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The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology
The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology explores this dark aspect of folklore and religion and the role that demons play in the modern world. This comprehensive resource presents more than 400 entries and more than 80 black-and-white photographs documenting beliefs about demons and demonology from ancient history to the present.
302 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
194 people are currently reading
2623 people want to read
About the author
Rosemary Ellen Guiley
141 books207 followersRosemary Ellen Guiley is a leading expert on the paranormal, and is the author of 45+ books, including ten single-volume encyclopedias. Since 1983, she has worked full-time in the paranormal, researching, investigating and writing. She has done extensive field work investigating haunted, mysterious and sacred places, and has had numerous strange and unexplained experiences. When she is not on the paranormal road, she is working on new books and writing for TAPS Paramagazine, FATE magazine, and the Journal of Abduction-Encounter Research. Rosemary lives in New Jersey, and spend much of her time traveling the spooky byways of one of the most haunted states in America, Pennsylvania."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
February 19, 2018
Excellent encyclopedia on demons. The only disappointment is finding out how similar most of them are.
September 23, 2012
The 72 demon's powers and attributes (if you want to call them that) were similar and sometimes exactly the same, but with a different amount of legions. Although, some demons work together I would have liked to have seen a list of the hierarchy. There is mention of dukes, marquis, grand dukes, earls, princes, kings, and presidents. Should I use modern time lists to see who is the most powerful or what.
There are some interesting things to learn about possession, witchcraft, amulets, seals, and the seven deadly sins.
A good resource book for writing about demons, but you will most likely have to find others as this is not all encompassing on this subject.
There are some interesting things to learn about possession, witchcraft, amulets, seals, and the seven deadly sins.
A good resource book for writing about demons, but you will most likely have to find others as this is not all encompassing on this subject.
September 9, 2016
Ordered this while quite drunk... came in the mail today. Nice one, me!
February 16, 2019
A very thorough tome. The writing a little dry to read cover to cover, but it's really not designed for that. It's really designed to be a reference book and is quite good at that.
January 13, 2018
I got this book because I have always been interested in mythology.
The good: This book is pretty thorough when talking about the various demons in Christian mythology, as well as the witch hysteria in Europe.
The bad: Although there are entries on Islam,Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism, This book is heavily Euro-centric. If you want to learn about evil spirits in non European belief systems, you might want to look elsewhere.
The disconcerting: I get the distinct impression that the author thinks that demons and demon possession are real. Which I think is nuts.
The good: This book is pretty thorough when talking about the various demons in Christian mythology, as well as the witch hysteria in Europe.
The bad: Although there are entries on Islam,Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism, This book is heavily Euro-centric. If you want to learn about evil spirits in non European belief systems, you might want to look elsewhere.
The disconcerting: I get the distinct impression that the author thinks that demons and demon possession are real. Which I think is nuts.
February 26, 2010
Very good collection of demon lore, although some entries felt like duplicate, cut-and-paste for the sake of increasing the page numbers. Still, well-researched and unbiased.
July 15, 2024
Great for my poems and acute,niche,eccentric demon obsession
January 25, 2022
A useful and quite complete reference book on the matter. I would supplement this with Grimoires such as the Lesser Key of Solomon the King (Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis or simply Lemegeton) which I read first years ago is in part to blame for my interest in the occult / Golden Dawn. Also add to the list Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum and books attributed to Honorius of Thebes, the 3-4 books (especially the 4th) by Cornelius Agrippa, Reginald Scot's 1584 book, "The Discoverie of Witchcraft", "The Magus" by British occultist Francis Barrett (1801) and Gerald Gardner's Book of Shadows. My basic list could not be complete without John Dee's ORDINES DESCENDENS an Enochian Grimoire on Demon Evocation & Black Magic
December 10, 2025
In an era when devils tend to be either campy franchise villains or half-ironic memes, “The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology” is stubbornly earnest. Rosemary Ellen Guiley takes seriously what most readers encounter, if at all, as the set dressing of horror films: names, hierarchies, cases, rituals, entire cosmologies of evil. The result is a book that operates on two levels at once. On the surface, it is exactly what it claims to be – a reference work, alphabetized, illustrated, useful. Underneath, it is a quiet argument that evil has both history and personality, and that we ignore that at our peril.
