Monsters werewolves witches and fairies remain a strong presence in our stories and dreams. But as Claude Lecouteux shows their roots go far deeper than their appearance in medieval folklore; they are survivors of a much older belief system that predates Christianity and was widespread over Western Europe. Through his extensive analysis of Germano-Scandinavian legends as well as those from other areas of Europe Lecouteux has uncovered an almost forgotten religious concept - that every individual owns three souls and that one of these souls the Double can - in animal or human form - leave the physical body while in sleep or a trance journey where it chooses then re-enter its physical body. While there were many who experienced this phenomenon involuntarily there were others - those who attracted the unwelcome persecution of the Church - who were able to provoke it at will: witches. In a thorough excavation of the medieval soul Claude Lecouteux reveals the origin and significance of this belief in the Double and follows its transforming features through the ages. He shows that far from being fantasy or vague superstition fairies witches and werewolves all testify to a consistent ancient vision of our world and the world beyond.

The Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486-7, is the standard medieval text on witchcraft and it remained in print throughout the early modern period. Its descriptions of the evil acts of witches and the ways to exterminate them continue to contribute to our knowledge of early modern law, religion and society. Mackay's highly acclaimed translation, based on his extensive research and detailed analysis of the Latin text, is the only complete English version available, and the most reliable. Now available in a single volume, this key text is at last accessible to students and scholars of medieval history and literature. With detailed explanatory notes and a guide to further reading, this volume offers a unique insight into the fifteenth-century mind and its sense of sin, punishment and retribution.

A practical guide to the Anglo-Saxon Futhark and how runes were used in Old England In the early Anglo-Saxon period, the region of Great Britain known as Northumbria was a kingdom in its own right. These lands, in what is now northern England and southeast Scotland, were the targets of the first Viking raids on Britain. This violent influx, followed by the establishment of trade routes with the Norse, brought the runes to the region, where they intermingled with local magical traditions and legends, resulting in the development of a practical runic wisdom entirely unique to Northumbria. In this guide to the Wyrdstaves, or runic practices, of Old Northumbria, Nigel Pennick examines the thirty-three runes of the Anglo-Saxon Futhark and how they were used in Old England for weaving the web of Wyrd. Sharing runic lore and legends from the area, he explains how the Northumbrian runes are unique because they contain elements from all the cultures of the region, including the Picts, Britons, Romans, Angles, Scots, and Norse. He illustrates how each rune in this tradition is a storehouse of ancient knowledge, detailing the meanings, historical uses, symbolism, and related tree and plant spirits for each of the thirty-three runes. The author describes the Northumbrian use of runes in magic and encryption and explores geomancy divination practices, the role of sacred numbers, and the power of the eight airts, or directions. He also shows how the Northumbrian runes have a close relationship with Ogam, the tree alphabet of the ancient Celts. Providing a magical history of Northumbria, as well as a look at the otherworldly beings who call these lands home, including boggarts, brownies, and dragons, Pennick explains how traditional spirituality is intimately tied to the landscape and the cycle of the seasons. He reveals how the runic tradition is still vibrantly alive in this area and ready for us to reawaken to it.

Steiner immerses the reader in the evolving stream of 11 mystics who appeared in central Europe between the 13th and 17th centuries, who resolved the conflict between their inner perceptions and beginnings of modern science.

In the first edition of the Bancroft Prize-winning Entertaining Satan, John Putnam Demos presented an entirely new perspective on American witchcraft. By investigating the surviving historical documents of over a hundred actual witchcraft cases, he vividly recreated the world of New England during the witchcraft trials and brought to light fascinating information on the role of witchcraft in early American culture. Now Demos has revisited his original work and updated it to illustrate why these early Americans' strange views on witchcraft still matter to us today. He provides a new preface that puts forth a broader overview of witchcraft and looks at its place around the world--from ancient times right up to the present.

Ranging from the pre-Christian era to Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton at the end of the seventeenth century, this Reader covers a broad range of alchemical authors and works. Organized chronologically, it includes around thirty selections in authoritative but lightly-modernized versions. The selections will provide the reader with a basic introduction to the field and its interdisciplinary links with science and medicine, philosophy, religion, and literature and the arts.

