First English translation of Victor Hugo’s writings on his experiments in spiritualism • Reveals Hugo’s conversations with renowned discarnate entities such as Shakespeare, Plato, Galileo, and Jesus • Examines his contacts with aliens from the planets Mercury and Jupiter and the revelation that our entire universe is a quantum hologram • Discusses Hugo’s possible role as a grand master of the Priory of Sion During Victor Hugo’s exile on the Isle of Jersey, where he and his family and friends escaped the reign of Napoléon III, he conducted “table-tapping” séances, transcribing hundreds of channeled conversations with entities from the beyond. Among his discarnate visitors were Shakespeare, Plato, Hannibal, Rousseau, Galileo, Sir Walter Scott, and Jesus. According to the transcripts, Jesus, during his three visits, condemns Druidism, faults Christianity, and suggests a new religion with Hugo as its prophet. To the skeptic, some of the “conversations” may seem self-serving--at best, the subconscious wishes of the naïve participants. But author John Chambers places Hugo’s experiments firmly in the tradition of visionary literature and psychic exploration, aligning those experiences with the poetry of William Blake, the table-tapping experiences of the Fox sisters, and the channeled writings of the great modern-day Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill, whose spirits’ utterances uncannily resemble those of Hugo’s. Hugo’s transcriptions are the missing link between the early nineteenth century’s fascination with the kabbalistic Zohar, reincarnation, and the writings of the Illuminati and the rise of spiritualism and the societies for the study of psychic phenomena in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In 1948, Vietnam's great 20th Century mystic Phạm Công Tắc (1890-1959) began a series of sermons making Caodaism's claims to universal salvation the clearest. In only two decades, Caodaism had stamped its fast-growing presence on the nation. With potent creative and poetic skill Phạm Công Tắc invited his co-religionists to take a shamanic journey with him to examine the heavens and literally see how they would be saved. The 35 sermons translated here are provided with a commentary and extensive introduction by Hartney. How Heaven Works is a fascinating insight into the deep connection between shamanic atmosphere, literature, and Modern syncretic concepts of salvation.

Postcolonial Vietnam has an urgent need for contextualized theology of mission, God, Christ, and the church that is rooted in indigenous cultural traditions and the dual Vietnamese spirit of resistance and assimilation. Dr KimSon Nguyen navigates the religio-cultural dimensions of Vietnamese spirituality and Daoism that have hindered the assimilation of the Christian faith in the Vietnamese context and explores a fresh approach to missiology in Vietnam. Dr Nguyen draws upon his deep knowledge of Vietnamese evangelical history to analyze contextualization and mission theology in Vietnam. He proposes an evangelical theology of God as Ðạo (way / 道), the centrality of the Vietnamese home as the “house of the Lord,” and ancestor veneration as a theological framework for an indigenous theology of the family. Narrowing the gap between culturally removed evangelical missionary practice and widespread syncretistic spirituality in Vietnam, Nguyen calls for a paradigm shift in Vietnamese mission theology that is both robustly evangelical and authentically Vietnamese.

"Word of Mouth brings together the insights of queer and lyric theory to tell the story of how gossip modeled forms of sociality and voice that poets experimented with over the course of the twentieth century. Through a set of case studies of culturally diverse American poets--Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, and others--who absorbed and contended with the loose talk that swirled about them and their work, the book argues that gossip became a vehicle for the performance of alternative sexualities and concomitant meditations on alternative modes of poetic practice. At the heart of this argument is a queer revaluation of modern lyric poetry. Attending to gossip's key role in modern and contemporary poetry enables a recognition of the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem--as, for example, an utterance smudging the lines between private and public, knowing and unknowing, intimacy and strangeness--have been shaped by, and afforded a uniquely suitable space for, the expression of queer sensibilities. More than simply mapping a curious poetic mode, then, Word of Mouth contributes a crucial, and largely neglected, queer perspective to current lyric studies and its renewed scholarly debate over the practices and forms of lyric poetry. The book presents new and instructive queer contexts for understanding the influential formal achievements of Stein, Hughes, O'Hara, and Merrill, and uncovers the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality"--

In This 88-page edition: ANCIENT MYSTERIES SEEKING THE “LOST” EQUATOR Ice-Age-Era Artifact of a Destroyed Civilization? BY JONATHON A. PERRIN THE PARANORMAL TUNNELING THROUGH TIME Could Visitors from the Past & the Future Be Here After All? BY MARTIN RUGGLES THE UNEXPLAINED VANISHING ACTS Tracking the Strange Disappearances of People & Animals Worldwide BY WILLIAM B. STOECKER UFOs U.S. FORCES VS. UFOS BEFORE ROSWELL Could Forgotten Accounts, Force a Look at Evidence Once Considered Taboo? BY FRANK JOSEPH THE UNEXPLAINED GIANTS IN THE PAPERS Lost Details of the Senora Skeleton Finds BY JAMES VIERA & HUGH NEWMAN CONSCIOUSNESS CHURCH ENERGY What Mystic Science Were the Builders Practicing? BY CHARLES SHAHAR THE OTHER SIDE “THE WAY” OF ST. JAMES Was It Sacred, or a Cover for the Profane? BY STEVEN SORA ANCIENT WISDOM QUEST FOR A GOLDEN AGE Have We Been Here Before? BY GEOFFREY ASHE THE OTHER SIDE THE DIMENSIONS OF INSPIRATION The Strange Case of Victor Hugo Yet Unsolved BY JOHN CHAMBERS ALTERNATIVE SCIENCE REALITY Fundamentally Speaking–What Is It Anyway? BY ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D. THE FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGIST FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGY AND CONSCIOUSNESS BY MICHAEL A.CREMO ASTROLOGY SNOW WHITE, THE GOBLIN, FAROUT And Other Denizens of the Outer Solar System BY JULIE LOAR PUBLISHER’S LETTER THE SUN’ A CRYSTAL IN THE MAKING? BY J. DOUGLAS KENYON

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