Communicating with the Spirits: Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology (Demons, Spirits and Witches)

This is the first volume of a series of three, containing 11 essays of altogether 43 articles based on the topics of the interdisciplinary conference held on this topic in Budapest in 1999. The authors - recognized historians, ethnologists, folklorists coming from 4 continents - present the latest research findings of an important area of universal human mental experiences and techniques and basic religious-ethnological concepts. The present volume focuses on the problem of communication with the other world: the phenomenon of spirit possession and its changing historical interpretations, the imaginary schemes elaborated for giving accounts of the journeys to the other world, for communicating with the dead, and finally the historical archetypes of this type of religious manifestation - trance prophecy, divination, and shamanism.