Guiley’s voice is recognizably the voice of a field researcher who has read widely, interviewed widely, and stood in more than a few cold, unfriendly rooms. The prose is plain, not scholarly, but it is packed. Her definitions are brisk, her case summaries compact, and her cross–references constant. She rarely lingers in theory for long. Instead, she moves the reader from object to story, from etymology to incident, as if the most convincing case for the reality of the demonic is the sheer volume and recurrence of the testimony.
The book’s architecture is straightforward. After a foreword by John Zaffis – an exorcism–seasoned investigator whose understated dread sets the tone – and a tight introduction in which Guiley lays out her operating assumptions, the text plunges into entries that run from “Abaddon” through “Zotz.” The coverage is broad: biblical, apocryphal, patristic, medieval, early modern, anthropological, occult, and pop cultural. Demons and demon–like entities stand beside demonologists, possessed nuns beside modern exorcists, Zoroastrian archfiends beside Japanese fox spirits and Brazilian exus. It is a genuinely international gallery, even if the gravitational pull of Christian demonology remains strong.
Guiley’s strengths are clearest when she leans into that catholic breadth. She has a knack for giving a name just enough context to become more than a line in a grimoire. A Goetic spirit is never only a sigil and a rank. It is a personality with a literary history: a fallen angel who once belonged to Thrones or Dominations, a lion–headed duke who now presides over twenty or forty legions, a sea–spirit whose mermaid body trails plague and rotting wounds in its wake. Biblical demons are framed not only by their proof texts, but by the interpretive traditions that have grown around them. Zoroastrian daevas stand as mirrors to the Amesha Spentas. The Watchers of 1 Enoch spill into Renaissance angelology and modern fallen–angel lore. Even minor figures – a cemetery–haunting Arabian algul, a German alp with its nocturnal, breast–feeding malice – arrive with enough folkloric texture to feel unsettlingly plausible.
Crucially, the book is not confined to beings. It is just as interested in technologies, symptoms, and legal instruments. Entries on amulets and talismans trace the logic of protective objects across cultures: the mezuzah as a boundary marker of covenant, bells as demon–repellers, metal plates and inscribed parchments as portable small–scale treaties between human and spirit. Possession is broken down into infestation, obsession, oppression, and full takeover, with attention paid to how these categories overlap with and diverge from psychiatric language. Witchcraft appears first as a theological crime, fueled by texts like “Malleus Maleficarum” and judicial zeal, and then reappears in its twentieth–century guises as Wicca, ceremonial magic, and explicitly Luciferian paths.
One of the book’s most useful moves is to fold in concrete cases. The Loudun possessions, the Nancy case, the Throckmorton children in Warboys, the Anneliese Michel exorcisms, the Amityville haunting, the Southington funeral home: each is reduced to a few pages, but Guiley manages to preserve the core problem of each story. There is always a tangle of factors – sexual repression, local politics, confessional rivalry, mental illness, fraud, genuine belief. The reader is not told exactly what to think. Instead, the cases are presented as nodes where the demonic vocabulary of a culture is asked to do explanatory work. That, in itself, is a kind of argument. Demons are not only figures appearing in remote antiquity; they are names given to uncanny experiences that refuse to sit quietly inside medical or social categories.
Guiley writes as a believer, and she is explicit about that in her introduction. She affirms that demons are real entities, not just metaphors. She warns that evil is most effective when ignored or reduced to entertainment. She is wary of people who pursue demonology as a kind of edgy hobby, and she shares Zaffis’s unease about the way media have glamorized exorcism. This perspective infuses the entries without overwhelming them. You can sense it in the way she narrates certain hauntings, the seriousness with which she treats sacramentals and blessings, the respect she accords to priests and lay investigators who, in her view, have risked themselves on the front lines.
For some readers, that stance will be a feature. The tone of the encyclopedia makes it unusually accessible to people standing inside religious frameworks who are wary of purely symbolic or psychological accounts of evil. For others, it will be a limitation. This is not a neutral academic compendium. Footnotes are sparse; bibliographic support is gathered at the back rather than attached to individual entries. Guiley’s synthesis relies heavily on secondary sources, including older demonological handbooks and modern occult writers, and she is sometimes more interested in reporting a tradition than in interrogating it.
That choice leads to the book’s most serious weakness: its classification system can be blunt. In order to make the encyclopedia comprehensive, Guiley adopts a very wide definition of demon and demonology. That means that, alongside figures whose demonic status is uncontested within their own traditions, she includes deities, folk beings, and underworld powers who have been labeled “demons” largely by hostile outsiders or by later Christian polemic. An Aztec god of sacrifice, a Norse death goddess, a Hindu demon–king, even the fox spirits and tengu of East Asia – all of them appear under a demonic umbrella.
