In this paper I examine different forms of spiritual practice which seek to (re)enchant the everyday and the ordinary. By considering the duality of sacred and profane as the relational outcome of both embodied action and the action of other objects or things that are nominally valued as profane, an account is sought which acknowledges the corporeal enacting and sensing of the sacred both in and of the everyday. Taking empirical examples from New Age spiritual seekers, I trace the ways in which profane spatialities and temporalities are reconfigured into sacred topologies and how these seekers realise spiritual enlightenment through a reinhabited appropriation or articulation of the world. The source of signification of this spiritual comportment lies in embodied practices of the everyday that are sensed as the spiritually`correct' or`true' way of doing things. New ways of thinking everyday spiritual practice are thus sought and elaborated upon.

No abstract

This article calls for the geographies of religion and belief to attend to the sensuous, vitalistic, and affectual forces through which spaces of the religious, spiritual, and the sacred are performed. Not only do we need to recognize and explore these forces themselves, but our analyses of how religious-sacred spaces (re)produce or challenge societal and cultural discourses can also be enhanced if we focus on affect and embodiment. Through the case study of nineteenth-century spiritualism and the key space of the séance, these points are exemplified and substantiated. Finally, I explore some of the implications of recognizing these sensations for the study of geographies of religion and belief through Bennett's (2001) nonreductionist and nonteleological notion of enchantment.

No abstract

This paper investigates the increasingly popular practice of ghost tourism comprising urban ghost tours and organised paranormal investigations. Set in the context of modern forms of enchantment, wherein audiences engage in a knowing and reflexive sense of ‘delight without delusion’, the paper explores the various infrastructures, (discursive, affective, and material) that engender a sense of supernatural possibility. I argue that practices of legend-telling, legend-tripping, ostension, and play produce affective assemblages of supposition and wonder that momentarily transform space into something charged with the strange and anomalous. This infrastructure relies on the engineering of dispositions that are both shaped on and brought to the tourist event itself. As such, those with deeply held beliefs in ghosts and the afterlife, as well as those for whom the infrastructures fail to generate wonder, place limits on the artifice of modern enchantment. The paper uses examples from participant observation on ten ghost tours across the UK, an overnight vigil in a Tudor mansion, and interviews with tour guides.