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An analysis of three problems for Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian cumulative case strategy in natural theology shows why he needs to shift the burden of proof to the unbeliever. Allegedly, this shift is accomplished by the argument from religious experience, which is based upon the Principle of Credulity and the Principle of Testimony. However, the Principle of Credulity does not apply to religious experiences, and genuine perceptual of-God experiences are impossible. Furthermore, if monotheism were true, most religious experiences (of other gods than God) would be deceptive, so that religious experience in general would be highly unreliable. Swinburne does not succeed to neutralize other defeaters of the argument from religious experience either, so that one cannot shift the burden of proof to unbelievers. It is concluded that Swinburne’s cumulative case for the existence of God fails, and that it is unlikely that anyone else will succeed in arguing convincingly that God exists.

La Llorona is terrifying, a spectre whose distinctive attire heralds death and destruction, a female figure of power, a female ghost who is feared. La Llorona has a diffuse and influential history. A centuries-old Hispanic folklore figure, La Llorona has innumerable redactions, most recently feminist retellings by American writers and appearances on U.S. television series. This specific context affects the meaning of both the ghost, her conflicted role as a mother, and the feminist narratives that reclaim her. This chapter explores the use of this figure through her appearance in literature and the television shows Supernatural and Grimm. Her essential narrative--that of a betrayed woman who threatens children--usually begins ominously, but twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts reveal sympathy for her situation.

Because miracles have supernatural causes, a justified belief that a given event is a miracle requires that one be justified in believing that its cause is supernatural. But the only way to infer that a supernatural cause exists is through a kind of inference -- inference to the best explanation. Unfortunately, inference to the best explanation cannot justify belief in the supernatural. Thus, belief in miracles is unjustified.

What are miracles? They are events that involve a violation of natural law due to the intervention of a supernatural, typically divine, being. Because we think that such interventions are extremely rare, miracles too should be among the least frequent of events. This makes justifying beliefs about miracles especially difficult.

This chapter lays out the context behind the shamanism that has proliferated in Mongolia in the aftermath of the collapse of socialism. It discusses existing assumptions behind shamanism, what constitutes shamanism in postsocialist Mongolia, and its multiple meanings in the context of Buryats’ relationship with the state. The supernatural and material are interconnected, but these connections are insecure and volatile, mirroring the chaotic political and economic conditions of a weak postsocialist state.The author argues that while Buryat shamans and their clients strive to engage in capitalism and gain economic resources, shamanic practices cause them to gain history instead. Thus this book adds to the study of different life-worlds beyond the universalization of capital, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words. Shamanism starkly shows the limits of capitalism; even the people who actively seek to be a part of capitalism end up creating a world alternative to it. This process also shows the dialectical, mutually-constitutive, but conflicting and colliding nature of different life-worlds, despite the fact that shamanism has often been modernity’s disowned creation. In this chapter, the author also introduces her fieldwork, which revealed shamanic competition and rivalry, clients’ suspicions, and the connections between gender, space, and power.

The process of locating and evaluating folkloristic data sources is presented here as a prelude to the analysis of the detailed magical references abstracted from those sources. The sources include multiple folklore collections gathered in Britain and New England. These sources provide at times a repetition of information from the historic sources, like the rationale of the Doctrine of Signatures, and in other instances references to beliefs, objects, and practices not noted in any historic documents including ideas about magical plants and some supernatural beings. These examples provide an additional layer of information into who was using magic during this period, why they used it, and how it manifested, specifically the use of gender related magic as a crisis response to a host of perceived dangers.

This chapter examines the complex, often antagonistic relationship between Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Hume’s The History of England (1754–62). As Walpole’s correspondence reveals, he had read numerous volumes of Hume’s history before writing Otranto (the first Gothic novel) and did not think very highly of its content or the methods used to write it. Reassessing the significance of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, this chapter discusses the extent to which Walpole’s novel can be viewed as a bold response to, and critique of, Hume’s historiography. Discussing the proliferation of violent and supernatural occurrences in Otranto, it is argued that the Gothic functions as Enlightenment history’s other; it exploits its insecurities, plagues its vulnerabilities, and imaginatively provides fictional presences for its many absences and omissions. Taking into account a wealth of historical evidence, this chapter proposes that Walpole’s novel can be read as an imaginative revolt against Hume’s multi-volume work of historiography and that it marks the beginning of the genre’s contentious relationship with Enlightenment historiography and the philosophy that underpins it.

