The Witchcraft Sourcebook, now in its second edition, is a fascinating collection of documents that illustrates the development of ideas about witchcraft from ancient times to the eighteenth century. Many of the sources come from the period between 1400 and 1750, when more than 100,000 people - most of them women - were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and colonial America. During these years the prominent stereotype of the witch as an evil magician and servant of Satan emerged. Catholics and Protestants alike feared that the Devil and his human confederates were destroying Christian society. Including trial records, demonological treatises and sermons, literary texts, narratives of demonic possession, and artistic depiction of witches, the documents reveal how contemporaries from various periods have perceived alleged witches and their activities. Brian P. Levack shows how notions of witchcraft have changed over time and considers the connection between gender and witchcraft and the nature of the witch's perceived power. This second edition includes an extended section on the witch trials in England, Scotland and New England, fully revised and updated introductions to the sources to include the latest scholarship and a short bibliography at the end of each introduction to guide students in their further reading. The Sourcebook provides students of the history of witchcraft with a broad range of sources, many of which have been translated into English for the first time, with commentary and background by one of the leading scholars in the field.

This book provides a history of witchcraft in the territories that compose contemporary Romania, with a focus on the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The first part presents aspects of earthly justice, religious and secular, analysing the codes of law, trials and verdicts, and underlining the differences between Transylvania on one hand, and Moldavia and Wallachia on the other. The second part is concerned with divine justice, describing apocalyptic texts that talk about the pains of witches in hell, but also the ensembles of religious painting where, in vast compositions of the Last Judgment, various punishments for the sin of witchcraft are imagined.

An investigation into the underpinnings and superstructures of the Pagan world view Pagan religions have tended to be more concerned with practice that with theory and in a system that has no dogma - no legislated doctrine - that is as it should be. Yet as the movement grows and matures, it is inevitable that we will begin to think in a more abstract way about our models and systems. John Michael Greer has provided a primer on the kinds of ideas and themes that must be included in any discussion of the theology and philosophy of Neo-pagan religions.  Much of the book takes shape in a dialogue with existing ideas in theology, philosophy, and comparative religion. It looks to find a middle ground between too much and too little reference to the work of other scholars to find a comprehensible yet intellectually rigorous middle ground. It aims to be part of a conversation, that stretches out over the centuries.  Voices of polytheist spirituality have had little place in that conversation for many years, but much of value has been said in their absence. The rebirth of polytheism as a living religious tradition in the Western world will inevitably force a reassessment of much of that heritage, and pose challenges to some of its most cherished assumptions.  Yet reassessment is not necessarily rejection, and the traditions of modern polytheism are deeply enough indebted to legacies from the past that an attentive ear to earlier phases of the conversation is not out of place.

Traditionally, alchemy has been understood as a precursor to the science of chemistry but from the vantage point of the human spirit, it is also a discipline that illuminates the human soul. This book explores the goal of alchemy from Jungian, psychological, and philosophical perspectives. Jung's Alchemical Philosophy: Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea is a reflection on Jung's alchemical work and the importance of philosophy as a way of understanding alchemy and its contributions to Jung's psychology. By engaging these disciplines, Marlan opens new vistas on alchemy and the circular and ouroboric play of images and ideas, shedding light on the alchemical opus and the transformative processes of Jungian psychology. Divides in the history of alchemy and in the alchemical imagination are addressed as Marlan deepens the process by turning to a number of interpretations that illuminate both the enigma of the Philosophers' Stone and the ferment in the Jungian tradition. This book will be of interest to Jungian analysts and those who wish to explore the intersection of philosophy and psychology as it relates to alchemy.

This book provides a selection of studies on witchcraft and demonology by those involved in an interdisciplinary research group begun in Hungary thirty years ago. They examine urban and rural witchcraft conflicts from early modern times to the present, from a region hitherto rarely taken into consideration in witchcraft research. Special attention is given to healers, midwives, and cunning folk, including archaic sorcerer figures such as the taltos; whose ambivalent role is analysed in social, legal, medical and religious contexts. This volume examines how waves of persecution emerged and declined, and how witchcraft was decriminalised. Fascinating case-studies on vindictive witch-hunters, quarrelling neighbours, rivalling midwives, cunning shepherds, weather magician impostors, and exorcist Franciscan friars provide a colourful picture of Hungarian and Transylvanian folk beliefs and mythologies, as well as insights into historical and contemporary issues.

