Black Magic A Tale Of The Rise Fall Of The Antichrist Book One

This is a tale of two companions who decide to practice the dark arts together. One is faithful and one is not.

Black Magic - A Tale of the Rise and Fall of the Antichrist by Marjorie Bowen Black magic has traditionally referred to the use of supernatural powers or magic for evil and selfish purposes. With respect to the left-hand path and right-hand path dichotomy, black magic is the malicious counterpart of benevolent white magic. In modern times, some find that the definition of "black magic" has been convoluted by people who define magic or ritualistic practices that they disapprove of as "black magic." In the large room of a house in a certain quiet city in Flanders, a man was gilding a devil. The chamber looked on to the quadrangle round which the house was bui

Black Magic begins with this ominous first line: 'In the large room of a house in a certain quiet city in Flanders, a man was guilding a devil'. That person is Dirk Renswoude, a craftsman and loner of noble birth who has been mistreated in some unspecified way by his family. He meets Thierry, a young scholar on his way to study at the university at Basle and they soon discover that they have a shared fascination with the black arts. However, Thierry is initially cautious and afraid of blasphemy, whilst Dirk is ambitious to be ""as great as the Master we serve can make his followers"" and thirst for power. Dirk leads them on to experiments with mystic circles drawn on the floor in chalk, the chanting of arcane incantations and the evocation of grotesque, demonic visions writhing in the speculum. Thierry still wavers, but when their experiments lead to murder the die is cast for both of them. One of the best gothic novels ever written!

Fantastic occult fiction, praised by Aleister Crowley. [Cataloguer's note].

This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem of how to write 'life itself.' Ghost stories are split between an ironic, often parodic reference to Gothic style and an evocation of 'life itself, ' an implicit repudiation of all literary style. Reading the ghost story as both a guest and a host story, this book traces the ghost as a disruptive figure in the 'hospitable' space of narrative from Maturin, Poe and Dickens to the fin de siècle, and then on into the twentieth century.