Mexican Magic

Mexican Magic
Author: Laura Davila
Publisher: Weiser Books
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2024-11-04
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1633413314

Mexican Magic shares spells and recipes deeply rooted in Mexican folk beliefs and magic. “Some are born with a star, while others are born starry.” This dicho (saying) refers to the Mexican belief that good luck is a matter of fate—something you are born with or not. Mexicans traditionally attribute their good or bad luck to a greater force, to God’s will, even to the stars in the sky. Being born with a star is a blessing. While some gain their luck through fate, Laura Davila believes even more in faith, virtue, and purpose. Some people are born with a natural gift for magic, but many others are compelled toward magic by life experience. The best brujos and magical people are not those who necessarily started off in perfect circumstances but those who looked at magic as a skill to be mastered. Mexican Magic offers an overview of magic and spells from across Mexico for daily use. Although the book’s spells may be practiced by anyone, they are deeply rooted in Mexican folk beliefs and magic. Featuring magical recipes, spells, tips, and advice for a wide variety of intentions, including love, lust, sex, good luck, money, protection, commerce, gambling, justice, pregnancy, travel, education, and more, Mexican Magic also offers direction on how to be a magical person and live a magical life.

Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain

Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain
Author: M. Tausiet
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137355883

Drawing on the graphic and revealing evidence recorded by the different courts in early modern Saragossa, this book captures the spirit of an age when religious faith vied for people's hearts and minds with centuries-old beliefs in witchcraft and superstition.

A Linking of Heaven and Earth

A Linking of Heaven and Earth
Author: Scott K. Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317187652

The Reformation of the sixteenth century shattered the unity of medieval Christendom, and the resulting fissures spread to the corners of the earth. No scholar of the period has done more than Carlos M.N. Eire, however, to document how much these ruptures implicated otherworldly spheres as well. His deeply innovative publications helped shape new fields of study, intertwining social, intellectual, cultural, and religious history to reveal how, lived beliefs had real and profound implications for social and political life in early modern Europe. Reflecting these themes, the volume celebrates the intellectual legacy of Carlos Eire's scholarship, applying his distinctive combination of cultural and religious history to new areas and topics. In so doing it underlines the extent to which the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in the early modern world was dynamic, contentious, and always urgent. Organized around three sections - 'Connecting the Natural and the Supernatural', 'Bodies in Motion: Mind, Soul, and Death' and 'Living One's Faith' - the essays are bound together by the example of Eire's scholarship, ensuring a coherence of approach that makes the book crucial reading for scholars of the Reformation, Christianity and early modern cultural history.

Substance and Seduction

Substance and Seduction
Author: Stacey Schwartzkopf
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2017-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1477313877

Chocolate and sugar, alcohol and tobacco, peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms—these seductive substances have been a nexus of desire for both pleasure and profit in Mesoamerica since colonial times. But how did these substances seduce? And when and how did they come to be desired and then demanded, even by those who had never encountered them before? The contributors to this volume explore these questions across a range of times, places, and peoples to discover how the individual pleasures of consumption were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political forces. Focusing on ingestible substances as a group, which has not been done before in the scholarly literature, the chapters in Substance and Seduction trace three key links between colonization and commodification. First, as substances that were taken into the bodies of both colonizers and colonized, these foods and drugs participated in unexpected connections among sites of production and consumption; racial and ethnic categories; and free, forced, and enslaved labor regimes. Second, as commodities developed in the long transition from mercantile to modern capitalism, each substance in some way drew its enduring power from its ability to seduce: to stimulate bodies; to alter minds; to mark class, social, and ethnic boundaries; and to generate wealth. Finally, as objects of scholarly inquiry, each substance rewards interdisciplinary approaches that balance the considerations of pleasure and profit, materiality and morality, and culture and political economy.

