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 metaphorical.

Witchcraft violence is a feature of many contemporary African societies. In Ghana, belief in witchcraft and the malignant activities of putative witches is prevalent. Purported witches are blamed for all manner of adversities including inexplicable illnesses and untimely deaths. As in other historical periods and other societies, in contemporary Ghana, alleged witches are typically female, elderly, poor, and marginalized. Childhood socialization in homes and schools, exposure to mass media, and other institutional mechanisms ensure that witchcraft beliefs are transmitted across generations and entrenched over time. This book provides a detailed account of Ghanaian witchcraft beliefs and practices and their role in fueling violent attacks on alleged witches by aggrieved individuals and vigilante groups.

A Definitive Edition of the Symbolist Classic by the author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages Manly P. Hall is widely recognized as the preeminent voice of occult scholarship in the twentieth century, famous for his esoteric masterpiece The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928). Now, in this "deluxe edition," Hall's earliest work, The Initiates of the Flame, is reborn with a full complement of illustrations and historical introductions. Originally published in 1922, The Initiates of the Flame is Hall's first exploration--and still one of his most powerful--of myth and symbol. Its pages shine on a light on the inner meaning of symbols including the pyramid, holy grail, flame of wisdom, ark of the covenant, all-seeing eye, sword and stone, the elements of alchemy, and other gateways to the unseen world. Edited and reintroduced by popular voice of esoteric spirituality, Mitch Horowitz, and president of the Philosophical Research Society, Greg Salyer, Ph.D., this is the signature presentation of Hall's landmark.

Originally published in 1967, this book is a study of witchcraft and sorcery among the Shona, Ndebele and Kalanga peoples of Zimbabwe. It analyses in their social context verbatim evidence and confessions from a comprehensive series of judicial records. It provides the first systematic demonstration of the importance and the exstent to which such sources can be used to make a detailed analysis of the character and range of beliefs and motives. The main emphasis is on witchcraft and sorcery beliefs, the nature of accusations, confessions and divination, btoh traditional and as practised by members of the Pentecostal Church.

Why does the Torah begin with the letter beit, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet? In seeking answers to this question, Michael J. Alter has gathered a wealth of material drawing from the Oral Law (Mishnah and Talmud), the Midrash, anonymous kabbalistic texts, and the works of many prominent rabbis, scribes, and writers spanning the past 2,000 years.

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. -- .

Esotericism is the search for an absolute but hidden knowledge accessed through mystical vision, the mediation of higher beings, or personal experience. In Western cultural history esoteric approaches to religion have often been in conflict with - and suffered at the hands of - more established forms of religious belief and practice. 'Western Esotericism' presents a very broad and engaging history of the people and ideas which have shaped occult history from antiquity to today. Throughout the history of esotericism the dynamic of concealment and revelation has characterized the search for secret knowledge. Pursued both publically and privately, esotericism has come to influence more mainstream religious practice and culture and has significantly shaped our understanding of modernity. Today, esotericism continues to be practised by a range of both established and new religious movements. 'Western Esotericism' presents the essential guide to one of the most fascinating, provocative, and sustained of religious traditions.

This ground-breaking biography of Bishop Francis Hutchinson (1669-1739) provides a detailed and rare portrait of an early eighteenth century Irish bishop and witchcraft theorist. Drawing upon a wealth of printed primary source material, the book aims to increase our understanding of the eighteenth-century established clergy, both in England and Ireland. It illustrates how one of the main sceptical texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Historical essay concerning witchcraft (1718), was constructed and how it fitted into the wider intellectual and literary context of the time, examining Hutchinson's views on contemporary debates concerning modern prophecy and miracles, demonic and Satanic intervention, the nature of Angels and hell, and astrology. This book will be of particular interest to academics and students of history of witchcraft, and the religious, political and social history of Britain and Ireland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. -- .

This book provides an annotated source edition of the only two extant documents related to the sorcery trial brought against Pes de Guoythie and Condesse de Beheythie in Lower Navarre, in 1370. It provides full transcriptions of both documents, and English translations of the most salient passages. These sources illustrate at an early date many of the features prevalent in later sources on which trials, such as the metamorphosis of those accused into animals; infanticide; poisoned apples; collective meetings; and ointments made from various creatures. As such, it offers a fascinating insight into allegations of witchcraft in the High and Late Middle Ages.

Walkern, 1712. England has been free from witch-hunts for decades until Jane Wenham is blamed for a tragic death and charged with witchcraft. A terrifying ordeal begins, as the village is torn between those who want to save Jane's life and those who claim they want to save her soul. Inspired by events in a Hertfordshire village, the play explores sex and society's hunger to find and create witches. Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern premiered at Watford Palace Theatre before going on UK tour in September 2015, in an Out of Joint, Watford Palace Theatre and Arcola Theatre co-production, in association with Eastern Angles.

