Night's black agents : witches, wizards and the dead in the ancient world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Night's black agents : witches, wizards and the dead in the ancient world
Hambledon Continuum, 2008
Available at 2 libraries
Note
Bibliography: p. [197]-217
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The supernatural lore of Ancient Greece and Rome is vividly brought to life in these pages.The literature of Classical antiquity bristles with horrible witches, mysterious wizards, terrifying ghosts, magic books, curses, voodoo-dolls, even werewolves, vampires and Frankenstein's monsters. Many of these tales have directly shaped our own culture's lore of magic and ghosts, and consequently, these tales speak to us today with great immediacy.This book covers a period of over a thousand years that witnessed some massive historical and cultural changes, including the advent of Christianity. Ancient culture was generally conservative and this is particularly true of its notions of ghosts and witches, which are strongly bound up with traditional tales and folklore of various kinds. Such tales preserve and conserve ideas about ghosts and witchcraft, and they survive to achieve this effect precisely because they are wonderfully engaging.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. The First Wicked Witches of the West?
- 2. Roman Gothic - the Witches of the Latin Tradition
- 3. Babylon and Memphis - the Sorcerers of the Imperial Age
- 4. Hidden Tales - Grimoires, Amulets and Curse Tablets
- 5. Across the Divide: Love and Sex Between the Living and the Dead
- Bibliography
- Index.
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