This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion. It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.

Kay Dowling was used to luxury, expensive pleasures, and the gentlemen who could afford them. But when she accompanied her wealthy family to her late grandfather's ranch, it was ordinary Tom McNair who caught her eye. Then Tom was arrested for a not-so-ordinary murder, and Kay's life was turned upside-down. But she was determined to help Tom prove his innocence, even if she had to put her own life in danger to do it.

The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter’s loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts’s case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades, The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.

A study of Rinehart's various mystery novels, from "The Circular Staircase" to "The Swimming Pool."

Here, for the first time, an author weaves together threads that explain the mysterious disappearance of ancient cultures in which women and the environment were at the center, a loss that has dramatically influenced 3,500 years of Western history.

Concentration is a choice. It excludes all except its object of concentration; it is a narrowing. If you are walking on the street, you will have to narrow your consciousness in order to walk. You cannot ordinarily be aware of all that is happening because if you are aware of everything that is happening you will become unfocused. So concentration is a need. Concentration of the mind is a need in order to live–to survive and exist. That is why every culture, in its own way, tries to narrow the mind of the child.

Sixty-six thousand words were omitted for reasons of propriety and publishing economics, as well as to remove material deemed expendable by Perkins. Published for the first time on October 3, 2000 - the centenary of Wolfe's birth - O Lost presents the complete text of the novel's manuscript.".

Love Won, Love Lost, Love Longed For Love is a roll of the dice. Nobody knows which of us will roll it right. Love is sometimes draw, loose or win. No matter what the odds are we gamble for love again and again. Love is a chance we take, hoping this time it won't end in heartbreak. Oh, but when we find Love, it makes our search worthwhile. For Love, true Love, I would walk a million miles. Love is a roll of the dice. Nobody knows which of us will roll it right. WWW.YOUNEEDWORDS.COM

In his mind, then, small cracks opened, from which ancient images emerged, perhaps lost in the mass grave of those fragments of mem ories thrown there, randomly and confused with others, buried in the cemetery of lost memories. As it happens when a ray of sunshine penetrates from the dormer window, to break through the walls of the darkness of a dusty attic, so the darkness of that mass grave was pierced by the dazzling reflection of a glow of memory, which raised the dust of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years past, that eternity had deposited there. ?Perhaps it is these ? he thought ? that appear in those strange dreams without meaning, where it happens that the door of the mass grave of those confused fragments opens and come out like the gusts of the winds of Aeolus, enclosed in the wineskin....

For millennia, seekers have used physical and emotional extremes to achieve transcendence and exaltation. Today, many BDSM and leather practitioners are discovering the potential of SM practice to reach personal, interpersonal and spiritual goals. In Radical Ecstasy, bestselling BDSM/sexuality authors Easton and Hardy document their own journeys into the transcendent realm of kink. With their trademark frankness and humor, they share their own stories and philosophies. They also share techniques that have worked for them - techniques which combine tantric breathing, visualization and movement with a combined half-century of BDSM experience - to create states of transcendence during solo and partnered sexual and BDSM practice. As outrageously revolutionary as any sex book published in the last decade, Radical Ecstasy sets the stage for the new millennium in BDSM and sacred-sex practices - a "must" for any kink, tantra, pagan or sacred-sex practitioner. "Amazingly mindful exploration of that which cannot be easily put into words... the ecstatic experience from sex to sadomasochism, from trance to intuition to archetypes and spiritual awakening. Totally real and personal. Not a 'how to' but a nurturing 'can do' book." - Fakir Musafar, father of the modern primitive movement. "Progressive, deliciously honest, and HOT HOT HOT! Dossie and Janet ask difficult questions about the nature of sex, intimacy and ecstasy, then they actually manage to answer the questions, plus turn us on when they do. These two erotically gifted women have a way with words - and sex. They raise the bar on erotic writing and sex education to new heights. I'm in awe." - Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D., prostitute/porn star turned sex guru/sexologist "Fascinating, heartfelt, honest, real stories of the heart/spirit/energy connection experienced in the passionate rituals of intimate consensual power play. These two courageous women write brilliantly of how erotic energies connect us with the big love we all seek from the source." - Cleo Dubois, educator, ritualist, video producer/star