Zar spirit possession in Sudan today is grounded in rituals derived from the ranks of the nineteenth-century Ottoman army, based on long-term ethnographic research in Sennar supported by life history data and archival documentation. The practice has accommodated ongoing changes linked to the interplay of Zar with Islam and Christianity. During colonial periods, European Christian Zar spirits were remembered as far more important; today authority has shifted to spirits of foreign Muslims, local holy men, and subaltern Blacks, reflecting concerns of new generations as political and religious landscapes transform.
Effortlessness is a key theme in the self-understanding of the emergent Dzogchen tradition's approach to contemplative practice, as explored in the commentaries by Nubchen Sangye Yeshe (ca. 844–mid-tenth century). The work examines the apparent paradox of learning the meditative skill of uncontrived effortlessness, where the process of meditative training and the content or ideal of this training are supposed to coalesce.
A recurrent theme in contemplative practice is the need for outward solitude, which provides a framework for contemplation that can give way to a suspension of all efforts and a state of inner letting-be. In the Christian tradition, following the Biblical typology of Martha and Mary (Lk 10:38–42), authors such as Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, John Cassian, and Gregory the Great interpret the state of 'non-doing' as essentially relational. This relational dimension, in which contemplation and letting-be are understood as a response to the initiative of the divine Other who is 'the origin' (Lat. principium), provides John of Ruusbroec with the basis to explain how action and non-doing (contemplation) can coalesce perfectly.
The introduction to a special issue proposes analyzing Western learned magic as an entangled tradition, calling for an interdisciplinary, transcultural, and transreligious perspective on its history. A working heuristic of seven types of entanglement is offered, with special emphasis on ritual hybridisation—processes where rituals reflect millennia-long textual-ritual transmission across cultural and religious boundaries. The introduction summarizes six contributions from a September 2019 workshop at the University of Bochum's Center for Religious Studies, which explore this entangled history.