Here is fantastic news from the publishers of The Science of Spirit Possession (2nd ed). They are offering a reduced price from £52.99 down to £16 for the hardback version for a limited period. So all students and researchers with limited resources can now get their copy straight from the publishers with the special discount code: a16c12
Aloha, Dr. Palmer!
Dr. Matt Miller here. I am sorry to have dropped out of sight. But I concluded that 1) your book was very important, 2) I was not well educated enough to fully understand it. I set out to educate myself.
I started with Collins’ The Apocalyptic Imagination and worked my way through the centuries, gathering significant records of contact with the dead. Days when the dead walked were built into the Anglo-Saxon liturgy before 1000. The Crusades and the Inquisition yielded a lot of data. John Dee was useful. Carlos Ginzburg and Emma Wilby’s work shed much further light on contacts with the dead in the 16th and 17th centuries.
I found an enormous amount of material relevant to Spirit Release Therapy in Swedenborg’s Diary (Vol 1). I have made a solid start on Spiritualism (Wallace, Myers, Hyslop, Turvey, Zollner, the Wicklands, Jung’s Red Book). Before me lie Baldwin’s Spirit Releasement Therapy, Sue Allen’s Spirit Release: A Practical Handbook, and Dianne Arcangel’s Afterlife Encounters.
From all this material I am constructing a history of European contacts with the dead. THEN I will reread your Spirit Possession with a better grasp of the context, which is always part of where meaning comes from.
I just purchased it, at the reduced price, from Cambridge Scholars. I expect to return to the fascinating discussions at this forum, in the near future, with a little more grasp of the whole thing.
So, once again, my gratitude to you for writing this book, and for being so kind as to let me have a pdf of it when I could not afford the price. You have quite literally changed my life, not all by yourself but as a catalyst, the flame dropped in dry twigs.
Matt Miller