Focuses on the problem of communication with the other world: the phenomenon of spirit possession and its changing historical interpretations, the imaginary schemes elaborated for giving accounts of the journeys to the other world and for communicating with the dead, and finally the historical archetypes of this kind of religious manifestation -- trance prophecy, divination, and shamanism.

This is the second volume of a series of three. The authors - recognized historians, ethnologists, folklorists coming from four continents - present the latest research findings on the relationship, coexistence and conflicts of popular belief systems, Judeo-Christian mythology and demonology in medieval and modern Europe. The present volume focuses on the divergence between Western and Eastern evolution, on the different relationship of learned demonology to popular belief systems in the two parts of Europe. It discusses the conflict of saints, healers, seers, shamans with the representatives...

Scientific approach to esoteric and mystical themes.

Examines the relics of European shamanism in early modern sources, and the techniques and belief-systems of mediators found in the records of witchcraft trials for the 16th to the 18th century.

This volume is the first of two containing hagiographical narratives from medieval Central Europe. The lives of the saints in this volume, from the tenth to eleventh centuries, written not much later, are telling witnesses for the process of Christianization of Bohemia, Poland, Hungary and Dalmatia.