Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales
10 best books like Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales (Lyle Saxon): Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of Baroness de Pontalba, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages, Why New Orleans Matters, Letters from New Orleans, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland, Hallucinogens and Shamanism
Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of Baroness de Pontalba
| Author | Christina Vella |
| ISBN | 0807129623 |
Born into wealth in New Orleans in 1795 and married into misery fifteen years later, the Baroness Micaela Almonester de Pontalba led a life ripe for novelization. Intimate Enemies, however, is the spellbinding true account of this resilient woman's life -- and the three men who most affected its course.
Immediately...
| Author | Sara Roahen |
| ISBN | 0393061671 |
Celebrating New Orleans' food culture, one specialty at a time.
A cocktail is more than a segue to dinner when it's a Sazerac, an anise-laced drink of rye whiskey and bitters indigenous to New Orleans. For Wisconsin native Sara Roahen, a Sazerac is also a fine accompaniment to raw oysters, a looking...
| Author | Carole G. Silver |
| ISBN | 0195121996 |
Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources...
| Author | Walter Burkert |
| ISBN | 0520058755 |
What is it about animal sacrifice that makes otherwise staid European scholars and experts on go ape-shit crazy and start fantasizing about primal violence and making up strange myths of their own? I liked this book, actually, it's fun, but it's in a certain tradition, ranging from Robertson Smith...
Cunning-folk were local practitioners of magic, providing small-scale but valued service to the community. They were far more representative of magical practice than the arcane delvings of astrologers and necromancers. Mostly unsensational in their approach, cunning-folk helped people with...
| Author | Claude Lecouteux |
| ISBN | 0892810963 |
Reveals the true nature of medieval belief in the Double of the Soul
• Demonstrates the survival of a pagan belief that each individual owns three souls, including a double that can journey outside the physical body
• Explains the nature of death and the Other World hidden beneath...
| Author | Tom Piazza |
| ISBN | 0061124834 |
Every place has its history. But what is it about New Orleans that makes it more than just the sum of the events that have happened there? What is it about the spirit of the people who live there that could produce a music, a cuisine, an architecture, a total environment, the mere mention of which can bring...
| Author | Rob Walker |
| ISBN | 1891053019 |
I don't think Rob Walker understands the city. I'm a native and I don't think I understand the city completely, so that isn't really why I'm only giving it two stars. The reason? He doesn't explain why New Orleans is a city worth staying in despite the bad points -- probably because he doesn't really believe...
| Author | Emma Wilby |
| ISBN | 1845191803 |
The witchcraft confessions given by Isobel Gowdie in Auldearn, 1662, are widely celebrated as the most extraordinary on record in Britain. Their descriptive power, vivid imagery and contentious subject-matter have attracted considerable interest on both academic and popular levels. This book...
| Author | Michael Harner |
| ISBN | 0195016491 |
This is a collection of ten anthropological studies that explore the use of hallucinogens in shamanism. Michael Harner serves as the book’s editor, and does a good job of including studies that provide different sets of information to the reader.
I think I first heard about this book from...
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
| Author | Carlo Ginzburg |
| ISBN | 0226296938 |
What we have tried to analyze here is not one narrative among many, but the matrix of all possible narratives.
So concludes this Triumph of the Weird. What a Borgesian proclamation! My head spins with the density and erudition displayed in this ethnohistory of an idea, the Sabbath. This was...
The Black Pullet: Science of Magical Talisman
| Author | Anonymous |
| ISBN | 1578632021 |
First surfacing in France in the 18th century, The Black Pullet is a guide to the construction and use of magical talismanic rings. With the use of these rings, people attained extraordinary powers. Perhaps the most wonderful secret revealed is the power to produce the Black Pullet, otherwise known...
Crone's Book of Magical Words
| Author | Valerie Worth |
| ISBN | 1567188257 |
Crone's Book of Magical Words (previously published as The Crone's Book of Words) by Valerie Worth is the book you've been waiting for! In its pages are over 125 spells, incantations, and charms. If you can think of a purpose for a spell, it's probably in this book. Need a spell to summon a ghost? Or perhaps...
The Call of the Horned Piper
| Author | Nigel Jackson |
| ISBN | 1898307091 |
Call of the Horned Piper
Nigel Jackson, Capal Bann
April, 1994
This is one of the best books written on the ancient craft of British Traditional Witchcraft. It is perfect for beginners giving them the mythology, symbolism and apt explanations. The book does an excellent...
A Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft
| Author | Lee Morgan |
| ISBN | 1780995490 |
The field of witchcraft studies is continually over-turning new information and research about traditional witchcraft practices and their meanings. A Deed Without a Name seeks to weave together some of this cutting-edge research with insider information and practical know-how. Utilising her...
Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path
| Author | Dale Pendell |
| ISBN | 1562791303 |
“Pendell’s ongoing subjects are the botanical ‘allies ’ humans have always associated with, and the ‘pharmakon,’ the drug that is both poison and cure. A poet, ethno-botanist and amateur chemist, he’s the best writer on drugs to come along since the late Terence McKenna.”—Richard...
Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans
| Author | Joan B. Garvey |
| ISBN | 0961296003 |
This is a book that doesn't quite know what it wants to be: there are notes in it as if it is academic, but it's not a particular rigorous read nor does it take any point of view. It begins as a historical and chronological narrative but shifts gears midstream and turns to a topical approach that quickly leaps...
Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children: . . . and Other Streets of New Orleans!
| Author | John Churchill Chase |
| ISBN | 1565549317 |
"John Chase has taken what in lesser hands would have been a dull recounting of fact and made a delightfully accurate yet breezy book." -New Orleans Times-Picayune
"History in its most painless form . . . lightened not only by cartoons but by narrative approach."
-New York Herald Tribune
The...
The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld
| Author | Herbert Asbury |
| ISBN | 1560254947 |
Home to the notorious "Blue Book," which indexed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans' infamous red light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But New Orleans' underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also...
A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau
| Author | Carolyn Morrow Long |
| ISBN | 0813029740 |
Legendary for an unusual combination of spiritual power, beauty, charisma, showmanship, intimidation, and shrewd business sense, Marie Leveau also was known for her kindness and charity, nursing yellow fever victims and ministering to condemned prisoners, and her devotion to the Roman Catholic...
New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City
| Author | Andrei Codrescu |
| ISBN | 1565125053 |
For two decades NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where...
Bourbon Street: A History
| Author | Richard Campanella |
| ISBN | 0807155055 |
New Orleans is a city of many storied streets, but only one conjures up as much unbridled passion as it does fervent hatred, simultaneously polarizing the public while drawing millions of visitors a year. A fascinating investigation into the mile-long urban space that is Bourbon Street, Richard Campanella's...
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans
| Author | Lawrence N. Powell |
| ISBN | 0674059875 |
This is the story of a city that shouldn't exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America's most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and...
Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast
| Author | Mike Tidwell |
| ISBN | 0375725172 |
The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history...
The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf
| Author | William C. Davis |
| ISBN | 0156032597 |
At large during the most colorful period in New Orleans' history, from just after the Louisiana Purchase through the War of 1812, privateers Jean and Pierre Laffite made life hell for Spanish merchants on the Gulf. Pirates to the U.S. Navy officers who chased them, heroes to the private citizens who...