The Salem Witch trials were one of the darkest chapters in American history. With absorbing historical narrative and 300 photographs, Pamela E. Apkarian-Russell recounts three hundred years of a city's past, from the trials themselves through the 1890s, when Daniel Low produced the first souvenir spoon, to years of memorabilia and collectibles. The historic sites in Salem are documented through their many changes. These tourist meccas are visited by tens of thousands of people each year, whose purchases have helped to create a photo album of printed images and a treasure trove of silver and china souvenirs showing both witches and the historic sites. Separate chapters in this book illustrate the witchcraft theme as depicted on jewelry, silverware, cups and saucers, assorted chinaware, bottled goods, and a host of other interesting items.

"The Key of Solomon" is the most famous and infamous of the Grimoires ever produced. Yet amazingly only one version of it has ever been published, by S L MacGregor Mathers, over 100 years ago. What Mathers may not have known is that there were much more detailed and complete versions of this grimoire available in many other languages. This is not just a variant of Mathers' text, but a translation of three completely different and beautifully illustrated 1796 French manuscripts of the Key of Solomon. These are the most beautiful and complete manu-scripts of "The Key of Solomon" ever published. Much of the detail omitted from Mathers' edition is given here, providing a complete and workable system of high magic with full details of implements, procedures, and a wide range of talismans. Much material not available to Mathers is also found in this extraordinary book, including planetary prayers, names of angels and demons, and a vast array of pentacles, as well as material on the Olympic Spirits, Planetary Spirits and Intelligences. The commentary by two of the best known scholar-magicians provides much additional material, a full survey of all the extant manuscripts of this famous grimoire and how they relate to each other, as well as the historical influence of the Key of Solomon on the development of magic from the Renaissance until now. The pentacles as drawn by Fyot, the original scribe, are reproduced here, with more than twice as many pentacles as were produced in Mathers' text. "The Key of Solomon" is the most significant magical grimoire ever penned, certainly for the period from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. This present work finally restores "The Key of Solomon" back to its place at the heart of practical Western magic.

This study explores the roles played by magic in contemporary African warfare, specifically through the case of Sierra Leone, to assess its impact on behaviour in conflict. In the last two decades, rituals designed to imbue people with supernatural power and make them immune to enemy fire have been seen on post-Cold War battlefields across Africa. Wlodarczyk argues that the use of magic in warfare can be understood, not as an illustration of how Africa's reality is qualitatively different from the West's, but as appropriate and logical. Here, a conceptual framework is suggested for analysing culturally alien practices more broadly, to inform approaches to civilian and military intervention not only in Africa but in conflict theatres around the world.

This study is the first to assemble the evidence for the existence of sorcerors in the ancient world; it also addresses the question of their identity and social origins. The resulting investigation takes us to the underside of Greek and Roman society, into a world of wandering holy men and women, conjurors and wonder-workers, and into the lives of prostitutes, procuresses, charioteers and theatrical performers.
This fascinating reconstruction of the careers of witches and sorcerors allows us to see into previously inaccessible areas of Greco-Roman life. Compelling for both its detail and clarity, and with an extraordinarily revealing breadth of evidence employed, it will be an essential resource for anyone studying ancient magic.

This book deals with a fascinating and original claim in 16th-century Europe. Witches should be cured, not executed. It was the physician and scholar Johann Wier (1515-1588) who challenged the dominant idea. For his defense of witches, more than three centuries later, Sigmund Freud chose to put Wier's work among the ten books to be read. According to Wier, Satan seduced witches, thus they did not deserve to be executed, but they must be cured for their melancholy. When the witch hunt was rising, Wier was the first to use some of the arguments adopted in the emerging debate on religious tolerance in defence of witches. This is the first overall study of Wier which offers an innovative view of his thought, by highlighting Wier's sources and his attempts to involve theologians, physicians, and philosophers in his fight against cruel witch hunts. Johann Wier: Debating the Devil and Witches situates and explains his claim as a result of a moral and religious path as well as the outcome of his medical experience. The book aims to provide an insightful examination of Wier's works to read his pleas emphasizing the duty of every good Christian to not abandon anyone who strays from the flock of Christ. For these reasons, Wier was overwhelmed by bitter confutations, such as those of Jean Bodin, but he was also celebrated for his outstanding and prolific heritage for debating religious tolerance.

