Ecclesiastes is one of the Ketuvim ("Writings") of the Hebrew Bible and part of the Wisdom literature of the Christian Old Testament. The title commonly used in English is a Latin transliteration of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word קֹהֶלֶת. An unnamed author introduces "The words of Kohelet, son of David, king in Jerusalem" (1:1) and does not use his own voice again until the final verses (12:9–14), where he gives his own thoughts and summarises the statements of Kohelet; the main body of the text is ascribed to Kohelet himself.
Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson, which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying.
Huna is the word adopted by the non-Hawaiian New Age author Max Freedom Long (1890–1971) in 1936 to describe his theory of metaphysics. Long cited what he believed to be the spiritual practices of the ancient Hawaiian kahunas (priests) as inspiration; however, contemporary scholars consider the system to be his invention designed through a mixture of a variety of spiritual practices from various cultures, with roots in New Thought and Theosophy, rather than in traditional Hawaiian beliefs.
Beacon Press is an American left-wing non-profit book publisher. Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, it is currently a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It is known for publishing authors such as James Baldwin, Mary Oliver, Martin Luther King Jr., and Viktor Frankl, as well as The Pentagon Papers.
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Macías, better known as Don Miguel Ruiz, is a Mexican author of Toltec spiritual and neoshamanistic texts.
Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist. Considered one of the foremost African authors in the postmodern and post-colonial traditions, Okri has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize. Okri was knighted at the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.
Ascended masters in a number of movements in the theosophical tradition are held to be spiritually enlightened beings who in past incarnations were ordinary humans, but who have undergone a series of spiritual transformations originally called initiations.
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda is a spiritual classic published in 1946. It recounts Yogananda's life, his search for his guru, and his teachings on Kriya Yoga. The book has introduced many to meditation and yoga and has been influential in both Eastern and Western spiritual circles. It has been translated into over fifty languages and continues to be widely read. Notable admirers include Steve Jobs and George Harrison.
Paul Brunton is the pen name of Raphael Hurst, a British author of spiritual books. He is best known as one of the early popularizers of Neo-Hindu spiritualism in western esotericism, notably via his bestselling A Search in Secret India (1934) which has been translated into over 20 languages.
The Famished Road is a novel by Nigerian author Ben Okri, the first book in a trilogy that continues with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). Published in London in 1991 by Jonathan Cape, The Famished Road follows Azaro, an abiku, or spirit child, living in an unnamed African city. The novel employs a unique narrative style, incorporating the spirit world with the "real" world in what some have classified as animist realism. Others have labelled the book African traditional religion realism, while still others choose simply to call the novel fantasy literature. The book exploits the belief in the coexistence of the spiritual and material worlds that is a defining aspect of traditional African life.
The Inheritors is a work of prehistoric fiction and the second novel by the British author William Golding, best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954). It concerns the extinction of one of the last remaining tribes of Neanderthals at the hands of the more sophisticated Homo sapiens. It was published by Faber and Faber in 1955.
Max Freedom Long was an American novelist and New Age writer.
Brian Bates is former chairman of Psychology at the University of Sussex. He is currently the director of the Medical Psychology Project at the Department of Psychology at University of Sussex in England. He is a visiting professor at the University of Brighton. He is known as the author of books on the shamanic wisdom of Anglo-Saxon England, and for his related course on "Shamanic Consciousness". He has also taught and directed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
Guy Finley is an American self-help writer, philosopher, spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician.
The Great White Brotherhood, in belief systems akin to Theosophy and New Age, are said to be perfected beings of great power who spread spiritual teachings through selected humans. The members of the Brotherhood may be known as the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, the Ascended Masters, the Church Invisible, or simply as the Hierarchy. The first person to talk about them in the West was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Theosophy), after she and other people claimed to have received messages from them. These included Helena Roerich, Alice A. Bailey, Guy Ballard, Geraldine Innocente, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Bob Sanders, and Benjamin Creme.
The Book of Sirach, also known as The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, is a Jewish literary work, originally written in Biblical Hebrew. The longest extant wisdom book from antiquity, it consists of ethical teachings, written approximately between 196 and 175 BCE by Yeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira, a Hellenistic Jewish scribe of the Second Temple period.
David Gordon Benner is a Canadian depth psychologist, author and wisdom teacher.
B. Kojo Laing or Bernard Kojo Laing was a Ghanaian novelist and poet, whose writing is characterised by its hybridity, whereby he uses Ghanaian Pidgin English and vernacular languages alongside standard English. His first two novels in particular – Search Sweet Country (1986) and Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) – were praised for their linguistic originality, both books including glossaries that feature the author's neologisms as well as Ghanaian words.
