SEX, SATANISM AND EATING ONIONS

Perttu Häkkinen and Vesa Iitti. Lightbringers of the North: Secrets of the Occult Tradition of Finland. Inner Traditions, 2022.

This enjoyable read has in my view been given the wrong title. I would suggest 'Riotous Assembly' for what follows is just that: a smorgasbord of short biographies mostly from the twentieth century of some of Finland's most notorious characters involved in one form or another in the occult. 

🔽

DEVIL OF A TALE

Ruben van Luijk. Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism. Oxford University Press, 2016.

This book begins where some people would suppose that a history of Satan worship might end, that is, the decline of witch-hunting in Europe. “Initial criticism of the witchcraft trials, most [historians] assert, was not motivated by a stance of rational criticism vis-à-vis the reality of the supernatural.
🔻

WHEN SATAN WENT POP

Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe (Eds.) Satanic Panic; Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s. Fab Press, 2016.

In the early 1990s Magonia published a series of articles about the then-current 'Satanic abuse' panic, which involved unproven allegations of mass child abduction, abuse and sacrifice which were being promoted by a number of agencies, and receiving widespread press attention.
🔻

REVISITING SRA

Richard Beck. We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. Public Affairs, 2015.

Back in the 1980s the United States became the centre of a series of social panics about the sexual abuse of toddlers in day care centres, the equivalent of Britain’s day nurseries, nursery schools and child minders. These rapidly escalated into grand conspiracy theories in which dozens of locals were sometimes named as being part of huge rings of child abusers.
 🔻

BLACK MAGIC AND BOGEYMEN

Richard Jenkins. Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular Belief in the North of Ireland 1972-1974. Cork University Press, 2014.

Northern Ireland forty years ago was in a very dark place indeed, with violence on a scale which dwarfs our current concerns with terrorism. It was a place of sectarian/ethic warfare waged by both 'Republican' and 'Loyalist' paramilitaries, neither showing any actual loyalty to the 'really existing' Irish Republic or United Kingdom respectively. 🔻

DEVILISH DOINGS

Robert Ziegler. Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-Siècle France. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

On the first page of the first chapter the author informs us that “In Britain, renowned occultist Alfred Waite characterized France as fertile ground for the spread of black magic . . .” Arthur Waite was indeed one of the leading occult authors of the time, but this does not encourage us. Later, he refers to “the Hindu goddess Shiva”.
  🔽

MONSTROUS DEMONS

Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J Dendle (Eds.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ashgate, 2012.

---

Theresa Bane. Encyclopedia of Demons in World Religions and Cultures McFarland, 2012.

The monstrous and demonic haunt our imaginations, both being symbols of the primordial chaos of the wilderness which threats to overwhelm the ordered society of habitat. The massive 500-plus page compilation edited by Mittman and Dendle tackles monsters from a wide variety of times and cultures, though it does not address in any great detail the monsters of the modern west, such as those tackled by cryptozoology and ufology.
🔻

REINVENTING THE DEVIL

Darren Oldridge. The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England. The History Press, 2011

In this book, a revised edition of his The Devil in Early Modern England, Darren Oldridge is principally concerned with image of the devil in the imagination of the harder-line 'hottest' Protestant reformers or 'Puritans' in the 16th and 17th centuries. 

🔻🔻🔻