The art of predicting earthly events from the movements of stars and planets has always been a source of fascination. Medieval astrologers, though sometimes feared to be magicians in league with demons, were usually revered scholars whose ideas and practices were widely respected. Politics, medicine, weather forecasting, cosmology and alchemy were all influenced by astrological concepts. Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts explores the dazzling complexity of western medieval astrology and its place in society, as revealed by a wealth of illustrated manuscripts from the British Library's rich medieval collection.

Michael Constantine Psellus (1018-1178 C.E) was one of the most notable writers and philosophers of the Byzantine era. The Byzantine domain was effectively the eastern Greek speaking part of the Roman Empire centred on Byzantium (Constantinople, modern Istanbul) which split off from the Latin West in 364 C.E. Its intellectual legacies helped lay the foundations for the Italian Renaissance. It was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that released a tide of Greek reading scholars into Western Europe, particularly Venice. With them came much of the magical and Hermetic knowledge which the Greeks in their turn had inherited from the Egyptians. "The Key of Solomon" was one such text. It is therefore essential to the understanding of such magical texts that one understands exactly how the Byzantines understood the nature of daemons. Psellus forms the bridge between the ancient world, Byzantine Greek, and the grimoire conception of the nature of daemons. Hailing from Constantinople, Psellus' career was an illustrious and practical one, serving as a political advisor to a succession of emperors, playing a decisive role in the transition of power between various monarchs. He became the leading professor at the newly founded University of Constantinople, bearing the honorary title, 'Consul of the Philosophers'. He was the driving force behind the university curriculum reform designed to emphasise the Greek classics, especially Homeric literature. Psellus is credited with the shift from Aristotelian thought to the Platonist tradition, and was adept in politics, astronomy, medicine, music, theology, jurisprudence, physics, grammar and history.

Halloween 1636: sightings of the ghost of an old woman begin to be reported in the small English coastal town of Minehead, and a royal commission is sent to investigate. December 1640: a disgraced Protestant bishop is hanged in the Irish capital, Dublin, after being convicted of an "unspeakable" crime.
In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Peter Marshall sets out to uncover the intriguing links between these two seemingly unconnected events.
The result is a compelling tale of dark family secrets, of efforts to suppress them, and of the ways in which they finally come to light. It is also the story of a shocking seventeenth-century Church scandal which cast its shadow over religion and politics in Britain and Ireland for the best part of three centuries, drawing in a host of well known and not-so-well-known characters along the way, including Jonathan Swift, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Scott.
A fascinating story in its own right, Mother Leakey and the Bishop is also a sparkling demonstration of how the telling of stories is central to the way we remember the past, and can become part of the fabric of history itself.

Among the most important sources for understanding the cultures and systems of thought of ancient Mesopotamia is a large body of magical and medical texts written in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. An especially significant branch of this literature centres upon witchcraft. Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and incantations attribute ill-health and misfortune to the magic machinations of witches and prescribe ceremonies, devices, and treatments for dispelling witchcraft, destroying the witch, and protecting and curing the patient. The Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals aims to present a reconstruction of this body of texts; it provides critical editions of the relevant rituals and prescriptions based on the study of the cuneiform tablets and fragments recovered from the libraries of ancient Mesopotamia. "Now that we have the second volume, we the more admire the thoughtful organisation of the entire project, the strict methods followed, and the insightful observations and decisions made." - Martin Stol, in: Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXIV n Degrees 3-4 (mei-augustus 2017)

The Path of the Devil is organized around three fundamental theories: witch hunts as functional sacrificial ceremonies, realistic conflict and strategic persecution, and scapegoat phenomena. All conjectures point to the role of epidemic disease, war, and climactic and economic hardships as considerable factors. However, such crises have to be differentiated: when war is measured as a quantitative characteristic it is found to inhibit witch hunts, while epidemic disease and economic hardship encourages them. The book integrates the sociologies of collective behavior, contentious conflict, and deviance with cross-disciplinary theory and research. The final chapters examine the Salem witch trials as 'a perfect storm, ' and illustrate the general patterns found for early modern witch hunts and 'modern witch hunts, ' which exhibit similarities that are found to be more than metaphorica

Naming the Witch explores the recent series of witchcraft accusations and killings in East Java, which spread as the Suharto regime slipped into crisis and then fell. After many years of ethnographic work focusing on the origins and nature of violence in Indonesia, Siegel came to the conclusion that previous anthropological explanations of witchcraft and magic, mostly based on sociological conceptions but also including the work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Claude Levi-strauss, were simply inadequate to the task of providing a full understanding of the phenomena associated with sorcery, and particularly with the ideas of power connected with it. Previous explanations have tended to see witchcraft in simple opposition to modernism and modernity (enchantment vs. disenchantment). The author sees witchcraft as an effect of culture, when the latter is incapable of dealing with accident, death, and the fear of the disintegration of social and political relations. He shows how and why modernization and witchcraft can often be companiens, as people strive to name what has hitherto been unnameable.

Magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to the distinctly modern models of religion and science. As a category, however, magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that it can best be explained in light of the European and Euro-American drive to establish and secure their own identity as normative: rational-scientific, judicial-ethical, industrious, productive, and heterosexual. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief.

From Shirley MacLaine's spiritual biography "Out on a Limb" to the teenage witches in the film "The Craft, " New Age and Neopagan beliefs have made sensationalistic headlines. In the mid- to late 1990s, several important scholarly studies of the New Age and Neopagan movements were published, attesting to academic as well as popular recognition that these religions are a significant presence on the contemporary North American religious landscape. Self-help books by New Age channelers and psychics are a large and growing market; annual spending on channeling, self-help businesses, and alternative health care is at $10 to $14 billion; an estimated 12 million Americans are involved with New Age activities; and American Neopagans are estimated at around 200,000. "New Age and Neopagan Religions in America" introduces the beliefs and practices behind the public faces of these controversial movements, which have been growing steadily in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America.

What is the New Age movement, and how is it different from and similar to Neopaganism in its underlying beliefs and still-evolving practices? Where did these decentralized and eclectic movements come from, and why have they grown and flourished at this point in American religious history? What is the relationship between the New Age and Neopaganism and other religions in America, particularly Christianity, which is often construed as antagonistic to them? Drawing on historical and ethnographic accounts, Sarah Pike explores these questions and offers a sympathetic yet critical treatment of religious practices often marginalized yet soaring in popularity. The book provides a general introduction to the varieties of New Age and Neopagan religions in the United States today as well as an account of their nineteenth-century roots and emergence from the 1960s counterculture. Covering such topics as healing, gender and sexuality, millennialism, and ritual experience, it also furnishes a rich description and analysis of the spiritual worlds and social networks created by participants.