Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World PDF Download

Author: John Chambers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1594777446
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
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.

Author: Bradley Stephens
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789141117
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Victor Hugo is an icon of French culture. He achieved immense success as a poet, dramatist, and novelist, and he was also elected to both houses of the French Parliament. Leading the Romantic campaign against artistic tradition and defying the Second Empire in exile, he became synonymous with the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. His state funeral in Paris made headlines across the world, and his breadth of appeal remains evident today, not least thanks to the popularity of his bestseller, Les Misérables, and its myriad theatrical and cinematic incarnations. This biography, the first in English for more than twenty years, provides a concise but comprehensive exploration of Hugo’s monumental body of work within the context of his dramatic life. Hugo wrestled with family tragedy and personal misgivings while being pulled into the turmoil of the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon’s Empire to the rise of France’s Third Republic. Throughout these twists of fate, he sensed a natural order of collapse and renewal. This unending cycle of creation shaped his ideas about freedom and roused his imagination, which he channeled into his prolific writing and other outlets like drawing. As Bradley Stephens argues, such creative intellectual vigor suggests that Hugo was too restless to sit comfortably on the pedestal of literary greatness; Hugo’s was a mind as revolutionary as the time in which he lived.

Author: Janet Alison Hoskins
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824854799
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
What is the relationship between syncretism and diaspora? Caodaism is a large but almost unknown new religion that provides answers to this question. Born in Vietnam during the struggles of decolonization, shattered and spatially dispersed by cold war conflicts, it is now reshaping the goals of its four million followers. Colorful and strikingly eclectic, its “outrageous syncretism” incorporates Chinese, Buddhist, and Western religions as well as world figures like Victor Hugo, Jeanne d’Arc, Vladimir Lenin, and (in the USA) Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. The book looks at the connections between “the age of revelations” (1925-1934) in French Indochina and the “age of diaspora” (1975-present) when many Caodai leaders and followers went into exile. Structured in paired biographies to trace relations between masters and disciples, now separated by oceans, it focuses on five members of the founding generation and their followers or descendants in California, showing the continuing obligation to honor those who forged the initial vision to “bring the gods of the East and West together.” Diasporic congregations in California have interacted with New Age ideas and stereotypes of a “Walt Disney fantasia of the East,” at the same time that temples in Vietnam have re-opened their doors after decades of severe restrictions. Caodaism forces us to reconsider how anthropologists study religious mixtures in postcolonial settings. Its dynamics challenge the unconscious Eurocentrism of our notions of how religions are bounded and conceptualized.

Author: Mette Gieskes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031395980
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary book investigates the various ways in which North American and European modern and contemporary artists, authors, and musicians have returned to earlier works of their own, engaging in inventive revivals and transformations of the past in the present. The book is distinctive in its focus on such revisits, as well as in the diversity of art forms under review: in addition to visual art, the book explores fiction, poetry, literary criticism, film, rock music, and philosophy. This scope, together with the time-span covered in the book, from the 1850s to the twenty-first century, allows for a broad view on retrospection and revision. The case studies presented here offer a multifaceted exploration of the widely different goals to which practitioners of the arts have made retrospection and revision functional against the background of cultural, social, political, and personal forces.

Author: John Chambers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1594779260
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A look at the metaphysical experiences that shaped the lives and work of 24 great men and women from the Renaissance to modern times • Chronicles the changing relationship with God, nature, and spirituality from the 16th century to the 20th century • Includes encounters with the paranormal of Ben Johnson, Isaac Newton, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Doris Lessing, and Winston Churchill What role did the esoteric thought of Swedenborg play in the creative output of Honoré de Balzac? Did a supernatural encounter prompt Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to focus her work on the theme of immortality? Building on his earlier research on communications with the spirit world that Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, experienced while in exile on the isle of Jersey, John Chambers now looks at the role occult knowledge and supernatural experiences played in the lives of 24 geniuses. His investigation spans the life and work of William Blake, Helena Blavatsky, and W. B. Yeats, whose esoteric interests are well known, as well as those little suspected of such encounters with worlds beyond ours, including Doris Lessing, Leo Tolstoy, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, and Winston Churchill. Chambers presents more than a collection of anecdotes and newly revealed secrets. His research provides insightful historical context of the decisive turning point that took place with the collapse of Prague, the occult capital of Europe, in 1620, which resulted in the victory of Cartesian reality and Newton’s scientific paradigm over the esoteric traditions that flourished until that time. The magical and occult world shown in the lives of these 24 great men and women offers us a glimpse of what could still be ours--a world that though it is now overshadowed by modern scientific and technological principles is yet still visible on the horizon through the visions and paranormal experiences of these geniuses.

