Daughters of Hecate unites for the first time research on the problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman culture. The book illuminates the gendering of ancient magic by approaching the topic from three distinct disciplinary perspectives: literary stereotyping, the social application of magic discourse, and material culture.
The volume challenges presumed associations of women and magic by probing the foundations of, processes, and motivations behind gendered stereotypes, beginning with Western culture's earliest associations of women and magic in the Bible and Homer's Odyssey. Daughters of Hecate provides a nuanced exploration of the topic while avoiding reductive approaches. In fact, the essays in this volume uncover complexities and counter-discourses that challenge, rather than reaffirm, many gendered stereotypes taken for granted and reified by most modern scholarship.
By combining critical theoretical methods with research into literary and material evidence, Daughters of Hecate interrogates gendered stereotypes that are as relevant now as for understanding antiquity or the early modern witch hunts.

The Ancient and Accepted Rite for England and Wales covers the 4th-33rd degrees, including the 18th 'Rose Croix' degree. The author explores the historic background to this important part of Freemasonry with the original being published in 1980. A second edition appeared in 1987 which was a completely revised work after much new documented evidence was discovered, and this third edition is another reprint of this authoritative study.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the end of the witch trials everywhere. This volume charts the processes and reasons for the decriminalisation of witchcraft but also challenges the widespread assumption that Europe has been 'disenchanted'. For the first time surveys are given of the social role of witchcraft in European communities down to the end of the nineteenth century and of the continued importance of witchcraft and magic as topics of debate among intellectuals and other writers

Between the age of St. Augustine and the sixteenth century reformations magic continued to be both a matter of popular practice and of learned inquiry. This volume deals with its use in such contexts as healing and divination and as an aspect of the knowledge of nature's occult virtues and secrets.

"The Goetia" is the most famous grimoire after the Key of Solomon. This volume contains a transcription of a hitherto unpublished manuscript of the Lemegeton which includes four whole grimoires: "Liber Malorum Spituum seu Goetia"; "Theurgia-Goetia"; "Ars Paulina" (Books 1 & 2); and, "Ars Almadel". This was owned by Dr Thomas Rudd, a practising scholar-magician of the early seventeenth century. There are many editions of the "Goetia", of which the most definitive is that of Joseph Peterson, but here we are interested in how the "Goetia" was actually used by practising magicians in the 16th and 17th century, before the knowledge of practical magic faded into obscurity. To evoke the 72 demons listed here without the ability to bind them would be foolhardy indeed. It was well known in times past that invocatio and ligatio, or binding, was a key part of evocation, but in the modern editions of the "Goetia" this key technique is expressed in just one word 'Shemhamaphorash', and its use is not explained. This volume explains how the 72 angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash are used to bind the spirits, and the correct procedure for safely invoking them using special seals incorporating the necessary controlling angel, whose name is also engraved on the breastplate and Brass Vessel.