Wahhabism is a fundamentalist branch of Islam, which was founded in the eighteenth century. It built its stronghold mainly in the region where it was established, on the Arabian Peninsula. Attempts to spread and gain popularity elsewhere in the Islamic world were made by various rulers from the House of Al Su’ud, but never yielded any great results. One such attempt was a letter sent in 1811 by Abd Allah Ibn Su’ud to the ruler of Morocco, Sulayman (known for adopting Salafi ideas), in which Ibn Su’ud elaborated on the nature of his religious doctrine and encouraged its adoption. These events were described by the most important Moroccan historians of the nineteenth century, including Al-Kansusi, Az-Zayyani, and An-Nasiri. This article is an attempt to recapitulate and arrange these records in order.

In the article, the author focuses on the phenomenon of Pentecostal expansion among contemporary Brazilians, first discussing some sociocultural contexts of massive conversions by means of applying chosen theories to the Brazilian religious context, and then looking at the decisions behind religious transitions through their socially and culturally situated perspective, which prepares a relevant background for understanding the reasons and meanings of individual decisions dealt with in the second part of the article. Based on conversion “flashes” from individual testimonies given by converts, the author makes an attempt to show the common and most enticing features of Pentecostal conversion in a search for an explanation for its “snowball effect” in Brazil. 

This article demonstrates the importance of alchemical symbolism in Victorian fairy tales. Contrary to Jungian analysts who conceived alchemy as forgotten knowledge, this study shows the vivid tradition of alchemical symbolism in Victorian literature. This work takes the readers through the first stage of the alchemical opus reflected in fairy tale symbols, explains the psychological and spiritual purposes of alchemy and helps them to understand the Victorian visions of mystical transformation. It emphasises the importance of spirituality in Victorian times and accounts for the similarity between Victorian and alchemical paths of transformation of the self. 

Some scholars, following a deconstructivist interpretation of Catharism (which denies the existence of Catharism as dualistic heresy, or at least diminishes the significance of dualism as its distinctive feature) propose a hypothesis which assumes that Cathar dualism was not an idea imported from the East (from the earlier dualist traditions, especially from Bogomilism), but that it emerged independently in the West, later than it is reported by the sources, as an effect of specific scriptural exegesis developed in the dissidents’ schools. The main aim of this article is to verify, through the analysis of Biblical exegesis, this hypothesis, on which the myth of the fall – crucial for the dualist doctrine – was built. Based on various sources, both polemical and created by the Cathars themselves, it reconstructs biblical foundations of this crucial myth in two main branches of Catharism: the moderate and the radical (within the latter in two of its options: the angelic doctrine, and the doctrine of the two worlds), comparing them to the analogical exegetical concepts developed earlier by the Bogomils.

Comparing the cycle of initiation rites in the Arrernte with initiation rituals in the desert tribes, we arrive at the conclusion that they are based upon an analogous symbolism of activities and ideas. The Arrernte initiations are therefore a transformation of the desert rites in which the ritual syntagmas are distributed differently. An example supporting this thesis is the use of tall torches of the witi/widi type in the circumcision rite instead of in the “proper” fire ceremony, the fact that they are not lit despite the presence of the symbolism of fire in the ritual songs, and the role of women in their destruction. The founding myth of the Engwura is at the same time a myth that introduces circumcision (Lartna), and both of these ritual activities are treated interchangeably in variants of the myth. The Engwura itself, as a fire ceremony, has to be considered the final and crowning phase of the initiation processes. It is characterised by the presence, shared with the Western Desert, of a symbolic complex in which a special role is played by the equivalence: adepts ≡ Eremophila ≡ torch fire. Due to the fact that use of Eremophila, on the one hand, refers to the symbolism of the monsoon season (the greenness of the plant) and, on the other hand, to fires of the dry season (the redness of the plant and associations with the emu), it constitutes an ideal operator for the initiation process.