Presence Of Supernatural Research Articles

Paranormal Interest and Contemporariness of Magical Realism in Macbeth.

Supernatural presence is something that has been widely acknowledged in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. There issupposedly an abundance of paranormal activity and eeriness in this play. In fact, it is not an over statement to say that paranormal events drive the action in this play. However, with increasing discoveries and broader horizons made available by scientific advancement in 21st century, the supernatural still stands relevant? If so, what has rendered it its contemporariness?
 A study conducted by Shane Rogers and his team from Clarkson University in the United States observed similarities between paranormal experiences and the hallucinogenic effects of fungal spores (Dagnall Neil, The conversation). This might explain why both Macbeth and Banquo sighted the witches, having been exposed to the same weather conditions which were conducive to the growth of fungi, i.e, “thunder, lightning and rain”. And all the remaining sightings were the fragments of Macbeth’s disturbed mind. However, if the dramatist had intended to eliminate the paranormal interest, he had not designed three scenes, solely devoted to the agents of supernatural or evil, which were the witches.

A CONVERGENCE IN A RELIGION COMMODIFICATION AND AN EXPRESSION OF PIETY IN HALAL CERTIFICATION

The relationship among globalization, modernity, the escalation of religiosity in Southeast Asia, and capitalism cause halal trend consumption raising. The phenomenon of halal certification in Indonesia is interpreted by scholars in myriads of thoughts. Some scholars describe it as a form of religion commodification with more profit oriented, rather than referring to Islamic values or the philosophy of the halal concept. The Islamic symbols are used as trading commodities or marketing goods. The other scholars interpret the issue as an effort to manifest the religious teaching and an expression of piety. Halal certification is a diffusivity phenomenon of sacred (concept of halal, piety) with profane thing (trade and commodification). The existence of halal certification in Indonesia is urgent owing to the inability to control the escalation of products distribution in the domestic market as a result of the food technology, technological engineering, biotechnology and biological chemical processes developments. Moreover, the condition of Muslim in Indonesia and one of the expression of piety is by consuming halal products. Anthropological studies indicate that the character of religious people is always destined to seek and ensure that what is consumed does not hinder their intimacy with God because purity and impurity is important for religious people regarding to the supernatural presence. In fact, there is a contiguity between commodification and an expression of piety in halal certification. It could be interpreted simultaneously to find the convergence. The importance of supervising the halal certification validation agency and the creation of legal verdict must be proceed.

Knowing God

My proposal is that local theory of mind – what I call here the ‘infrastructures of mind’ – shapes the way people recognize and experience supernatural presence. That is, I argue that the local cultural invitation to imagine thoughts, mental images and inner sensations in particular ways – as potent, powerful and dangerous, for instance, or as the heart of an authentic self – will affect the way people recognize and experience God’s voice. I compare interview data from similar churches in the US, Ghana and Chennai, to show that there are systematic differences in the way people experience God and that these differences appear to reflect culturally different understandings of mind. The often-unnoticed infrastructures of the thing that thinks – the way we think about our thinking – alters not only our mental experience but also the very texture of our reality.

The condition of recognition

This article discusses the evocation of the Gothic as a narrative interrogation of the intersections between place, identity and power in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004). The novel deploys common techniques of Gothic literary fiction to create a sense of disassociation from the grip of a European colonial sensibility. It achieves this in various ways, including by representing its central architectural figure of colonial dominance, Kuran House, as an emblem of aristocratic pastoral decline, then by invoking intimations of an ancient supernatural presence which intercedes in the linear descent of colonial possession and, ultimately, by providing a rational explanation for the novel’s events. The White Earth further demonstrates the inherently adaptive qualities of Gothic narrative technique as a means of confronting the limits to white belonging in post-colonial Australia by referencing a key historical moment, the 1992 Mabo judgment, which rejected the concept of terra nullius and recognised native title under Australian common law. At once discursive and performative, the sustained way in which the work employs the tropic power of Gothic anxiety serves to reveal the uncertain terms in which its characters negotiate what it means to be Australian, more than 200 years after colonial invasion.

Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert by Lisa M. Bitel

Reviewed by: Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert by Lisa M. Bitel Wendy M. Wright Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert. By Lisa M. Bitel. Photographs by Matt Gainer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. 200 pp. $24.95. As a medievalist familiar with apparitional accounts from the past, Lisa Bitel has taken it upon herself to increase her understanding of this religious phenomenon by investigating a present day Marian apparition. Since 1995, pilgrims have journeyed to a remote location in the Mojave Desert where seer Maria Paula Acuña reportedly converses with the Virgin Mary on the thirteenth of each month. Bitel, accompanied by photographer Matt Gainer, spent a number of years as a quasi-pilgrim herself in order to explore the diverse ways visitors and visionaries alike engage in age-old practices as well as utilize modern technology as they “make religion” at the apparition site of Our Lady of the Rock. Bitel’s descriptions and analyses are thick and shaped by multi-disciplinary perspectives. She factors in not only the historical and theological import of such revelatory events within the Christian faith, but the local cultural context of the site on the borderland between Mexico and the United States, contemporary Roman Catholic ecclesial perspectives, and academic theories of sight, perception, and belief. She first situates her account in the two-thousand-year-old Christian revelatory tradition, illuminating the way in which ancient themes such as desert pilgrimage prepare the ground for such a new appearance. She then turns her attention to the visionary, showing how Maria Paula’s self-understanding and public persona, which have evolved over the years, are shaped by historical Catholic expectations about authentic visionaries. Although she is a lay woman (her activity in the Mojave necessitates that she lives apart from her husband and grown family), Acuña and her close associates in her “Marian Movement” dress in identifiably traditional religious garb. Her messages from the Virgin echo similar well-known Marian utterances recorded at sites such as Fatima, Knock, and Lourdes: they decry cultural and personal sin and urge conversion. [End Page 84] Next, the pilgrims themselves are considered: their varied motives, backgrounds, testimonies, belief or skepticism. Acuña’s complex relationship with those who come to the grotto is evident. While she clearly wants to spread the messages the Virgin communicates, the visionary is guarded about means of modern communication. She is not supported by local clergy. She is also protective of her own prerogatives as the chosen seer and interpreter of Mary’s monthly visitations. Most interesting here is Bitel’s exploration of the numerous methods of discernment of spirits and visions employed by visitors to the sacred site. She spends considerable time with three pilgrim informants who themselves claim to be privy to visitations: Juan, a ninety-year-old from Mexico whose precarious immigrant status has led him into difficult situations from which the Virgin has rescued him; Adelia, whose harrowing immigrant passage from Nicaragua led her eventually to consult Maria Paula, even as she questions aspects of the visionary’s ministry; and Carolina, a college-educated publicist who wrestles with her own doubts about divine interventions despite her experience of such. The final chapters of Our Lady of the Rock are concerned with the changing contemporary visual means by which pilgrims “make religion.” Visitors bring cameras and cell phones in order to train them on the sky when Maria Paula’s actions indicate that a visitation is occurring. They pass on and refine tips to each other about capturing and interpreting the images that are said to indicate supernatural presence. The experience of Bitel’s photographer companion, both the way he is welcomed and later shunned, his skill as a visual journalist, and the limits of his medium to communicate what is essentially ineffable, are also treated. Finally, Bitel considers the use of new visual technologies, including the internet, where communal discernment of a huge range of historic and contemporary apparitions is taking place and shifting the sacra lingua of divine encounter. The scholarly voice that narrates Our Lady of the Rock is well informed and...

The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment by Christopher M. S. Johns