Defining 'magic' is a maddening task. Over the last century numerous philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and theologians have attempted to pin down its essential meaning, sometimes analysing it in such complex and abstruse depth that it all but loses its sense altogether. For this reason, many people often shy away from providing a detailed definition, assuming it is generally understood as the human control of supernatural forces. 'Magic' continues to pervade the popular imagination and idiom. People feel comfortable with its contemporary multiple meanings, unaware of the controversy, conflict, and debate its definition has caused over two and a half millennia. In common usage today 'magic' is uttered in reference to the supernatural, superstition, illusion, trickery, religious miracles, fantasies, and as a simple superlative. The literary confection known as 'magical realism' has considerable appeal and many modern scientists have ironically incorporated the word into their vocabulary, with their 'magic acid', 'magic bullets' and 'magic angles'. Since the so-called European Enlightenment magic has often been seen as a marker of primitivism, of a benighted earlier stage of human development. Yet across the modern globalized world hundreds of millions continue to resort to magic - and also to fear it. Magic provides explanations and remedies for those living in extreme poverty and without access to alternatives. In the industrial West, with its state welfare systems, religious fundamentalists decry the continued moral threat posed by magic. Under the guise of neo-Paganism, its practice has become a religion in itself. Magic continues to be a truly global issue. This Very Short Introduction does not attempt to provide a concluding definition of magic: it is beyond simple definition. Instead it explores the many ways in which magic, as an idea and a practice, has been understood and employed over the millennia. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This excellent little book is a wonderful introduction to the story of the trial of the witches of Pendle in 1612. In a very lively and readable style, Christine Goodier provides a who's who of the events, as well as an interesting angle on the trials themselves. She emphasises that the accused were merely flesh and blood, not demons, arguing that they were poor, uneducated people who were at worst misguided. Her inevitable conclusion is that a terrible injustice was done 400 years ago when they were famously convicted of witchcraft and hanged.

Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible. Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J. Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion.
Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee; and philosopher and sociologist Bertrand Meheust. Through incisive analyses of these thinkers, Kripal ushers the reader into a beguiling world somewhere between fact, fiction, and fraud. The cultural history of telepathy, teleportation, and UFOs; a ghostly love story; the occult dimensions of science fiction; cold war psychic espionage; galactic colonialism; and the intimate relationship between consciousness and culture all come together in "Authors of the Impossible," a dazzling and profound look at how the paranormal bridges the sacred and the scientific.

Telepathy, thought transference, unconscious communication. While some important early psychological theorists such as William James, Frederic W. H. Myers and Sigmund Freud all agreed that the phenomenon exists, their theoretical approaches to it were very different. James's and Myers's interpretations of and experimental investigations into telepathy or thought transference were an inextricable part of their psychical researches. Freud's insistence on the reality of thought transference had nothing to do with psychical research or paranormal phenomena, which he largely repudiated. Thought transference for Freud was located in a theory of the unconscious that was radically different from the subliminal mind embraced by James and Myers. Today thought transference is most commonly described as unconscious communication but was largely ignored by subsequent generations of psychoanalysts until most recently. Nonetheless, the recognition of unconscious communication has persisted as a subterranean, quasi-spiritual presence in psychoanalysis to this day. As psychoanalysis becomes more interested in unconscious communication and develops theories of loosely boundaried subjectivities that open up to transcendent dimensions of reality, it begins to assume the features of a religious psychology. Thus, a fuller understanding of how unconscious communication resonates with mystical overtones may be more deeply clarified, articulated and elaborated in contemporary psychoanalysis in an explicit dialogue with psychoanalytically literate scholars of religion. In Legacies of the Occult Marsha Aileen Hewitt argues that some of the leading theorists of unconscious communication represent a 'mystical turn' that is infused with both a spirituality and a revitalized interest in paranormal experience that is far closer to James and Myers than to Freud.