When she has space, she acknowledges the problem: that these beings are not demonic in their indigenous context, that their functions range from guardian to trickster to cosmic regulator. The entry on Zoroastrianism, for example, is careful about the distinction between daevas and yazatas, and about how the dualistic system is meant to be read. The treatment of Umbanda recognizes that spirits seen as sinister by outsiders are not simply equivalents of Christian devils. The entry on “Witchcraft” charts the shift from heresy to religion, and makes clear that contemporary Wiccans do not worship Satan. Yet there are moments, especially with briefer entries, where the compression flattens nuance. A goddess becomes a demon in a single sentence, the only explanation being that Christian writers said so.
The book’s reliance on the language of rank and legions has a similar double edge. For practitioners of ceremonial magic or readers interested in Solomonic traditions, the precision is welcome. The demons of “The Lesser Key of Solomon” and related grimoires are all present, complete with their offices, their preferred forms, and the number of troops under their command. For scholars of religion, those hierarchies are themselves an object of study. But for a reader hoping for more ethnographic depth, it can feel as if the more granular structures of one magical system are being granted more reality than the complexities of others.
Still, the very compression that causes those problems is also what makes the encyclopedia so usable. Guiley is a disciplined summarizer. She rarely wastes a line. Entries that could easily sprawl – “Satan,” “Lucifer,” “Witchcraft,” “Zoroastrianism” – are kept to a manageable length, with enough signposting to guide further reading. She knows when to let a narrative carry itself. The story of Theophilus, the medieval cleric who makes a pact with the Devil and then spends the rest of his life begging the Virgin Mary to intercede, is told with the clean, folkloric inevitability of a sermon. The account of the Throckmorton children has just enough detail that the reader can feel how frightening and manipulative such performances must have been, without turning into a miniature monograph.
The prose itself is sober. Guiley does not indulge in baroque horror language. She prefers short, declarative sentences with occasional bursts of rhetorical emphasis. When she quotes a demon’s self–description from a grimoire, she lets the strangeness of the voice stand. When she describes a haunting, she uses sensory detail sparingly. The effect is cumulative. By the time the reader has moved from Abaddon to Zotz, through dozens of possessions, exorcisms, curses, apparitions, and grim rituals, the plainness of the style has begun to feel like a form of testimony. This is how people talk when they want to be believed.
The book is also alert to modern media. Films like “The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” “The Witches of Eastwick,” and “A Haunting in Connecticut” are treated not as trivializations, but as part of the contemporary demonological archive: works that both draw from older lore and, in turn, reshape the expectations of audiences who may later find themselves confronting a set of knocks in the walls or a sudden change in temperature. Guiley is interested in how fictional treatments can amplify fear, create misperceptions, or occasionally serve as inadvertent catechesis about the tropes of possession and exorcism.
For writers, game designers, and artists, the encyclopedia is an obvious treasure trove. It offers hundreds of names, motifs, and narrative seeds. For clergy and laypeople involved in deliverance ministries or haunted–house investigations, it offers a way to situate particular stories in a larger pattern, to recognize when a “new” phenomenon is really just another face of a very old pattern. For readers with a general interest in religion and folklore, it is a fast way to move from the familiar Satan and Beelzebub to the less familiar, but no less haunting, figures that haunt thresholds, graveyards, childbirth beds, and dreams around the world.
What it is not is an exhaustive, source–critical encyclopedia in the academic sense. It will not replace scholarly handbooks for those who need detailed references, linguistic analysis, or careful argument about the development of a given tradition. It sits instead in a different category: informed, synthetic, and unapologetically shaped by the author’s own fieldwork and convictions. For many readers, that combination will make it more, not less, compelling. One feels, reading it, that Guiley has spent a lot of time listening – to grimoires, to historians, to priests, to mediums, to frightened families – and that the book is her attempt to put those voices in conversation.
Taken as a whole, “The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology” succeeds in its stated aim. It shines a steady light into a dark corner of religious imagination without pretending that illumination will make the darkness vanish. It is a book to be consulted, not swallowed in a single sitting, and it is best approached with the same caution its author recommends in her introduction: respect the material, be honest about what you do and do not know, and take seriously the possibility that evil is cleverer than you are. Measured against its intentions and its chosen form, it deserves an 89 out of 100.