The Visual Culture of Enlightenment. By Christopher M. S. Johns. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2015. Pp. xxii, 413. $89.95. ISBN 978-0-271-06208-2.)Among the discrete Enlightenments now abounding, the Catholic Enlightenment is one descriptive that commands widespread recognition and endorse- ment. The effort that Christopher Johns has put here into depicting its visual culture can only enhance its currency. As one might have suspected from his previous publications, Johns is actually dealing exclusively with Rome and the papacy between the mid-1720s and the 1760s so that his subject matter is more confined than the title suggests. He can, however, be forgiven that omission after producing a sumpuously illustrated volume that convincingly ties in his art object examples with those wider trends within the Church that constitute the Enlightenment: Christocentric, antibaroque, intellectually open, and socially aware. In chapter 2 Johns points out the declining supernatural presence in the paintings commissioned to glorify new saints (what Johns wittily calls the sanctification industry, p. 82); visions were outre, good works the mark of true holiness, with the supernatural elements in imagery downplayed in favor of social utility. Benedict XIV (1740- 58), the enlightened pontiff par excellence, created only five new saints in his long reign. One of them, St. Camillus de Lellis, was painted by his favorite artist, Pierre Subleyras, and the portrait was presented to him by the Camillian order. He is shown amid hospital patients, aiding the helpless.This was a papacy proud of its cultural inheritance and hanging on to it when foreign buyers wanted to buy much of it up. During the 1730s Clement XII issued anti-export decrees, restored the Arch of Constantine, and opened the Capitoline Museum in the Palazzo Nuovo (with the Albani Collection as its centerpiece) to the public and young artists. The museum was largely paid for by the re-establishment of the lottery in 1732. In chapter 4 Johns considers the museum's expansion in subsequent decades, with Benedict XIV again emerging foremost as a pope at the center of many artistic and patronage networks, most of them converging on his retreat in the Quirinal gardens where the Caffeaus, his garden casino and coffee house, became a foremost place of homosocial exchange in the city. Benedict's predecessor, Clement XII, had, in his own right, set the pace as a patron. …

The Sacred Disease: The Puzzling Genetics of Epileptic Disorders

In the September 12, 2013 issue of Nature, the Epi4K Consortium (Allen etal., 2013) reported sequencing 264patient trios with epileptic encephalopathies. The Consortium focused on genes exceptionally intolerant to sequence variations and found substantial interconnections with autism and intellectual disability gene networks.

Frozen Fire (review)

Reviewed by: Frozen Fire Deborah Stevenson Bowler, Tim Frozen Fire Philomel, 2008 [336p] ISBN 978-0-399-25053-8 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7–10 It starts with a phone call when Dusty’s home alone; she’s completely freaked out by the boy on the other end of the line, who claims to be committing suicide and who coincidentally drops names—like that of her brother, Josh, who disappeared two years ago—meaningful in Dusty’s life. When she tries to find the mysterious boy, she encounters a frightening trio of guys intent on chasing him down, who are now convinced she’s his ally. As her contact with the boy increases, she learns that he’s a suspect in a local rape, and even the authorities begin to suspect that she’s shielding him; Dusty, though, remains skeptical of the claims and mesmerized by his supernatural presence, convinced that he knows something about her beloved Josh. English author Bowler has a nice touch with his spooky motifs here, with ghostly phone calls and frosty face outlines at the window effective for raising those back-of-the-neck hairs. Dusty is an unusual heroine, a bellicose teen inclined toward feuds and the alienation of her friends, and her father’s vacillation between neediness and anger is credible and draining. The book talks away much of its tension, [End Page 417] however, so the ghostly effects lose impact; there’s also considerable contrivance in the police’s easy acceptance of the boy’s impossible characteristics and in the random involvement of a family of Gypsies. Nonetheless, fans of offbeat ghost stories may be drawn to this dramatic tale of different kinds of haunting. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Burning World, an Absent God

Psychological splitting, authoritarianism, literalism, and an emphasis on the direct experience of supernatural presence and mission—characteristics of fundamentalism—are on the rise. What are the practices and traditions that can be employed to oppose them? By studying and interpreting midrash, Jewish biblical commentary originating in late antiquity, the author explores this question. By researching both primary texts and secondary sources, he found that the process of midrashic study (1) is a good example of a hermeneutic tradition and (2) contains insights that can be applied to relational psychoanalysis and contemporary culture. In particular, four characteristics of midrash were identified: intertextuality, interpersonal engagement, the absence–presence dialectic, and the prohibition against idolatry. The author argues that midrashic study can serve as an extended argument against and resistance to fundamentalist movements. Finally, through the hermeneutic concept of dialogue, the author responds to a recent critique of his work.

