and punished evil.In other words, to summarize the above studies, it can be seen that 'walk-in' gives a few dead people an apportunity for spiritual growth as a result of good deeds by writing off Karma for the rest of their lives even with the body of others.

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

John Burnside. Ed. by Ben Davies

John Burnside. Ed. by Ben Davies. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic (Contemporary Critical Perspectives), 2020. 166 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978–1–3500–3697–0. Many critics have voiced the opinion that John Burnside is a key figure among those writers who maintain an ecologically-focused vision throughout their work. Such gestures at canonization have now been given formal weight by Bloomsbury Academic, which dedicated a volume to Burnside in their series ‘Contemporary Critical Perspectives’. The volume spares no effort; editor Ben Davies has recruited some notable literary authors alongside distinguished Burnside scholars to give detailed and compelling scholarly attention to the many facets of his prose and poetry. Citing abundantly from his dreamy yet inch-perfect prose, Peter Childs argues that Burnside expresses his Gnostic vision abstractly via descriptions of physical details such as bodily pain or sensual perception. Also focusing on his metaphysical worldview, Jan Wilm concludes that the awareness of dead spirits or God’s presence is provisional in Burnside’s poetry: the supernatural, for him, is always ‘almost’ perceptible. Wilm claims that since Burnside is interested in the boundaries of existence, it is the indeterminacy of the relationship between humans and other creatures that provides the underlying tone of his poems. Several other aspects of Burnside’s textual world are also investigated in depth: Alexandra Campbell probes the paradox between violence and familiarity, which is a central concern in his prose; Ruth Cain aims to clarify the sociopathic traces of his prose from a Lacanian standpoint; while Julian Wolfreys sets out to interpret his motifs of crossing, continuity and transformation in a subjective essay. Monika Szuba’s informed study calls on Heidegger to shed light on Burnside’s notion of homeliness in a geographical and linguistic sense. Also relying primarily on Heidegger but proceeding from definitions of the pastoral, Tom Bristow’s essay moves heavy philosophical equipment to untangle Burnside’s ecologically-themed poems. David Borthwick tackles the otherworldly and Unheimlich presences in Burnside’s verse. The volume ends with an informal interview conducted with the writer by Ben Davies and a useful, fifteen-page long Further Reading section. This marvellous collection will significantly contribute to our better understanding of John Burnside’s diverse ecological interests: it is required reading for Burnside scholars and strongly recommended to everyone whose research concerns ecological themes in contemporary British and Scottish literature. [https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac011]

Guardian Hosts and Custodial Witnesses: In loco parentis in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1852–1920

ABSTRACT In the mid nineteenthcentury, a subgenre of ghost stories emerged that had roots in a hybrid tradition of institutional religious doctrine and oral folkloric expressions of anxiety over the fate of the child’s soul in the afterlife. Given the persistently high infant mortality rates and increased public awareness of child abuse across the classes, the growing presence of stranded child ghosts in literary fictions of the period represents, I suggest, doubts or fears over the newly dominant liberal insistence that all children would attain peace in heaven and would be reunited and cared for by their family, as well as looked after by God. The child in this period represents the completion of the domestic and gendered ideal and various non-fiction and fiction literatures urged a sense of community care and guardianship over the living child that was extended to its dead spirit. In a great number of ghost stories by well-known and obscure Anglophone women writers, childless female and male protagonists and narrators act as witnesses for, or saviours of, the orphaned ghost child in ways that reframe or interrogate prescribed ideals regarding motherhood, fatherhood, the spinster, and the bachelor, but which simultaneously project concerns over childlessness and childhood more widely.

Urdu-6 An Analytical Study on the Muslim Youth in the Poetry of Allama Muhammad Iqbal in the Light of Quran and Hadith

It is beyond any doubt that the poetry of Iqbal played a vital role in bringing life to the dead spirit of Muslims in Indian sub-continent. It was Iqbal’s philosophy, which brought the element of synergy in Muslims of Indian subcontinent and played a pivotal role in making it possible for them to accomplish their drive for independence. He considered the youth as the nation’s wealth and remained in interaction with them in most of his poetry. Iqbal is such a legendary symbol that hundreds of PhDs and thousands of research papers have been written on his philosophy and poetry but it is a fundamental truth that none of these were able to completely frame the message of Iqbal. He urged the Muslim youth in his poetry to resemble with the qualities of eagle. In this research article an effort has been to illustrate the qualities of eagle that Dr. Muhammad Iqbal wished to see in the Muslim youth and analyse the characteristics of “momin” in the light of Quran and Hadith and for that references has been taken from various research papers and books. Iqbal’s entire poetry is actually the interpretation of message and teachings of Quran therefore, if we are to secure our today and future then we has to bring awareness of Iqbal’s poetry and its underlying message to the common people.