Guiley’s voice is recognizably the voice of a field researcher who has read widely, interviewed widely, and stood in more than a few cold, unfriendly rooms. The prose is plain, not scholarly, but it is packed. Her definitions are brisk, her case summaries compact, and her cross–references constant. She rarely lingers in theory for long. Instead, she moves the reader from object to story, from etymology to incident, as if the most convincing case for the reality of the demonic is the sheer volume and recurrence of the testimony.
The book’s architecture is straightforward. After a foreword by John Zaffis – an exorcism–seasoned investigator whose understated dread sets the tone – and a tight introduction in which Guiley lays out her operating assumptions, the text plunges into entries that run from “Abaddon” through “Zotz.” The coverage is broad: biblical, apocryphal, patristic, medieval, early modern, anthropological, occult, and pop cultural. Demons and demon–like entities stand beside demonologists, possessed nuns beside modern exorcists, Zoroastrian archfiends beside Japanese fox spirits and Brazilian exus. It is a genuinely international gallery, even if the gravitational pull of Christian demonology remains strong.
Guiley’s strengths are clearest when she leans into that catholic breadth. She has a knack for giving a name just enough context to become more than a line in a grimoire. A Goetic spirit is never only a sigil and a rank. It is a personality with a literary history: a fallen angel who once belonged to Thrones or Dominations, a lion–headed duke who now presides over twenty or forty legions, a sea–spirit whose mermaid body trails plague and rotting wounds in its wake. Biblical demons are framed not only by their proof texts, but by the interpretive traditions that have grown around them. Zoroastrian daevas stand as mirrors to the Amesha Spentas. The Watchers of 1 Enoch spill into Renaissance angelology and modern fallen–angel lore. Even minor figures – a cemetery–haunting Arabian algul, a German alp with its nocturnal, breast–feeding malice – arrive with enough folkloric texture to feel unsettlingly plausible.
Crucially, the book is not confined to beings. It is just as interested in technologies, symptoms, and legal instruments. Entries on amulets and talismans trace the logic of protective objects across cultures: the mezuzah as a boundary marker of covenant, bells as demon–repellers, metal plates and inscribed parchments as portable small–scale treaties between human and spirit. Possession is broken down into infestation, obsession, oppression, and full takeover, with attention paid to how these categories overlap with and diverge from psychiatric language. Witchcraft appears first as a theological crime, fueled by texts like “Malleus Maleficarum” and judicial zeal, and then reappears in its twentieth–century guises as Wicca, ceremonial magic, and explicitly Luciferian paths.
One of the book’s most useful moves is to fold in concrete cases. The Loudun possessions, the Nancy case, the Throckmorton children in Warboys, the Anneliese Michel exorcisms, the Amityville haunting, the Southington funeral home: each is reduced to a few pages, but Guiley manages to preserve the core problem of each story. There is always a tangle of factors – sexual repression, local politics, confessional rivalry, mental illness, fraud, genuine belief. The reader is not told exactly what to think. Instead, the cases are presented as nodes where the demonic vocabulary of a culture is asked to do explanatory work. That, in itself, is a kind of argument. Demons are not only figures appearing in remote antiquity; they are names given to uncanny experiences that refuse to sit quietly inside medical or social categories.
Guiley writes as a believer, and she is explicit about that in her introduction. She affirms that demons are real entities, not just metaphors. She warns that evil is most effective when ignored or reduced to entertainment. She is wary of people who pursue demonology as a kind of edgy hobby, and she shares Zaffis’s unease about the way media have glamorized exorcism. This perspective infuses the entries without overwhelming them. You can sense it in the way she narrates certain hauntings, the seriousness with which she treats sacramentals and blessings, the respect she accords to priests and lay investigators who, in her view, have risked themselves on the front lines.
For some readers, that stance will be a feature. The tone of the encyclopedia makes it unusually accessible to people standing inside religious frameworks who are wary of purely symbolic or psychological accounts of evil. For others, it will be a limitation. This is not a neutral academic compendium. Footnotes are sparse; bibliographic support is gathered at the back rather than attached to individual entries. Guiley’s synthesis relies heavily on secondary sources, including older demonological handbooks and modern occult writers, and she is sometimes more interested in reporting a tradition than in interrogating it.
That choice leads to the book’s most serious weakness: its classification system can be blunt. In order to make the encyclopedia comprehensive, Guiley adopts a very wide definition of demon and demonology. That means that, alongside figures whose demonic status is uncontested within their own traditions, she includes deities, folk beings, and underworld powers who have been labeled “demons” largely by hostile outsiders or by later Christian polemic. An Aztec god of sacrifice, a Norse death goddess, a Hindu demon–king, even the fox spirits and tengu of East Asia – all of them appear under a demonic umbrella.