One of the most enduring types of female ageing in fictional texts is the witch. Representations of the witch in British film are informed by a cultural imaginary which extends back through the centuries. A sequence of post-war films reiterated the threat of the ageing woman by evoking the supernatural, drawing on myths of the ageing unattached woman as a monstrous hag. In contrast the chapter examines a more benign figuration of the female grotesque and the supernatural with Margaret Rutherford’s performance as an eccentric medium in Blithe Spirit (1945), which was to define her persona as a ‘magic spinster’. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a return to the ageing woman as monster, as British horror films increasingly targeted a youth audience. These monstrous women were a boon for the ageing actress, finding a new younger audience.

The appearance of the supernatural on the theatrical stage as well as on the movie screen, in particular through a deus ex machina, but also in the form of ghosts or dybbuks, is still, even after the declaration of God's death a frequent phenomenon in modern and contemporary art. The stage can be seen as a utopian site, an aesthetic ‘no-place’, where the supernatural can appear, even if the audience does not necessarily ascribe to the religious belief-systems this kind of appearance implies. The chapter explores the interactions between the ‘language’ of performance, through which a certain dynamics is activated in the space we call the stage, on the one hand, and religious discursive practices or belief-systems, on the other, creating a discursive encounter where the religious things (alluding to the ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet as the thing that appears again tonight) enter and even invade the aesthetic sphere of the performance.

This chapter, approaches the mythological figure of Hercules through an indirect representation of the ancient hero, allowing us to think about issues of adaptation of ancient heroes. Rather than Hercules appearing directly on screen, the audience finds him in the long-running apocalyptic sci-fi series CW’s Supernatural (2005-). Despite an overt Christian narrative context in which the plot brings the audience to expect a Jesus figure, the character of Dean Winchester follows the path of Hercules.

The introduction provides a critical discussion of Radclyffe Hall’s unpublished works. It traces Hall’s career as a writer of fiction and explores the relation between her published and unpublished works. It examines Hall’s engagement with a wide range of topics, including outsiderism, sexuality, gender, feminism, religion, class, race, the supernatural, and World War I, and situates her work in the context of early twentieth-century literature and culture. Overall, the introduction argues that the critical understanding of Hall’s literary writings has remained flawed due to a narrow focus on The Well of Loneliness and demonstrates how the new materials presented in this volume can serve to enrich significantly scholarly perspectives

This chapter focuses on Xu Xu’s fiction from the 1930s and 40s, providing analyses of his main short stories and novels from this period, demonstrating how Xu’s work transitioned from modernist experimentation to popular romances after his return from studies in France. Xu’s bestselling short stories and novels were often set abroad and featured exotic, otherworldly characters, such as ghosts, spies, pirates and gypsies. In many of these works, the cosmopolitan, rational and educated male protagonist encounters a mysterious, elusive, otherworldly woman. Eventually, the truth is revealed and the mysteries are uncovered, vindicating the modern outlook of the male narrator. With their references to traditional literature, abnormal psychology and sexual desire, such works frequently echo Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying’s writings from a decade earlier, yet Xu’s writings are mainly escapist entertainment rather than an attack on rational modernity or the status of art in society.