The living being dead: Cotard syndrome presenting as a dead spirit

Jules Cotard described a syndrome with melancholic anxiety, delusions of possession, ideas of suicide and, thoughts of the non-existence of their own body and/or soul. ‘Perethaya’ is a greedy dead spirit recognized in Sri Lankan culture who expresses a dangerous longing for food until their subsequent incarnation. A 68-year-old female previously diagnosed with depressive disorder stated she is deceased and turned to a ‘perethaya’. She ate from garbage bins and attempted to consume water from toilet bowls as a ‘perethaya’ would do. A 42-year-old male diagnosed with recurrent depression stated he has died and is now a ‘perethaya’. He believed any person who would talk to him is dead as well. These reports present a culturally unique way of Cotard syndrome in Sri Lanka.

‘BAKWATA is Like a Dead Spirit to Oppress Muslims’

Abstract During the 2015 general election campaigns in Tanzania, a controversy arose between the ruling party and the opposition coalition, concerning the proposed constitution draft and the position of Zanzibar within the Union. Beyond this controversy, there have existed the impacts of Islamic revivalism on the one hand, and a fear for the perpetuation of Islam in Tanzania on the other – issues which have played a significant role in the country since Independence. In this paper, we focus in particular upon popular Muslim preachers, such as Ponda Issa Ponda, who complain that the National Muslim Council of Tanzania [BAKWATA] is just an extension of the mainstream government – an organisation which is unsympathetic to Muslims’ interests, which violates Muslims’ rights, and which functions contrary to its own purpose. This complaint draws on long-term memory, reaching back even further than the 1968 banning of the East African Muslims Welfare Society [EAMWS]. Two interesting questions are addressed here concerning a central state’s involvement in religious affairs under multi-party rule: How has the Tanzanian government managed religious diversity? And how should its management style be evaluated, given the perspective that has developed with the shift in focus from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ in policy and management sciences?

Conversion and the Idea of the Secret

Gauri Viswanathan, “Conversion and the Idea of the Secret” (pp. 161–186) Obsessed with the notion of the secret in his writings on religion, Jacques Derrida uncannily evokes a predecessor with whom he has rarely, if at all, been compared—the Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. This essay argues that Blavatsky’s occult writings set the stage for the kinds of speculations on crypto-conversion, conscience, and responsibility that subsequently engaged Derrida. Like Blavatsky, Derrida saw conversion not as change but as retaining whatever it displaces in the form of a secret, persisting as an enduring reminder of supplanted religious beliefs. While Derrida was more interested in conversion as a form of repression that mutually constitutes the old and the new, Blavatsky held a broader and more dynamic view of conversion-as-repression: in describing Christianity’s battle against the heterogeneous belief-systems it eventually supplanted, she sought to illuminate conversion as a larger process well beyond the individual and involving religious expansion and consolidation. The essay culminates in a close reading of an occult text, W. B. Yeats’s “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’” that exemplifies the problematics of crypto-conversion as delineated by Blavatsky and Derrida in their respective ways. “Leo Africanus” stages Yeats’s encounter with a dead spirit alternatively grasped as his anti-self and historical conscience. A breakthrough in understanding allows Yeats to acknowledge an occluded history—his as much as that of his deceased interlocutor—that can only be told in the terms of crypto-conversion, in this instance of a sixteenth-century African slave forcibly converted to Christianity and turned into a native informant of African history and geography.