Diablo novohispano

Diablo novohispano
Author: Alberto Ortiz
Publisher: Universitat de València
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2015-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 8437089468

El diablo llegó a América protegido por el imaginario colectivo y el mito tradicional, pero los autores del discurso contra la magia y los propios colonizadores afirmaron que siempre había estado allí, fungiendo como señor de los naturales, proclamándose dios entre las supersticiones y las idolatrías. Así que fue necesario gestionar en la continuidad de los discursos que alertaban, aleccionaban y protegían contra un enemigo capaz de disfrazarse y adoptar formas rituales autóctonas; comenzó entonces una nueva etapa en la redacción de textos asimilados a la tradición del discurso demonológico. La atención se centró en la idolatría; el enfoque remozó su prejuicio diferenciador, y el formato recurrió al tratado, al informe, y la literatura. En el presente libro se analizan algunas muestras representativas de este proceso cultural acaecido en la época novohispana, pero detectable aún bajo las bases de nuestra idiosincrasia, a la luz de la teoría que Occidente había legado para comprender la presencia del mal y sus representantes en el mundo.

Subversive Silences

Subversive Silences
Author: Helene Carol Weldt-Basson
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838641729

Weldt-Basson (Spanish, Wayne State U.) investigates how seven Latin American women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have used the concept of submissive silence in their works as a sign of women's rebellion against the passive silence imposed by patriarchy. Using different theoretical perspectives in each chapter, she demonstrates how Marta Brunet, Maria Luisa Bombal, Rosario Castellanos, Isabel Allende, Rosario Ferre, Laura Esquivel, and Sandra Cisneros have used silence thematically and stylistically through hyperbole, coding, irony, parody, and cultural symbol and how silence reflects different time periods and countries.

Weaving the Past

Weaving the Past
Author: Susan Kellogg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2005-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 019028420X

Weaving the Past offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of Latin America's indigenous women. While the book concentrates on native women in Mesoamerica and the Andes, it covers indigenous people in other parts of South and Central America, including lowland peoples in and beyond Brazil, and Afro-indigenous peoples, such as the Garifuna, of Central America. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, it argues that change, not continuity, has been the norm for indigenous peoples whose resilience in the face of complex and long-term patterns of cultural change is due in no small part to the roles, actions, and agency of women. The book provides broad coverage of gender roles in native Latin America over many centuries, drawing upon a range of evidence from archaeology, anthropology, religion, and politics. Primary and secondary sources include chronicles, codices, newspaper articles, and monographic work on specific regions. Arguing that Latin America's indigenous women were the critical force behind the more important events and processes of Latin America's history, Kellogg interweaves the region's history of family, sexual, and labor history with the origins of women's power in prehispanic, colonial, and modern South and Central America. Shying away from interpretations that treat women as house bound and passive, the book instead emphasizes women's long history of performing labor, being politically active, and contributing to, even supporting, family and community well-being.

Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches

Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches
Author: Joan Cameron Bristol
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826337993

New information from Inquisition documents shows how African slaves in Mexico adapted to the constraints of the Church and the Spanish crown in order to survive in their communities.

Traditions in Contact and Change

Traditions in Contact and Change
Author: Peter Slater
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0889206104

"Traditions in Contact and Change" was the theme of the fourteenth quinquennial congress of the International Association for the History of Religions. This selection from 450 papers by scholars form all over the world address the theme. Section One, "Indian Traditions and Western Interactions," treats subjects ranging from the flood story in Vedic ritual to a s study of the women of the Nehru family. Section Two, "Buddhist, Chinese, and Japanese Studies," includes discussions of the origin of the Mahayana, William James and Japanese Buddhism, and lyrical imagery and religious content in Japanese art. Section Three, "Mediterranean Cultures," covers a broad range of topics, from foster children in early Christianity to "the transformation of Christianity into Roman religion" to the change in the status of women in Iceland from pagan to Christian times. Section Four, "Islamic, African, and Amerindian Developments," examines such subjects as religions in conflict and change in the works of African novelists, tradition and change in Indian Islam, and religious acculturation among Oglala Lakota. Section Five offers "Methodological and Theoretical Discussions" of women's studies, Western perceptions of Asia, structure in Jung and Lévi-Strauss, among others. The essays provide ready access to the leading edge of scholarship across a wide range of religions and cultures and should be of interest to students of religion, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy.

The Flower and the Scorpion

The Flower and the Scorpion
Author: Pete Sigal
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2011-11-25
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 082235151X

Sigal argues that sixteenth century Nahua sexuality cannot be fully understood only through colonial sensibilities and sources. He examines legal documents, clerical texts, pictorial manuscripts, images and glyphs of Nahua gods and goddesses and descriptions of fertility rituals and other historical accounts and stories to show the complexity of Nahua sexuality.