This chapter considers the translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs along with advancements in printing technologies across the nineteenth century, which led to an increased hieroglyphic presence in modern media. It focuses, in particular, in the use of hieroglyphs by authors of fiction, including H. Rider Haggard and E. Nesbit. In some cases, Egyptologists lent their expertise; alternatively, authors and designers consulted these experts’ grammars and dictionaries to construct their own (sometimes erroneous) meanings. Analysing the use of hieroglyphs in a variety of fiction and other cultural forms not only reveals networks of consultation between those with a professional and an amateur interest in ancient Egypt, but the wealth of connotations that the hieroglyphs suggested: from a magical language (often in children’s or supernatural fiction) to a romantic script suitable for love letters and secret correspondence (suited to romance, mystery, and detective genres). Meanwhile, increased tourism in Egypt resulted in the proliferation of palimpsestic chiselling of names onto temples and pyramids, while ankhs obelisks were incorporated into European and American grave designs. Ultimately, these uses of hieroglyphs reveal a bid for immortality, whether that of the individual or even the literary works that contemporary authors were inscribing with ancient Egyptian script.

Klingsor’s kingdom represents the anti-Grail, and his chromatic music is pitted against the diatonic music of the Grail. This conflict is brought to a climax in the great scene between Parsifal and Kundry: as she delivers her poisoned kiss, a dissonant, chromatic contamination of the rising, aspiring head of the Communion theme conveys the dark forces at work. In responding to the kiss, Parsifal becomes an agent of the Grail and begins to act as a supernatural medium. The music of Act 2 has influenced other composers including Verdi and Mahler. The concluding music at Parsifal’s confrontation with Klingsor, with its collision of C major and B minor, was misunderstood by Adorno, but offers a superb example of Wagner’s use of tonal spaces to convey dramatic conflict.

One of the core assumptions of the proposition that moral punishment is an instinct is that punishment stimulates cooperation among group members. This chapter starts with supernatural punishment, illuminating that whereas belief in heaven has no effect on national crime rates, belief in hell reduces crime rates. Also, in economic games, the possibility to punish increases the cooperation that people display. These effects emerge because punishment increases deterrence, communicates moral norms, and instills trust. The chapter then notes that punishment has facilitated cooperation among strangers as people started forming large states, and that people become more punitive in situations that required unconditional cooperation and self-sacrifice for the group (i.e., war). These findings suggest that punishment indeed stimulates cooperation in social groups.

This chapter considers the role of metaphor in news reporting about terrorism and shows how metaphors of natural forces, animals and the supernatural were used to represent the Islamic State group in general and the "jihadi brides" in particular. All these metaphors had two things in common: they dehumanized the women in question, and they constructed the "jihadi brides" as a grave threat that required urgent intervention. By importing knowledge about these domains, metaphors enabled the establishment of particular perceptions about these women. At the same time they pointed to how the problem of the "jihadi brides" should be evaluated and managed, opening up and closing down possibilities for action and making some strategies of management appear natural while others were made to appear absurd.

Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fiction to offer a theology of mediation and participation. She works with Shaftesbury’s Platonic moral realism in contrast to Mrs Barbauld’s associationist view of taste and develops a mode of mystical ascent through the interplay of vertical and horizontal experiences. The sublime allows ascent through an awareness of one’s created nature, which is linked to Shaftesbury’s taxonomy of forms. It is an inherently social and virtuous experience, as in James Thomson’s Seasons, and centred on melancholy—an awareness of fallenness, which again allows for a mediation through this distantiation. Twilight’s veiling inbetweenness restores a sense of the lost Eden, while music and liturgy offer humanity’s articulate praise as an example of a Shaftesburian ‘form that forms’. Radcliffe’s explained supernatural is revisioned as a false idolatrous sublime that mistakes an effect for a cause and refuses the mystical ascent.

Eschatological dramas use the biblical Book of Revelation as their premise; however, despite the direct connection with the New Testament, the shows’ creatives disavow the religious nature of their narratives, reframing Christian elements as mythology. Supernatural (the WB/CW, 2005–2020), Dominion (Syfy, 2014–2015), and Constantine (NBC, 2014–2015) all use the Bible as the basis for what they assert is supernatural mythology. Such a strong disavowal of religion is especially necessary for creatives working on these three shows: they had a particularly strong fear of being associated with religious culture and audiences because their narratives are so closely tied to the Bible. The pushback against religion aligns with the assumption that the upscale fan audience these shows target is nonreligious.