Saint Tupac

AbstractWidespread fascination with Tupac Shakur's 2012 holographic resurrection at the Coachella music festival provides the occasion for theorizing human possibility in the context of Afro‐diasporic religions. In considering Tupac's life and legacy, we refer to the spiritual power of his resurrection as an apotheosis, or divine ascendency toward sainthood. However, instead of restricting our discussion to the familiar context of Catholic sainthood, we draw upon Afro‐Cuban religious cosmologies (espiritismo, santería, and palo monte) to explore the complicated relationship of spirit copresences who are also described of as “angel guardians” or santos (saints). We consider how these logics shift the role Tupac plays for hip hop. Tupac as guardian angel of hip hop acts as an Afro‐Cuban santo who guides and protects his constituency from death. In addition, we complicate this dynamic by exploring how the Tupac hologram in particular might be akin to the palo monte practice of enslaving dead spirits for economic gain in the form of a spiritual cauldron (nganga). In this way, we explore Tupac's resurrection through multiple Afro‐diasporic logics in order to theorize how the rebel spirit of this murdered rapper continues the fight against systematic oppression, even as he is potentially resurrected by different parties for different reasons.

Dampak Akulturasi Budaya pada Kesenian Rakyat

The sub district of Selo lies between the slope of Merapi and Merbabu mountains. It has several arts which are still developing because of the support from the surrounding societies. Folk arts in Selo have been performed in second and forth weeks since 2008 in the Hall of Tourism Office, Selo sub district. Some of the dance forms have come to acculturation, for example, dances of Campur Bawur, Suro Indeng, Buditani and Prajuritan. Folk arts become a media for conveying feeling and thinking coming from the artist along with the supporting society. Involvemen of the arts in ritual as well as non ritual events shows that the arts have important role in the society’s life.The dances of Campur Bawur and Prajuritan  as the media of expression have been performed in onther areas such as Surakarta for the sake of appreciation and entertainment. Arts performance also represents the society’s legitimacy or belief of the dead spirit. The dead spirit as the embryo of human being and the societies is considered to be able to protect and give safety to the socienty. As an entertainment, the form of its movement is simple and the accompaniment is dynamic. Every per- formance is mostly affected by situation of the society.  The forms of make up, costums, movements, and accompaniment have mixed with moern performance. Keywords: folk dance, aculturation, entertainment.

13 Days of Midnight by Leo Hunt (review)

Reviewed by: 13 Days of Midnight by Leo Hunt April Spisak Hunt, Leo 13 Days of Midnight. Candlewick, 2015 [336p] ISBN 978-0-7636-7865-4 $13.00 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 Luke didn’t know his dad well, and he tried to avoid the paranormal reality show his father hosted. Now his dad is dead, and while Luke is happy to have the man’s cash, he learns that there was much more to his father than he knew when ghosts begin to appear around him, and the only clues seem to be locked in a green book he can’t open. No problem, he’ll just set the ghosts free, except Luke realizes that [End Page 93] he is stuck with them either until he learns how to release them in a way that they won’t destroy the world—or until they kill him. The ghosts are mostly a malevolent bunch, prone to scare tactics and genuine violence, but a few provide assistance to Luke, who also gets help from Elza, a local goth girl with second sight.. Luke’s difficult relationship with his dad only gets worse as he is forced to deal with his father’s dead spirit as well; this family complexity is a gripping point of authenticity in what is otherwise a solidly supernatural thriller. Hunt balances the macabre with dark humor, and Luke’s wry narration suggests that no matter how many times he screws up, he’ll likely pull through. Offer this to ghost fans who don’t mind some serious creepiness and a sturdy amount of gore mixed in with their spectral hauntings. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Modernisation des temples bouddhiques et société locale : le Nanzō-in de Sasaguri