When she has space, she acknowledges the problem: that these beings are not demonic in their indigenous context, that their functions range from guardian to trickster to cosmic regulator. The entry on Zoroastrianism, for example, is careful about the distinction between daevas and yazatas, and about how the dualistic system is meant to be read. The treatment of Umbanda recognizes that spirits seen as sinister by outsiders are not simply equivalents of Christian devils. The entry on “Witchcraft” charts the shift from heresy to religion, and makes clear that contemporary Wiccans do not worship Satan. Yet there are moments, especially with briefer entries, where the compression flattens nuance. A goddess becomes a demon in a single sentence, the only explanation being that Christian writers said so.
The book’s reliance on the language of rank and legions has a similar double edge. For practitioners of ceremonial magic or readers interested in Solomonic traditions, the precision is welcome. The demons of “The Lesser Key of Solomon” and related grimoires are all present, complete with their offices, their preferred forms, and the number of troops under their command. For scholars of religion, those hierarchies are themselves an object of study. But for a reader hoping for more ethnographic depth, it can feel as if the more granular structures of one magical system are being granted more reality than the complexities of others.
Still, the very compression that causes those problems is also what makes the encyclopedia so usable. Guiley is a disciplined summarizer. She rarely wastes a line. Entries that could easily sprawl – “Satan,” “Lucifer,” “Witchcraft,” “Zoroastrianism” – are kept to a manageable length, with enough signposting to guide further reading. She knows when to let a narrative carry itself. The story of Theophilus, the medieval cleric who makes a pact with the Devil and then spends the rest of his life begging the Virgin Mary to intercede, is told with the clean, folkloric inevitability of a sermon. The account of the Throckmorton children has just enough detail that the reader can feel how frightening and manipulative such performances must have been, without turning into a miniature monograph.
The prose itself is sober. Guiley does not indulge in baroque horror language. She prefers short, declarative sentences with occasional bursts of rhetorical emphasis. When she quotes a demon’s self–description from a grimoire, she lets the strangeness of the voice stand. When she describes a haunting, she uses sensory detail sparingly. The effect is cumulative. By the time the reader has moved from Abaddon to Zotz, through dozens of possessions, exorcisms, curses, apparitions, and grim rituals, the plainness of the style has begun to feel like a form of testimony. This is how people talk when they want to be believed.
The book is also alert to modern media. Films like “The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” “The Witches of Eastwick,” and “A Haunting in Connecticut” are treated not as trivializations, but as part of the contemporary demonological archive: works that both draw from older lore and, in turn, reshape the expectations of audiences who may later find themselves confronting a set of knocks in the walls or a sudden change in temperature. Guiley is interested in how fictional treatments can amplify fear, create misperceptions, or occasionally serve as inadvertent catechesis about the tropes of possession and exorcism.
For writers, game designers, and artists, the encyclopedia is an obvious treasure trove. It offers hundreds of names, motifs, and narrative seeds. For clergy and laypeople involved in deliverance ministries or haunted–house investigations, it offers a way to situate particular stories in a larger pattern, to recognize when a “new” phenomenon is really just another face of a very old pattern. For readers with a general interest in religion and folklore, it is a fast way to move from the familiar Satan and Beelzebub to the less familiar, but no less haunting, figures that haunt thresholds, graveyards, childbirth beds, and dreams around the world.
What it is not is an exhaustive, source–critical encyclopedia in the academic sense. It will not replace scholarly handbooks for those who need detailed references, linguistic analysis, or careful argument about the development of a given tradition. It sits instead in a different category: informed, synthetic, and unapologetically shaped by the author’s own fieldwork and convictions. For many readers, that combination will make it more, not less, compelling. One feels, reading it, that Guiley has spent a lot of time listening – to grimoires, to historians, to priests, to mediums, to frightened families – and that the book is her attempt to put those voices in conversation.
Taken as a whole, “The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology” succeeds in its stated aim. It shines a steady light into a dark corner of religious imagination without pretending that illumination will make the darkness vanish. It is a book to be consulted, not swallowed in a single sitting, and it is best approached with the same caution its author recommends in her introduction: respect the material, be honest about what you do and do not know, and take seriously the possibility that evil is cleverer than you are. Measured against its intentions and its chosen form, it deserves an 89 out of 100.
