Astrology is a means of interpreting the influence which the positions of certain heavenly bodies have upon the earth and human beings. The earliest records are those of Babylon, which were designed to help its kings understand the will of their gods. It then became a way of making sense of the world as people saw themselves as integral parts of a vast but puzzling whole. Medicine, politics, religion, the sciences, all had astrology woven into their fabric, and the best minds of the Middle...

For over 500 years witches, male and female, practised magic for both harm and good in their communities. Most witches worked locally, used by their neighbours to cure illness, create love, or gratify personal spite against another. Margaret Lindsay from Northumberland was prosecuted for making men impotent, John Stokes in London for curing fevers, Collas de la Rue on Guernsey for killing people by witchcraft, and Isobel Gowdie in Auldearn for a variety of offences including consorting wit...

In 1901 a rich collection of extracts from documents relating to witch beliefs and witch trials in the Middle Ages - Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung in Mittelalter - was published in Bonn. Most of the original documents are in Latin, with some in medieval German and French, and it has been left largely untranslated, making the material inaccessible, and neglected. This new translation of the key documents will enable students and scholars to look afresh at this crucial period in the dev...

Explains the origin of astrology, explains the basic principles and provides an illustrated list of the planets, their influences and the alchemical metal associated with them. Discusses transits, what they are and how they are used with quadrants and progressions to calculate horoscopes. Traces the melding of Vedic and Babylonian of astrology by the 3rd century BC Alexandrian Greeks and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Tirsmegistus. How does astrology influence modern American politics?

What happened to the European mind between 1605, when an audience watching Macbeth at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration of the natural order that ghosts could burst from the ground, and 1649, when a large crowd, perhaps including some who had seen Macbeth forty-four years earlier, could stand and watch the execution of a king? Or consider the difference between a magus casting a star chart and the day in 1639, when Jonathan Horrock and William C...

'The most chilling witch-hunt in English history . . . fascinating' Independent on Sunday**'A terrible tale marvellously told . . . This is how history should be shown' Ronald BlytheBy the spring of 1645, civil war had exacted a terrible toll upon England. Disease was rife, apocalyptic omens appeared in the skies, and idolators detected in every shire. In a remote corner of Essex, two obscure gentlemen began interrogating women su...

One of the most ambitious works of paranormal investigation of our time, here is an unprecedented compendium of pre-twentieth-century UFO accounts, written with rigor and color by two of today's leading investigators of unexplained phenomena.In the past century, individuals, newspapers, and military agencies have recorded thousands of UFO incidents, giving rise to much speculation about flying saucers, visitors from other planets, and alien abductions. Yet the extr...

This is a study of star-worship collected from all available astrological and astronomical texts from antiquity. Cumont shows that astronomical knowledge was developed over time in the ancient Near East, eventually allowing prediction of phenomena such as the location of the planets, the phases of the moon, and eclipses. This knowledge was used as the basis of a religious system which was integrated into Greek and Roman Paganism. This involved worship of the planets and stars and a belief ...

This book is intended for the general reader as well as for the student of anthropology. In this volume I have followed one line only of anthropological enquiry, the survival of an indigenous European cult and the interaction between it and the exotic religion which finally overwhelmed it. I have traced the worship of the Horned God onwards through the centuries from the Palaeolithic prototypes, and I have shown that the survival of the cult was due to the survival of the races who adored ...

Next to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, no other place on Earth holds as much esoteric symbolism as France's Rennes le Ch'teau. Its location and design are the subjects of countless rumors, myths, and legends. Mysteries of Templar Treasure and the Holy Grail, formerly published as The Secrets of Rennes le Chateau, delves into the reality behind the action and adventure of The Da Vinci Code. Rennes le Chateau has plenty of secrets: buried treasure, unsolved murders, s...

Henrietta Leyser considers the problems and attitudes fundamental to every woman of the time: medieval views on sex, marriage and motherhood; the world of work and the experience of widowhood for peasant, townswoman and aristocrat. The intellectual and spiritual worlds of medieval women are also explored.MEDIEVAL WOMEN celebrates the diversity and vitality of English women's lives in the Middle Ages.