Surrealist artist Max Ernst defined collage as the "alchemy of the visual image." Students of his work have often dismissed this comment as simply a metaphor for the transformative power of using found images in a new context. Taking a wholly different perspective on Ernst and alchemy, however, M. E. Warlick persuasively demonstrates that the artist had a profound and abiding interest in alchemical philosophy and often used alchemical symbolism in works created throughout his career.

A revival of interest in alchemy swept the artistic, psychoanalytic, historical, and scientific circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Warlick sets Ernst's work squarely within this movement. Looking at both his art (many of the works she discusses are reproduced in the book) and his writings, she reveals how thoroughly alchemical philosophy and symbolism pervade his early Dadaist experiments, his foundational work in surrealism, and his many collages and paintings of women and landscapes, whose images exemplify the alchemical fusing of opposites. This pioneering research adds an essential key to understanding the multilayered complexity of Ernst's works, as it affirms his standing as one of Germany's most significant artists of the twentieth century.

Outline of the processes of cosmic evolution, including detailed exercises for attaining higher conscious states.

For more than a year, between January 1692 and May 1693, the men and women of Salem Village lived in heightened fear of witches and their master, the Devil. Hundreds were accused of practicing witchcraft. Many suspects languished in jail for months. Nineteen men and women were hanged; one was pressed to death. Neighbors turned against neighbors, children informed on their parents, and ministers denounced members of their congregations. Approaching the subject as a legal and social historian, Peter Charles Hoffer offers a fresh look at the Salem outbreak based on recent studies of panic rumors, teen hysteria, child abuse, and intrafamily relations. He brings to life a set of conversations - in taverns and courtrooms, at home and work - which took place among suspected witches, accusers, witnesses, and spectators. The accusations, denials, and confessions of this legal story eventually resurrect the tangled internal tensions that lay at the bottom of the Salem witch hunts. Hoffer demonstrates that Salem, far from being an isolated community in the wilderness, stood on the leading edge of a sprawling and energetic Atlantic empire. His story begins in the slave markets of West Africa and Barbados and then shifts to Massachusetts, where the English, Africans, and Native Americans lived under increasing pressures from overpopulation, disease, and cultural conflict. In Salem itself, traditional piety and social values appeared endangered as consumerism and secular learning gained ground. Guerrilla warfare between Indians and English settlers - and rumors that the Devil had taken a particular interest in New England - panicked common people and authorities. The stage was set, Hoffer concludes, for the witchcraft hysteria.