“Jaguars of the Dawn is the best publication to date on one of Brazil’s most intriguing and influential new religions, Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn). This is an exceptionally rich and valuable work on an important and understudied new religious movement. The focus on embodied experience in the training of mediums makes Jaguars essential reading for students and scholars interested in mediumship and spirit incorporation.” • Numen
“This is an exciting book for several reasons… it contributes original knowledge to theoretical debates on the relationship between humans and spirits and the ways in which spirit possession/mediumship is about a transformation of the self.” • Cristina Rocha, Western Sydney University.
The Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is the place where the worlds of the living and the spirits merge and the boundaries between lives are regularly crossed. Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, the author explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides. She sheds light on the ways in which mediumistic development in the Vale do Amanhecer is used for therapeutic purposes and informs notions of body and self, of illness and wellbeing.
Emily Pierini is a Marie Curie Fellow in anthropology at Sapienza University of Rome and visiting professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.
LC: BF1242.B6 P53 2020
BISAC: REL000000 RELIGION/General; SOC039000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology of Religion; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural
BIC: JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography; JHB Sociology