This paper studies the modernization of a Buddhist temple, Nanzō-in located at Sasaguri town, Fukuoka prefecture in Kyūshū, and its socio-religious relationship with the local society. This temple belongs to the Shingon sect and is the first stop of the 88 pilgrimage sites, fudasho, replicas of the Shikoku Reijyō based upon Kōbō Daishi belief. According to legend, Sasaguri pilgrimage sites had been founded in 1835, and they flourished until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. According to the Meiji government's political order of the separation of Buddhism and deity belief, the socio-religious system of pilgrimage in Sasaguri had radically changed and gradually declined. Local people introduced the new idea of making requests to the headquarters of the Shingon sect located at Mt. Kōya. In 1898, Nanzō-in temple has migrated to Sasaguri and was afforded the supreme status of pilgrimage site. During the Meiji period, Nanzō-in was supported by local society and outsiders, including laborers of the coal-mining industry, so that this temple eventually passed through the process of modernization. The main topics of this paper are the history of temple, socio-economic background, the change in belief systems, the leadership of the main monk, and the transformation of the relationship between the temple and local society. Nanzō-in temple is a complicated religious site, comprising a main temple, Daishi-dō dedicated to the religious founder, small shrines, a large statue of Fudō-myōō and stone images of numerous bodhisattvas. We discuss radical changes in the temple's character from the supplication and prayer in this world to the appeasing of dead spirits in the other world. After the construction of the large bronze image of the 'Lying Buddha' in 1995, Nanzō-in transformed itself into a commercial temple and focused on conducting religious services for the storage hall of the bones of the dead, the nōkotsudō. This is a new business for the temple. Nanzō-in encompasses various believers from ascetics to pilgrims and is beginning to align itself with the 'Engaged Buddhism' movement. This study will highlight the 'invention of tradition' and modernization of Buddhism supported by the local society to establish the function of the temple's social capital. In conclusion, we discuss the negotiation of external and internal society and its inhabitants.

The Best‐Laid Schemes: Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and the Making of US Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1947–2009

The Best‐Laid Schemes: Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and the Making of US Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1947–2009

This Secret Charm of Numbers: The Clandestine Relationship between Shortwave Number Stations and Twentieth-Century Poetry

Mystery exists only in precise things. Jean Cocteau The Muses count. Jack Spicer Turn your to the microwave bands and listen there. Christopher Dewdney 4.1.2008 Dead Voices on Air There is strange transmission currently broadcasting from 8,099 kHz of the shortwave band. A lifeless, mechanical voice emerges from the static and begins droning out list of seemingly random numbers in Spanish. The rhythmic regularity and invariance in her pitch give the voice an eerie, almost otherworldly, quality. She reads string of five numbers, pauses, then another five, pauses, and then continues reading in this fashion for forty some minutes. Then, ending with final, the female voice dissolves into crackling waves of static. But later, she will re-emerge on different part of the band. She has been broadcasting in this manner, up to eighteen hours day, for forty-odd years. No one knows who she is, where she transmits from, nor what her numbers are for (to listen to sample of one of these transmissions, click on Atencion, CD track 44 (1)). 9.12.1921 The Birth of Shortwave Radio In the shadow of today's sophisticated internet technologies, shortwave might have quaint air of obsolescence But despite the ubiquity of cell phones, Wi-Pi, et al., the medium is active A single sweep through the dial reveals wide variety of transmissions: fire-and-brimstone evangelical preachers, tepid calypso music, vast spectrum of foreign languages, and less readily identifiable audio events. Idiosyncratic as this variety may be, there is stranger side to the shortwave band. Shortwave is an utterly bizarre world; its wavelengths are too short to be properly monitored and controlled by any government agency, and its low fidelity makes it of little use to commercial broadcasters. Hence, it proliferates with pirates, politically clandestine and propagandist broadcasters, and numerous other unsavoury users. What is more, the propagation of shortwave is notoriously unstable. Under some conditions, the waves are unable to travel any lengths. But when they travel far, they do so by bouncing off Earth's ionosphere and refracting down to receiver, often traversing thousands of miles. This makes the transmitter virtually impossible to locate by normal methods of triangulation. Adding to shortwave radio's mystique is its nocturnal clarity; due to solar interference, listening at night often leads to the clearest reception. In particular, cloudless winter nights give the most optimal conditions. Given these circumstances, perhaps it is not surprising that so many unidentifiable aural ghosts glide through these airwaves. This spectral substrate of was well-known by its inventors even prior to the advent of shortwave Guglielmo Marconi, for instance, believed that his early antennas were pulling in the voices of ghosts some where from outer space. Nikola Tesla similarly thought that his early receiver was picking up communications from distant alien life forms on Mars and Venus. Indeed, the itself was born of the nineteenth century's fixation with spiritualism; both Marconi and Thomas Edison pursued the idea that radio, with some modifications, could hear the dead speak (Banks 99). Similarly, artists have imagined tuning into ghostly frequencies on the dial; Velimir Khlebnikov, referring to radio-wave propagation as a spider web of lines in the air, felt was great sorcerer and ensorceler of the world (Khlebnikov 32), and ET. Marinetti and Pino Masnata's La Radia manifesto called for reception and amplification of vibrations emitted by living beings ... or dead spirits (Marinetti 269). These and other supernatural descriptions attest to something like economy inherent within radio. As Marshall McLuhan later wrote, is sort of tribal magic (McLuhan 324), device capable of mystically entrancing its listeners far and wide and propagating voices deep into the vacuum of space If, following McLuhan, radio is the extension of the central nervous system, even more than telephone or telegraph (330), then the nerves it extends may be viewed as schizophrenic wires that reach distances beyond reason. …