The focus of this book is on the phenomenon of cursing in shamanic practice and everyday life in Tuva, a former Soviet republic in Siberia. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork where the author interacted with a wide range of people involved in cursing practices, the book examines Tuvans' lived experience of cursing and shamanism, thereby providing deep insights into Tuvans' intimate and social worlds. It highlights especially the centrality of sound: how interactions between humans and non-humans are brought about through an array of sonic phenomena, such as musical sounds, sounds within words and non-linguistic vocalisations, and how such sonic phenomena are a key part of dramatic cursing events and wider shamanic performance and ritual, involving humans and spirits alike. Overall, the book reveals a great deal about occult practices and about social change in post-Soviet Tuva.

Shows students of the history of witchcraft and magic that the beliefs of the seventeenth century continued through the Enlightenment, despite the attempts by philosophers to dismiss magic and its practice, into the nineteenth century. The volume is divided into three sections highlighting different definitions of magic including the concern over the non-material world as found in popular and elite practices, its relationship with science and medicine, and other forms of divination available to the general population. Providing students with a broad view of how magic was engaged with in the eighteenth century to inform their own studies. Explores the relationship between magic, science and medicine providing students with a good understanding of how the emerging fields of science and medicine came into conflict with popular belief in and practice of magic. Allowing students to see why magic still resonated with the general public into the nineteenth century.

With their dramatic descriptions of black masses and cannibalistic feasts, the records generated by the Basque witch-craze of 160914 provide us with arguably the most demonologically-stereotypical accounts of the witches sabbath or akelarre to have emerged from early modern Europe. While the trials have attracted scholarly attention, the most substantial monograph on the subject was written nearly forty years ago and most works have focused on the ways in which interrogators shaped the pattern of prosecutions and the testimonies of defendants. Invoking the Akelarre diverts from this norm by employing more recent historiographical paradigms to analyze the contributions of the accused. Through interdisciplinary analyses of both French- and Spanish-Basque records, it argues that suspects were not passive recipients of elite demonological stereotypes but animated these received templates with their own belief and experience, from the dark exoticism of magical conjuration, liturgical cursing and theatrical misrule to the sharp pragmatism of domestic medical practice and everyday religious observance. In highlighting the range of raw materials available to the suspects, the book helps us to understand how the fiction of the witches sabbath emerged to such prominence in contemporary mentalities, whilst also restoring some agency to the defendants and nuancing the historical thesis that stereotypical content points to interrogatorial opinion and folkloric content to the voices of the accused. In its local context, this study provides an intimate portrait of peasant communities as they flourished in the Basque region in this period and leaves us with the irony that Europes most sensationally-demonological accounts of the witches sabbath may have evolved out of a particularly ardent commitment, on the part of ordinary Basques, to the social and devotional structures of popular Catholicism.

Faith horror refers to a significant outcropping of mid-1960s and 1970s films and adaptative novels that depict non-Christian communities of evil doers and their activities. Before this period, the classical horror villain was ultimately ineffectual. The demonic monster was an isolated, lone individual easily vanquished by an altruistic Christian protagonist. Alternatively, the villain in faith horror is organized into identity-affirming, likeminded religious congregations that successfully overcome protagonists. Faith horror was a cinematic trend that depicted Satanism, witchcraft and paganism during a cultural deliberation over the "Death of God," which debated the legitimacy of alternative spiritualities and the value of alliance to any faith at all. Covering popular works like Rosemary's Baby, The Wicker Man and The Omen, this book regards these films and their literary sources in relation to this historical moment, providing new ways of understanding both the period and the faith horror movement more generally.

Explores how bodies of knowledge developed, concerning folkloric beliefs, magic, sorcery, and witchcraft from the 12th -18th century which allows students to see how culture was exchanged across Europe leading up to the witch-trials of the 17th century and offers an explanation of why the witch-hunts and trials became so prevalent due to a strong belief in the existence of witchcraft in the popular conscious. The collection looks at a range of sources which crossed the religions, political and linguistic boundaries such as objects, legal documents, letters, art, literature, the oral tradition and pamphlets providing students with a range of case studies to deepen their understanding of the period and to inform their own research. Includes examples from across Europe from England to Italy, Norway to France and the Netherlands to Spain. Allowing students to see how these cultural exchanges crossed geographical boundaries to form a collective phenomenon.

