The book of witches

Lest any reader should open this volume expecting to read an exhaustive treatise on witches and witchcraft, treated scientifically, historically, and so forth, let me disarm him...

To the superficial glance it might seem that he who would urge a revival of witchcraft is confronted by a task more Herculean than that of making dry bones live--in that the bon...

It is wild weather overhead. All day the wind has been growing more and more boisterous, blowing up great mountains of grey cloud out of the East, chasing them helter-skelter ac...

The witch, in the broader sense of the word, may be said to have existed ever since mankind first evolved an imagination, and may be expected to expire only with the death of th...

Having decided, very early in his earthly career, to acknowledge a supernatural world, Man promptly set to work to people it after his own image. One not providing scope for his...

In his very learned and exhaustive treatise, "De la Démonomanie des Sorciers," the worthy Bodin, with enterprise worthy of a modern serial-story writer, keeps his reader's curio...

Having seen how the witch in general lived and went about her evil business, it may be well to consider the personality of individual members of the craft. There have been, need...

Such zealous sixteenth and seventeenth century dogmatists as King James I., the Inquisitor Sprenger, Jean Bodin, or Pierre de Lancre might have found it difficult to put forward...

Although the Christian witch was the direct descendant of the Jewish, there were yet other branches of her family tree not without their influence upon her final development. Ch...

Seeing that it affects ourselves so considerably, we are in the habit of proclaiming the introduction of Christianity as the greatest revolution in history--a claim which will b...

I have elsewhere in this volume attempted to show that, even in our own days, there is nothing particularly incredible about a witch--and that the disrespect into which she has...

The law--especially in this country--gains half its terrors from its pomp and circumstance. An English prisoner, condemned to death by a wigless judge, might well regard himself...

The influence of longitude upon national tendencies in superstition is far too wide a subject to be here discussed in any detail, but speaking generally, it may be said that the...

The universality of the belief in witchcraft carried in its train international belief in the efficacy of persecution as its cure. When one nation led the others were bound to f...

Were it not that dogs and horses have frequently been observed to express their fear of ghosts, an apt definition for man would be "the superstitious animal." Certainly no human...

To those who deny the existence of the witch in fact, any mention of the witch in fiction as a separate entity may seem superfluous. Nevertheless even the enlightened must admit...

No study of witchcraft--however slight--could be considered complete did it ignore its importance in the world of to-day. Dispossessed though she may be, in a small intellectual...