Ocean State Libraries

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra analyzes the Salem Witch Trials to offer key insights into the role of women in its events while explaining how its tragedies became possible. It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death"-- adapted from dust...

While readying her grandmother's abandoned home for sale, Connie Goodwin discovers an ancient key in a seventeenth-century Bible with a scrap of parchment bearing the name Deliverance Dane. In her quest to discover who this woman was and seeking a rare artifact--a physick book--Connie begins to feel haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials and fears that she may be more tied to Salem's past than she could have imagined.

Cunningham's classic introduction to Wicca is about how to live life magically, spiritually, and wholly attuned with nature. It is a book of sense and common sense, not only about magick, but about religion and one of the most critical issues of today: how to achieve the much needed and wholesome relationship with our Earth. Cunningham presents Wicca as it is today: a gentle, Earth-oriented religion dedicated to the Goddess and God. Wicca also

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Vividly detailed and highly readable, this classic history of witchcraft and demonology provides a thorough exploration of sorcery, Satanism, and every variety of the black arts. Reflecting popular folklore and theological opinions of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, this survey of necromancy traces witchcraft from ancient times to the twentieth century, describing the link between heresy and the occult. Threaded with dramatic accounts...

Presents the practices, rituals, and roles of witches and magic-makers around the world and throughout history.

"A cohesive and complete system of witchcraft based on traditional sources, assembling and integrating key components from the past and present. Also offers practical instructions and a clear five-step process of empowerment for anyone who wants to walk the path of witchcraft"--

Harold Roth is a leading authority on plant/herbal magic. His new book, The Witching Herbs, is an in-depth exploration of 13 essential plants and herbs most closely associated with witchcraft—13 because it's the witching number and reflects the 13 months of the lunar calendar. The plants are poppy, clary sage, yarrow, rue, hyssop, vervain, mugwort, wormwood, datura, wild tobacco, henbane, belladonna, and mandrake.Roth writes simply and clearly

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"This book is a groundbreaking and comprehensive guide to the art, path,and practice of Modern Traditional Witchcraft"--

Confessing to "familiarity with the devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. The case of Ann Cole, who was "taken with very strange Fits," fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events at Salem. More than three hundred years later, the question "Why?" still haunts us....