“Evliya Çelebi, the traveller who toured almost every region of the Ottoman Empire…records stories of spiritual armies made of dead martyrs’ souls, armies of plague made of jinn, sultans whose souls exit their bodies, vampires of the Caucasus who fight in the night skies, and Bulgarian witches who turn into hens.” -Dr Marinos Sariyannis For…
“We have in the Inquisition trials and elsewhere numerous testimonies of Africans and Europeans alike that describe how knives, swords, or even bullets from firearms have literally bounced off the skin of bolsa de mandinga wearers.” -Professor Cécile Fromont In 1730 an African slave and Vodun devotee named José Francisco Pereira was arrested in Lisbon…
“Pentecostals everywhere train themselves to hear, to see, or to feel God’s presence in their daily lives. That kind of intimate relationship…is one of the defining aspects of evangelical religiosity.” – Dr Naomi Richman Jesus famously predicted that the apocalypse would be preceded by “wars and rumours of wars”, pestilence, earthquakes, mass persecutions, and the…
“Praetorius’s world and his work were constructed of wonderment at the magical universe and of the speculations of the new science.” -from Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time (2006) by Gerhild Scholz Williams Among Germany’s many legendary sites, the Brocken (formerly known as the Blocksberg) is…
“They can assume all manner of shapes at their pleasure, appear in what likeness they will themselves…they are most swift in motion, can pass many miles in an instant…” -from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621) Almost four hundred years ago, a young Oxford graduate named Joseph Glanvill published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, a…