The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology by Russel Hope Robbins

I grew up in a house full of books. Thanks to Dad’s voracious appetite for popular fiction, and Mum's school teacher's instinct for filling the house with improving volumes, our house was like a Greek temple held up by unsteady columns of glossy volumes on history, art and cheap paperbacks and that never got thrown out, but were packed three deep in bookshelves that lined the living room, dining room and all the bedrooms.

This was my treasure trove, rooting though the shelves looking for something new and exciting and generally finding it, at least up until I was older enough to get out to the library or the bookshop myself. It's during these expeditions that I discovered Isaac Asimov and Michael Moorcock, and the fat anthologies of Golden Age SF that Dad devoured at a rate of two a day. I found all manner of intriguing non-fiction - Pelican English histories (a bit dry for me); slightly outdated large-format histories, especially of the ancient world, and occasional gems such as the Encyclopedia of Demonology and Witchcraft.

An actual pact with the devil (or devils),
signed and everything, scared me
shitless as a kid!

I remember this book scaring the hell out of me when I was a gullible kid. I didn't really read it too closely (I was probably under eight when I found this one) but the historicalm illustrations and the copious information gave me the impression of a world that was alive with malignant evil magic going back centuries. I loved all this sort of stuff when I was a kid - UFOs, Loch Ness Monster, Satanists, ESP, Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle and that whole Charles Berlitz world of wierdness, magic and active, malignant supernatural evil.

I can vividly recall being scared shitless by the idea of The Exorcist when it first came out. I remember being driven to near-hysterical tears one night when we were being looked after by a baby sitter who described the movie to me and my sister. What sort of baby-sitter is that? I don't recall where my older brothers were at the time - probably laughing their arses off in the other room.

Well, I've matured somewhat since then. I was a right little skeptic (with a k!) for a while at Uni anmd afterwards, but I think my views have mellowed a bit since then into a more ruefully agnostic state. I don't really believe in it, but I think the world's a sweeter place if we admit the possibilities rather than angrily declaim that it's all falsehood.

I'm not sure if Mum and (more likely!) Dad's copy is still on the shelves at Mum's place in karori - I've looked for it before and not found it - and so when I found a copy in a (rather nice) second hand bookshop in Much Wenlock while I was on holiday and I knew I had to have it. Reading it now is a very different experience, of course.

Robbins (who, the cover notes, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature!) takes a properly materialistic view of the subject, and provides a series of authoritative entries on various historic, thematic or biographical subjects. He seems particularly keen to emphasise the injustice of it all, men and women falsely accused by the mad or the wicked, physically and mentally ruined through torture then put to death. I can't help seeing the shadow of The Crucible here, both as a thematic inspiration but also perhaps as inspiration to the publisher who might see a market of people keen learn more about the subject in the wake of the Miller's play.

Young boys always have a healthy interest
in torture.

Of course, witchy stuff was VERY popular in the sixties - Rosemary's Baby, Corman's Poe adaptions, The Witchfinder General and The Devil Rides Out and so on and so forth - but this book must have taken years to compile. Robbins works dutifully from primarty sources - boasting somewhat about his visits to the world's great libraries in the the introduction - so this is no slap-dash quick cash grab trend exploitation.

Neither does it provide a trendy 60s New Age gloss on the subject. It focuses on witch hunts and Christian-based deviltry, rather than the wider questions of esoteric thought. There's nothing here on occultism or Rosicrucianism, nothing on ritual magick, the Golden Dawn, Crowleyite magic or Gardnerian Wicca. It's focused entirely on the medieval witch cult, from about 1300 to about 1700 - and early or later examples of witchiness are pretty much ignored - maybe one or two entries on Biblical and classical sources, but nothing after the last of the witch hunts in Europe.

I don't know why I love this stuff so much. When I first discovered this book - I was maybe six or seven - I was too younf to read the entries, but revelled in the pages of illustrations showing demons, witches and gruesome tortures, and lets not forget the eroticism inherent in the subject - I've never forgotten the sexy basque witch on p 41.

Yeah, definitely interested in
this sort of thing.

A more interesting question is what was Dad doing with it? There's not really another book like it that I recall from my childhood - most of the non-fiction was sober and solid, dealing with ordinary history, usually from a populist point of view, often connected with a big exhibition like the several volumes on Tutankamun, or tv shows - Ken Clarke's Civilisation, The Ascent of Man, Life on Earth etc etc. If this book was published in the late sixties, that'd put Dad in his early thirties when he (and I've no doubt it was him, not Mum), bought this. What was he thinking? Why did it interest him? How has this interest passed on to me?

It's only when they're gone you get curious about these things. He's gone now, and I'll never be able to ask him about this. Would he really be able to tell me? He wasn't really a self-absorbed type and I don't know if he's have had any interest in the discussion anyway. I guess it'll just have to be one of those things that I'll never know about him.