"Shakespeare knew all about the devil, and Yolande Suzin tells you why. Using her formidable knowledge of the supernatural, she tells what the man from Stratford could never say. Fast, intelligent and challenging, this book earns the rare distinction of being nonfiction that matters." Gerald Brittle, Author, The Demonologist, The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren Shakespeare's tragedies are powerful tales of the occult for sophisticated audiences. Where witchcraft is in play, the rules of interaction with the spirit world are not to be broken. Elizabethans knew infractions sanctioned evil to dispense extraordinary influence over our senses, emotions, imagination and body; moderns do not. This narrative describes the conflict behind the scenes in the barter for possession of a human soul, and why spirits act as they do. What was eliminated from Shakespeare's works is skillfully illuminated in the writer's narrative to show the balance of condemnation, punishment and deliverance in the invisible world. Told from the view of hunted and hunter, this detailed exposure of a victim to the impact of witchcraft explains why for thousands of years the practice of sorcery evoked a death penalty, and rightly so.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1904 Edition.

Children of Lucifer explores the historical origins of Satanism, the "anti-religion" that adopts Satan, the Judeo-Christian representative of evil, as an object of veneration. Ruben van Luijk traces its development from a concept invented by the Christian church to demonize its internal and external competitors, to a positive (anti-)religious identity embraced to varying degrees by groups in the modern West. Van Luijk offers a comprehensive intellectual history of this long and unpredictable trajectory; a story that involves Romantic poets, radical anarchists, eccentric esotericists, Decadent writers, and schismatic exorcists, among others, culminating in the establishment of the Church of Satan by carnival entertainer Anton Szandor LaVey. Yet, he argues, this story is more than just a collection of colorful characters and unlikely historical episodes. The emergence of new attitudes towards Satan proves to be intimately linked to the Western Revolution-the ideological struggle for emancipation that transformed the West and is epitomized by the American and French Revolutions. It is also closely connected to secularization, that other exceptional historical process during which western culture spontaneously renounced its traditional gods in order to enter into a self-imposed state of religious indecision. Children of Lucifer, thus, makes the case that the emergence of Satanism presents a shadow history of the evolution of modern civilization as we know it.

The title of this book is a question, and one by no means strained, if considered from the view-point of modern thought. We have undertaken an answer. If by reason and revelation we can arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, the gain thereby cannot be overestimated. If the personality of Satan can be successfully consigned to the religious junk pile, our Bible is at once thrown into a jumble of contradictions and inconsistencies. The result will be even worse than our enemies claim for it now. One of the late recognized writers on the Old Testament says: "The Old Testament is no longer considered valuable among scholars as a sacred oracle, but it is valuable in that it is the history of a people." If the Devil is a Myth, our Bible can be nothing better than historical chaos. -C.F. Wimberly