January 5, 2020
I have to add my voice to the other 5-star love that this book is getting. It's informative, detached, well written, and well illustrated. The author is clearly deeply interested and deeply versed in demonology, but she is not trying to sell belief in demons. She reports the facts and describes the legends and lore as they are known, without sensationalism and without scoffing. The articles are neither too scholarly nor too lightweight; they strike the right balance of giving interesting and unexpected information without going overboard. She does, however, tell some lurid stories of famous possessions, witch trials, and even the plots of demonic movies--these are some of the longest articles in the book. These are perhaps her one indulgence, but they are interesting, and the information is not easily found elsewhere.
In her introduction, the author notes that many people are afraid to learn about demons for fear of becoming victimized by them. Her own view is that knowledge is power, and that we stand a better chance against a devil we know than a devil we don't. This book goes a long way toward outfitting the reader's armory of knowledge.
In her introduction, the author notes that many people are afraid to learn about demons for fear of becoming victimized by them. Her own view is that knowledge is power, and that we stand a better chance against a devil we know than a devil we don't. This book goes a long way toward outfitting the reader's armory of knowledge.
February 18, 2022
Its a good book but honestly a lot of money for not that much information. I get that there are only few information on the internet about every demon.. but it seemed mostly like a copy-paste from wikipedia.
January 27, 2013
The book really was not what I had expexted, it was a real let down :{
Read
November 8, 2013it was awesome and helpful in my research
November 14, 2014
Splendid!
April 17, 2015
its very informative, interesting book , if you are into demons or just want to know more , I recommend this book .
January 2, 2022
The book is well put together with a comprehensive list of demons. I have to say I'm less interested in demons after reading this book. I could probably come up with better demons myself honestly but who am I to argue with 16th century demonologists.
December 3, 2024
some of the possession stories you hear you're like damn that's crazy then you hear about a girl who was thought to be possessed because she had sneezing fits and you're like damn that is just allergies
June 28, 2021
Useful reference guide
October 18, 2021
I haven't read all of this book, but in the time I spent skipping around for whatever interested me, I will give it a high rating, as it was very engaging and illustrated beautifully.
January 9, 2022
fun read lol
December 25, 2022
essential
Rosemary Ellen Guiley is a legend. I bought the kindle version before committing to the physical copy. I’m so glad I did
Rosemary Ellen Guiley is a legend. I bought the kindle version before committing to the physical copy. I’m so glad I did
December 28, 2023
Great study book to learn more. I will be looking into her books!
August 8, 2024
Actually wanted this one for the longest. It’s was alright. I’ll reread it though soon.
December 28, 2024
This had a lot of potential. Unfortunately I was expecting something a bit more academic, unbiased. The author's personal beliefs are glaringly obvious throughout, with certain historical cases even containing her personal opinion, without any attempt at framing it as an objective conclusion. The entries around the Warrens also betray a heavy bias. Considered alongside much repetition, this "encyclopedia" could have benefitted from a skilled (and objective) editor.
May 14, 2014
Not my usual taste, but I've been on a religious nonfiction kick lately, and I figured this would be an interesting way to learn about historical religion. "Interesting" is stretching it at times, but it's a thorough treatment of all kinds of crazy things: artistic representation of various demons, the non-biblical Solomon legends (hosts and hosts of demons, most of which have wacky powers), various hauntings, and a dash of spiritism. The witch panics are probably the most interesting entries--some truly horrifying stories in there, and a good summary of our capacity for egotism and wanton cruelty. I was glad to see the end of this book (it's an encyclopedia, so it's not exactly gripping--by P or so I was pretty done), but it was certainly thought-provoking to consider the fine line between religious belief and ludicrous superstition.
May 25, 2012
A facinating and useful history of demonology and will appeal to many people - not just the spooky brigade. The only complaint is some of the drawings are a bit cartoonish next to the historical woodcuts. Ms Guiley is one of the few writers into the supernatural who works hard to deliver non-sensationalists information concerning the shadowlands of the human experience.
March 15, 2015
Excellent, detailed encyclopedia of some of the most arcane material a horror aficionado could desire. I marked that I have read 50% of it as I occasionally return to it for researching background material for my stories. However, it is fascinating just to leaf through and pick topics at random.
June 2, 2012
Tough to slog through at times (it's like reading the encyclopedia...oh, wait), but interesting nonetheless.
October 17, 2015
not a bad collection. some felt repetitive but great for research
Want to read
July 23, 2012awesome book
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews