History of Witchcraft

by Montague Summers

Book Overview

Vividly detailed and highly readable, this classic history of witchcraft and demonology provides a thorough exploration of sorcery, Satanism, and every variety of the black arts. Reflecting popular... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880291559
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Hippocrene Books
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Was not happy with this book. It's not what I'm looking for. I'll be returning this one.

It's written from a religious point of view without trying to be religious & is inaccurate on what Satanism actually really is. The author cannot separate Satan from Satanism!

Good old Monty!

I stumbled over this book purely by accident. I had no idea that Summers is still in print. It is like finding a long-lost childhood friend! Back in the 1950s I used to hang with ceremonial sorcerers and the occasional black magician in my old home town of San Francisco. I was an avid collector of old coinage, you see, and my main source for Indian head pennies and Liberty dimes was a strange little shop in the Mission District run by an old geezer who was also a taxidermist. He claimed to be over 200 years old, his life preserved and extended by ingesting certain Lovecraftian "essences" from his stock in trade. Frankly, I didn't believe him; I'm sure he wasn't a day over 150. Anyway, the shop was the local gathering place for the questing brotherhood. After all, if you lived in San Francisco and your grimoire called for, say, a tablespoon of bat's blood, where on earth were you going to get it but from your friendly and slightly weird local taxidermist? Let me make it clear that I never met a sorcerer who was anything but respectable. The black magicians in particular were the most law-abiding of people. One would-be necromancer spent his days visiting and cheering up elderly residents in hospitals. The story that he was sizing up future clients was a vile canard. These were not the social misfits who took up Satanism as peddled by Anton LaVey and all his charlatan successors; they came much later. Really, the only questionable thing about the sorcerers I knew was a deplorable tendency of some to walk about the streets in cloaks. From time to time, one sorcerer or another would take the plunge and attempt to conjure up a demon. (The more namby-pamby among them would say "daimon," but it was a distinction without a difference.) Real ceremonial magic is not for the unindustrious or slothful. There are robes to be embroidered, wands to be cut, blades to be forged, sigils to be drawn, flames to be lit, smokes to be inhaled and, believe it or not, prayers to be uttered. It is a long, intense, fatiguing process and, what the heck, it sometimes worked. It worked, that is, to the extent that an exhausted and half wigged-out sorcerer would convince himself that he had indeed called up a spirit from the vasty deep. And it would scare him silly. (In one of his books, Aleister Crowley gives a lengthy description of his shot at demon-raising and the absolutely predictable result.) After a bout of demonism, sorcerers would check in for short stays at convenient psychiatric facilities or, perhaps more likely, go on long benders. Then it was back to the taxidermy shop for sorcerous bull sessions about the esoteric literature then in print. (Grimoires, of course, were only valid in manuscript form and copies were held secret and unique to each individual sorcerer.) Eliphas Levi, the consensus held, was instructive but unsound in detail. Aleister Crowley was suggestive but ultimately incomprehensible--a delusion and a snare. Montag

Achieves it's Mission!

This work about witchcraft, sorcery, black magic, neuromancy, damnation, Satanism and every kind of magic and occult is written by the undisputed scholar in the field and is a work of unprecedented authority, of interest to all who are connected with the subject.

A Fascinating History of Witchcraft and Demonology.

_The History of Witchcraft and Demonology_ by Roman Catholic priest Montague Summers provides a fascinating account of the influence of Satan on the development of witchcraft and heresy. Montague Summers, a convert to Catholicism, was an eccentric character - a priest who operated independently in England and wrote much on the occult and folklore from the perspective of a medieval traditionalist Roman Catholic. Summers argues against the so-called rationalists and skeptics who refuse to recognize the existence of the supernatural or the role of evil and of Satan in the world. Against these and other modernists, Summers provides the traditional Roman Catholic view regarding the demonic nature of heresy and the role of Satan in its proliferation. According to Summers, the witch is at once "heretic and anarchist". He seeks to show how all heresy, beginning with the dualistic Gnostic heresy including Manicheeism, is rooted in satanism and attempts to supplant the godly order of society and makes war against Christ and his Catholic Church. Among other heresies mentioned by Summers are those of the Waldensians, the Adamites, and the Cainites - Gnostics who spurned Christ and opted instead for the worship of Satan making an effort to identify with the sources of evil in Holy Scripture such as Cain and Judas Iscariot. Summers also mentions the Templars who became corrupted and engaged in vile acts including the worship of a human head known as the Baphomet. The witch, a devotee of Satan, may be understood as a revival of these most ancient and heinous heresies. Summers argues for the reality of witchcraft, claiming that there really existed a conspiracy against medieval society represented in witchcraft and that that conspiracy involved the worship of Satan, against the rationalists who attempt to explain it away through other means. Summers also argues against the theories of Margaret Murray, an anthropologist and Egyptologist who in her (in)famous book _The Witch-Cult in Western Europe_ argued that witchcraft represented a surviving pre-Christian pagan religion of Dianic worship which underlay medieval Christian society. Summers attempts to outline various features of the witch including the role of various demons and familiars, the witch's mark (believed to be an imprint left from the claw of Satan, and explaining the role of the "witch pricker"), the presence of a tiny nipple on the witch's body through which the familiar often in the form of a cat was nourished, and the role of the witch's sabbat. Summers also shows how the witch as Satanist sought to ape the Church of Christ, desecrate the host and religious objects, and engage in the black mass. Among others, Summers makes reference to such notorious criminals as Gilles de Rais (who engaged in the murder of children - another frequent accusation made against the witch) and the author J. K. Huysmans (whose novels feature Satanism and the black mass). Summers also turns his attention t

The definitive work of witchcraft & demonology!

This is a textbook of witchcraft and demonology written by the Catholic priest that found the need to translate the "Malleus Maleficarum" (the professional manual for witch hunters for nearly three centuries) into modern English. This was written prior to the modern Wiccan movement and discusses the horrors of sorcery and pacts with the devil. If you are looking for the definitive non-fiction work on the evils of witchcraft and demonology then, you have found it. If you are looking for a book promoting bunny-fluff Wiccan friendship magic, you're in over your head here.

A classic study of witchcraft

One of the first, and still the best, scholarly studies of witchcraft, which deals in general terms with its history and practices (the companion volume The Geography of Witchcraft describes specific cases of witchcraft from around the world). Summers's baroque language is ideally suited to his subject, which is treated seriously, but with considerable wit. His inclination to believe too much rather than too little has not always found favour, but he wrote from the viewpoint of a Catholic priest who, though he relished describing the ways of the witch, also roundly condemned them.