Rameau's Imaginary Monsters: Knowledge, Theory, and Chromaticism in Hippolyte et Aricie

Abstract In recent years, historians have begun studying the compromises and semiotic slippages underlying Enlightenment thought, what writers of the time characterized as, among other things, monstrosities. Monsters failed to conform to a perceived natural order and as such became models for discussing everything from the limits of knowledge to departures from generic practices. Taking advantage of both this critical trope and the presence of monsters in Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), the present essay describes Rameau's struggles with instrumental reason in his theorization of the chromatic genus. The composer marked the climactic moment in act 4 of the opera with what is surely the most striking progression in the performed version, a chromatic modulation that captures the characters' shock and registers the monster's supernatural presence. During the same period, he experimented theoretically with numerous descriptions of the chromatic progression, as both an ordinary and an extraordinary property of music. Working as composer and theorist, then, Rameau let chromaticism occupy varied epistemological positions in his work, which in turn allows us to observe him dealing with the limitations of his theoretical system and musical representation.

Sanctity and Sanction in Communal Ritual: A Reconsideration of Shinto Festival Processions

Japanese society is characterized by an emphasis on harmony and self-restraint as guiding principles of daily interaction. A a consequence, alcohol is often considered a necessary catalyst for promoting the open expression of alternative viewpoints, though only in certain culturally prescribed contexts. A Shinto festival procession provides one such context. The bearers of a large, sanctified object purify themselves with liberal amounts of sake, and their intoxicated condition combines with the sheer bulk of the object to lend an ominous uncertainty to its movement. Since the object is perceived as being controlled by the will of the deity, however, no one can be held responsible for any damages incurred during the procession. This type of ritual may thus be considered an instrument of social sanction, affording the people a means of enforcing compliance with accepted norms or seeking retribution for perceived injustices. (Japan, Shinto festival processions, matsuri, alcohol consumption, informal social sanctions, ritual liminality) Small-scale, highly integrated communities employ a variety of informal social control mechanisms that function in the absence of, in addition to, or in conjunction with formal legal institutions. Well-known examples include gossip, ridicule, and social ostracism, all of which rely upon the weight of public opinion to influence personal behavior. Often some form of supernatural power is invoked, as in the use of sorcery, witchcraft, and curse, which threaten the errant party with physical harm of misfortune. While such beliefs and practices convey a generally negative image, they have nonetheless been recognized as conferring certain social benefits. Fear of being labeled a practitioner of such dubious arts - generally associated with a despicable or avaricious personality - encourages people to reaffirm their good faith through periodic acts of kindness and generosity. Perhaps more significantly, incertainty as to who is capable of generating the malevolent power and fear of it being directed against oneself lead people to avoid offending others in any way that might invite retribution. The overall result is the promotion of harmonious social relations and a more equitable distribution of wealth (Norbeck 1961:202-04; Mair 1969:105-06; Mbiti 1989:206). It is within this context that I propose a reconsideration of the Japanese matsuri, Shinto shrine festival, which has figured prominently in much of the recent literature on the anthropology of Japan (see for example Bestor 1989; Robertson 1991; Ashkenazi 1993). Matsuri are communal celebrations generally performed as annual events. They are dedicated to the local tutelary deities that Smith (1974:3) describes as defenders and protectors of the people who live within the compass of their power, whether or not those people are bound by ties of kinship. Part of the significance of these celebrations lies in their ability to encapsulate the values, ideology, and accepted patterns of interaction that identify the local population as a cohesive social unit. In fact, community festivals of this type serve as excellent examples of what Singer (1955:23-26), Geertz (1973:113), and Ortner (1978:1) describe as cultural performances; physical expressions of a people's world view presented in a succinct and readily observable manner. Indeed, previous characterizations of matsuri have focused almost exclusively on their role in reaffirming the social order and instilling a sense of territorial identity (Bestor 1985; Littleton 1986; Ashkenazi 1988, 1993; Ben-Ari 1991). This article, however, addresses an entirely different aspect, that of the intoxication and general unruliness the occasion of matsuri almost inevitably entails. The core of the matsuri as a religious event is a public procession in which some type of large, sanctified object (typically a palanquin-like vehicle containing the spirit of the local tutelary deity) is borne shoulder-high through the streets, in order to revitalize the community with its supernatural presence. …