Author: Carl A. Grant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000376176
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book – written for teacher educators, teachers and admirers of James Baldwin –employs his essays and speeches to discuss how the effects of race and racism enter the souls of African American students and become attached and difficult to dislodge. Yet, his essays also provide educators and students with purpose, meaning and suggestions for how to stand up against racism, develop an authentic self and fight oppression. Whereas this book takes advantage of the full body of Baldwin’s work – fiction, nonfiction, interviews, lectures, speeches and letters – its foundation is three speeches James Baldwin gave in the 1960s on the education of African American children and African American and European American race relations in the United States. The purpose of education, defying myths, freedom, willful ignorance and developing identity are discussed through a Baldwinian lens. African American and European American teachers are encouraged to "Go for Broke" as this book explores the important role Baldwin’s work can play in schools and universities.

Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004365516
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Machiavelliana is the first comprehensive study of the uses and abuses made of Niccolò Machiavelli’s name in management, primatology, leadership, power, as well as in novels, plays, commercial enterprises, television dramas, operas, rap music, children’s books, and more.

Author: John Chambers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1620552051
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Newton’s heretical yet equation-incisive writings on theology, spirituality, alchemy, and prophecy, written in secret alongside his Principia Mathematica • Shows how Newton’s brilliance extended far beyond math and science into alchemy, spirituality, prophecy, and the search for lost continents such as Atlantis • Explains how he was seeking to rediscover the one true religion that existed prior to the Flood of Noah, when science and spirituality were one • Examines Newton’s alternate timeline of prehistory and his study of prophecy through the Book of Revelations, including his prediction of Apocalypse in the year 2060 Isaac Newton (1643-1727) is still regarded by the world as the greatest scientist who ever lived. He invented calculus, discovered the binomial theorem, explained the rainbow, built the first reflecting telescope, and explained the force of gravity. In his famous masterpiece, Principia Mathematica, he described the mechanics of the physical universe with unimagined precision, proving the cosmos was put together according to laws. The perfection of these laws implied a perfect legislator. To Newton, they were proof that God existed. At the same time Newton was writing Principia Mathematica, he was writing a twin volume that he might have called, had it been completed, Principia Theologia--Principles of Theology. This other masterpiece of Newton, kept secret because of the heresies it contained, consists of thousands of essays providing equation-incisive answers to the spiritual questions that have plagued mankind through the ages. Examining Newton’s secret writings, John Chambers shows how his brilliance extended into alchemy, spirituality, the search for lost continents such as Atlantis, and a quest to uncover the “corrupted texts” that were rife in the Bibles of his time. Although he was a devout Christian, Newton’s work on the Bible was focused not on restoring the original Jewish and Christian texts but on rediscovering the one true religion that existed prior to the Flood of Noah, when science and spirituality were one. The author shows that a single thread runs through Newton’s metaphysical explorations: He is attempting to chart the descent of man’s soul from perfection to the present day. The author also examines Newton’s alternate timeline of ancient history and his study of prophecy through the Book of Revelations, including his prediction of an Apocalypse in the year 2060 followed by a radically transformed world. He shows that Newton’s great hope was that these writings would provide a moral compass for humanity as it embarked upon the great enterprise that became our technological world.

Author: Chad Bennett
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421425378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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"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"--

Author: Elaine M. Kuzmeskus
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 162585725X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
In the aftermath of the Civil War, distraught Connecticut residents turned to Spiritualism as a means of connecting with their lost loved ones. Daniel Dunglas Home of New London held his first public séance as a teenager in 1851, and he reportedly levitated and handled hot coals without injury. Famous Litchfield native Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, Calvin, were believers, and Harriet's sister Isabella Beecher Hooker practiced mediumship. After the death of their son Willie, President Abraham Lincoln and the first lady invited Hartford medium Nettie Colburn Maynard to conduct secret séances at the White House. Even today, believers congregate at the Pine Grove Spiritualist Camp. Author Elaine Kuzmeskus investigates this dramatic, mystical history.