|
Books > Religion & Spirituality > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies > Satanism & demonology
A 17th-century French haberdasher invented the Black Mass. An
18th-century English Cabinet Minister administered the Eucharist to
a baboon. High-ranking Catholic authorities in the 19th century
believed that Satan appeared in Masonic lodges in the shape of a
crocodile and played the piano there. A well-known scientist from
the 20th century established a cult of the Antichrist and exploded
in a laboratory experiment. Three Italian girls in 2000 sacrificed
a nun to the Devil. A Black Metal band honored Satan in Krakow,
Poland, in 2004 by exhibiting on stage 120 decapitated sheep heads.
Some of these stories, as absurd as they might sound, were real.
Others, which might appear to be equally well reported, are false.
But even false stories have generated real societal reactions. For
the first time, Massimo Introvigne proposes a general social
history of Satanism and anti-Satanism, from the French Court of
Louis XIV to the Satanic scares of the late 20th century, satanic
themes in Black Metal music, the Church of Satan, and beyond.
Russian Tales of Demonic Possession: Translations of Savva Grudtsyn
and Solomonia is a translation from the Russian of two stories of
demonic possession, of innocence lost and regained. The original
versions of both tales date back to the seventeenth century, but
the feats of suffering and triumph described in them are timeless.
Aleksei Remizov, one of Russia's premiere modernists, recognized
the relevance of the late-medieval material for his own
mid-twentieth-century readers and rewrote both tales, publishing
them in 1951 under the title The Demoniacs. The volume offers a new
translation of the original Tale of Savva Grudtsyn as well as
first-ever translations of The Tale of The Demoniac Solomonia and
Remizov's Demoniacs. Russian Tales of Demonic Possession opens with
an introduction that interprets and contextualizes both the
late-medieval and the twentieth-century tales. By providing new
critical interpretations of all four tales as well as a short
discussion of the history of demons in Russia, this introduction
makes an eerily exotic world accessible to today's English-speaking
audiences. Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia, the protagonists of the
two tales, are young people poised on the threshold of adulthood.
When demons suddenly appear to confront and overmaster them, each
of them teeters on the brink of despair in a world filled with
chaos and temptation. The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn and The Tale of
the Demoniac Solomonia propel us forcibly into the realm of good
and evil and pose hard questions: Why does evil afflict us? How
does it manifest itself? How can it be overcome? Aleksey Remizov's
modernist re-castings of the two stories offer compelling evidence
that these same questions are very much with us today and are still
in need of answers.
|
|