" Despite their centuries-old history and traditions, witchcraft and magic are still very much a part of modern Anglo-American culture. In Lucifer Ascending, Bill Ellis looks at modern practices that are universally defined as "occult," from commonplace habits such as carrying a rabbit's foot for good luck or using a Ouija board, to more esoteric traditions, such as the use of spell books. In particular, Ellis shows how the occult has been a common element in youth culture for hundreds of years. Using materials from little known publications and archives, Lucifer Ascending details the true social function of individuals' dabbling with the occult. In his survey of what Ellis terms "vernacular occultism," the author is poised on a middle ground between a skeptical point of view that defines belief in witchcraft and Satan as irrational and an interpretation of witchcraft as an underground religion opposing Christianity. Lucifer Ascending examines the occult not as an alternative to religion but rather as a means for ordinary people to participate directly in the mythic realm.

'A groundbreaking work . . . Federici has become a crucial figure for . . . a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood. 'Rewarding . . . allows us to better understand the intimate relationship between modern patriarchy, the rise of the nation state and the transition from feudalism to capitalism' Guardian

Attain wealth, prosperity, and abundance with The Witches' Wealth Spell Book Add a little bit of magic to your daily life with this pocket-sized guide for spell casters of all levels. With spells and incantations for wealth, success, prosperity, and more, this charming collection is perfect for anyone with a penchant for the magical.

Best known as the Saducismus triumphatus (1681), Joseph Glanvill's book on witchcraft is among the most frequently published from the seventeenth century, and its arguments for the reality of diabolic witchcraft elicited passionate responses from critics and supporters alike. Davies untangles the intricate development of this text and explores how Glanvill's roles as theologian, philosopher and advocate for the Royal Society of London converge in its pages. Glanvill's broader philosophical method and unique approach to the supernatural provide a case study that enables the exploration of the interaction between the rise of experimental science and changing attitudes to witchcraft.

This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic-which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters-Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

This book began with a simple question: when readers such as us encounter the term magic or figures of magicians in early modern texts, dramatic or otherwise, how do we read them? In the twenty-first century we have recourse to an array of genres and vocabulary from magical realism to fantasy fiction that does not, however, work to read a historical figure like John Dee or a fictional one he inspired in Shakespeare's Prospero. Between longings to transcend human limitation and the actual work of producing, translating, and organizing knowledge, figures such as Dee invite us to re-examine our ways of reading magic only as metaphor. If not metaphor then what else? As we parse the term magic, it reveals a rich context of use that connects various aspects of social, cultural, religious, economic, legal and medical lives of the early moderns. Magic makes its presence felt not only as a forms of knowledge but in methods of knowing in the Renaissance. The arc of dramatists and texts that this book draws between Doctor Faustus, The Tempest, The Alchemist and Comus: A Masque at Ludlow Castle offers a sustained examination of the epistemologies of magic in the context of early modern knowledge formation. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Offering a new template for future exploration, Susan Greenwood examines and develops the notion that the experience of magic is a panhuman orientation of consciousness, a form of knowledge largely marginalized in Western societies. In this volume she aims to form a "bridge of communication" between indigenous magical or shamanic worldviews and rationalized Western cultures. She outlines an alternative mythological framework for the latter to help develop a magical perception, as well as giving practical case studies derived from her own research. The form of magic discussed here is not fantastic or virtual, but ecological and sensory. Magical knowledge infiltrates the body in its deepest levels of the subconscious, and unconscious, as well as conscious awareness; it is felt and understood through the connection with an inspirited world that includes the consciousness of other beings, including those of plant, animal and the physical environment. This is anthropology from the heart rather than the head, and it engages with the messy area of emotions, an embodiment of the senses, and struggles to find a common language of listening to one another across a void of differences. The aim is to provide a non-reductive structure for the creative interplay of both magical and analytical modes of thought. Passion is a motivator for change, and a change in attitude to magic as an integrative force of human understanding is the main thread of this work.

The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the best-known treatises dealing with the problem of what to do with witches. It was written in 1487 by a Dominican inquisitor, Heinrich Institoris, following his failure to prosecute a number of women for witchcraft, it is in many ways a highly personal document, full of frustration at official complacency in the face of a spiritual threat, as well as being a practical guide for law-officers who have to deal with a cunning, dangerous enemy. Combining theological discussion, illustrative anecdotes, and useful advice for those involved in suppressing witchcraft, its influence on witchcraft studies has been extensive. The only previous translation into English, that by Montague Summers produced in 1928, is full of inaccuracies. It is written in a style almost unreadable nowadays, and is unfortunately coloured by his personal agenda. This new edited translation, with an introductory essay setting witchcraft, Institoris, and the Malleus into clear, readable English, corrects Summers' mistakes and offers a lean, unvarnished version of what Institoris actually wrote. It will undoubtedly become the standard translation of this important and controversial late-medieval text. -- .