This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The neglected history of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have approached ideas of the occult which challenged biblical religion.

This book explores how Romanticism was shaped by practices of popular magic. It seeks to identify the place of occult activity and culture – in the form of curses, spells, future-telling, charms and protective talismans – in everyday life, together with the ways in which such practice figures, and is refigured, in literary and political discourse at a time of revolutionary upheaval. What emerges is a new perspective on literature’s material contexts in the 1790s – from the rhetorical, linguistic and visual jugglery of the revolution controversy, to John Thelwall’s occult turn during a period of autobiographical self-reinvention at the end of the decade. From Wordsworth’s deployment of popular magic as a socially and politically emancipatory agent in Lyrical Ballads, to Coleridge’s anxious engagement with superstition as a despotic system of ‘mental enslavement’, and Robert Southey’s wrestling with an (increasingly alluring) conservatism he associated with a reliance on ultimately incarcerating systems of superstition.

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the faded image of a man who appears to have undergone physical torture consistent with Roman crucifixion. The Shroud is preserved in the St.John Cathedral in Turin, Italy. It is widely believed to have wrapped the body of historical Jesus of Nazareth and has become one of the most perplexing enigmas for the researchers. The author has attempted to explain the scientific causes of the image on the Shroud under the realm of quantum physics. By drawing a plethora of evidences from the alchemical secrets of resuscitating spectral plants out of ashes, the author establishes that material body of organisms, even if consumed to ashes, retain their selfsame form and figure. Even parts of the body like blood, skin etc., are capable of forming the 3D geometrical structure of the host organism in its entirety, which is a quantum hologram in the modern scientific terminology. According to this theory, the Shroud image is an imprint of the Quantum Self. This is the first book on Shroud of Turin by an Indian author, and proposes for the first time, the quantum bio-holographic idea to explain the Shroud image. It also gives re-birth to the forgotten science of palingenesis - the resurrection of spectral images of plants out of ashes. The author has attempted to explain almost all the peculiar characteristics of the Shroud image like photographic negativity, spatial encryption of 3D data, non-directionality and other amazing aspects.