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for women or challenged the norm of male cultural and political leadership,Rastafari may not have gained half the ground it now “trods.”

While Edmonds does much to convince the reader of Weber’s continuedrelevance, his undertheorized account of Rastafarianism impedes a richer ex-ploration of its entrenchment. Rastafari not only rewards prior acquaintancewith “dread” concepts and history but also punishes the nonspecialist. Ed-monds frequently leaves Rasta terms untranslated and assumes a thoroughgo-ing familiarity with Jamaican culture. Confusion inevitably ensues; Edmondswrites of “Kumina ceremonies” on page 60 yet buries the definition of “Ku-mina” in a footnote for a citation on page 100. Ultimately, Rastafari may provemore valuable for theologians and sociologists of religion than for anthropol-ogists, historians, or ethnomusicologists. It is a measure of Edmonds’s contri-bution to the neo-Weberian literature that despite a text too often marred bytypographical errors, unedited redundancies, and missed opportunities, Ras-tafari still merits a qualified recommendation.ELIZABETH PEREZ, Chicago, Illinois.

YELLE, ROBERT A. Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Dream of a NaturalLanguage in Hindu Tantra. Religion in History, Society, and Culture. NewYork: Routledge, 2003. xv�187 pp. $75.00 (cloth).

Mantras, the often seemingly unintelligible sequences of syllables that play anessential role in the practice of many South Asian religious traditions, are oneof the more widely recognized features of these traditions in the modern West-ern world, as is exemplified by the proliferation of mantras in material mani-festations of pop culture. Despite their ubiquity, mantras remain a poorly un-derstood feature of South Asian religious practice, particularly in the contextof the tantric traditions that are largely responsible for their contemporarydissemination. It is this lacuna in understanding that Robert Yelle addressesin his short but ambitious monograph, which starts from the relatively spe-cialized issue of the mantra and expands to address theoretical issues of inter-est across multiple academic disciplines.

One of the difficulties mantras present to their interpreters is that they typ-ically contain little semantic content and often consist only of strings of sylla-bles that have no obvious meaning. Thus they were often rejected as mean-ingless. Yelle rejects this claim and argues that mantras represent asophisticated form of discourse that is pragmatic, composed with a distinct aim.In order to make his case, he begins with a survey of the structural featuresof mantras, which exhibit numerous poetic elements. He argues that such “po-etic devices, including palindromes, are employed in an effort to bridge thegap between language and reality and convert the mantras into a natural lan-guage, one that directly reflects and can even influence reality” (p. 23).

Yelle is interested in explaining the motivational force of ritual utterances,and he argues, convincingly, that the poetic structure of these utterances isdeployed in order to create an illusion of correspondence between languageand reality and, hence, of the possibility that the former might affect the latter.He makes this case in the context of Tantric mantras by showing how—in theirvery structure as well as in the ways in which they are intoned and linked toyogic exercises—mantras replicate the threefold cosmic processes of creation,stabilization, and dissolution, which are central features of the cosmologies

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that underlie these traditions. Here he makes excellent use of Michael Silver-stein’s concept of the indexical icon, which has a pragmatic function, describ-ing “not only relations among signifiers, but also the relation between signifierand signified. Especially in effective ritual, words may point to worlds beyondthemselves” (p. 73).

Yelle seeks to dispel the view that signs are conventional, with merely arbi-trary relation to their referents. He criticizes J. L. Austin’s theory of “perfor-mative utterance,” which has been employed in previous attempts to theorizeabout mantras, on the basis of Austin’s view that the performative impact ofsuch utterances derives from convention alone. Performative utterances, suchas marriage vows, often exhibit poetic elements, which, Yelle argues, collec-tively “accumulate to relatively motivate or augment the force of ritual as anindexical icon of its prospective goal” (p. 89). Yelle here rightly points out thelimitations of Austin’s work with respect to mantras, and his rhetorical ap-proach seems useful here because the poetic elements of mantras, which areprominently employed in magical practices that explicitly aim to influencereality, appear to contribute to the illusion of their efficacy.

When Yelle turns his attention to other forms of discourse, his analysis be-comes somewhat less convincing. In chapter 5, he argues that a rhetoricalapproach is necessary with two additional genres of religious discourse, thecanon, or list, and taxonomy. He criticizes J. Z. Smith’s observation that somelists appear arbitrary and suggests that the study of the poetic structure of suchlists might be fruitful, without providing an example. Yelle then turns to tax-onomies, where he seems to waffle on the issue of whether these are “natural”or “cultural” constructs.

Yelle concludes with a call for a semiotic approach in the discipline of reli-gious studies. While he makes this case successfully only in the limited arenaof magical utterances, his call is provocative and worthy of serious consider-ation. He argues that words themselves are the “idols” of postmodern societiesand that it is necessary to apply a semiotic critique to contemporary culturalphenomena. This is a conclusion that he foreshadowed earlier in the bookwhen he compared mantra recitation to contemporary marketing practices.Being embedded in a technical study of an esoteric subject, Yelle’s critiquemay not gain the wider attention it deserves. It is to be hoped that he willcontinue his work in this area and publish a general book on semiotic criticismmore accessible to scholars from multiple disciplines.DAVID B. GRAY, Rice University.

BAILEY, MICHAEL D. Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the LateMiddle Ages. Magic in History. University Park: Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 2003. xii�200 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

In this valuable, accurate, and engaging volume, Michael Bailey investigatesthe “prehistory” of the early modern concept of witchcraft through the writingsof Johannes Nider, a Dominican whose fundamental treatises—in particular,the seminal Formicarius—are still “remarkably understudied” (p. 6). Although,as Bailey underscores, Nider was “never aware of consciously developing orconstructing the idea of witchcraft” (p. 8), his Formicarius is “heavily” presentin Heinrich Kramer’s subsequent and groundbreaking Malleus maleficarum (p.3). These two treatises in fact respond to two deeply different ideologies. How-