In the Western world, magic has often functioned as an umbrella term for various religious beliefs and ritual practices that seek to influence events by harnessing supernatural power. The definition of these myriad occult and esoteric traditions have, however, usually come from those that are opposed to its practice; notably authorities in religious, legal and intellectual spheres. This book seeks to provide a new perspective, directly from the practitioners of modern Western magic, by exploring how a distinctive mode of embodiment and consciousness can produce a transition from an 'ordinary' to a 'magical' worldview. Starting with an introduction to the study of magic in the Western academy, the book then presents the author's own participant observation of five ethnographic case studies of modern Western magic. The focus of these ethnographic case studies is directed towards ideas and methods the informants employ to self-legitimise and self-represent as 'magicians'. It concludes by discussing the phenomenological implications and issues around embodiment that are inherent to the contemporary practice of magic. This is a unique insight into the lived experience of practitioners of modern magic. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of the Occult and New Religious Movements, as well as Religious Studies academics examining issues around the embodiment and the anthropology of religion.

During the Victorian period, women were judged on the legendary guilt of the female sex. As the women's rights movement gathered strength and coherence, the advent of mesmerism, spiritualism and theosophy - collectively the new witchcraft of the Victorian period - revived old notions of female occult power. In this book, the author explores these two strands of Victorian feminism and argues that the taboo subject of menstruation was the hidden pleader at the centre of the woman question.

Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe. Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people in Europe were forced to flee their native lands and live in a state of physical or internal exile as a result of religious conflict and upheaval. Drawing on new insights from history of emotions methodologies, Feeling Exclusion explores the complex relationships between communities in exile, the homelands from which they fled or were exiled, and those from whom they sought physical or psychological assistance. It examines the various coping strategies religious refugees developed to deal with their marginalization and exclusion, and investigates the strategies deployed in various media to generate feelings of exclusion through models of social difference, that questioned the loyalty, values, and trust of "others". Accessibly written, divided into three thematic parts, and enhanced by a variety of illustrations, Feeling Exclusion is perfect for students and researchers of early modern emotions and religion.

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.

Witchcraft has proven an important, if difficult, historical subject to investigate and interpret over the last four decades or so. Modern historical research into witchcraft began as an attempt to tease out the worldview of ordinary people in 16th- and 17th-century England, but it quickly expanded to encompass the history of witchcraft in most cultures and societies that have existed with scholarly studies now extending back to the time of earliest law code that punished sorcery, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.E.), and forward to the last witchcraft cases in England, those of Helen Duncan and Jane Yorke, tried in 1944. There has also been a significant amount of interest in the development of the modern religion of witchcraft, or Wicca, as various forms of neo-paganism continue to attract adherents. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft covers the history of the Witchcraft from 1750 B.C.E. though the modern day. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on witch hunts, witchcraft trials, and related practices around the world. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the history of witchcraft.

This book takes what is often referred to as the "supernatural" to be normal natural phenomena that are closely linked to the neurobiology of the human species. Reflecting the neurocultural and biocultural perspective, the chapters cover phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, ghosts, and experiences of spirit entities. The contributors consider the "supernatural" as emerging from innate neurobiological structures and functions, and reflecting known neurobiological processes that explain their universality and persistence.

Do prophecies fail? A small group led by spirit mediums, infiltrated by social scientists, and reported on at intervals by the press: Together, these different parties create a sequence of mutual misunderstandings that leads both to a series of missed appointments with flying saucers from distant planets and to success in averting a global catastrophe.This volume proposes a re-reading of Leon Festinger's classic work on cognitive dissonance, offering a different account of the motivations and meanings of a group expecting the arrival of spacemen from another planet and anticipating the End of the World, and incorporating the social scientists who studied them into the picture.The author explores the relations between anthropology and psychology and between social scientific and natural scientific accounts of human behaviour, contributing to ideas about the role of science in contemporary society and to the sociology of secrecy..

Originally published in 1992, Channeling is a comprehensive bibliography on the subject of channeling. The book defines channeling as any message received or conveyed from transcendent entities and covers material on the history of channeling, those that have claimed to transcend death, contact with UFOs and contemporary channeling groups. The book acts as a research guide and seeks to outline the historical roots of channeling, explaining its major teachings and considers its significance as a spiritual movement. It provides sources from books, booklets, articles, and ephemeral material and offers a comprehensive list of both primary and secondary materials related to channeling, the bibliography takes the most diverse and useful sources of the time. This volume although published almost 30 years ago, still provides a unique and insightful collection for academics of religion, in particular those researching spiritualism and the occult.

This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch's links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.

The Malleus is an important text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet it also presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context, and is not generally representative of late medieval learned thinking. This, the first book-length study of the original text in English, provides students and scholars with an introduction to this controversial work and to the conceptual word of its authors. Like all witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their witch out of a constellation of pre-existing popular beliefs and learned traditions. Therefore, to understand the Malleus, one must also understand the contemporary and subsequent debates over the reality and nature of witches. This book argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic text, its arguments were powerfully compelling and therefore remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten. Consequently, although focused on a single text, this study has important implications for fifteenth-century witchcraft theory. This is a fascinating work on the Malleus Maleficarum and will be essential to students and academics of late medieval and early modern history, religion and witchcraft studies. -- .