Trafficking With Demons

Trafficking with Demons explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith. As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essense of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.

C.S. Lewis continues to meet CSI...when Amazon Bestselling author Michael Angel presents the seventh installment in his series, 'Fantasy & Forensics'. Dayna's got to solve an unusually gristly homicide. Dayna arrives at a Los Angeles mansion to solve a murder where the victim's been torn to pieces by a mysterious new type of weapon. Her worst suspicions are triggered when she finds a nightmarish clue as to who designed it. King Fitzwilliam's court reaches the boiling point. Protests erupt at the arrival of a centauress warrior for the upcoming Spring Tournament. Worse, the kingdom's poised to tip over into civil war if Dame Chrissie can't find a way to break a deadly standoff in the throne room. And the LAPD no longer has her back. Rumors swirl among the officers that Dayna Chrissie is responsible for a veteran retiree's horrific death. Others whisper that the Police Chief wants her scalp pinned to his desk. In the end, Dayna's friends will be the only ones to protect her from the forces of the dark! Dayna must face down her foes in both worlds if she hopes to solve her case and expose the enemy once and for all!

Here is an illuminating study of the devil from a veteran seminary professor and author. "This work uses the light of Scripture to expose the person and methods of Satan . . . Competent books on this subject are not plentiful. . . . Pentecost gives us a very useful survey of information on Satan."--"Christianity Today."

After the fight of a lifetime in The Devil Always Collects, Alexandra is living her dream, merging socially conscious public relations with investigative journalism to laud the good organizations and persecute the bad within New Orleans. Lockstep with her dashing man Tom, the two enjoy the cultural riches of Creole country, successful in their careers and free from typical family obligations. But, while the sun shines on their faces, dark and ominous clouds build unforeseen at their backs. Like the classic, duplicitous masks of Mardi Gras, the sinister underbelly of New Orleans rips the heart out of the happy couple's bodies, putting them directly in the path of Russian Mafia's human-trafficking operation and its devilishly handsome leader. Caught in the crossfire of the Crescent City's bloody war, Alexandra must sacrifice everything to join the battle. Her survival depends on betraying her feelings and transforming everything she thought she knew. Chasing Shadow Demons brings us back to Alexandra's cursed universe as we watch demons encircle and torment her. But, despite a valiant fight, will the casualties and disaster of her war leave her broken or just bruised? Follow Alexandra's journey as her deadly tale continues in this second installment.

Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, willfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade's hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism. This is an underground economy in which a sex slave can be bought for the price of a gun, but Cacho's powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity makes it impossible to ignore the terrible human cost of this lucrative exchange. Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the colossal scope of its enquiry, and for the tenacious bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.

In 2005, after publishing her book The Demons of Eden—where she denounced the very powerful men behind the a Mexican child pornography ring—Lydia Cacho became a target. Exactly eight months after the publication of the book, one morning as she was making her way to work, Lydia was apprehended by the police from the neighboring state of Puebla, and taken into custody during a nightmarish 24 hours during which she was tortured, intimidated and abused. In this chilling memoir, comparable to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, Lydia tells her story and exposes the horrific ways in which women—and young girls in particular—are abused then disposed of, while an oftentimes corrupt government simply sits and watches.

Three thousand years of encounters with malevolent beings that have invaded our waking lives and our nightmares A Penguin Classic For millennia, societies have told tales of their fears incarnate—otherworldly couriers of plague, death, temptation, and moral decline. The Penguin Book of Demons summons these supernatural creatures—and the humans who have hunted and been haunted by them—across cultures and continents: the daemons of ancient Greece and Rome; the giant, biblical half humans known as Nephilim who stalked the earth before the Great Flood; corrupted angels, condemned to eternity in Hell; the jinn of Islamic Arabia; the female, child-eating Gelloudes of Byzantium; the seductive incubi and succubi of northern Europe; the animal spirits of early modern China; and the cannibalistic Wendigo of Native American folklore. From demonic possession to black magic, these accounts give life to a spellbinding, skin-crawling history of the paranormal. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

She is a victim of intimate partner violence, a woman who has been harmed. She is a criminal offender, a woman who has harmed others. Superficially, it seems she is two separate women. "Victim" and "offender" are binary categories used within law, social science, and public discourse to describe social experiences with a moral dimension. Such terms draw upon cultural narratives of good and bad people and have influenced scholarship, public policy, and activism. The duality of "good" and "bad" women, separated into mutually exclusive extremes of angels and demons, has helped segregate thinking about, and responses to, each group. In this groundbreaking study, Kathleen J. Ferraro exposes the limits of such thinking by exploring the link between victimization and offending from the perspective of the women charged with the crimes. Interviewing forty-five women charged with criminal offenses (more than half of whom killed their abusers; the others participated in a range of violent crimes related to domestic violence), Ferraro uses their stories to illuminate complex interactions with violent partners, their children, and the legal system. She shows that these women are neither stereotypical angels nor demons, but rather human beings whose complicated lives belie the abstract categorizations of researchers, legal advocates, and the criminal justice system. Ferraro begins with a general discussion of blurred boundaries and the complexity of experience, and moves from there to discuss women's interactions with the criminal processing system. In the course of her study, she reexamines, and finds wanting, many standard ways of evaluating women's violent behavior, including "mutual combat," "battered woman syndrome," and "cycle of violence." She argues that a more complex, nuanced understanding of intimate partner violence and how it contributes to women's offending will contribute to public policy less focused on control and accountability of individuals than on developing social conditions that promote everyone's safety and well-being and foster a sense of hope.

The problem of evil has preoccupied world religions for centuries. The Old Testament contained no uniform dogma on evil powers, launching a fierce debate that has dominated theological and philosophical thought through the centuries to this day. Evil and the Devil brings together contributions from leading inter national scholars to chart that debate, tracing the history of evil from its origins in the Old Testament through early Judaism and the New Testament to the thought of Origen and one of the topic's most influential theologians, Augustine. What role did evil adopt in ancient Judaism? What impact did the association of miracles with demons have upon Matthew's Gospel? Evil and the Devil examines such questions, resulting in a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of portrayals of evil and its power and influence on religious thought.

The Devil was a commanding figure in Tudor and Stuart England. He played a leading role in the religious and political conflicts of the age, and inspired great works of poetry and drama. During the turmoil of the English Civil War, fears of a secret conspiracy of Devil-worshippers fuelled a witch-hunt that claimed at least a hundred lives. This book traces the idea of the Devel from the English Reformation to the scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century. It shows that he was not only a central figure in the imaginative life of the age, but also a deeply ambiguous and complex one: the avowed enemy of God and his unwilling accomplice, and a creature that provoked fascination, comdey and dread.