This anthropological pantheon traverses Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and Europe. While it would have been tempting to illustrate it with exotic or sensational images, their absence immerses the reader in ornately descriptive ethnographic accounts while introducing the art of anthropological writing in which pictures have been painted with words.

Some chapters are universally readable while others probably suited for the anthropology scholar. For instance, non-experts may find themselves reaching for a dictionary as they seek to comprehend occasional content like ‘ … the Cartesian artifice of a solipsistic, indulgent, individualism subverts the elegance and intellectual beauty of existential life’ (p. 10). Arguably, this interrogatory process also contributes to the reader's scholastic growth.

In Panama, readers are introduced to the Black Christ of Portobelo and the ‘miraculous healing’ powers of this unconventionally black statue with roles alleviating sickness as well as the deviant behaviour of burglars and drug dealers, contributing to spiritual forgiveness and reintegration of the marginalised.

In Ghana, the therapeutic palette of healers – Pentecostal, psychiatric, juju, magic and alternative spiritual – emphasises the multiplicity of alternatives available. In the internet era, ethnographic descriptions of the Sakawa occult acquaint readers with elaborate religious rituals used to facilitate scams, internet fraud and the pursuit of wealth. Insightful discourses into ‘supernatural’ fortune and contradictory fusion of sacrifices, indigenous African Christian faith, and witchcraft defy imagination. Propagated through rumours, social and electronic media, status is perpetuated.

One of the most intriguing chapters explores ‘Ecstatic Contemplation’ in the USA, involving the focusing of energies through recurrent clitoral stimulation and orgasms. It is posited that the practitioners, a number of whom previously had addiction difficulties, invariably substitute one external agency of addiction for another sensory one in their quest of self-control and power.

In traditionally catholic Peru, the growth of Pentecostal churches and conversion to ‘new’ Christian faith practices becomes increasingly intertwined with indigenous customs moulding therapeutic options in the quest for healing and the management of mental disorders across rural and urban societies. While in Haiti, perceptions of sorcery and poison in the evolution of the zombi state serve as a vehicle of social cohesion in health, disease and death. The chapter evokes vivid mental imagery describing the role of zombification in the social history of Haitian society and postulates zombis may be mentally ill though not recognised as such.

In the ‘cosmologies of fear’ in UK, the author persuasively argues the influence of modern cultural responses in the medicalisation of anxiety with changes in cosmological attribution and labelling of distress, hitherto shifting agency from the spiritual and faith realm to the clinician and pharmacological interventions. Here the pendulum swings from expanding spiritual interventions in some parts of Africa and South America.

The theoretical framework on role of evolutionary psychology in religion and contemporary diagnosis of schizophrenia is thought provoking. It postulates that agency, agent detection, theory of mind and metarepresentation are useful concepts in the understanding of religious thinking and psychosis.

This scholarly volume invites reflection on the morphing and metamorphosis of faith and spirituality across societies as they deal with health and disease.

As adapted from the Greek classic Oedipus Rex – The Gods are Not to Blame (Ola Rotimi) or are they?