spirit

…with the belief that the spirits of the slaughtered goats would follow the dead owner into the realm of spirits, where he would need them. Belief in providing for the needs of the dead seems to have been the root of the widespread custom of burying with the body or…

The localization of a particular spirit in a specific mask must be considered a highly significant reason for its existence. In masks worn for socially significant rituals, the change in identity of the wearer for that of the mask is vital, for if the spirit represented does not reside in…

They often represent supernatural spirits as well as ancestors and therefore have both a religious and a social significance.

…there is continuous interaction between spiritual forces and the community. Spiritual beings may inhabit natural elements or animals and may also take possession of human mediums. This possession of persons is usually temporary and confined to ritual, as when the priest of the Yoruba god Shango dances into a state…

…is only because humans are spirit that they can grasp and comprehend the Spirit of God. Hegel works out this conception in an exegesis of passages in the Gospel According to John. The kingdom, however, can never be realized in this world: humans are not spirit alone but flesh also.…

…played in the self-realization of Spirit. The historical religions fall into three great divisions, corresponding with the stages of the dialectical progression. At the lowest level of development, according to Hegel, are the religions of nature, or religions based principally upon the immediate consciousness deriving from sense experience. They include:…

” Huaca also means spirits that either inhabit or actually are physical phenomena such as waterfalls, mountains, or man-made shrines. The aforementioned shrines, which are found throughout the Inca territory from Ecuador to Chile, may be as simple as stones piled in a field (apachitas) or as complex as…

…seeking individual contact with a spirit-being, usually through prayer and a vision. Among Coast Salish all success in life—whether in hunting, woodworking, accumulating wealth, military ventures, or magic—was bestowed by spirit-beings encountered in the vision quest. From these entities each person acquired songs, special regalia, and dances. Collectively, the dances…

…belief in many animae (“spirits”) and is often used rather crudely to characterize so-called primitive religions. In evolutionary hypotheses about the development of religion that were particularly fashionable among Western scholars in the latter half of the 19th century, animism was regarded as a stage in which the forces…

…society in dealing with the spirit world. A given shaman is usually known for certain mental characteristics, such as an intuitive, sensitive, mercurial, or eccentric personality, which may be accompanied by some physical defect, such as lameness, an extra finger or toe, or more than the normal complement of teeth.…

…in good and evil bush spirits.

…his soul becomes an auxiliary spirit of his living colleagues, helping them in their curing practices and in the control of harmful spirits; among the Rucuyen, the bodies of common individuals were cremated, while that of the shaman was kept in a special place so that his soul might live…

…have the ability to contact spirits directly. Some mediums worked while in a trancelike state, and some claimed to be the catalyst for various paranormal physical phenomena (including the materializing or moving of objects) through which the spirits announced their presence.

…maleficium was trafficking with evil spirits. In the Near East—in ancient Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, and Palestine—belief in the existence of evil spirits was universal, so that both religion and magic were thought to be needed to appease, offer protection from, or manipulate these spirits. In Greco-Roman civilization, Dionysiac worship included…