The Journey of the Dead

The Journey of the Dead Chief Sukon In the traditional belief of our ancestors, when a person from Uripiv dies, their spirit eventually departs the island to join other spirits of the dead in a place near the big fire where all the dead spirits go, on the island of Ambrym. However, the spirit only begins its journey after it has discovered that it belongs to a person who has died. It happens like this: On the morning of the first day following the burial, the spirit of the dead person would go down to the beach on the other side of the island and stand there to warm itself in the rays of the sun as it rose from the east. As the sunlight threw the shadow of the spirit on the beach, the spirit, seeing its own shadow, would notice that its shadow was headless. A headless shadow is the mark of the spirit of a dead person. It was then that the spirit came to realize that it now belonged to a dead person. The spirit would then begin its journey to leave the island of Uripiv (the island of the living) in order to join the rest of the spirits in the spirit world on the island of Ambrym (the island of the dead). The spirit would first journey out from Uripiv in a southerly direction toward Pankumu near Tisman. Then from Pankumu, the spirit would go on to the tip of the point of Tisman (the longest point on the east coast of Malakula, facing the island of Ambrym). This point is known as Bongnaon and, because of its association with the spirits of the dead, is revered by people of Uripiv to this day. Here, on the following morning, the spirit would light a fire to send a signal of smoke to Ambrym. This particular signal traditionally means that the person sending it has a message. The spirits on Ambrym, noticing the signal of smoke, would send a spirit originally from Ambrym to Bongnaon to find out who was sending the message; in particular, what island or community in Malakula the [End Page 505] spirit sending the message was from, what the message was about, and who the message was intended for. The Ambrym spirit would travel by canoe over to the Bongnaon point to find this out. When it had found out that the spirit had come from the island of Uripiv, it would travel back to Ambrym to the camp where the spirits of the dead from Uripiv were and tell them what the message was. Meanwhile, the recently dead spirit would have to wait at the Bongnaon point until one of the spirits of Uripiv came over to get him. Having passed on the message to the community of Uripiv spirits, the Ambrym spirit then left it to the Uripiv spirits to take care of the rest. One of the Uripiv spirits would then paddle from Ambrym across to the Bongnaon point to meet the waiting spirit there and bring him back with him to Ambrym. There it would be able to join the rest of the spirits of the dead from Uripiv in their camp near the large fire (or volcano) known as Marum. The women and the men would come together to celebrate with a maki (grade-taking ceremony) and with singing and dancing to welcome the new arrival. The spirits of the dead from Uri, Wala, Rano, Tautu, Litzlitz, Vao, and Atchin, who also had their own camps in Ambrym near the big fire, would also join in the celebration. Whenever a new spirit arrived to join the company of other spirits, it was an occasion for all the spirits to come together for feasting, celebration, and many other activities to mark the arrival of the new spirit. Copyright © 2007 University of Hawai'i Press

Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century (Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique Series) by Joshua Gunn

Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and Drama of Secrecy in Twentieth Century (Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique Series) Joshua Gunn, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005. How many taboos can a scholar violate before being permanently assigned to publishing limbo? Judging from this book, quite a few! Joshua Gunn, assistant professor of communication studies at University of Texas-Austin, treats seldom analyzed (because disreputable) territory of occult, typically understood to include phenomena such as fortune telling, astrology, black magic, Satanism, and channeling dead spirits. He wishes to show how individuals use language ... secrets, creating groups of insiders and outsiders (xv). Gunn reveals that his investigation was launched by a smugly framed insult tossed at him in a graduate seminar; another student publicly chastised him for his ignorance of Lacan on desire (235). Perhaps reflecting emotional sting of that classroom humiliation, he risks offense to many respectable colleagues in a first chapter that begins with a babbling satire of French postmodern stars, Deleuze and Guattari. Such a ruse momentarily suggests his sympathy with Alan Sokal, who hoaxed journal Social Texts a decade ago with famously fashionable nonsense. But after this deliberate linking of occultism's with that of postmodern critical discourse, he goes on to offer a qualified apologia for both. While he does not defend truth claims of either, he argues instead for legitimacy of their shared purpose-to disclose previously unknown truths conveyed through language that is by necessity exploratory. As he works out parallels between popular and scholarly occult, Gunn develops a subtle, original analysis that helps us understand the poetics of obscurity and how it functions to create appreciative audiences. In addition to this philosophical strand focused on meaning, argument of book is framed historically, encompassing ancient origins of occult tradition, its suppression by early Christian church, its revival during Renaissance, and its period of greatest vitality in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when church's social authority to forbid what it called magic declined. For American aspect of Gunn's analysis, principal figures covered are H. P. Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, and Anton LaVey. And just as spiritual authority of church diminished, Gunn sees a downward path from a period of earnest seeking after secrets to a period of occult commodification dominated by scary images rather than esoteric language. Blavatsky was a world traveler from Ukraine who, in 1875, formed Theosophical Society in New York; she circulated as a spiritualist celebrity who commanded special insights and powers based upon her study of assorted world religions. The Society still exists today and her works such as his Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), although denounced by some of her contemporaries as rubbish, are still in print today, remaining important to theosophical strand of New Age religions. Her rhetorical style, which was repetitive, list-laden with citations, and filled with imported terms (especially from Sanskrit), helped Blavatsky cultivate aura of authority among her devoted, though often bemuddled followers. …

Do Babies Have Culture?

Alma Gottlieb. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. '[B]efore local officials of the Ivoirian government ordered all thatch-roofed houses to be destroyed in the late 1960s, the Beng [of the Côte d'Ivoire] lived in large, round dwellings that accommodated an extended family, which was meant to include not only the living but also the dead. Every night someone in the household would put out a small bowl of food for the ancestors of the family, and the last person to retire would close the door, locking in the living and the dead to sleep together. In the morning, the first person to open the door released the wrus, who travelled back to wrugbe for the day—only to return at night for their dinner and sleeping spot once again' (Gottlieb 2003:.82). Today all the dead spirits (wru) of "all the world's ethnic groups live together harmoniously" (98) in spirit villages (wrugbe) that are "dispersed among invisible neighbourhoods in major cities in Africa and Europe" (80). The dead may be invisible to us, but we live alongside them. Are we invisible to them? Presumably so. It would seem likely that from their own point of view the dead lead a material existence, but why today is it an urban one? Perhaps the existence [End Page 167] of the dead alongside us has to do with the wealth of the city and its plentiful food; there, one might suppose, the dead have access to everything they need. But perhaps the dead are not able just to have what they want? Perhaps access to what may be obtained by the dead requires the mediation of the living? Certainly it seems that living Beng have to make the dead recognize them, remember their ties to them as kin, and in doing so at once protect the living from all forms of evil and ill chance and promote their well-being and fertility. By the same token, it may be the case that from the spirits' point of view wrugbe finds its material continuity in the dutiful behaviour of the living towards the dead. 1 Wrugbe—the domain of the dead—may be accessible to adults in dreams (82), but otherwise adults must undertake special procedures via diviners to consult the dead and gain their support. Babies, however, have unmediated access to wrugbe where they spend a good deal of time (p169): "all infants and young children, as well as adult diviners, tack back and forth between past and present by travelling—one might even say commuting—to wrugbe" (80). Considered as a spatiotemporal location, wrugbe is always present; and like our own lived present, this one contains with in it its own past and its potential future. 2 Beng neonates incarnate specific ancestors, though often enough the ancestor remains unknown in that s/he cannot be identified with a named, now dead, once living, person (89). The living baby and the dead ancestor are, however, aspects of an entity whose substance and sociality is slowly differentiated over the years of infancy and early childhood—a process that cannot itself really begin until the stump of the newly born child's umbilical cord withers and drops off (83). A child who dies before this time is not yet classified as a person, so the death is not announced publicly, the neonate being deemed simply to have returned to wrugbe (p83); indeed, it is perhaps because it is wru that the dead neonate is "buried in a muddy patch behind the home" but is given no funeral (90). The neonate is so closely at one with wrugbe that until the umbilical stump drops off he or she must be washed four times a day using a special soap that is otherwise used only to wash a person newly deceased, and four times a day the child's mouth too must be washed with half a newly-cut...

