Bring a touch of witchcraft into your tarot practice with this illustrated deck inspired by Hocus Pocus! Beloved since its release in 1993, Hocus Pocus has put a spell on fans with its humor and heart. Now, tarot enthusiasts and Hocus Pocus fans alike can celebrate their love for the film with this official tarot deck. - A MUST-HAVE FOR FANS: Featuring original illustrations of the Sanderson sisters and the wider world of Hocus Pocus, this deck matches characters from the film with tarot archetypes, making it a fresh interpretation of a traditional tarot deck. - COMPLETE TAROT EXPERIENCE: This deluxe set of 78 cards consists of both major and minor arcana, perfect for anyone beginning their tarot practice, as well as for experienced practitioners. - BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED: Each card features a full-color illustration of a character from Hocus Pocus, including the Sanderson Sisters, the Dennisons, Ernie, Billie Butcherson and more. - DETAILED GUIDEBOOK: Includes a 128-page guidebook with explanations of each card's meaning and simple spreads for easy readings. - GREAT GIFT: Packaged in a sturdy and decorative gift box, Hocus Pocus: The Official Tarot Deck and Guidebook will enchant fans of the film and tarot practitioners alike. - COMPLETE YOUR COLLECTION: Hocus Pocus: 13 Frights of Halloween also available! See corrections and errata here.

The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France. Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and gender; this study considers the male, female, and hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women's experiences to be sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child. Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore, by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and gender.

The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France. Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and gender; this study considers the male, female, and hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women's experiences to be sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child. Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore, by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and gender.

Alone, standing amid the wreckage of the House of Urantz, the last of Valni's strength ebbed. She trembled, a young girl wearing a parvis oil soaked sack dress, her head hanging forward, her long hair caught in a shaft of sunlight. Slowly she descended to her knees, sinking them in the ash and charcoal which covered the floor of the fire gutted hall. The fire and smoke blackened sculptures of her ancestors and her parents remained on their pedestals where the Mools had left them in dread of magic. The stone eyes stared blankly at the scarred and blackened opposite walls. Gradually the girl toppled forward and stretched out amid the charred debris, wriggling in it and covering herself with it despairingly. Her weeping was a lone, unheard anguish, lost on the empty plain, the last sound of a living Latannese between the horizons.

James Benson had an astute eye for a good deal, or a shapely leg. Shrewd appreciations of circumstances were his benchmarks. He wasn't right all the time but he accepted that as a natural part of life. The important thing to him, as he grew older, was being rarely, if ever, badly wrong. The facts were that he had been hugely unobservant and grievously wrong about diabolical events and characters close to him, and his life had run parallel to a monstrous evil he had not even suspected.

David Vidardal felt that if he was not careful he could go quite mad here, surrounded by the ghosts of a bygone age and a breeze whispering in the enveloping trees. His musings were disturbed by a movement at the entrance to his studio, a brief blink of the intense, African sunlight as someone crossed the threshold. Michaela appeared as quietly as though she had been carried to the room by a mist. Her hair was in a pony tail, she wore a plain T-shirt, and was so blonde it seemed she had no eyebrows or eyelashes. She stared at him with intense, green eyes while she made a vague gesture to her right, "I live in the house next door, with my aunt Julia, and my cousin." The meeting was the beginning of a journey into obsession and dangerous friendship where reality mixed with illusion, passion and murder.

Sheel-Da was caught between her own world and the beguiling powers of beings who wandered black seas and fire islands of the cosmos. Her life had been cast in the image of a dark order which had rescued her from death and raised her to serve an alien master. She had fought and clawed for her betterment, endured indignities and suffered pain. No one who knew her would have thought she could be turned from the order which had moulded her. She touched the diamond armband given to her by Thoromaz the adventurer, lightly with the tips of her fingers. She had never owned a jewel of her own, they were extremely rare in her own time and place. Later, when the ship was settling down for its second night on the sea of the floating islands, she stood on deck and watched the moon, enjoyed the cool breeze and privately admired the only gift anyone had ever given her without expecting something in return. When Thoromaz consulted Jastogal the clairvoyant, he was told, "The woman named Sheel-Da is like a ghost over the sea on a still night. She is a misplacement from beyond our understanding and she will fade from us through a gate we cannot open." The cause of the misplacement was the Stream of Arobo, and its mission was to destroy the empire that Sheel-Da served.