The Contest of the Serpents This message is for those who are tired of frustration. and those who are tired of unbelievers collecting what they are supposed to get. It is also for those who are determined that a transaction must happen in the heavens that would turn things around for good in their lives.

The Contest of the Serpents This message is for those who are tired of frustration. and those who are tired of unbelievers collecting what they are supposed to get. It is also for those who are determined that a transaction must happen in the heavens that would turn things around for good in their lives.

This book opens our eyes to the truth about spiriUial power. There is the power of God and the power of darkness. There are sorcerers and magicians; there are satanic intermediaries and serpents of the magicians. All these powers go about perpetrating evil. In this book we are taught how to identify them, and deal with them instead of watching them wreak havoc in our lives.

Abandoned as a baby, Adam Equinox has grown up in the grim, dark Highgate Children's Home, where nothing good ever happens to him. Until now. Adam has entered a competition run by mysterious computer billionaire Quentin Quested. The prize is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to test Q's top-secret computer game.

These case studies explore how competing interests among the keepers of a community's heritage shape how that community both regards itself and reveals itself to others. As editors Celeste Ray and Luke Eric Lassiter note in their introduction, such stakeholders are no longer just of the community itself, but are now often "outsiders"--tourists, the mass media, and even anthropologists and folklorists. The setting of each study is a different marginalized community in the South. Arranged around three themes that have often surfaced in debates about public folklore and anthropology over the last two decades, the studies consider issues of representation, identity, and practice. One study of representation discusses how Appalachian Pentecostal serpent handlers try to reconcile their exotic popular image with their personal religious beliefs. A case study on identity tells why a segment of the Cajun population has appropriated the term "coonass," once widely considered derogatory. Essays on practice look at an Appalachian Virginia coal town and Snee Farm, a National Heritage Site in lowland South Carolina. Both pieces reveal how dynamic and contradictory views of community life can be silenced in favor of producing a more easily consumable vision of a "past." Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners offers challenging new insights into some of the roles that the media, tourism, and charismatic community members can play when a community compromises its heritage or even denies it.