"Between Two Worlds": The Dybbuk and the Japanese Noh and Kabuki Ghost Plays

The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds by S. Ansky (Shlomo Rapoport) (1) the most renowned production by Ha'bimah (The Stage), Israel's National Theater. It premiered in 1922 in Moscow, staged by Ha'bimah, which was a Russian-Jewish company at that time, with the advice and support of Constantin Stanislavski. The play was performed in Hebrew and directed by the Russian-Armenian Yevgeny Vakhtangov shortly before he died. (2) Since then it has been staged more than one thousand times, reviving Vakhtangov's direction, and has become probably the most famous Jewish and Israeli play. The play's themes, structures, dramatic means, and theatrical elements show a remarkable similarity to those of many plays in the repertoire of Japanese traditional theater, especially of Noh, the aristocratic lyrical theatrical form that was established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Noh draws its material from many sources and its form from ritual and folk dances. It is essentially a drama of soliloquy and reminiscence of the main character who in many plays begins as a reincarnation and then appears as a ghost. There are enormous differences in many respects between the backgrounds of this singular Western play, The Dybbuk, and the Eastern traditional Japanese theater and drama. Whereas the belief in dead spirits, reincarnation, and ghosts is quite common in Japanese thought, such beliefs were and still are not part of mainstream Jewish belief. The ritual that has always played an important role as a connection between beliefs and their artistic/performative embodiments is very developed in Japan but not in Judaism, in which belief is based mostly on verbal expression. Further, theater was discouraged in Judaism. The Dybbuk is therefore not a characteristic play in the Jewish or Israeli repertoire, and since few other plays deal with a dybbuk (a discontented dead spirit that takes possession of the body of a living human being) or gilgul neshamot (transmigration of souls), it is impossible to analyze this play as part of any dramatic genre. In spite of these differences, however, a comparison between various elements in The Dybbuk with those in Japanese Noh and Kabuki (traditional popular theater) ghost plays can provide a better comprehension of the various aspects of both this singular Western play and the traditional Japanese ghost plays. Belief in Dead Spirits, Reincarnation, and Dybbuks In Japan, belief in the existence of the soul, in spirits of the dead, and in reincarnation is ancient and widespread. The Japanese believe that the soul and the body are two separate entities, and this belief exists in both the original Shinto religion and the imported Buddhism that entered Japan in 552 C.E. and created a synthesis with Shinto in various elements. This synthesis, in turn, influenced the performing arts. (3) One of the expressions of this belief is the erection of two separate graves: one for the impure body and another for the soul. After death the soul (tamashii) wanders for several years until it is purified and becomes a quasi-god (kami) that resides in another world, beyond the sea or sky. It is there that the dead spirits become the ancestral souls. At the time of death, the soul of a person can become either an angered or a peaceful spirit, according to the psychological status of the person at the moment of death. Emotions such as jealous love or hatred will engender a very dangerous spirit. The spirit of an unmarried man or woman or of one killed in an accident will be disturbed after death and will face difficulty in entering the other world. Such hurt spirits can return to the mortal world and attack human beings. This belief led to the creation of various rituals aimed at honoring the purified spirits and at appeasing the disturbed ones so that they will refrain from doing harm. (4) The most important such event is obon, the Festival of the Dead nowadays celebrated in mid-August, during which the families prepare to welcome the dead spirits of deceased relatives, who come to visit. …

CRYPTOGRAMS FROM THE CRYPT

A Cambridge don and psychic researcher left two encrypted messages to test whether the dead can communicate with the living. The authors describe successful cryptanalysis of one of these messages, a double Playfair cipher with overlapped pairs. In summary: Computerized medium channels dead spirit to recover cryptographic keys.

National Social Policy toward the Mentally Ill in Japan and Its Consequences

In Japan, for many centuries, the prevailing ideas about the etiology of mental illness were derived largely from animistic and supernatural thinking. It was believed that abnormal, bizarre behavior was caused by the tricks of such animals as foxes or badgers and by such supernatural beings as evil or dead spirits. Behavior disturbances were considered beyond the reach of a physician and were left to be treated by monks and shamans, mainly by incantations, exorcisms, and bathing under waterfalls.